C.L.R. James

Emotechnics, Lachrymators & the Tears of the Occupiers

2012-02-09T17:50:00.000-08:00

I want to think today aboutthe semiotics of tear gas. We know what the deployment of gas looks like:masses lined up against police, a canister thrown, a rising cloud, peoplerunning, and then, in the aftermath, tears. Lots of them. The primary functionof tear gas obviously inheres in its capacity to disperse crowds, but I want tosuggest that tears are not a secondary effect, a mere index ofhaving-been-gassed, the trace that power leaves behind. As signs, tears have aconstitutive 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 alachrymatory agent enables the state to visually recode subjects-in-revolt as contritelylachrymose. Tear gas disciplines subjects not simply by inflicting (what I’veheard is) excruciating pain and thus inducing flight and crowd dispersal;rather, the subject’s somatic response to the irritant simulates an affectiveresponse to a personal sin. After the revolt, tears of sorrow, and perhaps onewill come to recognize the merciful beneficence of the Sovereign we dared tocontest. Huic ergo parce, Deus, pie Jesu Domine, and please don’t shoot. Wewere bad, we’re sorry, and we promise to be good.

Emotechnics produce somaticresponses in order to simulate affective investments in power. (We are moreaccustomed, through critiques of nationalism, to states operationalizingaffects of love, say, or rage-against-others to generate cathexes to power.) Inconditions of neoliberal capital—that is, at a moment when the bundle of rightsand protections to which citizens are or feel entitled is becoming unbundled inorder to facilitate capital accumulation—the only ties binding citizens to thestate are affective ties. When these ties don’t exist, emotechnics do thetrick.

But what necessity drivesthe production of such affective ties? I want to suggest that the state’sreconstitution of citizens as disposable and negligible, the state’s totalirresponsibility to its citizenry, has put its sovereignty into question. Thesovereign’s secret power, as Derrida points out in volume 1 of The Beast & the Sovereign, is thesovereign’s ability to absolve itself of sovereign responsibility. The exerciseof this power-to-be-irresponsible, however, is self-destructive, insofar assovereignty imaginatively and materially commands allegiance only insofar asaddresses directed toward a sovereign can become felicitous speech-acts. Minusthe possibility of felicitous address, after a while we’ll all get tired ofmaking demands of an absent God. If protego ergo obligo is the cogito of thepolitical, protection subtends the possibility of obligation; but, in ourneoliberal moment, with the withdrawal of protection, all that remains of thestate/citizen articulation is the bare coercive demand for obligation, for goodsubjects who will cry (or seem to cry) when they don’t oblige the state. Occupynot only refuses to oblige the state by committing acts of dubious legality: italso refuses to oblige the state by refusing to direct its tears toward thestate, by unlearning the political grammar that made state-citizenship a sourceof hope (and thus refusing to reaffirm the irresponsible state as a sovereign site ofresponsibility), 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 thestate—by affectively disinvesting from the state and investing in one another.

The state is learning howcruel it is to be abandoned. It’s important to note that the Oakland Communewas really truly not looking for a fight; they were, rather, really trulyattempting to establish an alter-state of care, one indifferent to the givenstate of indifference. And so, to reaffirm an unearned sovereignty, to commandobligation without offering protection, the state shot tear gas to recodesubjects-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 itanticipates a state without citizens, without subjects.

We caught a glimpse of thestate’s sadness during the battle in Oakland. Miscalculations about wind direction (as well asOccupiers returning gas canisters back to sender) resulted in the clouds of gasenshrouding the line of riot cops. A backfire of emotechnics. They had to pauseand re-affix their masks before they could advance and try to simulate sadnessin 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 imaginepolice officers silently crying as they try to make post-citizens sad forabandoning the state that abandoned them.

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

2012-02-01T11:00:00.000-08:00

It’s a refrain: Occupy hasbegun a national conversation about income inequality. Slight modifications areallowed: 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, onethat circulates through Twitter, through the media, and even through Occupysites. (Just Google “Occupy national conversation.”) The other night, I wasstruck by how frequently this sentiment was voiced as I scanned the Twitterfeeds to see what was going on with Occupy DC, a camp that faces eviction. Theutterance is mostly reparative, enabling us to extract a last kernel of valuefrom Occupy before all encampments are swept away. But I think that theutterance is more than reparative—that in fact it destroys what it would repair.Locating the primary value of Occupy in its discursive effects, the utteranceactually produces an indifference to the materiality and practical reality ofOccupy. The sites could go on or not, tevs, it will continue to exist in theairy ideality of a national conversation. We can all go home; we’ve done ourjobs.

That this utterance issayable indexes the fact that Occupy has notchanged the “national conversation.” Not one bit. Not even a little. And thisis because the public who utters this statement still thinks having aconversation, saying things, having an opinion, matters, and matters as a politics. Indeed, suchutterances place in a position of priority and superiority the abstract liberalsubject who opines, who reflects, who debates—but never decides, because thereis no real apparatus linking reflexive judgment to determinative judgment, to adecision for and on the political. After all, the “conversation” being changedis that which is staged in the hypercapitalized world of televisual media; itneedn’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 lateat night, at Thanksgiving dinners with conservative uncles, wherever—this ismeaningless so long as the effect of the change in conversation is simply achange in conversation. The point of crisis to which Occupy needs to bring the “nationalconversation” is to show that having an opinion—a private reflection that isexpressed occasionally—is not a political act. That conversing cannot be thetranscendent value of the political, or politics turns into a spectacle that wesimply discuss from a distance—without touching or being touched by it. AndOccupy is all about touching, about bodies in contact, about being-there on thescene, about, well, occupying materiality.

Badiou neatly attends tothis dynamic in his critique of Arendt and Arendt’s reading of Kant. He writesthat in Arendt’s idea of “the political” that the “perspective of the spectatoris systematically privileged. Arendt justifies the fact that Kant had a ‘boundlessadmiration’ for the French Revolution as a phenomenon, or historicalappearance, whilst nurturing ‘a boundless opposition’ to its revolutionaryventures and their actors. As a public spectacle the Revolution is admirable,while its militants are contemptible.” This neatly maps onto the discursive economyI’m describing. As an item of public debate, Occupy is admirable; it has, afterall, brought our attention to “inequality.” But Occupiers are dirty smellyanarchists who should just disappear into the ideality of their discursiveeffects. Those deciding against “inequality” are replaced by those whoreflectively determinate that inequality is bad, say so, and…sleep or gobowling or something. The revolution is awesome—it gives us more shit to talkabout—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 speechand act, the hyperproceduralist commitment to clarifying questions, strawpolls, friendly amendments, and so on? We reflect all day—and then determineourselves, set ourselves to a goal, decide on a new kind of political truth oraim. 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 fullspectrum 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 onthe 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

2012-01-30T13:36:00.000-08:00

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

I want to think today, quitebluntly, about political subjectivation. How is it that in the punctum of ourpresent a political subject has emerged? Why Occupy? And what do I even mean bypolitical subject, by the political itself? Gestures toward “the political”saturate my own discourse, and, thus far I’ve refused to define the term exceptindirectly: it’s something lost, something irreducible to regimes ofcalculability, and so on. But it remainsa vague term. Those of us who live anti-liberalism religiously tend to invokethe political as a blank, critical resource. Given that the political is thatagainst which liberalism defines itself, that which liberalism seeks to limit,contain, and expel, we inflate the signifier as signifier, as if “thepolitical” has a transcendent signified utterly exorbitant to linguisticcapture. It has no such signified, and we kind of know this, and when we’repressed to contort the exorbitant(ly empty) term into a communicable form wetypically stutter out some Schmittian line. Here, I don’t want to define “thepolitical”; rather, I want to think of the political itself as the process bywhich signifiers, on one hand, point beyond themselves to a transcendentexorbitancy and, on the other hand, point to nothing in the world. Let’s saythat the political is ex-orbitant: it names a world saturated with transcendentmeaning 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 theemergence of the political subject called Occupy.

The political isn’tidentical to a scale, institution, or form; rather, the political is whatadvenes in the de-structuring of a worldly ordinary. It comes to pass in theconditions of absolute undecidability, when the nomos of the given world iscancelled. I use the passive voice [“is cancelled”] because I want to leave theagency of cancellation unmarked, just as I want to leave the structuring nomosunmarked. This cancellation, I want to suggest, actually produces the nomos itcancels as a self-conscious entity; it subjectivates it. (The “Keynesian state”becomes subjectivated after its wholesale destruction, and is subjectivated asa critique of neoliberalism, for instance.) The political takes place in thewithdrawal 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 formof activity—it takes place in the break, between regimes, as an interregnumwhere undecidability is the norm. Nor could it be an agential subject,something that an intending actor does, for subjectivation happens as an effectof structural cancellation, as the subjectivation of a lost world, a lostordinary. The political subject is called into being by a lost world, a cancellationof a structure that becomes legible only through its cancellation. The ancien regimeappears as a political subject only through revolutionary fighting in thestreets.

The political subject is astructure of intentionality that survives the loss of the world that made thatmode of being-toward-the-world an unexceptional aspect of being-in-the-world. Itemerges in the cruelty of a desire or demand that won’t quit despite thestructural impossibility of its realization—a demand for a state that cares,for instance, that is not set to work merely to facilitate the valorization ofcapital. The political begins when we’ve lost our grip on reality, when ourworldly ordinary vanishes and, vanishing, seems to have been real, when we're forced to decide on new approaches to the real. The inauguraltonality of the political is thus one of frustration, of disorientation. Thisfrustration, I want to suggest, is not primarily a frustration with the givenworld, but a frustration with one’s inability to unlearn the protocols ofintentionality that produce this frustration—a frustration not with the worldin which one is but a frustration with one’s being-toward-the-world that couldonly produce frustration. Conservative political subjectivity refuses to let goof this frustration; it wishes for the world to re-conform to its worldlessstructure of intentionality. This dynamic explains how both conservative and radical political subjectivity canbe denigrated as romantic, as utopian—each prioritizes a structure ofintentionality over an epistemically valid description of the world as such.

But the radical politicalsubject relates to intentionality differently. If the political emerges in themismatch between a structure of intentionality and the given world, radical politicalsubjectivity enacts itself by unlearning the intentionality that binds subjectsto a lost world, by destroying the phenomenological structure that makes thesubject optimistically invest again and again in a world that has abandoned theworldly structures that might have made this investment worthwhile. The radicalpolitical 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 radicalsa part of Occupy, those for whom the world of capital held no promise. My pointis that the radical is becoming the set that incorporates the reformist [andRon Paulite] elements.) Oaklandis in the lead here, and their example is contagious, spreading in the form ofsmall acts. Occupy Philly’s march through Center City last night—tying uptraffic, confusing police, generating a carnival atmosphere in which people incars honked out tunes in time with our chants—ended with some tearing down thefence around a privatized Dilworth Plaza, tearing down the stupid Dilworthproject banners that surround the site to tell the public that privatization isjust fucking awesome. We’re getting angry, we’re learning from our ownfrustration, we’re cultivating our hatred for capitalism, we’re starting towork on our own structure of desire to come to a point where we can begin toco-decide on new modes of being-toward-the-world. Occupy is now undertaking therevolutionary labor of ex-ing the orbis by unlearning the epistemic programmingthat makes subjects invest in a world that is always already lost. Reformistswill drop out. Bye!

Will the world follow ourintentions? Who knows. The co-decision on a new being-toward-the-world isnecessarily exorbitant to the world that is—there is nothing that guaranteesthat the world will bear the burden of the novel intentionality we will decideupon. 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 thisundecidability, how to occupy the space of the incalculable. For now, we’recontent to frighten power by our radical refusal to be frustrated by a worldthat has abandoned its promises. We’re already desiring other worlds. We're already political.

Why We Should Read Thomas Clarkson

2012-01-17T21:14:00.000-08:00

“For let us consider howmany, both of the living and the dead, could be made to animate us.” So writesThomas Clarkson in chapter eleven of TheHistory of the Rise, Progress, & Accomplishment of the Abolition of theAfrican Slave-trade (1808), the chapter in which Clarkson explains his famous riverine “map” that traces the confluences of antislavery sentiment thatled, in part, to the abolition of the trade in 1807. Clarkson’s graphical depictionof the rhizomatic communication of influence functions as an interesting counterpointto the rather linear narrative given theretofore. Through the image, we seethat political animation—the kind that Clarkson described above—is neverlinear, obvious; it snakes around, twists about, drawing even on the life ofthe dead for its motive force. Looking back over the image as I re-readClarkson’s masterpiece, I was struck by how it approximates one mapping of OWSTwitter networks I had seen two months ago. This similitude prompted aquestion: How could the social movement propelled by Clarkson’s labors “be madeto animate us”? What lessons does Clarkson hold for us?

Admittedly, Clarkson isprobably not the literary bread-and-butter of Occupy. Occupiers are more likelyto read Marcuse, for instance, or other 20^th centuryquasi-/post-/neo-Marxists, than they are to settle down with a history of areformist movement composed in 1808. Particularly on college campuses, it isperhaps through an intellectual engagement with the questions of class andexploitation posed by these theorists that students come to desire aninvolvement with a movement like Occupy. Here, theory quickens and animates, transformingintellectuals thinking about the world into intellectuals attempting to changeit. For many Occupiers I know, theory isn’t merely theory: even if theoreticalengagement 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 biographicalsection of his history, he describes how he came to awareness of theslave-trade. Students at Cambridgecompetitively submitted dissertations in the hopes of securing a universityprize. Young Thomas had won such a prize the year before, and desired the fame ofwinning first prize again. The prompt for the prize was simple: “Anne liceat Invitosin Servitutem dare? or, Is it right to make slaves of other against their will?”Clarkson eagerly anticipated both the intellectual enjoyments of crafting afine Latin essay and the honors that such a fine essay would bring. Like a goodgrad student, he began to diligently research slavery, focusing on thepresent-day slave-trade. He began to write, but the pleasures he hadanticipated were “damped by the facts which were now continually before me. Itwas but one gloomy subject from morning to night…It became now not so much atrial for academical reputation, as for the production of a work, which mightbe useful to injured Africa.” A fight for academic prestige, the flexing ofrhetorical and analytic muscles…these served to bring Clarkson into ethical,and then organizational, contact with British antislavery.

Lesson one, then: we don’tget to choose the manner of our activist animation, we don’t get to choose howa politico-ethical demand appears within the bland contexts of our everydayworlds. We might begin as silly students, reading Heidegger and Nancy late atnight 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 themanner in which we comport ourselves once we’ve made contact with the animatedworld of activism; we don’t get to choose, I mean, what the practice ofactivism looks like. Sure, antislavery historians or Hollywood movies will direct us to the spectacular scenes of popular mobilization—loudspeeches, louder crowds, and all topped off with petitions, written onstreaming rolls of paper, unraveled before Parliament. But anyone involved withOccupy knows that much of the work of Occupy takes place in front of acomputer, navigating cluttered inboxes, making sense of lengthy email chains, readingand writing endless responses. Clarkson had a similar experience. Supposed tosend his comrade a “weekly account” of his progress in stirring up initialsupport, Clarkson describes the textual bloat: “At the end of the first week myletter to him contained little more than a sheet of paper. At the end of thesecond it contained three; at the end of the third six; and at the end of thefourth I found it would be so voluminous, that I was obliged to decline writingit.” But the reading and writing didn’t stop. Clarkson describes daily sessionsthat stretched from 9pmuntil 3am where he and his colleagues examined custom-housereceipts until their “eyes were enflamed by the candle.” And Clarkson’s History is itself an artifact of thehumdrum textuality of revolutionary activism.

If lesson two is thatrevolutionary activism entails decidedly nonrevolutionary, unsexy, and (let’ssay it) boring activity, the third lesson we can take from Clarkson is the importanceof not letting our revolutionary aims be trumped by the feeling of quotidiannormality that even revolutionary activity assumes. In a beautiful passage,Clarkson describes how, eyes enflamed, “tired by fatigue,” he and his comradewould “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 instillness to converse upon them, as well as the best means of the furtherpromotion of our cause…Having recruited ourselves in this manner, we used toreturn to our work.” Dreaming dreams in the solitude of night. But we also geta lesson, shortly thereafter, about the possible consequences of failing todream well enough, to dream deeply enough. Clarkson and company are in ameeting, one of the first of their formally organized society, and someoneposes the question: Do we oppose merely the slave-trade, or slavery as aninstitution? The conveyance of slaves or the very mode of labor? You probablyknow how the debate goes: Given that plantation slavery relied on fresh importsdue to staggering death-rates, and given that Parliament definitely had thesovereign power to regulate commerce but did not have uncontested sovereigntyover the internal affairs of colonies with representative assemblies, and giventhat property rights—even in people—should remain inviolate, the societydecided to focus on the slave-trade, leaving slavery a fact of the Britishworld for decades more. It’s tragic reasoning, a failure of imagination, areformist approach to the real. An anti-lesson.

Ifwe let Clarkson animate us, we’ll derive three lessons: We don’t choose whatpropels us to act; revolutionary action is less a punctual moment of affectiveintensity than a humdrum labor that takes time; and, despite the routine androutinized work of revolution, we need to keep our revolutionary dreams alive. Let’sadd one more: Clarkson’s work—his history, his activism—demonstrate thatanother world is indeed possible. For thousands of years, slavery, commerce inpeople, was simply a fact. Without making too big a claim for Anglo-Atlanticexceptionalism, we need to take seriously the fact that the zone of formal freedomthat Clarkson helped carve into being was minimal compared to the zones wherehuman “enslaveability,” to use Drescher’s term, would continue to conditionhuman life. Antislavery beat the odds, beat the weight of history, and madeopposition to slavery, and thus formal freedom, a ground-level assumption abouthuman being in the world. There were and are limits to the value of this formalfreedom, as any post-emancipation society shows. But taking this longhistorical view, we might see ourselves as the newest tributaries on Clarkson’sriverine map—we might see ourselves as people struggling to achieve substantialfreedom in a world where formal, merely formal, freedom is the norm.

Stuttering toward the Future

2012-01-02T11:08:00.000-08:00

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

Marx articulates the problemneatly in a famous passage. On one hand, “The social revolution of thenineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from thefuture.” For Marx, earlier revolutions suffered from a failure of imagination;they could not read the poetry to come, the poetry of the future: “Earlierrevolutions required recollections of past world history in order to drugthemselves concerning their own content.” Marx resolves the problem with anormative claim—one that, humorously, “require[s]” a Christological messianismfor it to make sense: “In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution ofthe nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead.” (For readers withoutthe dubious benefit of 12 years of Catholic education, “let the dead bury thedead” is an utterance of Jesus, Matthew 8:22.) That is, the revolution mustmove beyond the poetry of the past, the “required recollections,” and livedangerously open to a future-oriented present. Indeed, it must speak the futurein the present as if it were already the future (“draw[ing] its poetry…onlyfrom the future”). But what would this poetry sound like, look like? Marx makesthis poetry thinkable by comparing it, formally and semantically, to thepast-oriented poetry of earlier revolutions: “There [in the past] the phrasewent beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase.” It’s notthat the phrase says more than it means—rather, the phrase cannot say what itmeans. We don’t have the language yet, but the intuition of this content, thispoetry of the future that lacks a language, has already beggared the words, thephrases that we do possess. The future that affects language does so byloosening its hold on the future, insofar as the future (the content) goesbeyond the phrase.

Language has nothing to sayabout the future.

With brutal honesty, Marxsubmits his own work to the double bind he diagnoses. The future cannot besaid, its content is exorbitant to its phrasing. Yet one writes. And, indeed,writes with phrases derived from “recollections of past world history” (e.g., “letthe dead bury the dead”). One could read Marx’s entire corpus as a negotiationwith this double bind: How to write the new, to develop a hermeneutic forreading novelty, knowing that one only possesses the poetry of the past—thatone is “required,” cognitively, to read the future in the determinate figuresgenerated by the past? Capital is little more than the generalization of thisrequirement, as if, one day, everyday, capitalism reads a kind of requerimientoto those whose imaginations it would colonize. We can see Marx playing withthis fact at multiple points: the subordination of variable capital to constantcapital discussed in volume 1 has its cultural-linguistic counterpart in Marx’sclaim that “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmareon 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 thisoperation of fashioning the new in a determinate image. All that remains forthe revolutionary is this blank sign, the “future,” the “new,” which intimatesa “content” that exceeds its phrasing. But one cannot speak the new as new, innew 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 sametime, 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 acognitive structure to perceive the new, because the new renders the cognitivestructures that we do possess indeterminate. We might not know it when it hitsus. But we might symptomatize it. As I re-read Marx’s sentence about phrasingrevolution (“…here the content goes beyond the phrase”), I’m struck by how thisseems to mimic a kind of stutter. A meaning-to-say that stumbles on themateriality of language, a content that can’t quite—but not for lack of trying—articulateitself. It’s at this point, where language can’t fully grasp the object orprocess it tries taking in hand, that some kind of newness is being illumined.The future appears, first and foremost, in moments where the epistemologicalauthority of the past and present is evacuated. Not as a destruction, but as anindetermination—one that exposes the poetry of the past to the possibility of apoetry 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 affectsone, that brings one to speech.

I want to think of Occupy asa series of revolutionary stutters, a movement that has brought one language(that of neoliberalism in the U.S.) to crisis while, simultaneously, seeking alanguage to describe the future it would inaugurate. We need to hold onto thisstuttering revolutionary speech. (That, at least, is what I’ve been trying todo: 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 thearticulation of such phrases.) We need to do so because the moment that Occupy’sstuttering indeterminacy becomes easily articulated speech, we will have lostthe future, Occupy will have become a reform movement, and we will be leftspeaking the language of the present. We need to see in our stutteringcritiques and programs that force of a future to come, to, indeed, becomecomfortable with the fact that we don’t have a language for what we want.

Radically Stylish (This Is What Democracy Looks Like II)

2011-12-19T10:28:00.000-08:00

“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?"

2011-12-08T11:29:00.000-08:00

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.

"...have you not forgot to wind up the clock?"

2011-11-30T19:59:00.000-08:00

I began writing this before the eviction. Tenses are screwy. I'm letting it stand. I don't want to talk about Dilworth in the past tense yet. Hopefully I'll never have to do so.

Occupy Philly’s continued occupation of Dilworth Plaza has generated a number of pseudo-leftist critiques from people concerned with “labor” and “job creation.” For those of you who do not know, the rationale behind Occupy Philly’s eviction is that a 50 million dollar building project has been slated to begin at the site of the occupation since November 15. The city gets a skating rink; the unemployed can look forward to 800 or so jobs. Aren’t jobs what Occupy wants? How, ask liberal conservatives, conservative liberals, and (my favorite crowd, insofar as they expose the political bankruptcy of Maddow-watching "progressive" Democrats) conservative conservatives, can a left-wing social movement impede job creation? Of course, as they will acknowledge, these jobs will be temporary; 800 workers won’t be employed all at once. But isn’t something better than nothing? “In this economy?” (A lovely phrase that imagines “the economy” as an object susceptible to deictic indication…)

The answer, of course, is no. Such right-liberal criticisms routinize the precarity of employment; indeed, they show how well neoliberalism and flexible accumulation practices have altered normative understandings of work. Not only are we to take exploitation in the form of surplus extraction as the way of the world; now we are to be positively grateful when—happy chance!—a charitable capitalist consents to exploit us at all. Precarity and the exposure to contingency have become the nomos of the contemporary—the way in which the present divides itself. This round of struggle does not pit the proletariat against capitalists, but the precariat against the existentially secure. Of course, the language of the mid-nineteenth century continues to map onto the present: the precarious proletariat, as Marx would always state, were vogelfrei, free as birds, free to starve if they couldn’t secure, say, a low-paying job building a skating rink at Dilworth, while Mssrs Moneybags could shut down the shop for a year and still eat heartily, growing their jowls if not their capitals. But Occupy, I think, has foregrounded the issue of precarity, that the norm now is exposure to contingency, and it’s along these lines that the current cycle of struggle should be thought. They’ve brought this issue to the fore in two ways: negatively, by not making demands for jobs their primary concern, and, positively, by fashioning sites of occupation as havens from precarity and contingency. We might say: An Occupy camp is that place where members of the precariat meet and, through the mutuality of care, free one another from exposure to existential contingency. Even as Occupy thrives on contingency of all kinds—chance encounters, the openness to creative accident, and even bodily contiguity—it has cut a spatial division between the world of precarity and a world of care. In so doing, it has taken over the role of the state: to shield citizens from exposure to unwilled, unintended, contingent forces.

Occupy forces us to think the political from the perspective of precarity. Materially and ideologically, Occupy constructs itself from fragments, conjoined bric-a-brac: “homes” patched together with multiple pieces of cardboard and plywood, flimsy tents lashed to trees, flimsier consensus built through grueling hours and days of argument. (I’m recalling now the one woman who had an indescribable collection of stuff on display, first by the west-facing steps, then on the north side: some radical papers, odd toys, records with no apparent political import, dead flowers, chipped vases…) And, of course, the Occupiers themselves, the precariat, left with nowhere to go but to one another. All of these gatherings, collections, conjoinings were susceptible to interruption. Consider, for instance, the concerns about the coming cold, the weather: we’re actually talking about a political movement, a polis, so precarious that snow could destroy it—and, indeed, by literally destroying people, exposed bodies. Even as it empowered itself in its contingent coming-together, precarity, exposure, and bad contingency persistently threatened Occupy. The substrate of the potential world we would make is the ontological fragility of the world we inhabit.

I take finitude—and thus precarity—to be an ontological fact. So does any economics (it’s a science of finitude), and for this reason economic discourse is always inches away from serving as an ontological discourse. We might say that economics is a technology for negotiating the facticity of finitude, of precarity. It thus risks a certain callous positivism: scarcity is the way of the world. The proper ethico-ontological question concealed within economic thought is: how is finitude, precarity, our given exposure to contingency, to be negotiated, reckoned with, handled? How do we care about our contingent being-here-together?

We can’t unwork this fact of sheer exposure. No one can determine, before birth, if they are to be born into the secured-wealthy or the growing precariat. We’re thrown into our positions—we could call this contingent distribution of security and precarity a “birthright lottery,” with Ayelet Shachar. But, if we can’t control the underlying heteronomy that determines the modality of our being, the contingent assignment to a life free from or exposed to further contingencies, we can make a world that controls the effects of such contingent assignment, that cares for the fact of our unintended thrownness. (Once more: this is what the state used to do, at least normatively.) I’m recalling now the opening lines of Tristram Shandy, a “novel” at the origins of a literary tradition that, we are told, brought into the world the autistic and autarkic liberal subject. But, as we see, exposure to contingency, to an unwilled determination of one’s being, stands at the very origins of this subjectivity:

“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me…”

Tristram’s origins are tainted by nonreflexivity—the way his parents refuse to consider the effects of their actions, as they were duty bound. Contingency undoes everything in Tristram’s life-course, from his name to his nose. But, as Tristram knows, the origins are unassailable, he is factically in the world as he is, and what remains is to manage effects, to negotiate his unwilled presence in the world.

There are better and worse ways of managing the fact of precarity, of exposure to contingency. But it cannot be annulled. Liberals would have us think that the 800 people securing jobs at Dilworth will be freed from contingency, from exposure to bodily undoing. But the precariat cannot be freed from precarity through labor. Precarity will return, months later, jobs gone, skating rink complete. Neoliberalism’s valorization of labor—as an expression of self-responsibility, self-care, and as a modality of freeing oneself from contingency—enables us to ignore the fact that precarity can’t be un- or over-worked. It’s labor’s ontological presupposition.

The 800 people needing labor are precarious anyhow. Far more precarious is the thought of precarity itself. The struggle now consists in showing the insistent, non-transcendable fact of precarity, in showing how we are differentially exposed to contingency, and in developing a modality of sociality that does not seek to annul (through labor, through ideologies of freedom, or both) precarity, but continually (re)organizes social being to negotiate fragility, finitude. The struggle consists, in other words, in showing how a village of cardboard, plywood, and plastic offers members a greater freedom from precarity by insistently recognizing its own, and their, fragility. A fragility that no kind and no amount of labor—not even 800 jobs—can un-work.

A Plea: Colleagues, Come to City Hall at 5pm

2011-11-27T11:25:00.000-08:00

Occupy Philadelphia faces eviction tonight. Its permit expires at 5:00pm. Most likely, police enforcement of the eviction will take place after 11:00pm. Many Occupiers plan to stay there, to remain in the commons that their co-presence produces. You should join them—us, I mean.

I make this request in particular to those of you who cannot stand behind the politics that Occupy seems to endorse—who do not feel represented by Occupy, who do not feel as if the issues that motivate you are represented by Occupy. At this moment, the politics of Occupy—its varied ideologies, desires, and aims—are less important than the question of the political itself. And it is in the name of fidelity to the political, of a receptivity to a futurity that has been breached but might be closed, that I ask you to come to City Hall tonight.

Most of us cannot recall a time at which the private has not enclosed, diminished, and ultimately dissolved the political. Two years after I was born, a British halfwit declared, “They’re casting their problems on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” The sociality of the political was cast as a mis-citation, a fantasy, a mystifying dream. Just individuals and families, mommy-daddy-me. Meaningful sociality was reduced to whom one fucks (heteronomatively), the relations between mommy-daddy and the human product of their fucking (making genealogy, and thus race, a substrate of neoliberal sociology), and one’s self-responsible interactions with other self-responsible actors (a subjectivity derived from normative models of market sociality). That’s it. Three ways of being social. Nothing else could fit into the epistemic coordinates of neoliberalism, and we’ve been subjectivated to take this impoverishment of being-with as being real: “And, you know, there is no such thing…” Sure we do, Marge. Neoliberal realism codes any figuration of the social that exceeds the scope of these impoverished hermeneutics as merely ideological, merely cultural, an interested mystification of the real forces at work. In so doing, it reduces real antagonisms to administrative problems.

I don’t have time to write more right now. I just want to make two claims. First: The event of the political is constituted through the advent of being-with that cannot fit into given modalities of counting the social. The political fucks up the census; it introjects an excessive modalization of subjectivity into the quantified and integral space of administered being. Second: The excessiveness of the political to the given means that it is properly speaking incalculable. It cannot be contained, reined in, or reigned over by given hermeneutics. This includes our own radical practices of reading, our own mechanisms of critique. I’ll take myself as an example. I think that much of Occupy’s discourse is bourgeois-reformist in orientation; its focus on finance capital enables Occupiers to neglect class stratification within the “99%.” But this critique is feckless (at best) and conservative (at worst) if it is not made on site—in this place where one is not not an individual, a family member, etc., but where one is also more than that in an as yet undetermined, incalculable way. Even though Occupy might seem regressive or stupid from a given position (say, my open Marxist position), we have to accept that we can’t outsmart the political, because the emergence of the political puts what makes us “smart” into question. In negative terms, the political will always seem stupid, and this is because the event it marks cannot be contained within given frames of intelligibility. We can only use our pre-given modes of knowing (say, class critique) to help attune us to the incalculable event that comes. But we can’t use our modes of knowing to stifle the event.

There is not one radically oriented academic hermeneutic that does not have a basis in a real social movement—political actions where subjects faced the state and demanded that their complaint be treated as a political problem, a failure of the polity that puts the polity itself in question. The event of the political produces new knowledges, new modalities of reading the social. As academics, we come belatedly to the political—so many owls of Minerva—and transform the political work of others into knowledge. It’s a kind of appropriation; at least, it is a kind of division of labor, a stratification of primary producers (activists) and secondary, value-adding producers (academics). Bring the knowledges you possess, submit Occupy to immanent critique—a critique that quickens, a critique that opens Occupy to its full potential—and come be a primary producer of the political knowledges that will have arrived.

The Police and the Polis

2011-11-22T10:16:00.000-08:00

About a week ago, while at the Occupy Philly GA, I witnessed firsthand, and for the first time, the enforcement of Philadelphia’s racist, classist curfew law. (For those of you who do not know about this law: it makes it illegal for minors to be in University City—Penn’s campus—and Center City after certain times. It essentially makes it illegal for young black kids to travel to and through affluent white areas of the city.) It’s actually incorrect to say that I saw its enforcement firsthand, for I didn’t realize what was happening until it was over. I had to perform a cognitive double take, as it were. This is because the violence that I was witnessing was extremely distressing, extremely disorienting. For one, there was the noise: the two police officers grunting orders, shouting at the black kid who was caught between them, their arms crooked between his, his body tugged forward as he shouted back. Moreover, the cops were not in uniform; they only signifier of their office was a red armband that, due to the speed of events, I could not see. The police, in short, did not appear as police; they appeared as private persons in a private dispute, carting a kid away from City Hall for reasons neither they, nor the victim, nor I, nor my co-witnesses, could immediately comprehend. They didn’t act like police, either—that is, their actions did not conform to my ideal-typical understanding of how police action appears. They weren’t cool, they weren’t calm. They were affectively and personally involved in the situation, angry and enraged at the kid who squirmed in their too-tight grip. It seemed as if, at the moment of enforcing the law, the transcendence of the law that they were enforcing was forgotten; all that remained was a kind of nonpurposive, nonreflective violence—a brute desire to dominate this resistant subject, the one right there, right at them, the one they touched and grabbed and grasped. Legal motivations provide the before and after of the event of enforcement, but the event itself seemed to suspend these legalistic concerns. All that remained was force, and their passional investment in enforcing their wills—not the determining will of the law.

I offer this scene of disorientation, of confusion, as a hermeneutic for reading the spread of police violence against Occupy that we have witnessed in the past week. We’re all familiar with these acts of violence, from NYC to UC Davis. What is most shocking about this violence is that it continues. Many are asking: How, given the fact that police know that someone is filming them, that thousands of cameras expose the rightlessness of their actions, is it possible that police continue to use batons, gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets? The scene of enforcement, however, is one in which futurity does not matter, in which questions of legitimation and right are suspended. This is not because scenes of enforcement are states of exception, paralegal spaces in which the law produces zones of exteriority in which it renders itself non-effective. Law may still exercise its grip over these scenes; it may penalize the police for the cruel violence they inflict. The law will remember these scenes, and it is important that we make the law remember these scenes. But these scenes of enforcement are constituted such that, in their taking-place, actors forget the law, forget the transcendent will that they enforce, and substitute the law’s will with their own wills, fully immanent and attuned to the situation, passional and violent. The thesis: In these scenes of enforcement, the wills of the police are not determined by the determining will of law but by the affective composition of the event itself.

If the sovereign has two bodies, the police has but one—and it’s always right there, fully involved in and immanent to the event. Policing takes place such that the police can never step outside and attain a position of exorbitant reflexivity to the world that their presence convenes. We can’t be misled, then, by the seeming impersonality of cops in riot gear—the uniformity of their dress, the invisibilization of defining and personalizing features, the bodies too sleek and shiny to be striated by particularity. Abstraction here—the abstractness of the individual bodies allegorizing the abstractness of the state—is not a uniform but a costume, a disguise. What remains important is the embodied singularity beneath the drag of abstraction, of uniformity, of impersonality. For an impersonal abstraction is not affected by affect, and it is affective pulsations—frustration, rage, perhaps even sadistic pleasure—that choreograph the movement of a decidedly non-abstract baton-wielding hand in the arc that completes itself on a protestor’s head. Abstract force, the state itself, only becomes concrete through the contingent conduits of affected singularities—and, in the moment of this concretion, abstraction is entirely forgotten, suspended. The scene of police violence is in the world of the contingent concrete, of force undetermined by an unaffected will.

It’s probably shocking to no one that police are not good Kantians, that their will is always involved and interested in the situation in which they find themselves. But I think that this goes a little distance in explaining how apparently unmotivated acts of police violence against non-violent subjects (such as the pepper-spraying of students at UC Davis) are possible. Because the will of the police is undetermined by legalistic reflexivity, non-violent protest in such situations does not signify as demonstrators legally exercising a set of rights (including, in the event of an illegal action, the right of due process). It is the affected and non-rational will of the police that matters, that participates in the shaping of these events. Any resistance—violent or “non-violent”—signifies as a violation of the police’s (not the law’s) will. Indeed, non-violent protest (e.g., the refusal to move at the police’s command) affectively determines the police as frustrated, as temporarily feckless, and produces a state in which the police will use whatever means are available to enforce their irrational will. Ultimately, the aims of the police have to strike any observer as nonsensical: what is at stake, for instance, in removing these students from this plot of grass? Who cares? I’m assuming that a police officer, off duty, away from the scene, would agree. But in the situation, it is the negation of an affected will—one that cannot achieve a position of exorbitant reflexivity—that matters and that compensates for its negation by brutalizing others.

My point, then, is that these scenes of police violence are scenes of activity whose purposivity is determined by an immanent field of affects. The nonpurposiveness of the democratic polis finds its perverse double in the purposeless violence of the police. It’s an eerie reminder: in these scenes of violence stripped of transcendent reference, in the immanent enfolding of two singularities in a field of affective intensity, it no longer becomes clear who is fighting for what, or what constitutes the difference between the whos. Only the properly political distinction between friends and enemies can, at this point, separate the police and polis—but even this distinction might dissolve in the scene of violence. The police, the polis: Mon semblable,—mon frère!

Please sign this petition urging the DOJ to investigate the UC Davis police actions.

Utopia; or, the Brooklyn Bridge

2011-11-20T12:43:00.001-08:00

Occupy Wall Street’s Day of Action on November 17 concluded with a dramatic occupation of the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge has an obvious significance within the movement’s internal history: Occupy was galvanized when hundreds of protesters were arrested on the bridge on October 1. But what is it about the Bridge that made it such a cathected site for Occupy in the first place? It is possible that the bridge--any bridge--offers a potent set of symbolics for the movement. We might think of Occupy, for instance, as attempting to bridge that gap between the elites and the plebes. We might think of it as bridging a history of social, political, and economic injustice with a future democracy, a polis to come. We might think of the bridge as symbolizing the peculiar way that Occupy materializes sociality--it convokes a virtual space, a zone of being-with that cannot be localized or demarcated, a place that can always move elsewhere, a site of pure liminality and thus potentiality. Taking a more historical perspective, I suggest that Occupy’s march across the Brooklyn Bridge bridges a gap between utopian socialists of the mid-nineteenth century and social movements today. Indeed, the Brooklyn Bridge is one sedimentation of utopian socialist knowledges and practices that circulated through the Atlantic world in the republic’s first half-century. We might see Occupy’s return to the Bridge as a kind of unconscious homage to their socialist forebears--because, as we know, and as we must always assert, socialism did have a vibrant role in U.S. politics until some silly jackass decided that socialism and class-conscious politics are an impossibility in our always-already utopian land of plenty.

John August Roebling was the chief designer of the Brooklyn Bridge. Born in Germany, Roebling studied architecture and engineering in Berlin; he also attended lectures offered by Hegel. It was in Berlin, and possibly in Hegel’s lecture hall, that he met John Adolphus Etzler. Like Roebling, Etzler was interested in Hegel and engineering. He also had a particular hobbyhorse--emigration from the authoritarian states of Prussia. Indeed, Etzler had been jailed for promoting emigration in 1829. Upon his release in 1830, Etzler and Roebling jointly published A General View of the United States of North America, Together with a Community Plan for Settlement, founded an emigration society, and in 1831 sailed for Philadelphia.

What would this “community plan” have looked like? I have not been able to track down a copy of the text, unfortunately, but “community plans” circulated with a ferocious speed in the Atlantic world and in the Americas during the period. We also have Etzler’s plans for settlements he would attempt to found in the 1840s in the U.S. and Venezuela. A techno-Fourierist, Etzler proposed that communitarians would live in something like a phalanstery. Every member--men and women alike--would have their own room. There would be no marriage; sexual freedom was ensured to all. Materially, the phalanstery would rely on a curious machine called the Satellite--a kind of prototype for modern day tractors that would be self-propulsive, energy efficient, and would drastically increase yields of farm land. Etzler, in short, imagined a technological transcendence of Malthusian subsistence limits; moreover, the hyper-supply of foodstuffs would also spell the death of Ricardian political economy, premised as it was on distributionist class politics. The promise of subsistence would reverse capitalism’s economy of social attention, an economy Etzler neatly glosses: “The poorer man is, the more he is neglected.” It also promised another benefit to the typical working man of Jacksonian America: aside from easy managerial labor--the superintendence of the Satellite--work itself would be abolished. As in Fourier’s Four Movements, Etzler’s New World is one where sociality is freed from privative limits, a world where “[l]ove and affection may there be fostered and enjoyed without any of the obstructions that oppose, diminish, and destroy them in the present common state of men.” Indeed, Etzler shifted the telos of sociality from the satisfaction of need to the mutual intensification of pleasure, “to please and to be pleased…to enjoy life as well as possible by mutual sociality” (Etzler, The Paradise within Reach of All Men, 1833).

Perhaps Etzler’s utopia seemed a little too utopian to Roebling. Dependent as it was on the success of the Satellite, it is possible that the engineering student recognized early on that the machine could never work. The pair had a falling out in 1831, when Roebling suggested that their party of migrants settle land the good old fashioned way and begin a small agrarian community. While it would be organized on something like a “community plan,” it wasn’t radical enough for Etzler. The party split: Roebling founded Saxonburg in Butler County, Pennsylvania, on land snatched from an Indian tribe. Etzler would go on to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Haiti, the British West Indies, Venezuela, and, eventually, my dissertation, leaving in his wake a heap of failed utopias (including my dissertation). Despite their split, Roebling remembered Etzler fondly; as J.A. Robeling’s son would write, Roebling considered Etzler “the greatest genius ever.”

In the split between Etzler and Roebling, we might see a split between two theories of social change: one works within the social, political, and economic limits of the given world, the other attempts its utopian breach. The split between these epistemes is not absolute, nor is there a contradiction in posited ends. Indeed, Roebling did not dispute the socialist, communitarian aims of Etzler’s project--he questioned the project’s pacing. Roebling’s utopian energies were directed into the pragmatic field of technology. He innovated wire rope production in Saxonburg, and it is this rope that would be instrumental in his design of the Brooklyn Bridge. Wire rope: not so grand as a robot that could produce wheat at will, but a small, quotidian object that would materially alter city-scapes throughout the world, promoting easy mobility across disjointed spaces.

We can see Occupy’s occupation of the Brooklyn Bridge as bridging the gap between these two epistemes of social change. Practical technological innovations like Roebling’s have altered our world, enabling the massive productivity that Etzler could only dream about. Indeed, our world is a perversion of the New World that Etzler imagined, and the fact that poverty reigns in a world in which Malthusian limits have been overcome should remind us that enhanced productivity without a redistributionist politics simply entrenches the class divisions Ricardo lamented. We need to keep Etzler’s vision--one in which no poor person is “neglected”--alive. And so we might see Occupy’s occupation of the Bridge as enacting a historical rendezvous between Etzler and Roebling, a re-joining after their split. The socialist Etzler strolls across the bridge, approaches the pragmatic Roebling, and says: “You’re own schemes have succeeded: you and others like you have re-made the world and enhanced the productivity of humanity. You’ve done what I failed to do. But you’ve done it in a distorted form. Everyone can eat, but many starve; no one need work, but people clamor for jobs. 170 years ago, it was perhaps correct for you to ignore me, to conceive of me as a charlatan. But today the Paradise that I imagined is social possibility. It’s time for you--the pragmatists and the technicians--to step aside; it’s time to embed the material world within a social morality. It’s time to ‘enjoy life as well as possible by [a] mutual sociality’ unfettered by material limits.” The occupation of the Bridge amounts to this: a remoralization of a factually existent material world that generations past could only imagine as a slightly insane utopian possibility.

Originary Acalculia; or, Perfume and the Political

2011-11-17T10:57:00.000-08:00

Given the spate of recent Occupy clearances, as well as the threat of eviction facing Occupy Philly, the question arises: What’s at stake in staying, in continuing to occupy, in forcing a confrontation with the city and the police, in putting bodies in harm’s way? Some at Philly—the so-called “Reasonable Solutions” group—believe that we should be reasonable and move, and they’re acting on that belief. Denying the GA’s authority, they claim to represent the majority of occupiers—those who aren’t “radicals” or “anarchists”—and have been in talks with Nutter’s office. I think that this solution is “reasonable,” if we define reasonableness as participation in capitalist rationality. This rationality controls the event of the political by regulating the distribution of social time-space—through an economy of the political. We could re-read the entire archive of classical political economy to tease out this process of invagination, the point at which the species term [political] becomes a mere instance of the erstwhile part [economy]. But the regulative distribution of social time-space has far deeper roots, as we know. So let’s turn back to a diktat of Jesus, a locution that serves as the commonsense of any distributive rationality.

“The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.” A woman, you recall, had just washed Jesus’ feet with perfume; the apostles, appalled by the costliness of the gesture, suggest that the perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor. The act of expenditure brings into conflict two distinct temporalities: the insistent transhistoricity of the poor and the eruptive but finite temporality of Christ’s appearance. Chronos versus kairos, the long duree versus the event. Jesus offers a phenomenological reduction of his own eruption into the world’s time-space: “the poor” mark that which must be bracketed, suspended in an epoché, kept away so that the divine kairos can take place as kairos. Humorously, the poor are actually too wealthy to participate in this kairos: they’re too rich with time, with chronos. They’ll always be around. Fidelity to the eventness of the event—the eruptive apparition of the divine—means neglecting the ordinary, the poor. The poor serve as an anti-figure for the event: they must not appear, and thus must be rendered invisible, so that the extraordinary, kairotic moment can constitute itself.

The poor will continue to serve as a species-term for that which, because omnipresent, cannot and should not appear in the constitution of an event. The semiosis of the poor will be an anti-semiosis; the omnipresence of the poor means that their signs mark nothing more than an unremarkable being-there. To try to find the poor is to enter a disorienting world in which signs cannot direct us anywhere, a world in which signs signify disorientation. After all, the omnipresent poor have no direction, no aim, no ability to transcend the bad infinity that is impoverished dwelling on earth. Engels invites us to take a walk through this bad infinity: “Above Ducie Bridge, the left bank grows more flat and the right bank steeper, but the condition of the dwellings on both banks grows worse rather than better. He who turns to the left here from the main street, Long Millgate, is lost; he wanders from one court to another, turns countless corners, passes nothing but narrow, filthy nooks and alleys, until after a few minutes he has lost all clue, and knows not whither to turn. Everywhere half or wholly ruined buildings, some of them actually uninhabited, which means a great deal here; rarely a wooden or stone floor to be seen in the houses, almost uniformly broken, ill-fitting windows and doors, and a state of filth!” It goes on like this. The semiosis of poverty revolts against the order of the proper by refusing to be anything but horribly common, horribly generic. Phenomenologically and rhetorically, Engels can’t get his bearings: the proper sign of “Dulcie Bridge” is sharply juxtaposed to clichéd descriptions of the world of the poor, a world bereft of deixis, proper names, the possibility of orientation. And, as he points out, Manchester was constructed in such a way as to produce zones of visibility, of orientation, of proper signs and stable semiosis, and zones of invisibility, of disorientation, of common signs—of the poor.

We see, then, a double invisibilization of the poor. As ordinary, as a chronological constant, they cannot appear in the constitution of the kairotic event. But, as ordinary life unfolds in its humdrum chronos, the ordinary/poor is also that which one need not consider or make legible. The poor are foreclosed from participating in the constitution of an eruptive moment and they are so spatially distributed that they will not come-to-legibility within the ordinary time that they figure.

What are the implications for us, in our decision to move or not move? The demand that Occupy move from the site of the polis—City Hall—is to ask the poor to invisibilize themselves, to disappear from view, to go elsewhere. Through the production of camps, the poor as poor are appearing: Dilworth Plaza is not unlike the messy, disorienting Manchester neighborhood through which Engels walks (though it’s far more hygienic). This common space is invaginating the site of the proper; the properly political is re-subordinating the economic. To leave would be to participate in the invagination of the polis by the economic, to willfully submit to the very economization of political time-space that constitutes itself by bracketing the apparition of the poor. Our visibility, our constitution of a political event, is more important than an administrative decision—particularly a decision to gentrify City Hall. We’re removing the political from the economic, from distributive rationalities. The political will only ever appear as an incalculable event, only after a polis-to-be has staked its possible being on a refusal to participate in the economization of who-appears. An originary acalculia: the kind of decision that led a seemingly irrational woman to dump perfume on Jesus’ feet without considering what that expenditure meant for the poor.

Bloomberg, That Fucking Asshole; or, Reflections on the Insult

2011-11-15T10:32:00.000-08:00

I intended to write about the genre of the petition today—to clarify, for myself, the implications that inhere to the act of petitioning—but last night’s clearance of Occupy in New York has interrupted my schedule. Like many, I’m angry. I imagine a utopian scene in which I sit down with the mayors of Oakland, New York, Portland, (Philly soon, one guesses) and so on. I imagine, in my frustration, taking seven minutes to insult them with the full range of my cruel rhetorical resources. I would tell Bloomberg that he’s a fucking asshole, a marionette of capital, a vulgarian facilitating the vulgarization of the world, an intellectually impoverished cock whose concept of responsible authority is determined by a realty company asking for “assistance.” This scene of insulting speech is obviously a product of frustration. But I want to consider how the structure of insulting speech-acts sheds light on what has been happening to Occupy camps throughout the states. I want to suggest, briefly, that these crackdowns are rhetorically structured as insults.

What is an insult? Let’s take as an example the utterance, “Bloomberg, you’re a fucking asshole.” The utterance seems like an act of predication: Bloomberg, the subject, is included within the class of fucking assholes. But we might also think of “Bloomberg is a fucking asshole” as a nonpredicative assertion. Unlike other terms—white, tall, etc.—it seems impossible, as Agamben discusses, “to establish a class that includes all things to which the predicate in question [“fucking asshole”] is attributed.” Agamben discusses nonpredicative statements in his discussion of friendship, and, usefully and intriguingly, he suggests that the assertion of friendship (“I am your friend”) is rhetorically parallel to the insult (“You’re a fucking asshole, Mayor Bloomberg”). Insults, he writes, “do not offend those who are subjected to them as a result of including the insulted person in a particular category…something that would simply be impossible, or, anyway, false.” Bloomberg is not a “fucking asshole”; the assertion is catachrestical; it doesn’t refer to an actual reality; the statement is consciously false. So why might the good mayor get offended? Because an insult “is effective precisely because it does not function as a constative utterance…it uses language in order to give a name in such a way that the named cannot accept his name, and against which he cannot defend himself.” Insult is effective because it misses what it hits; and, indeed, it hits by missing. Bloomberg is not a fucking asshole—whatever that would actually be—and it is the mis-naming of Bloomberg that hits him, that hurts him. Or would, if he weren’t a fucking asshole.

Insult is a speech-act that affects the insulted by not addressing itself to the properties of the subject. And it’s the structural errancy of insult—how it hits by missing—that rhetorically structures the acts of violence visited upon Occupy camps. As Bloomberg knows full well, the Occupy movement now has a virtuality exorbitant to its materialization in common space; moreover, the destruction of one common space will be recuperated immediately, in the occupation and formation of new common spaces. We’re a many-headed hydra. Each act of violence—the slashing of a tent, the grip of a cop’s hands on the arms of a yelling protestor as she is hauled away, gas in eyes, batons on heads—necessarily misses what it intends to hit. Bloomberg knows this: he knew that there would be a GA today, he knew that people would return to a park (if not the park), he knew that these moments of violence are not and could not be addressed to the subject that is Occupy, because Occupy is exorbitant to its punctual manifestations. Occupy now names the virtual matrix out of which bodies will precipitate an occupied time-space. Bloomberg knows this.

Like my own desire to insult that fucking asshole, Bloomberg, Bloomberg’s own violent insults emerged out of a frustration. The mayor claims that he was decisively sovereign in his command to clear the park. In an item on Bloomberg’s news site, under the dramatic heading “Final Decision,” we read the mayor assert sovereign responsibility for his decision: “But make no mistake -- the final decision to act was mine.” Nonsense. The mayor also notes, “Inaction was not an option.” The closure of options restricts the field of decisiveness; Bloomberg’s sovereignty was bounded by the (apparent) structural necessity to act. I suggest that the sovereign, final decision was in fact a frustrated negotiation with a heteronomous force that produced a mood, a feeling that positioned Bloomberg as having-to-act. Waiting to act would have been savvier; while I think Occupy will outlast the winter, the coming weeks do threaten to produce a slow-down of Occupy activity. He knows this fact, too. The decision to move was a non-sovereign submission to an affective tonality of frustration. This frustration was itself the product of the fact that Occupy is a virtuality, vague and amorphous. It’s not a centered subject. It can appear anywhere, and will reappear once it has been temporarily forced to disappear. It cannot be bargained with. But neither, humorously, can it really be insulted: a non-subject, Occupy has no properties, and so it can't be mis-named, either in speech or in violence structured as insulting speech.

And thus the comfort of the insult, as a speech-act or as a violent act on bodies. Even if an insult misses what it intends (hitting by missing), the structural requirement that the insult miss its addressee necessitates that we think of the addressee—even if it doesn’t exist—as a subject possessing a set of properties, as a centered subject that can be wounded by actions, verbal or otherwise. Bloomberg’s violent insults attempt retroactively producing Occupy as a subject, even if only as a subject-in-and-through-violation, because the non-subjective, de-centered sociality of Occupy is frightening. A specter is haunting Bloomberg, and he’s afraid. And so he tries exorcizing the specter by transforming it into a (wounded) subject—a set of bodies that can be hit, a material agglomeration that can be slashed, removed, and trashed. All the more unethical because it cannot achieve the aim it posits. Bloomberg’s decision to raid was the feckless insult of a fucking asshole.

Press Release from Occupy Philly (in part)

2011-11-14T11:24:00.001-08:00

Below is the text of a press release issued by Occupy Philly in response to Nutter's opportunistic instrumentalization of a rape at City Hall—an instrumentalization that paves the way for the demolition of the site. I don't have all of the working groups' texts, but the People of Color Caucus' statement offers an insightful critique of Nutter's opportunism and cynicism.

PRESS RELEASE

RESPONSE TO MAYOR'S SUNDAY PRESS CONFERENCE

FROM OCCUPY PHILLY LEGAL, FOOD, AND SAFETY WORKING GROUPS AND PEOPLE OF COLOR CAUCUS

November 14, 2011

First, we want to thank the people of Philadelphia for their ongoing support for Occupy Philly and our efforts to address social and economic inequities in our city and beyond.

We’ve called this press conference today to correct the inaccuracies in Mayor Nutter’s statements yesterday about our occupation.

Occupy Philly and the occupy movement in general did not create the problems of public health and unemployment outlined by the mayor. On the contrary, these problems, among many others, created the occupy movement. Such problems are not symptoms or inventions of Occupy Philly, nor are they exclusive to the occupy movement. They are instead indicative of the greater social, political, and economic injustices of our society and everyday life—injustices often perpetuated by the mayor’s policies. This is exactly why we started this occupation.

We feel that the mayor’s inaccuracies, which four Occupy Philly working groups will specifically discuss today, were an intentional effort to divide and discredit our movement. Within Occupy Philly, we proudly support a diversity of opinions. We stand in solidarity with each other and our direct democracy, and we reaffirm our commitment to nonviolence.

We haven’t changed; the mayor has. The mayor’s new tone is an attempt to shift the focus from the real source of the problems impacting our city to those of us engaged in trying to create just alternatives.

So we’ve brought together delegates from the Occupy Philly Legal, Food, Safety, and People of Color of Caucus to address specific comments of the mayor’s.

Statement from the People of Color Caucus

As the People of Color Caucus, we work to eliminate racism and related systems of oppression inside and beyond the Occupy Philadelphia movement. We oppose the mayor’s recent statements about Occupy Philadelphia regarding civil disobedience, homelessness, and violence against women and invite him to meet with us to resolve them.

It is shameful that the Mayor has decried the use of civil disobedience as a tactic, when it has been used by leaders like Rosa Parks and Philadelphia’s own Cecil B. Moore as a way to fight racism in our nation. Civil disobedience is at the heart of American values, but the Mayor’s policies are not.

We reject the Mayor’s argument that more policing leads to more safety. We point to both the repressive youth curfew law and Stop and Frisk as examples of how increased police contact actually puts people of color at risk. We point to the police shooting just last week of Sadiq Moore as he entered his own home. We demand an Occupy Philly encampment and a City of Philadelphia that are free from police harassment and violence.

We question the Mayor’s concern about homelessness given his refusal to consider the very serious problems that the Dilworth Plaza renovations will cause for the homeless Philadephians who have occupied the space far longer than these 40 days. This issue is especially pressing given the City’s recent decision to close the Ridge Avenue shelter this Winter, our largest homeless shelter.

We believe that the cynical use of sexual violence and health concerns are opportunistic ways for the mayor to justify an attack on our movement. In the most recent reports available from the PPD, there were 28 rapes reported in our city in the last two weeks of October – where were the other 28 press conferences over those two weeks? We oppose violence against women in all of its forms, and this movement is ultimately about creating a just world in which all people are safe in their bodies, homes, and cities. As we stand against that violence, we also stand against attempts to derail this movement.

This is Real

2011-11-13T14:27:00.000-08:00

I write this post anticipating (with many others) that things are about to get real in Philly. By real, I mean violent. Invoking the realism of biopolitical governmentality, Nutter seems poised to send in the baton-wielding clowns. A conflict of social ontologies is about to ensue. The co-presence of competing realities promises a violent production of the real.

“This is real”: so read a sign popular during the initial weeks of Occupy. Like most Occupy utterances, “this is real” signifies in two split registers. On one hand, the slogan asserts that Occupy is a movement that possesses the same gravity and density as any other “real” political movement. Occupy is neither ephemeral nor a group of kids pretending to be revolutionary: this is real. On the other hand, “this is real” calls into question the ontological status of the polity from which it solicits recognition. This—this event here, this sign, these people, we-here-together—is real, unlike the para-reality that is out there, beyond the pale of Occupy. “This is real” is thus not merely a bid for recognition but a weapon of de-realization.

As a weapon, the slogan is a technology of violence. Of war.

We can’t avoid this fact. We need to keep it in play against claims that the movement is “non-violent.” To imagine a non-violent alteration—a making-other—of social ontologies is to imagine a coming moment of messianic violence, a force that will alter the world without ripping that world’s self-identity. Such an imagination enables us to disavow the violent force of our own activity, proleptically normalizing it as the emergent real. Let’s recall Fanon’s words from his essay “On Violence” in Wretched of the Earth: “Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for total disorder. But it cannot be accomplished by the wave of a magic wand, a natural cataclysm, or a gentleman’s agreement.” What is required is violence—a force that de-realizes one ontology and seeks the production of another. As Fanon suggests, the responsibility for this violence cannot be displaced. Whatever the causal relations that lead us to undertake violent acts, we are not conducting forces greater than ourselves (magic, nature, or delegated popular will); we ourselves are doing it. We need to keep in mind the fact that all de-realization is violent: it is irreducible to bodies in pain, to batons crashing on heads, to tear gas in eyes. It is sitting in a public space, en masse; it is cathecting to a dialectical process that ends with us willfully putting our heads in the arc of fast-flying batons, of exposing our eyes to gas. In terms of a bodily register, the two violences here are irreducibly different. But we must keep in mind the fact of our own being-violent.

Why? Let’s turn back to Fanon. Describing violence in an ideal-typical colony, he describes “this atmospheric violence, this violence rippling under the skin.” For Fanon, violence in the colony is pervasive, a fact of life that enfleshes the colonized. For the colonized, violence comes to represent “the absolute praxis,” an absoluteness—an unbinding of the real, an ab-solving—that takes the form of an “irreversible act.” It is thus a de-ontologizing act that has an ontological status: the irreversible breaking of the real possesses the force of reality. This violence is necessary—the real is intolerable—but this necessity requires that we assume a position of absolute responsibility for the effects of our violent ab-solution from the intolerable real. Being responsible for violence means, first and foremost, recognizing the violence and force of our own “peaceful” praxis. “This is real” testifies to the irreversibility of our actions; we’ve made an event. If we neglect to consider the violence we visit upon the given, we risk becoming a force of absolute negativity, a violence without end which is endless for its refusal to name itself as violence. The praxis of freedom thus becomes a praxis of calm fury, and we’re left confirming Hegel’s remarks on the Terror: “It [death in the name of universal freedom] is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water.”

We must be violent; we are being violent. But we can’t let our acts of violence become routinized, insignificant. The phrase “this is real” says, to those out there, outside of the ambit of the “this”: “The world you know is unreal, and we will make it unreal. You will not be able to recognize the world once we’ve made it otherwise, and you will not be able to recognize yourself in the world; you will not be able to recognize yourself. We will rip you from self-identity. We do this in the name of a better real.” This is our statement, and I have no objection to it. I simply hope that we—as opposed to a capitalist world-system that routinizes the destruction of positions of responsibility—maintain an ethical relationship to the violence we have enacted, are enacting, will enact. The “99%” (I really hate this term) have worked out compromises, constructed lives in a world increasingly closed to such constructions; they will be as disoriented as the “1%” in the event of the (violent) birth of a just world. This disorientation will be on us, on the effects we unleash, and we need to be responsible for this forceful disorientation. I’m not necessarily sure what form this responsibility should take, or how one can indeed be ethically responsible for political violence. I end with this uncertainty.

Yapping Away

2011-11-07T09:23:00.000-08:00

The ecstasy that Melville describes in “A Squeeze of the Hand” (discussed here) shows how the labor process can itself generate resistances to the violence of capitalist labor regimes. For Melville, these resistances are embodied and affective: the hands-that-labor take in hand a kind of affective surplus that resists valuation, monetization, and so on. Grace Lee Boggs, long-time James collaborator, recalls something similar of her time as a factory worker during the Second World War: “There was a tremendous camaraderie. While our hands were busy wiring and soldering, our mouths were yapping away.” The phrase “yapping away” is fortuitous. If the profit-oriented labor process generates an affective and discursive surplus, these wayward words and affects are irreducible to pre-given structures of purposiveness—whether these are capitalist profit-making or anti-capitalist organizing. If, as a Hegelian ontology of labor would have it, labor is itself the power of negating the given, these moments of non-purposive sociality (yapping away) ironize the second moment of labor—when the negated given is purposively reconstituted in a new form.

Labor secretes the non-purposive, and intends keeping this secretion secret. The play of labor—squeezing hands, yapping mouths—is always over-coded by the for-structure of capitalism. Marx describes this for-structure in the Grundrisse: “Where money is not itself the community [Gemeinwesen], it must dissolve the community.” Money initially intends something beyond itself; it is used to exchange for use values. But as capitalist modalities of exchange become dominant, the for-structure of money becomes the community itself: “It [money] is itself the community [Gemeinwesen], and can tolerate none other standing above it.” Marx’s narrative seems little more than a Tonniesian narrative in which Gesellschaft replaces Gemeinschaft. But I want to think of Gemeinwesen—which we could translate as common-being, or, indeed, being-in-common—as a third term that gets us out of the unhelpful, nostalgia-laden binaries of an older sociology. We might think of this being-in-common as a non-purposive, factical sociality that indexes less a historical organization of a society that has been lost than an ontological possibility that continually shadows—and indeed is the ontological substrate of—purposiveness, the for-structures that dominate our thought of the economy, the political, and so on. In this sense, Gemeinwesen has not disappeared and cannot disappear. Indeed, in the squeezing hands and the yapping mouths we can see the activation of this Gemeinwesen at the heart of the for-structure of capitalism.

Marx will describe the same dynamic in terms of communist organizing, the “labor process” of political activism. “When communist workmen gather together,” he writes, “their immediate aim [Zweck] is instruction, propaganda, etc. But at the same time, they acquire a new need—the need for society—and what appears as a means had become an end.” The substitutability of ends and means opens the kind of democratic circularity that I discussed in a previous post. This non-purposive sociality is the surplus of communist organizational efforts. He continues: “This practical development can be most strikingly observed in the gatherings of French socialist workers. Smoking, eating, and drinking, etc., are no longer means of creating links between people. Company, association, conversation, which in turn has society as its goal, is enough for them.” Marx describes a freeing of sociality from purposivity: modalities of association (smoking, eating, drinking) are not longer means of association but its enactment. This is, as he writes, “enough for them.” Yet, this “enough,” of simple satisfaction, is not a privation. For Marx, the enough-ness of Gemeinwesen generates a particular mode of appearance: “The brotherhood of man is not a hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their work-worn figures.” The reality of this “brotherhood”—a problematic phrase indexing non-purposive sociality—shines (leuchtet), glows, radiates. Sociality here appears as a kind of halo, a para-material surplus that is not a tool, not reducible to technical purposivity, but signifies the completion and being-enough of that from which it radiates.

To ask what Occupy is “for” is to rip halos from heads, to subject the satisfaction of a sociality that is enough to over-coding by a for-structure that saturates the social with dissatisfaction. Even as people attempt this over-coding, at City Hall hands keep squeezing, mouths yapping, drums drumming, and associates eating, drinking, and smoking together. Occupy shines forth a fact scandalous to capitalist society: that sociality needn’t be for anything at all.

A Squeeze of the Hand

2011-11-06T09:41:00.000-08:00

The phrase, “This is what democracy looks like,” bears similarities to the species of utterance that logicians call an “ostensive definition.” Ostension relies on examples to define qualities or concepts that language itself is ill-equipped to define autonomously. The quality of being-red, for instance, is difficult to describe purely discursively. An ostensive definition of “red” posits the existence of a set containing “red” (i.e., color) that is exemplified by a bearer of redness in the world: “This color [e.g., of a rose] is red.” Ostension introduces a peculiar tension into logic and language. Through the dynamics of ostension, we see that ideality is yoked to a materiality that it can never fully sublate. The non-self-sufficiency of language necessitates that it take leave of its ideality and tarry with materiality. The deictic marker “this” indicates the mode by which concepts (re)turn to the concrete: pointing. Indeed, the etymology of “concept” (coming from “capere,” to take; the German term is similar, "Begriff" comes from “greifen,” to seize) shows that the physicality of the hand is inseparable from the ideality of the mental conception. The hand is the scandalous remainder—but also the initiating technology—of conceptual thought.

Hands are also the initiating technology—and scandalous remainder—of capitalism. On one hand, we have the “invisible hand,” a theory of capitalism’s distributional efficiency attributed to Adam Smith. Of course, Smith never speaks of “capitalism” and only used the term “invisible hand” a handful of times (three time, I think, in his lectures on astronomy, in Moral Sentiments, and in Wealth). Regardless of fidelity to the Smithian text, the term itself provides a vernacular (and, dishearteningly, even expert) normative conception of capitalism. Yet there is another set of hands that runs through Wealth of Nations: they appear when Smith attempts empirically defining how a market-system does (or should) function. These “hands” are, of course, laborers, figures for bodies that have been transformed into mere synecdoches by capitalism. We might think of the relay between Smith’s hyper-ideal “invisible hand” and the “hands” that labor as the relay we saw at work in ostensive definition: the invisible hand of capitalism can only be made to appear, to achieve definition, by turning to these all-too-material hands. Material hands concretize the invisible hand.

The becoming-material of capital is scandalous to capitalism—particularly in our day, when financialization and post-Fordism would have us believe that we participate in an immaterial economy, an informational economy. From the perspective of these narratives, we are to read capitalism as a process of invisibilization; the hands that labor are continually dematerialized, achieving the very ideality of Smith’s metaphor. Nothing would be easier than to posit an absolute distinction between hands in prior regimes of capitalism accumulation to the one that (supposedly) has taken hold today. Rediker, for instance, describes how the hands of sailors epidermalized their function within capitalist distribution. Tortured and toughened, deformed and calloused, one could tell a sailor by simply looking at his hands—hands marked, in effect, a form of race, a phenomenalization of one’s position within a society structured in dominance. Today, we are told, the paradigm of labor has shifted: the computerization of labor means that hands can remain lily white. (And my invocation of whiteness here is intended to show the ways in which this dematerialization of labor is itself circumscribed to a particular class that is itself structured through racial privilege.) But, of course, information labor cannot fully get rid of the real hands that labor. Consider Bartleby, for instance: how his hands must have (would have, had he preferred to labor) ached, cramped, and contorted. Computerized labor does the same: we now have a long list of occupational disorders. The invisible hand always touches down in (the form of) real hands.

Thus, the figure of the hands—otherwise an “abusive synecdoche” for laboring persons, in Bruce Robbins’ phrase—retains a revolutionary potential, insofar as it links the ideality of capitalism to the processes of its violent materialization. These hands are insistently material, the points at which capitalism matters. Capitalism necessarily produces this little point of materiality even as it seeks to sublate it into an a-material ideality. It’s from this point, the releve of a capital attempting to move beyond its dependence on hands, that we can begin taking in hand new futures.

And, indeed, hands are important to Occupy. Like “concept,” “Occupy” is etymologically linked to “capere”—it is a seizure of space, both a conception and a taking-in-hand of the commons. And hands, in their vibrant materiality, are on display at City Hall: drumming, clapping, “blinking” in affirmation, touching others, hugging, writing, and now freezing as the days shorten. And, I should add, defining, pointing, materializing a new conception of democracy. The “this” to which the slogan “This is what democracy looks like” points is a space in which the vibrant of materiality of the demos is demonstrated and taken in hand. A democratic materiality: here, pointing out democracy is to touch it, to touch one’s being-with-others.

I want to end with another invocation of Melville, this from the chapter of Moby-Dick entitled “A Squeeze of the Hand.” The matter upon which the workers labor (spermaceti) and the means by which they labor (their hands) is insistently and ecstatically present, the material means through which Ishmael comes to imagine a kind of democratic paradise. Melville’s Ishmael never names what takes place “democracy,” but we can. And we can see these squeezing whalers’ hands as prefiguring the insistently material hands materializing democracy at City Hall:

“Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, - Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.”

Circles

2011-11-04T10:10:00.000-07:00

A problem that has propelled my interest—and participation—in Occupy is the scission between the discourse it produces and the sociality it activates. The categories through which Occupy interprets itself in the media are typically the categories of power: one would believe it to be little more than a critique of finance capital and a demand for the return of a Keynesian state seeking to promote full employment. (These weak reformist demands are only radical to the extent that they are structurally not realizable.) We will miss the radical nature of Occupy if we limit ourselves to asking how effective it may be in producing reforms to the state, to finance, to capitalism in general. The new question—“What will victory for Occupy look like?”—is a trap. Asking Occupy to articulate a set of aims transcendent to itself is a means of asking Occupy to get innocuous, to fall in with official discourse before it produces a genuinely political, and even socio-ontological, event. Luckily, this event has already taken place, and it takes place everyday. We can descry a radical sociality that exceeds discourses of reformism in the repertoire of practices now common to the Occupy movement—practices that have not yet, but certainly will, find a conceptual language. The point now is to take this radical potential in hand, to begin to interpret the world from the concepts implicit in Occupy’s praxis. We need to become preoccupied with ourselves in order to limn the outline of the other world we might make.

What follows is something of an ethology, notes taken while on site. If the potentiality immanent to the movement is exorbitant to the outer world it critiques, we need to get a read on this potentiality, to see what we ourselves are doing in our average everyday interactions at City Hall. This is one attempt to build a set of keywords by which we might see the social logic implicit in Occupy’s modality of dwelling.

Circles

Oct. 6. Drumbeats, then, and subtle movements as I, we, stand around. A carnival atmosphere, as if the future we would like to make is already present. And in many ways it is: there is something of a Sunday taking place here as we gather. No one is working; rather, we are coordinating ourselves around a single site, sharing space, fashioning a new being in common. The tragedy inheres here: a communist sociality advenes at City Hall, enabling the critique of capitalism we put forth, but this advent of the commons seeks its own enfolding into non-revolutionary time. As if the truth of Sunday consisted in looking forward to Monday. But one should ignore the reformist discourse—more jobs, regulated Wall Street, and so on. One should instead listen to the drums and participate in this non-purposive sociality. Really, one cannot help but do so, for the laughter and shouting and clapping touch one, and one claps in response. The circulation of this affect encircles one; it figures the demos as a circle.

Affect indexes the state of the social. One is enraged, frustrated, hopeful, indifferent…But the communicability of affect means that it exceeds its indexical function (as sign) and produces events (as force). The telos of early utopian socialists—Fourier in particular—understood freedom as little more than the freeing of affect. Fourier desired the unimpeded flow of affect, passional energy linking man’s materiality to the world in common. Passions here literally make the world, which is defined as a set of energetic forces. The Fourierist phalanstery was to both prefigure this world (serving as an index of the future) and produce it (its example and sheer power forcing all to mimic its arrangements). In demarcating a site for being in common (like a phalanstery, like City Hall), a space is opened to coordinate the flow of affective intensities. Feeling makes this world; the movement is thus irreducible to slogans, cognized self-reflections—indices without force. It is for this reason that the movement’s assertion (“This is what democracy looks like”) is a failed apperception. “This is what democracy feels like” would be closer, but the dangling simile keeps the statement in the realm of the theoretical-reflective. It would be best to say: “This is democracy, and it feels.”

Feels what? The impossible “This” of the utterance, the force of its taking-place that is irreducible to indexing what-takes-place. It feels itself, gives itself to itself to be felt. But there can be no moment of reflexivity (the “this” and the “like” of the slogan assuming a phenomeno-political Subject-who-feels-and-knows). For the “this” that indexes the affectivity of democracy indexes nothing more (or less) than its spacing, and thus is striation, inadequation, and non-totality. The “this” of the slogan is an open broken space in which affect shares itself out—the kratia of the demos. It is not identical to itself, it is not like anything else: this “this” cuts open a space to let us share and play, one with another. And so, once more, drums and dance.

The origins of democracy (re)produce its telos. Democracy literally gets ahead of itself: the pulsation of affect, its sharing and intensification, intend nothing more than the extension of this intension through time. It neither begins nor ends: it performs its telos in its origination, in the cut of the “this.” And so the dialectics of the telos make no sense here. What “this” wants is to continue, but moreso—a process that entails continually extending the referent of the “this,” transforming the bare punctum into an expanding scene of circulation.

Circles, circulation, the circularity of ending at a beginning, the shape of a drum, the circles in which we sit—democracy figures itself circularly. This makes sense: I am describing the passage of non-purposive time, a social time with no transcendent aim or object that would cut a path out of the circle. (As Heidegger always claims, the difficulty is not getting out of a circle, but getting into one.) The revolutionary aim is “this”: to continue to revolve around and circulating through this aimless, auto-referential, auto-telic site. Democratic autoaffection is circulation, it affects itself as a circle, and it only desires itself. Which means others.

Autumn's Children

2011-11-02T19:53:00.000-07:00

I haven't used this blog in forever, but given that Occupy is such a Jamesian event, and given that I'm writing constantly about Occupy for myself, I figured that I might as well begin posting. The piece below was written on October 16th. Happily, it's already dated.

Autumn's Children

We are witnessing, we are told, the emergence of an “American Autumn”—a moment of radical political possibility inspired by the pro-democratic movement called the “Arab Spring.” The citation of influence is symbolically valuable: it suggests that U.S. democracy is being revitalized, not threatened, by Arab-world populist movements. Despite the value of this discursive shift, we must be careful with our metaphors. By narrating global struggle as if it participated in the same unilinear chronology as seasonal change, the figure of an “American Autumn” threatens to hide from view the persistence of radical struggle in the Arab world. We must keep in mind that the “Arab Spring” and the “American Autumn” are now synchronous events. Despite this and other problems, the figure of an “American Autumn” conveys more than we might think. By recovering the meanings implicit in this figure, we can get a read on both the limits to and potentials for radical change in our political present.

The domination of a state by financial capitalism—the motivating complaint of the Occupy movement—is an autumnal phenomenon. Such is the conclusion that Fernand Braudel reaches in the third volume of his magisterial Civilization and Capitalism. Describing the process by which London overtook Amsterdam as the premier trade entrepot of Europe in the late-eighteenth century, Braudel suggests that Dutch capitalists’ reorientation toward finance capitalism contributed to their own demise. They “dropped the bird in hand to go chasing shadows,” abandoning the trade of material goods in favor of “a life of speculation and rentierdom.” They left “all the best cards to London” and “even financ[ed] her rival’s rise.” Far from being particular to the history of Amsterdam capitalism, Braudel suggests that the turn to finance signals the beginning of the end of any globally dominant power’s hegemonic reign: “Every capitalist development of this order seems, by reaching the stage of financial capitalism, to have in some sense announced its maturity: it [is] a sign of autumn.”

The U.S. has long since fallen into the autumn of finance capital, Giovanni Arrighi argues in The Long Twentieth Century. Arrighi charts the rise and fall of four hegemonic powers (Genoa, Holland, Britain, and the U.S.), substantiating Braudel’s claim that financial capital signals the autumn of one hegemonic power and the emergence of a new one. According to Arrighi, American autumn began decades ago: “Underneath the accelerating inflation and growing monetary disorder of the 1970s we can detect in new and more complex forms the dynamic typical of the signal crises of all previous systemic cycles of accumulation.” The loose monetary policy of the 1970s—designed to forestall inflation in the domestic U.S. economy—did not spur the “material expansion of the U.S.-centered capitalist world-economy.” Rather, the “liquidity created by U.S. monetary authorities…turned into petrodollars and Eurodollars,” which “re-emerged in the world economy as the competitors of the dollars issued by the U.S. government.” The Reagan administration attempted to repatriate this mobile money through pecuniary incentives (high nominal interest rates) and a drive toward financial deregulation. We know the result: “US and non-US corporations and financial institutions [gained] virtually unrestricted freedom of action in the United States.” What followed seems like a period of economic health—a new belle époque. But the flowers of finance capital are more like dying leaves—a multi-hued but ephemeral beauty that soon turns brown and ugly.

Arrighi’s analysis outlines some of the structural limitations of the Occupy movement. The Occupy movement began with a simple plea. It asked that the state occupy a position of responsibility, that it guarantee the availability of jobs, health care, education, and so on to all citizens. This is now a structural impossibility. If the turn to finance marks the transfer of power from one hegemon to another, the state to which U.S. protesters direct their pleas for financial overhaul, jobs, and economic redistribution is less empowered to act than we might hope. There is no political power capable of resolving today’s economic crisis. The neoliberal reforms through which the U.S. attempted to retain global hegemony effectively disembedded economic processes from territorial state control. Financial deregulation and free trade policies have produced a situation in which states cannot generate revenue by siphoning from the flows of capital traversing their boundaries. To attempt to build revenue from capital flows is to invite capital flight. The loss of revenue sources means that states are largely dependent on financial markets to provide basic services. And so the House’s primary constituent is Moody’s. Critiquing the House for this reality is a useless strategy. Their hands are tied; or, as Marge said long ago, there is no alternative. We have to give up our nostalgia for the Keynesian state. It won’t come back.

If the global economic crisis exceeds the scope of any single sovereign state, we might be tempted to look to supranational organizations to promote economic restructuring. Yet, the supranational organizations that do exist are feeble, lacking mechanisms to respond to mass demands and even the procedures to entertain them. For instance, many aspects of neoliberal reforms (and, indeed, capitalism itself) are in direct contradiction to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (see, for instance, articles 22-26 of the UDHR), but obviously the UN has no mechanisms to enforce these rights, nor do we have the ability to present petitions or demands to the UN. As Adam Smith pointed out in that revolutionary year of 1776, capitalists always organize better than workers, and the truly functioning supranational organizations and mechanisms are those that have produced and reproduced the current crisis: the IMF, WTO, NAFTA, GATT… Both nation-states and supranational states are weak indeed compared to the power possessed by these globe-making organizations and mechanisms. Given the global scope of the crisis, it is unsurprising that we’ve seen the Occupy movement spread over the past few days. It’s autumn everywhere, and has been for some time.

Indeed, many involved in the youthful Occupy movements—I include myself—were born into this autumn, we’ve lived with its effects throughout our lives, and we’ve never known anything else. The destruction of the Keynesian state, the subsequent racialized war against the poor, the less metaphorical debt-fueled wars through which the U.S. has injects liquidity into the economy and attempts securing resources for itself, the financialization of daily life in the form of home mortgages, credit card debt, student debt, and the pegging of retirement funds to the whims of financial markets…these are the facts of the world into which we autumnal children were born. The rhetoric of the Occupy movement is saturated with a nostalgia for something—let’s call it a springtime—most of us have never experienced first-hand: that is, a political community that has not abandoned its citizens to the mystical workings of a self-regulating markets in goods, labor, and capital.

While this nostalgia makes Occupy rhetoric banal at best or naïve at worst, it has generated practical effects on the ground that prefigure new modalities of democratic community. Occupy camps have rearticulated subsistence needs (water, food, shelter, basic sanitation, even medical attention) with political participation. No one at a General Assembly need be hungry. In its commitment to feeding those who gather, Occupy demonstrates the viability of non-market modes of material distribution. (That the movement relies on donations—and thus the corporations that they protest—is a problem requiring resolution.) No doubt the situation is rather austere, but Occupiers seem more interested in the vibrant democratic sociality in which they participate than in pursuing an endless accumulation of wealth. The definition and experience of work subsequently shifts. Working at Occupy is not a burden nor a means to something more than work itself; it is the mode by which Occupiers make themselves responsible to and for one another. In short, Occupiers are doing far more than their slogans say: they are surrogating for the very state that has abandoned its obligations to them, and doing so in a radically democratic fashion.

The figure of “American Autumn” is split. On one hand, it names the melancholic fact that the state’s facilitation of finance capitalism has left it unable to meet the demands we make upon it. This situation produced the rage and anger that drove many to camp out in public spaces across the U.S. These protesters refuse the fact that the state has made itself structurally irresponsible to our pleas—time will tell whether these pleas will have practical effects or remain a utopian cry for a just state. On the other hand, “American Autumn” names a potentiality irreducible to explicit critiques of the articulation of the state and finance. It names the production of new communities, new forms of responsibility, new articulations of material subsistence and political belonging. This is the real value of the Occupy movement; this is where the work is happening. If autumn is a season of decay, it is also the time of harvest.

With the Sharecroppers

2009-02-13T18:10:00.000-08:00

I’ve been spending some time recently attempting to come to terms with the ways in which we periodize James. To begin: I think most of these periodizing operations are useless and stupid, reducing James’ thought and theory to biography. (The sheer number of biographical and biochronological introductions to James never fails to anger me. I think two were published in 2008 alone. Ya basta.) In the interests of, frankly, messing with the ways in which we emplot James’ intellectual life, I have been looking for soft spots in the narrative vis-à-vis James’ texts. What follows is an essay that I am preparing for (hopefully) publication.

The trotskyist/post-trotskyist distinction seem to me to be most unstable. Not so much because James didn’t break with Trotsky – he decidedly did – but because we take this break as an obviously good thing. The break with Trotsky is conflated with his break with vanguardism; his break with vanguardism (at least in the special, special environment of the northeastern American academy) is conflated with his understanding of the autonomy of black politics. (Never mind that Trotsky, initially, was far more an autonomist.) In short, the break is read as an escape from the confining, conservative-Left politics of Marxism.

Never mind that James’ theoretical justifications are rarely read closely; never mind that James is frequently reduced to an oracle who made pronouncements with which we might or might not agree. The point of this post is to deny the equation of break = anti-vanguardism = good politics. James’ anti-vanguardist break leads him to an organicism (which I too gleefully have already written about) that we need to question. The fact is this: James’ anti-vanguardism is justified through a cultural analysis that tends to exclude non-purposive socialities from political consideration. Indeed, tracing the vanishing position of the Party/intellectual – a position that indicates gaps and ruptures in the field of the social – we can see an entirely immanentist, monodetermined society taking shape in James’ hands. Indeed, the disappearance of the intellectual in James’ post-trotskyist theories do not represent a gain but a problematic loss of heterogeneity in his understanding of the social. (This loss of heterogeneity occurs even as James supposedly sets free black politics from Marxism.) The vanishing space of exteriority serves to consolidate an immanentist, organicist vision of society that renders alternative socialities illegible and illegitimate.

James theorized his historical conjuncture by activating two key strands in Marx. Firstly, James argued (in texts like State Capital and World Revolution [1951] and Facing Reality [1958]) that society has been totally incorporated into capitalism; real subsumption has occurred. Henceforth, there is no outside to capitalism; everyone – and he states this categorically – has their being, in America, through capitalism. The result is a general recoding of subjectivity (cf. James 1999, 148). Secondly, James claimed that capitalism – and particularly American industrial capitalism – had activated the full potential of humans as laborers. The American worker appears as a fully developed, “universal” subject: he knows that he wants and he is able to produce it. James’ critique of Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed occurs through the recently translated Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, which James reads as examining alienation directly in the process of production (and not in the spheres of consumption or distribution, as Trotsky argued). To repeat, James deploys an analysis of real subsumption of society by capitalism and a narrative in which American capitalism fully developed the potentialities of the laborer.

In this analysis of American society, the vanguard party has been left without a place to stand. With the real subsumption of society under capitalism, the former transcendent position of the vanguard (who bore the consciousness of progress) is erased from the political map. Society is now immanent to capitalism, and produces knowledge of itself immanently (cf. James 2005, 108). Furthermore, the vanguard always lags behind the worker, whom James wrote of as being the self-conscious dynamic force of history. The worker’s potential has been unlocked through his own labor, and the party is not required to tell the worker his own potentiality (James 2006, 96). The worker became theorized as self-standing and self-activating (cf. James 1986, 117; and see my last post on into the problematic of Selbstbetätigung). The shift in actors (party to worker) entails a shift in spacing. The location of the political moves from the fragmented space that that the vanguard sought to integrate through its synthesizing position, to the factory, which “is the single stable, unifying, and integrating element in […] society” (James 2006, 42).

This theory is bold and brilliant and under-discussed. It is also fundamentally problematic. James’ analysis of the real subsumption of society and of the worker’s production of his own potential trucks in a set of organicist theories and metaphors. The organicism of society (which is “an enormously complex organism”) works with the integrating and totalizing figure of the factory to produce an entirely immanent ontology centered on purposive production. The proletariat moves itself of itself for itself. The contradiction of James’ conjuncture was over who would determine the needs and the purposes of society, a contradiction James writes of as “this antagonistic relation between an administrative elite calculating and administering the needs of others, and people in a social community determining their own needs” (James 2006, 72). The political question was: will the proletariat be auto-purposive or have its needs determined by an exterior apparatus of control?

The elaboration of an immanent purpose through production thus becomes the goal of James’ socialism. Everything exterior to the organism of the proletariat presents itself as a risk to the being of the proletariat. This is particularly marked in the case of intellectuals, where the Party morphs into the repressive State. But it is visible throughout the social text, where only productively purposive or creative desires are given political and social legibility and legitimacy. Indeed, James even takes the alternative society formed by his mariners, renegades, and castaways and transmutes it into a floating mini-factory (James 2008, 8). Recall that special hate is reserved for Ishmael, the intellectual who exists alongside and beside the laboring community. Alternative socialities, non-purposive modes of being in the world, are coded as dangerous or useless. The vanguard party was theorized out of existence and use because the proletariat became the knower and producer of its own potential and purpose; this rejection of the vanguard served to consolidate an ontology of the world that is entirely immanent and purposive, in which society is a total organism working toward an end that it gives itself. The intellectual vanishes as society becomes more homogenous. As I read James, the disappearance of the intellectual marks the disappearance of non-purposive socialities. As a result of the homogenization of being, James ignores and renders non-political non-purposive modes of being in the world.

Marx codes – and this I can only assert for the moment – non-purposive socialities through the term “community.” (We saw above that James locates the “social community” within capitalism as determining its own purpose.) Part of the work of capitalism, at least as it is described in the Grundrisse, is the invagination of community by capitalism. Indeed, where capitalist exchange once began on the edges and fringes of community, it eventually comes to constitute community’s inorganic being: “Where money is not itself the community, it must dissolve the community” (Grundrisse 224). Marx’s term for community here is not Gemeinschaft but Gemeinwesen, which more directly inscribes the problematic of being, and which might be rendered “being-in-common.” The violence that money effects on the community is to dispose what was “being-in-common” to being-for-wealth: “When labor is wage labor, and its direct aim is money, then general wealth is posited as its aim and object” (224). Money recodes non-purposive socialities and forces them into purposive dispositions. James’ post-trotskyist work would agree.

Indeed, it would be foolish to give into the “romance of the community”. However, I would like to work a critique of James through this barely formulated notion of Gemeinwesen. We can set something like “community” loose through James (and Marx) without giving into a nostalgia for something that is always already lost. If part of the historical violence of capitalism is to recode “community” such that it must dispose itself purposively, one risks restating the effects of capitalism by assuming this newly purposive “common being” as the location where politics occurs, as the political subject position. If capitalism operates by encoding all relationships as purposive (even if this purpose as desire is not derived from lack), does this necessitate that we only look for politics within money relations (and the network of relations that money signifies, including production)? Did Gemeinwesen, and whatever it signifies, disappear one day forever from the ontological constitution of subjects? I would like to argue that one can look for the “outside” of capitalism – or that which capitalism has dissolved – even inside of capitalism.

The purpose of what follows is to determine the extent to which this vanishing Gemeinwesen can reappear to interrupt politics of purposivity. This interruption, as I hope to show, is productive. Gemeinwesen is never defined by Marx: it is a nearly blank sign whose presence can serve as a resource for generating new readings. Below I will substitute Gemeinwesen with Heidegger’s Mitsein in a reading of C.L.R. James’ pre-break work. Alternative socialities lost in the expulsion of the intellectual might be recoverable without recourse to vanguardism. If James’ reaction to capitalism’s coding of Gemeinwesen involves, in part, the eventual erasure of the vanguard party, how does Heidegger’s Mitsein allow us to determine a new position for the intellectual? Does the sentence “Where money is not itself Mitsein, it must dissolve Mitsein” seem too radical an alteration of Marx’s meaning? And if this substitution is allowable, can we not ask after the political future of being-with another in a relation not reducible to purposive activity?

Classing Sharecroppers
James’ essay “With the Sharecroppers” (1941) documents the struggle of a sharecropping community in south east Missouri. Importantly, James wrote the article some years after the struggle he documents. He was attempting to learn ways in which political organizations could effectively assist the sharecroppers. (One result is the pamphlet that he wrote for the strike of 1942, which I discuss below.) The content of this struggle – what it is for – is by no means certain, and one of the purposes of James’ text is to explore the constitution of the sharecroppers’ revolutionary position. By the essay’s end, James appears to have reached a conclusion: the sharecroppers are not necessarily for anything so much as they are against the “general conditions” in which they “live and work” (James 1941, 30, 32).

The essay divides along lines whose relations need to be more fully established, along the lines of “work” and “life”. On one hand are economic considerations and a politics located in the relations of production as they articulate with Roosevelt’s Agriculture Adjustment Act. Here, the sharecroppers are shown to be subject to manipulations on the part of landowners in order that the latter can receive a greater share of the subsidies that the AAA promised to cotton growers. One political strand in the text operates to expose these machinations and manipulations, to show how the sharecroppers responded, and to establish protocols for studying the situation in accordance with economic demands. The other strand concerns itself with the affective and existential dimensions of (mostly black) sharecropper life in the South. The experience of being a sharecropper does not map in any transparent way onto the structural conditions that produce the environment of the sharecropper. James marks this experience through terms like “terror”; the sharecropper is exposed and vulnerable to violence without any hope or chance for redress (22). The politics emerging from “life” are less clear and obvious than those emerging from “work”; however, “hate” and negation constitute the affective dimensions of this political impulse (28).

Marxian politics have frequently located politics solely in the sphere of work or in networks of distribution. Classes, which name economically politicized identities, are formed or are located within either production relations (the boss and the worker) or within a wider social web that determines access to consumption and to political power. In the traditional Marxist determination, classes are structural categories existent regardless of a given class’s self-knowledge of itself as a class. In such a situation, the class exists in-itself; it is not aware of itself or of its interests; it is pre-political. The movement from pre-political to political existence entails a given class shifting from being in-itself to for-itself; it becomes aware of its being (or it calls itself into being, or is called into being) as a class with a unified interest. Prior to politicization, class elements exist beside one another, but lack organization or shape. A class in-itself “is formed by the simple addition of isomorphous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes” (Marx 1973, 239).

The movement to class for-itself – giving shape to the sack of potatoes, as it were – turns what was unconsciously held in common, like work or lived conditions, and establishes this commonality as the basis for a collective interest or desire. This movement, however, is not necessarily derivable from the class’s existence in itself; the movement from passivity to activity, from unconsciousness to self-consciousness, might require a push from the outside. One such technic for the establishment of a class for-itself is the party, as theorized through a Leninist tradition. The Leninist/vanguardist party supplies the revolutionary consciousness that a class-in-itself lacks. If the pre-political class is “incapable of asserting [its] class interest in [its] own name,” the party applies a name to a class in an attempt to establish that class as for itself (Marx 1973, 239).

Naming marks a direction of purpose, a tendency. Ideally, the vanguardist party’s application of the name is a constitutive speech act that calls what was in-itself to a position of purposivity. If we recognize that class in-itself is nothing but a set of structural conditions for the possibility of that class becoming for-itself, the act of naming constitutes an historical event insofar as it introduces a new, conscious actor into history (even if that actor’s full entrance into history is only temporally imaginable through recourse to a projected future). These classes, now historical actors, derive their status from the economic/political structuring conditions that produced them. Whether or not the name actually “fits” (if the proletariat has ever existed, etc.), naming establishes the lines of historical and political legibility. Furthermore, the act of naming gives a false unity to the entity constituted through naming. That is, the catachresis of class typically involves the hierarchization of one element of identity over another, and an abstraction that maintains one possible subject determination at the cost of all others.

This is all to say, then, that Marxism obscures other socialities that could be constitutive of a politics. Class-in-itself erases other socialities by indicating lack. The in-itself-ness of a given class marks it as pre-political and constituted through an almost dimwitted sociality (being beside one another as potatoes in a sack); as for-itself, it marks a self-conscious, purposive incorporated subject. Class is a catachresis that functions to abstract one determination (the purposive economic subject) as politically actionable. At each moment, something constitutive to all of these categories is being occluded as having political potential, something that James above marked as “life.”

Apposition / Opposition
James’ essay begins by establishing sharecroppers as the subjects of his care. As I will spend a lot of time with this paragraph, I will reproduce a large part of it:

Among the one-third of the nation that lives in direst poverty and greatest misery are thousands upon thousands of sharecroppers, Negro and white, in Arkansas, Missouri, and other states. Ill housed, ill-clad, ill-fed, they daily feel the severest lash of landlord and government. But despite the most vicious exploitation, despite terror – yes, actual, real terror – and despite starkest oppression, these are men whose spirits have not been broken, who stand ready to fight with every worker against class tyranny. They hunger for bread and they hunger for freedom… (22)

What is a sharecropper? Following what we read above from Marx, the sharecropper class seems fated to remain in-itself due to structural conditions: limited access to consumption, geographic spread, its racially mixed composition. In fact, these sharecroppers do not appear much different than the “small-holding peasant” whom Marx considers in that famous passage from the Eighteenth Brumaire. One mode of organizing – which James names Stalinist – would involve establishing a union as the representative of the sharecroppers, who would then negotiate for wages and such with the landowners (32). This union would engage in the economistic abstraction and catachresis that I discussed above.

Rhetorically, however, the sharecropper is constituted quite differently. Here, the sharecropper is coded as part of an extreme case (“Among the one-third of the nation that lives in direst poverty…”). The naming of the sharecropper splits it from the other two-thirds of poor, miserable people. The name of “sharecropper” is both a separation and a unification: it marks likeness (a shared situation of poverty) and some form of difference (through – at least – occupation). The economic name here functions as a separation; “work” interrupts the posited existential unity of the impoverished and miserable.

This analytic separation of the sharecropper from the remainder of the country’s impoverished does not serve to form the “sharecropper” as internally coherent and unified, however. “Work” is in turn interrupted, this time by two lived categories placed in apposition to one another and to sharecropper itself: “sharecroppers, Negro and white.” The “sharecropper” is constituted (in part) as the apposition of two potentially antagonistic predicates. The appositive relation of black and white to the “sharecropper” establishes the sharecropper on an unsteady terrain of relation of substantive to substantive. Reading for apposition rather than reading for modification entails very real political decisions. If one reads “sharecroppers, Negro and white” as a displacement of adjectival modifiers (i.e., “white and Negro sharecroppers”), then the “sharecropper” is situated as a unifying element, an abstraction that reduces potential differences to the position of modifier. Reading for apposition, however, retains the complexity of relationship, insofar as it renders “white” and “Negro” as substantive, self-standing identities that cannot in any easy way simply modify a more important abstraction.

Apposition is a strategy that allows differences to function while retaining a relation to an apparently abstracted/abstracting identity. The OED defines apposition in a few helpful ways: “3. The placing of things in close superficial contact; the putting of distinct things side by side in close proximity. 4. The fact or condition of being in close contact” (OED). Apposition is thus a spatial function (whether we understand this as cartographic space, social space, existential space, etc.); it brings things “side by side in close proximity.” Apposition relates, through proximity, two distinct things to one another. It is not a relation of predication (“the sharecropper is black”) or modification (“the white sharecropper”), but a setting beside of one another in the space opened up by the label “sharecropper.”

The class-name sharecropper can establish two opposed procedures. On one hand, the class-name can establish a politics taken to be emerging from an essential (thought abstractly produced) subject. The class-name would thus make legible a certain interest, assisting in the transformation of the sharecroppers into a purposive political body. The catachrestic operation of naming would be disavowed, and the political program would proceed as if a unified “sharecropper” class existed (or should exist, as vanguardist thought tends to operate in the imperative). On the other hand, the class-name can function as “perfectly neutral name, the blank part of the text,” deployed as a “theoretical fiction to entitle the project of reading” (Derrida 74; Spivak 280). The class-name can generate a heuristic through which we read appositive relations as they occur in a world.

James shuttles between these two options. His text is unstable insofar as he desires to allow apposed differences to interrupt and to feed one another, even as he is simultaneously a party operative invested in a notion of class politics. Indeed, we see this shuttling in a single sentence:

But despite the most vicious exploitation, despite terror – yes, actual, real terror – and despite starkest oppression, these are men whose spirits have not been broken, who stand ready to fight with every worker against class tyranny. (22)

Here, a series of conditions are set in relation to one another: “exploitation,” “terror,” “oppression.” The anaphoric setting-beside of exploitation, terror, and oppression can be read as apposition, in which case none of these structuring conditions retains analytic or political priority. However, this chain of conditions could also be translated into an hierarchical grammar: “exploitation” moves to class, “terror” to race, “oppression” to an odd space between race and class, where the Second International would locate the “national minorities”. The organization of these terms effectively reduces the apposing forces to a sociological chain: class - race - nation.* A second or third internationalist Marxism always effectively established class as the “general equivalent” to these other “values”; the positing of class as the basis of politics incorporates these differences in the interest of establishing a stable subject. James’s sentence ends by performing this reduction/incorporation, in that “men” (a blank name for those living in the appositional space constituted by exploitation, terror, and oppression) are replaced by “workers” who have the purpose of defeating “class tyranny.” The subjects-in-apposition (those men – and there must be more than one – constituted through terror, exploitation, oppression) yield to the incorporated class subject-in-opposition.

The class-name of worker in this paragraph functions to restrain the appositive reality in which these “men” are caught. The class-name functions as an abstracting/catachrestic mechanism that establishes a purposive politics stemming from an incorporated subject. This rhetorical movement is not specific to Marxist organization: the simulation of an nonconflictual identity is common to most formal political movements. Indeed, one could say that the very formality of the formal political requires a proper subject whose name is necessarily catachrestic. In short, my point is not to abject “Marxist” or class politics in order to substitute for it equally problematic (but possibly dematerialized) political identities. Nor should an attention to appositional subjectivities lead to a civil social organizational model of coalition building. Rather, I am following James as he describes the political location of subjects-in-apposition before they are (or even as they are or while they are) directed by the purposive abstraction/catachresis of opposition.

It should be noted, finally, that James of the early 40’s (and even through Notes on Dialectics, though there things begin to tilt into an organicist language) was self-conscious regarding the artificiality and exteriority of “purpose” to the entity that was being organized as purposive. That is, James did not imagine that a political purposivity naturally or essentially emerged from “the worker” once the worker had received his name. In a 1943 article on Sidney Hook, James takes issue with Hook’s characterization of Marxist historical philosophy. Hook, James writes, sees Marxism as endorsing a nearly theological teleology that is scientifically untenable; for Hook’s Marx, the proletarian’s purpose is inscribed in the fabric of time. James responds:

[An entity like a river] acts that way because that is its nature, and my business as a scientist is to examine that, and not look for the hand of God or any outside agency. On this use of “purpose”, both Hegel and Engels, as we see, had common ground. But both Marx and Hegel understood quite clearly that you could never finally prove this purpose or any necessity purely by empirical observation. […] As Engel’s says: “The empiricism of observation alone can never adequately prove necessity…. But the proof of necessity lies in human activity, in experiment, in work.” Could anything be simpler? (James 1943, 55)

“Purpose” is not verifiable as a fact within the world. The proof of the philosophical attribution of purposivity rests in changing the world itself. (Here James interprets the eleventh thesis.) The attribution of “purpose” establishes the agency of the actor (not “the hand of God or any outside agency”) and the necessity of the actor’s work within the world to make true the attribution of purpose. Establishing purpose is thus a program.

The techne of purposivity operates at cross-purposes with the assumed agency of the purposive subject: even the internally coherent agent requires a naming from outside to have its purpose rendered legible. James gets around this in his Johnson-Forrest texts by extending the function of naming to the working class itself: the proletariat, in production, produces knowingly its own purpose (cf. James 2005, 78, 88, 109). This position is coterminous with James’ increasing organicism. We do not, however, need to follow James down this path. Indeed, James’ sharecroppers (white and Negro, exploited, terrified, and oppressed) raise another set of questions: what politics belong to the non-purposive? Where do these politics occur?

Apposition; or, Mitsein
The politics of purposivity demand the catachrestic/abstracting production of the subject-in-opposition. Naming, as we saw above with Marx, marks the moment of a class’s becoming for-itself. Beside the name I placed the apposed conditions and identities of non-class subject – those elements that must be sublated in the production of the class. The gamble that I am taking is that appositional subjectivities productively lack the purposivity of the oppositional incorporated subject. This being said, apposition is not opposed to opposition. Indeed, one might say that a politics of apposition is apposed to a politics of opposition. The possibilities presented by this apposition will occupy the remainder of this paper.

As I discussed above, James’ concerns in his essay are bifurcated along the lines of “work” (and its formal political apparatuses and economic structures) and “life” (which I described as the experience of living in the world of the sharecropper). We now see, however, that this apparent analytical division actually establishes a different lens as well as a new politics. “Work” and “life” appose one another. One might say that work and life partake in different ontological coding. If the ontological (and political) function of work in Marx and James is clear, the function of living or life is more obscure. Indeed, James eventually seems to subsume life into work through an organicist analytic of the real subsumption of society by capitalism; it is, of course, this problem that propelled this paper. James does, however, provide us with an alternative way of discussing life. Usefully, this different mode comes through Heidegger. In a lecture on Wilson Harris’ sui generis and difficult The Palace of the Peacock, James deploys Being and Time to make sense of the novel. From this lecture, and in particular James’ discussion of Heidegger, we can take a number of things.

Firstly, James establishes the “world” not simply as a product of man’s past labor but as what Heidegger would call a “referential totality”: “May I say that everybody has a philosophical view of the world and of politics and of literature and everything else. He may not know it […] but he has one” (Heidegger 160; James 1980, 157). Secondly, this “philosophical view of the world” or “referential totality” establishes itself as prior to activity that accomplishes aims or goals; an interpretation of the world, even if it is unconscious, is prior to work within the world, insofar as any changing of the world requires the constitution of the world, which is always already a philosophical movement. James highlights this through reading the reiterative narrative of the novel, in which the death of characters reveals their disposition toward and interpretation of the world as determining their activity within it (James 1980, 158). Thirdly, James describes Heidegger’s concern for “everyday life,” “the life that is lived by you and me and Heidegger himself” (James 1980, 160). The everyday, for James, becomes a space of the inauthentic, in which one is given over to “idle talk” and where the world appears to one as an “average” or as a fact” (James 1980, 160). The everyday is recuperated by James through an experience of Being-there. For James, recognizing one’s Dasein begins an “authentic existence.”

This language of authenticity might strike us as problematic. However, James deploys Dasein not in order to produce an existential ethics but instead to attend to a world-forming activity that is not reducible to “work.” James thus fixates on the existential operation of Lichtung and its relationship to the “truth” of Dasein:

Heidegger says that although Plato and Aristotle knew better, they set us on a path which has made us completely lose sight of what truth is. He says truth is in nobody’s mind. You have to find out truth by being there […] Truth is covered over and the find out of truth means you uncover what is there, but it can be uncovered not by philosophy, not by knowledge of any kind, by the fact of dasein. […] And the dasein, the “being there”, is an uncovering of the truth of Being that exists. (James 1980, 161)

Being-there is for James an activity that clears and uncovers the world of Being. This “uncovering’ of the world – or this clearing of the world so that Being can appear – is not an operation that occurs in thought; it is not an epistemological problem. Nor is it merely a problem of work or activity, for reasons I discussed above. The uncovering of the world is an ontological problem specific to “life”.

A question remains, however: what is the technology by which “truth” is uncovered, by which a space for Being is cleared, by which a world emerges as a world? James is categorical here: “The means he uses to find what he is finding out, to live an authentic existence, is language […] Language” (James 1980, 161). Language uncovers the truth of Dasein’s being in the world. Yet, “language is not a tool”; language is not equipment or a thing, in Heidegger’s terms (James 1980, 161). James inscribes language as the element that makes man’s existence possible: “In Heidegger’s view man lives a human life because of language. Without that he would be, I do not know what he would be, but he would not be a human being” (James 1980, 161). This ontological centrality of language could only sit uneasily with Marx’s positing of the ontological primacy of labor.*

Language, for James, is the way in which one orients oneself in the world; it is the way by which a world is formed. Language is not instrumental but fundamentally poetic. James cites Heidegger:

Language is not a mere tool, one of the many which man possesses; on the contrary, it is only language that affords the very possibility of standing in the openness of the existent. Only where there is language, is there world. […] Language is not a tool at his disposal, rather it is that event which disposes of the supreme possibility of human existence. (cited in James 1980, 169)

James cites a reading of Holderlin that Heidegger gives, in which Heidegger stresses the sociality of language in its formation of the referential totality of a world: “We – mankind – are a conversation. The being of man is founded in language” (cited in James 1980, 169). Man’s constitution through language establishes him as always already with someone else.

But what is it to be with someone? Heidegger undertakes this analysis in Being and Time. Dasein’s Being-in-the-world is always already to be with others: “The world of Dasein is a with-world. Being-in[-the-world] is Being-with Others” (Heidegger 155). Others are not encountered as tools, equipment, or things; Others are encountered in a specific mode, which Heidegger writes of as a sharing of or similitude of condition: “[Others] are like the very Dasein which frees them, in that they are there too [in the world], and there with it (Heidegger 154). Being-there-with is a fact of being in the world. In a world, one is always beside, among, alongside, or with the Dasein of Others. What is curious in the passage just cited, however, is that Dasein being-with the Dasein of an Other can free the Dasein of the Other. Heidegger’s analysis continues by attending to the modes of being-with the Dasein of Others that free (or do not free) the Dasein of Others.

In everyday being, Heidegger argues, one appears with Others almost “unconsciously.” One appears alongside “the They” [das Man]. This being-alongside does not free the Dasein of the Other; one appears alongside the Other indifferently, uncaringly. However, Dasein can also relate to the Dasein of Others positively. Heidegger identifies two positive modes of being-with, which he places under the term “solicitude”. In the first case, solicitude operates negatively; it can “take away ‘care’ from the Other and put itself in his position in concern: it can leap in for him” (Heidegger 158). In Heidegger’s terms, “concern” is the existential disposition of Dasein to things in the world; “care” is the existential disposition of Dasein to the Dasein of Others. Here, Heidegger indicates that “caring” for the other might be to substitute oneself for the other. “Leaping in” is to take the concerns of the other as one’s own, to attend to the matter concernfully, and to return the matter to the Other as “something finished and at his disposal” (Heidegger 158). This leads to a situation of dependency: “In such solicitude the Other can become one who is dominated and dependent” (Heidegger 158).

The other mode of solicitude, claims Heidegger, is to free the Other: “[it] does not so much leap in for the Other as leap ahead [vorausspringen] of him […], not in order to take away his ‘care’ but rather to give it back to him authentically” (Heidegger 158-9).* This mode of solicitude is freeing because it “pertains essentially […] to the existence of the Other, not to a ‘what’ with which he is concerned.” “Leaping ahead” thus “helps the Other to become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it” (Heidegger 159). The point here is that Dasein in leaping ahead does not claim the concern of the Other as Dasein’s concern; rather, this care for the Other respects the Other as a Dasein who is oriented to the world concernfully and singularly.

In the first mode, Heidegger essentially detailed the master/slave dialectic of Hegel. Here – and this is perhaps a perverse reading – the bondsman “leaps in” for the lord to work on the lord’s concern, to return the matter to the lord as attended to. The bondsman, as the narrative goes, “becomes” lordly in his unmediated relationship to the world; the cared-for Other (here, the lord) becomes, in Heidegger’s words, “dominated and dependent.” In the second mode, Heidegger expands Hegel’s sense of the social to include a beside-ness that does not seek to control the concern of the Other. Recognizing and caring for the Dasein of the Other, Dasein “leaps ahead” of the Other. This should not be read – as one might be tempted– temporally, as if Dasein, in leaping, is one step ahead of the cared-for Other. This is not a teleology, in which the Other will assume the position that Dasein assumed when it leapt ahead. Nor is this leaping ahead anti-social, as one scholar maintains.* Nor is the concept of “leaping” particularly agential: if Heidegger is thinking of the master/slave dialectic, we see that “leaping in” might occur under conditions of domination. Similarly, “leaping ahead” is not necessarily a heroic activity, “requir[ing] great exertion”; after all, it occurs in the everyday (Dostal 407). Instead, this “leaping ahead” should be read as a clearing of space, an opening, a creative “leap[ing] forth and liberat[ing]” of “potentiality-for-Being” (Heidegger 159).* “Leaping ahead” lets the Other be even as it maintains a relationship with this Other; this relationship occurs within a shared world, as a Being-with-in-the-world.

“Leaping ahead” in the world places Dasein beside the Dasein of the Other in such a way that one does not incorporate or substitute itself for the Other; instead, Dasein recognizes the Other as Being-there in the world. “Often exclusively,” Heidegger writes, “Being with one another is based […] upon what is a matter of common concern in such Being” (Heidegger 159). This commonality is not similitude: “A Being-with-one-another which arises [entspringt] from one’s doing the same thing as someone else” produces distance and reserve (Heidegger 159). Leaping ahead, the being-with of Daseins, does not establish these Daseins as similar or identical. It establishes a commons: “when they devote themselves to the same affair in common, their doing so is determined by the manner in which their Dasein, each in its own way, has been taken hold of” (italics added; Heidegger 159). Being-in-common or being-concerned-with is not in conflict with the own-ness of the way of each Dasein. Commonality is not identity; it is the being-with and beside of different identities for a common concern. The “leaping ahead” that establishes being-with as the commonality of mutually recognizing Daseins is the setting in apposition of Dasein through a common.

“Leaping ahead” establishes the common through which Dasein is with the Dasein of Others. Leaping ahead is not, as such, an agential act; being in an “affair in common” is not a purposive work. Rather, the affair in common “takes hold of” one. One is simply there, thrown into the world, apposed to and alongside Others. Dasein is set in apposition to Others through the common as much as Dasein sets the Dasein of Others in apposition. Being-with-in-common is more a fact than the product of a work. And it is this being-in-common, or “common being,” or “community,” or “Gemeinwesen” that, for Marx, was to be dissolved by capitalism.

We are thus back to my initial question: has being-with as being-in-common really been eradicated by the effects of capitalism (which codes all subjects as beings-for)? Turning back to the sharecroppers, we will see James explore not only the presence but the political efficacy of a reactivated notion of being-with/in-common. Three questions remain for us to put to James: what – if one can ask after the what-ness of that which is between beings – is the common, and how is it politically actionable? And, finally, what is the position of the intellectual in all of this?

Standing with
Returning to the first paragraph of James’ “With the Sharecroppers” (and I hope now, at this point, we are sensitive to the loaded nature of this seemingly innocuous “with”), one sees that the worker is not simply opposed to the capitalist and that workers are not simply apposed to one another. The relationship is more dynamic: they are apposed-in-opposition: “But, despite the most vicious exploitation, despite terror – yes, actual, real terror – and despite starkest oppression, these are men […] who stand ready to fight with every worker against class tyranny” (22). “Standing” – as both with (each other) and against (oppression) – mediates relations of apposition and opposition to form the political subject that we recognize as the “sharecropper.” “Standing” negates both the passivity of submission to heteronomy and the activity of heroic autonomy. Neither claiming a law or motivation for himself, nor allowing exploitative capital to subject his body to external logics of power, the sharecropper standing against oppression stands-there outside the economy of revolution/submission.

It is this standing-there that I would like to track, as a politicization of the being-there of Heidegger. Heidegger gives short attention to the existential meaning of “standing.” Either standing registers in the domain of autonomy (as in to be self-standing), or it marks a mode of being that is indifferent and unconcerned with the world (cf. Heidegger 153, 156). Yet, Heidegger acknowledges “standing around” as “an existential mode of Being [… which entails] tarrying alongside everything and nothing” (Heidegger 156). James’ examination of the sharecroppers gives a fuller meaning to “standing-there.” While the standing-with/against of the initial paragraph that I have not stopped reading might be seen as “just rhetorical,” James elaborates standing-there and staying-there as having political effects.

In 1938, the landowners determined that if they had no tenants they would receive a larger share of the federal AAA subsidy on cotton. Sharecroppers’ contracts expired in January; in 1939, they were told to leave by January 10. “Twenty thousand workers were told to leave the shacks in which they lived. They had nowhere to go” (23). This abandoned multitude, about 5,000 people, Negroes for the most part, with a few whites, camped on the St. Louis highway. They took their scanty possessions with them and announced their intention of staying there” (emphasis added; 23). The abandoned sharecroppers quite literally camped on the highway.

A host of apparatuses were unleashed to do something with this undisciplined, squatting mass of vogelfrei (ex-)laborers. “Police, armed to the teeth, came to intimidate these Negroes and make them leave the highway. The Negroes, who had their guns with them, refused” (emphasis added; 24). Force failing, another disciplinary apparatus was called: “The Health Department and the Humane Society came out and investigated. The sit-down strike was called a menace to public health” (24). Still, “the result was nil. There they were and they were going to stay” (emphasis added; 24).

Standing-there and staying-there emerged as the last ontological resources of a multitude whose only protest to capitalism was the there-ness of their being. However, as James claims, this staying-there was not spontaneous (“though it would have been nonetheless significant”); union organization had preceded this activity (24). Yet, James details how this activity occurred without and beyond the desires of the STFU and the CIO: “Butler, the leader of the STFU replied to Whitfield [a local preacher and organizer]: ‘You did it without consulting us. Go back’” (24). Indeed, the strikers are eventually folded into UCAPAWA (a CIO organization), and Whitfield was incorporated into the labor aristocracy.

And yet, despite this abandonment by the union, and outside of the organization of class politics, the sharecroppers continued to “revolt” through the simplicity of their staying-there-together: “they found a piece of land, infertile and rocky, and at the top of a hill. It was situated in the county of New Madrid, Miss. Three hundred and five families made the trek to it, and they began life over on July 3, 1939” (25). Their initial living conditions were appalling: “About a thousand people lived on bread and gravy for two months, bread made of flour, water, and salt” (25). They were met with no organizational help from unions. Nor did local aid societies lend a hand: “The local relief committee gave them as little as possible, hoping to throw them out” (25). Finally, even the law entered: “The sheriff threatened them. ‘You must not stay here. Tonight I will protect you, but after that I can’t.’ However, they stayed at the camp, Poplar Bluff, and they built a village which they will inhabit” (emphasis added; 25).

Doubly abandoned, the sharecroppers stand-there and stay-there with one another. In each case, the spectacle of the masses presents their simple being-there-together as unacceptable to the order of capitalism. Their “lives” (and not necessarily their position in work) disrupt capitalist, state, and civil social discipline. A common ontological resistance is being deployed here, a simple massing of being-with that is scandalous to the purpose-obsessed consciousnesses of capitalism and organized labor. Quite simply, their staying-there with one another is ontologically resistant to capitalism, and this resistance becomes politically actionable: “Late in 1939 the Negroes began to threaten to hold another roadside demonstration.” Here, however, there is already some manipulation of this force by unions, who end the demonstration by bargaining with the governor (25-26).

James’ plan, in 1942, is to discover a means of setting this ontological resource of the sharecroppers (white and Negro) to work beside the oppositional politics of the party. How can the standing-there of sharecroppers operate with the party, in such a way that the party does not simply manipulate, instrumentalize, or purposively recode the sociality of the sharecroppers? We will turn now, finally, to a pamphlet that was written at the time, in which I hope to bring together numerous terms that I’ve used in this paper: Gemeinwesen, apposition, being-with, and language.

The Pamphlet

One of the more significant things to emerge from James’ time in Missouri is a small pamphlet entitled “Down with Starvation Wages in South-East Missouri”. This document addresses itself to all sharecroppers (though it takes the time to address white workers specifically), and puts forward basic demands for increased wages and time-and-a-half pay for overtime. All in all, it seems like a generic piece of revolutionary literature, with bland calls for solidarity and the injunction for black and white to unite and fight.

It is not the pamphlet itself but its composition that is noteworthy. Indeed, as James’ career progressed increasing stress was put upon the content of the composition of revolutionary literature. James’ composition incorporates the revolutionary nature of being-with that he documented in “With the Sharecroppers.” James describes the process as follows:

When the time came for us to have a strike, I called some of the leaders together and said: ‘We have to publish something, for everybody to read about it.’ They said yes. So I sat down with my notebook and said, ‘Well, what shall we say?’ So (I used to call myself Williams) they said, ‘Brother Williams, you know.’ I said, ‘I know nothing. This is your strike. You are all doing it, you have to go through it. I have helped you, but this pamphlet has to state what you have to say. Now, have you got something to say about what you think?’ And I went through each of them, five or six of them; each said his piece, and I joined them together. Everybody said what he thought was important. I didn’t write anything, none of them wrote it… They said what they thought and I put it together. (emphasis added; James 1977, 89)

The meaning of the composition seems simple. James essentially convenes a group writing session. Nicole King claims that the presence of the “I” in this passage, and James’ agency in calling together the strike leaders, smuggles a vanguardism into a scene of supposed democracy (cf. King 95). This argument is unconvincing. The vanguard party assembles and organizes a mass into a class through the production of being-for; James is doing something much different here, regardless of charges of egoism or self-promotion.

James posited a divide between himself and the sharecroppers. The latter are simultaneously the agents, the knowers, and those who must experience the consequences of their action. James, on the other hand, is not a participant in the strike as a striker; his mobility and class identity preclude him from experiencing as a sharecropper the struggle of the sharecroppers; and James disavows possessing any knowledge. The division effected by class, distribution of activity, and experience of effects was inscribed into the production of the document.

This division between the intellectual and the sharecropper, however, is generalized when one recognizes the differences subtending sharecropper identities. That is to say, the sharecropper is not constructed as homogenous; indeed, the “sharecropper” has five or six leaders meeting with James alone. Furthermore, the document inscribes a difference between “unskilled” workers and tractor drivers (the latter demand fifteen cents an hour more than the unskilled), black and white workers, and these impoverished workers versus the rest of the nation’s working population. The work does not restrain the plurality of identities, either through positing a monological authoritative representative, or through suppressing the intra-sharecropper class difference of unskilled/skilled. The differences constructing the composite figure of the sharecropper are not deadened or homogenized through the process of recording their words, but are rather set loose. How is this possible?

The figure of “joining” is crucial here. Indeed, the determination of how to read the activity of joining in this text determines the position of the intellectual. If the intellectual-as-joiner or the party-as-joiner in its act of joining substitutes an abstracted figure to stand in for the chain of identities being joined, then one has something like a vanguardist situation. Vanguardist “joining” can operate through reducing difference and “yoking” social identities to a single purpose. Indeed, something like this happens with the slogan, “Black and White, Unite and Fight,” where class desire is supposed to yoke the abstract worker, regardless of racial antagonisms, to a class goal.

James, on the other hand, means something different. To re-quote: “And I went through each of them, five or six of them; each said his piece, and I joined them together. […] They said what they thought and I put it together.” As stated, one could read this “putting together” as a vanguardist activity that “puts together” and “joins” through positing an abstract identity. In which case, joining would produce an authoritative political identity whose authority would be conferred by the joiner. The conjoined political identity would be given to the sharecroppers as an artifact for their use. Heidegger would describe this modality of being-with (which is here a being-with-for) as einspringen, “leaping in.” Vanguardism is the activity wherein one leaps in for a political subject to produce consciousness for a class, which is then given to the class as “something finished” (Heidegger 158). In such a case, authority is maintained by the one who leaps in – the party, the intellectual. In an obscure sentence, however, James denies authority to anyone: “I didn’t write anything, none of them wrote it.” The pamphlet is here constructed as authorless, even as we have seen five, six, or seven possible “authors” of the text. No author is “leaping in” to produce a homogenous political subject. James denies that a proper, homogenous subject is producing the text. Differences proliferate without substitution or catachrestic naming.

James, I want to suggest, is “leaping ahead.” Leaping ahead, as we described above, clears a space (the operation of Lichtung) in which beings can operate in common while retaining substantial differences: “when they devote themselves to the same affair in common, their doing so is determined by the manner in which their Dasein, each in its own way, has been taken hold of” (italics added; Heidegger 159). Being-in-common, or attending to the same affair in common, clears for itself a common space in which to operate. As we saw in James’ discussion of Wilson Harris, the means by which Dasein clears a space for its being (which is necessarily a being-with Others) is through language. Language is the space in which apposed identities can be placed beside and with one another; text provides the common space for being-in-common.
The point here is that text itself – here, the most generic of pamphlets – provides the possibility of apposing beings, of setting Mitsein loose through the world of politics. Text, as the clearing of space so that Mitsein can appear in the world, is the very possibility of apposed identities; the pamphlet “joins together” (without erasing) differences. Text is the Gemeinwesen of being; being-with or beside the Other is always already a textual situation. The intellectual here, far from homogenizing or organizing masses into classes, provides the very textual common through which differences can be apposed to one another. If catachrestic naming functions to endow the class with purposivity, it does so because it affixes a “proper” name to an entity that will always be improper to its label. What James is encouraging us to think, however, is the possibility of “common naming,” of using the commons of the name/text to appose identities: “Sharecroppers, Negro and white.” For this C.L.R. James, the being-with of the sharecroppers is not analogous to the apolitical and asocial mode of Marx’s class in-itself. “Sharecroppers” does not designate a structural given without identification (“much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes”); instead, sharecroppers is a name that produces a political commons through which differences can relate without reduction or abstraction.

A Brief Conclusion
This paper has been sprawling, almost unmanageable; this is a symptom of the difficulty of thinking beyond the binary of the worker doesn’t know / the worker knows. As I have argued, vanguardist and anti-vanguardist logics alike assume the “worker” as the proper name of a purposive, agential subject. Whereas vanguardist thought presumes that it must Prometheus-like bring consciousness of the purposive construction of the political subject to the class in-itself, anti-vanguardist thought (like James’ work from the mid-forties through the sixties) argues that the proletariat produces knowingly its own purpose. Each argument consolidates the political subject as a purposive being ontologically programmed by capitalism. Vanguardist claims argue that Gemeinwesen, or being-in-common, is a sociality ontologically and politically inferior to the “being-for” sociality that capitalism generalizes. Anti-vanguardist thought argues much the same, the difference being that the generation of the purposive sociality is located immanently within proletarian self-formation.

Reading C.L.R. James through Heidegger, I have argued that we can displace the crippling couplet of the-worker-doesn’t-know / the-worker-knows) by attending to the fictive, catachrestic nature of the proper name of the worker itself. The oppositional identity of the “sharecropper” emerged through the abstracting of elements from appositional identities. Seeking a politics of apposition, I identified the grammar of apposition with Heidegger’s analytic of Mitsein. I argue that the rhetoric of apposition as an embodiment of Mitsein provides a space wherein different identities and socialities can enter into non-purposive, but still political, contact. One such space is that of everyday life: even without the apparatus of a party or union, the sharecroppers mobilized their community in a resistant activity that I would call being-there-with. Another such space is that of text: text provides a commons through which apposed identities can relate to a common concern. The intellectual or the party finds a new position: he or she does not bring a purposivity from without, but provides the text through which differences can be apposed to one another in a common concern. In text, I argue, James finds the possibility of politics by a common name.

Bibliography
Buhle, Paul. C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary. London: Verso, 1988

Callinicos, Alex. Trotskyism. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1990

Dostal, Robert. “Friendship and Politics: Heidegger's Failing.” Political Theory Vol. 20, No. 3. pp. 399-423.

Giardina, Michael and Cameron McCarthy. “The Popular Racial Order of Urban America: Sport, Identity, and the Politics of Culture,” Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2005, pp. 145 - 173

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962

James, C.L.R. The Future in the Present. London: Allison & Busby, 1977.

James, C.L.R. State Capitalism and World Revolution. Written in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986

James, C.L.R. C.L.R. James on the ‘Negro Question’. Ed. Scott McLemee. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.

James, C.L.R. Marxism for Our Times: C.L.R. James on Revolutionary Organization. Ed. Martin Glaberman. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1999

James, C.L.R. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways. Ed. Donald Pease. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001.

James, C.L.R. and Grace Lee James. Facing Reality: The New Society: Where to look for it & How to bring it closer. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2006

King, Nicole. C.L.R. James and Creolization: Circles of Influence. Jackson, MI: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2001.

Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Version, 1985

Lenin, V. I. What is to be Done? Trans. Joe Fineberg and George Hana. London: Penguin, 1988

Marazzi, Christian. Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy. Trans. Gregory Conti. New York: Semiotext(e), 2008.

Marx, Karl. Surveys From Exile: Political Writings Volume II. Ed. David Fernbach. New York: Vintage, 1974.

Marx, Karl. Early Writings. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. New York: Penguin, 1992.

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin, 1993

Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Creation of the World; or, Globalization. Trans. David Pettigrew. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.

Negri, Antonio. The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics. New York: Semiotext(e), 2008.

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997

Pease, Donald. “C.L.R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways and the World We Live In,” in Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways by C.L.R. James. Ed. Donald Pease. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001.

Trotsky, Leon. Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism & Self-Determination. London: Pathfinder, 1978

Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004

Worcester, Kent. C.L.R. James: A Political Biography. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.

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Disconnected notes (I don't understand blogger at all):

*See Lenin’s “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions” for a justification of these “translations.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jun/05.htm

*The opposition between these competing ontologies has been resolved in recent years through an incorporation of linguistic being into productive technologies. James himself, in his later texts, performs this incorporation. One would also look to Virno (2004), Hardt and Negri (2000), Negri (2008), and Christian Marazzi (2008), to list only those coming from the autonomist school of Italian Marxism. My aim here is to establish a path that resists both opposition (Heidegger versus Marx) and incorporation (which historicizes Heidegger’s ontology). The way out, I hope, is apposition, a (as I will show below) “joining” of language and labor, life and work.

*It is important that “leaps ahead” could also be translated as “leaps forward.” Heidegger goes on to describe this activity as “that which leaps forth and liberates” (Heidegger 159).

*“‘Leaping’ (Springen) mitigates against togetherness and mutual reciprocity. The verb suggests that one leaps ahead, or in place of, or even behind. Leaping is a decisive action that requires great exertion; "being together" is contrary to it.” (Dostal 407)

*This is akin to Heidegger’s analytic of Lichtung, in which being discloses itself in its there-ness. Leaping-forth clears space for the Dasein of Others. Heidegger writes of Lichtung: “To say that [man] is ‘illuminated’ [‘erleuchtet’] means that as Being-in-the-world it is cleared [gelichtet] in itself, not through any other entity, but in such a way that it is itself the clearing [Lichtung]. Only for an entity which is existentially cleared in this way does that which is present-at-hand become accessible in the light or hidden in the dark. […] Dasein is its disclosedness” (Heidegger 171). Leaping-forth is the operation of Lichtung applied to the Dasein of Others.

James and Purposivity

2008-12-21T23:58:00.000-08:00

Before doing anything with James and transnational readings of Facing Reality, I'd like to take a quick look at James on the concept of purposivity.

Now, it is clear to me that marxism (as a body of texts affiliated with the corpus of Marx, not as an official movement or organized set of interpretations) has difficulty with non-purpose driven modes of sociality. One thing I am interested in is a Heideggarian Marxism that would open up the ontological constitution of the subject to non-intending modes of being-in-the-world. Can labor coexist, say, with language as ontological determinants of a marxist subject? Perhaps not. The point, however, is that Marx, for me, took liberalism and liberal philosophy at its word in terms of its constitution of its subject. Corporate subjects (like classes) are either inert and mute, like potatoes in a sack, and therefore existent only in-themselves; or, they have been activated as purposive subjects and become for-themselves. Similarly, non-corporate sociality - like simple exchange - is also, for Marx, always already premised on relations of desire and purposeful interaction. One is never just with someone. Because of this subject constitution, vanguardism seems to me to be the inherent and ever-present risk in marxism itself.

But what if subjects were not merely constituted through purposivity; or, if purposivity were held to be a fiction? James of the early 40’s (and even through Notes on Dialectics, though there things begin to tilt into an organicist language) was self-conscious regarding the artificiality and exteriority of “purpose” to the entity that was being organized as purposive. That is, James did not imagine that a political purposivity naturally or essentially emerged from “the worker” once the worker had received his name (if we read naming as a moment of purpose/identity endowing). In a 1943 article on Sidney Hook, James takes issue with Hook’s characterization of Marxist historical philosophy. Hook, James writes, sees Marxism as endorsing a nearly theological teleology that is scientifically untenable; for Hook’s Marx, the proletarian’s purpose is inscribed in the fabric of time. James responds:

[An entity like a river] acts that way because that is its nature, and my business as a scientist is to examine that, and not look for the hand of God or any outside agency. On this use of “purpose”, both Hegel and Engels, as we see, had common ground. But both Marx and Hegel understood quite clearly that you could never finally prove this purpose or any necessity purely by empirical observation. […] As Engel’s says: “The empiricism of observation alone can never adequately prove necessity…. But the proof of necessity lies in human activity, in experiment, in work.” Could anything be simpler? (James 1943, 55)

James and Selbstbetätigung

2008-12-14T08:51:00.000-08:00

To get a read of Jamesian Bildung, I'd like to pick out the Marxian resonances of a term dear to James' heart - that of "self-activity." Turning to a passage in Marx's EPM, we read:

Only through developed industry, i.e. through the mediation of private property, does the ontological essence of human passion come into being, both in its totality and in its humanity; the science of man is therefore itself a product of the practical self-activation of man [ein Produkt der praktischen Selbstbetätigung des Menschen]. (Early Marx, 377)

I have modified the translation somewhat. Selbstbetätigung was translated as “self-formation,” which is misleading, and led Livingstone to add an entirely superfluous phrase. He did not translate “praktischen Selbstbetätigung” as “practical self-activation” but rather split its meanings through “self-formation” and “practical activity." The translation is useful, insofar as it invokes both ordinary practice and something like Bildung (self-formation).

But what is Selbstbetätigung? I would argue that, for Marx, self-activation partakes in an odd intentionality that translates into a circular causality. The "science of man" that he is after appears as an effect of the emergence of man as the product of his own activity; however, man only emerges as man through working on himself. What does it mean to activate (or, in less loaded terms, act on) oneself when the status of that self is only confirmed and made possible through the act/ivation?

What we assume as teleological in Marx is frequently a theoretical fiction that Marx writes in order to make the past legible. Posited but erased in the term Selbstbetätigung is a project stated in the future anterior tense whose present we now inhabit. The “self” of the “self-activation” is on loan from the present as if it had always been a reality; or, rather, as if it had always been projected as becoming a reality. The human in history appears as both the cause and the effect of his own activity. Where, from one point of view, human labor in the past could have been mere activity possessing no reflexive value, from the Marxian perspective of the present previous labor appears as a purposive project of self-elaboration – a self-activation. This fiction of the purposive, self-activating subject, which operates through a pseudo-telos, becomes dominant within Marx’s text; it comes, as we see above, to constitute the principle of scientificity for Marxism.

This fiction of self-activation nullifies the possibility of heteronomy in the ontological constitution of the human subject. For this Marx, the human makes its own ontology; it is autological and autonomic. It is a self-producing organism, whose life is its purpose and product. Of course, this fiction is also utopic: the self-production of man always occurs within a regime of exploitation. The fiction of self-activation that Marx writes, however, allows us to read exploitation as inorganic and exterior to the self-constitution of the worker-human. The political and ethical stance of Marxism follows almost necessarily from this ontology: if humanity produces its own being, but external or inorganic control over production and distribution leads to an unequal proportioning of these products in which the producers lack that which they made, the very producers of being experience ontic lack. The task, for a certain form of Marxism, is then not to focus on redistribution of goods (which, read dialectically, is nothing more than a redistribution of lack), but is rather to expel heteronomy from the self-elaboration of the proletarian subjects. The Marxian program thus becomes not so much an economic as a great philosophical drama, in which the worker attempts to reestablish himself as the producer/product of Selbstbetätigung, and in which the value-form, the State, or simply capital attempts to taint this self-activation with an external trace of power. The worker attempts to rest control (or the ability to endow activity with purpose) from the capitalist; the worker wishes to work not for the enrichment of another, but for the humanity that he actively produces.

Capitalist purposivity, then, versus proletarian purposivity: heteronomy versus autonomy. We are on the track of Bildung.

James developed a shorthand for the theoretical expression of the purposivity of capitalism, naming it “rationalism.” Texts like State Capitalism and World Revolution (1958 [1986]) and Facing Reality (1951 [2006]) provide an elaboration of the history of this rationalism, its development in and through capitalism, and a strategy for overcoming the force of capitalist rationalism. Importantly, a proletarian philosophy is never named, save rather vaguely as a “philosophy of life” (James 2006). The vitalism implicit in this to-be-elaborated philosophy is important to the discussion that follows.

James wrote in State Capitalism that “the war over productivity is fought in terms of philosophy, a way of life” (James 1986, 114). Productivity is thus linked in a real way to philosophy, which is glossed as a mode or disposition of living. James’ philosophy of history, as it emerges in this period of texts (roughly 1947 to 1961), is an attempt to identify the motive force of history. Initially, the bourgeoisie provided an economic rationality to production that furthered historical progress:

In the springtime of capitalism this rationalistic division of labor was the basis of a common attempt of individual men associated in a natural environment to achieve control over nature. (James 1986, 115)

Rationalism (frequently embodied for James through Descartes) enabled a tremendous explosion of creative energies. Capitalist rationality “all over the world […] united the population as never before” (James 1999, 62). Enlightenment and rationalism were liberating inasmuch as they freed the intellect from traditional determinations and freed the laboring body for the superadequation of capitalist commodity production. (James had a somewhat rosy view of primitive accumulation and, as we see in this narrative, colonization. Postcolonial approaches to James cannot afford to overlook these problematic passages.)

While rationalism first brought together and “associated” “individual men” in a “common attempt” at organizing and metabolizing nature, it eventually tended toward something more sinister. In the scene that James elaborates as the “springtime of capitalism,” we see the positive aspect of capitalist rationality: it establishes a common (even when it enclosed the commons), it produces association (even as these associations became increasingly less voluntary), and it controls nature (even as this led to total de-naturing). But the point of this mythical story of “springtime” is that while rationality/capitalism initially produced healthy results, this same technique or technic quickly became poisonous. Rationalism, as James tells us, is pharmakontic; it is both poison and antidote. While rationalism brings men together in labor, it simultaneously submits them to external controls, determinations, demands, and forces. An antagonism develops between the associated workers and the rationality that appears increasingly exterior and inorganic to the productive process of labor:

This antagonistic relation between an administrative elite calculating and administering the needs of others, and people in a social community determining their own needs, this new world, our world, is a world which Descartes never knew or guessed at. As an actual liberating philosophy of life, rationalism is dead. (James 2006, 72)

By this point, a switch has occurred. Where rationality initially extended a collective purposivity to masses of men in associated labor, it eventually becomes vestigial to the process of labor itself. Rationality only retains its position through state force: “Nothing but the most unlicensed, unrestrained, carefully cultivated brutality can keep [the great masses] down” (James 2006, 79). For James, the proletariat of 1950 knows exactly what it wants. The proletariat has incorporated rationality for itself.

What has happened here? Rationality – which is alternately figured as Descartes, capitalism, and the State – functions to produce a new organization of life and labor. This new organization of labor develops into a type of systematicity that eventually attempts to erase the fact of its exterior causality. Rationalism, while now dead, was once, if not alive, then at least life-bestowing and purpose-endowing. Capital/reason is a techne that begins and enables the production of a certain mode of life. For James, this mode of life develops its own mode of being that becomes antagonistic to the very techne that originally gave it life. That which attempts to efface the radical and exterior gift of life through positing a vital force as an always already interiorized motor is called (in a philosopheme going from Aristotle to Blumenbach to Kant to Hegel to James) an organism. It is no accident, then, that James will refer to “the organism we have been following, the proletariat” in his Notes on Dialectics (1948). This organicism is not a disfiguration or mystification of Marx; this logic follows the fiction of Selbstbetätigung that I discussed above.

The organism of the proletariat does not, by James’ admission, emerge as the result of a Selbstbetätigung. It does not turn itself on or give itself life. Frankenstein-like, the proletarian organism has been given life only to turn against the intentions of its creator. The turn against the creator, the incorporation of the giver of life such that life appears to be self-given (or self-activated), is what James explores through dialectics. In what he calls a “Hegelian critique of rationalism,” James establishes a number of rules for the movement of his organic multitude (James 1986, 116). He deploys vitalist and organicist metaphors, metaphors that construct the proletarian multitude as a living body, self-moving, extending itself imaginatively and materially through space. One assertion of the “Hegel” whom James pirates is that “[a]ll development takes place as a result of self-movement, not organization or direction by external forces” (James’ emphasis; James 1986, 117). Thus, a given body contains within itself its own principles of movement and causation and its own purposivity; it is auto-causal.

However, this theory of organic auto-endowment of purposivity does not account for why a body would move in the first place. If an organism gives itself purpose, there would still be an initial irruptive break at which this organism would make a gift to itself, in which the organism would activate itself. What makes the organism move itself? To answer that the organism would move itself of itself is tautological. James wants to inscribe a technic of movement that is at once exterior to but incorporated by the organism. He wants to inscribe what should be before the organism as the organism. James continues: “Self-movement springs from and is the overcoming of antagonisms within an organism, not the struggle against external forces” (James’ emphasis; James 1986, 117). An organism thus produces its own contradictions, its own antagonisms; an organism is a set of self-contained, self-produced antagonisms.

This is obviously a sleight of hand. This dialectical rule of self-movement effectively erases the initial gift of life and purpose that capital/rationalism extended to the “individual men” associated in labor. James attempts to incorporate the dubious gift of capitalist rationality. The exterior technical organization of men in associated labor becomes, over time, an organic self-technique for the purposive production of the organism itself. The proletarian organism of 1950 is thus able to incorporate (as if it were proper to it) an entire capitalist history of technical production. Proletarian rationality becomes, in fact, the true motor of history. The point here is that the proletariat produces itself; or, rather, from a certain historical perspective, can be seen to have produced itself, and can be seen to be producing itself purposively. Having lost their position as the bearers of rationality, the state and capitalism only remain through and as violence. The state contradicts the auto-purposivity of the organism by submitting it to an enforced Plan. Capitalist value only reproduces itself as command.

James’ revolutionary argument is that the state is no longer required to plan and to distribute; the real subsumption of society by the organism of the proletariat means that the proletariat can look after society for itself (for itself in a double sense). In fact, the social becomes as organic as the proletariat: “Modern society in particular is an enormously complex organism” (James 2006, 47). In fact, James figures society as an organism at the precise moment that he is attempting to evade charges of economism and workerism:

Social relations in production do not constitute society and no one has ever claimed that they did. Modern society in particular is an enormously complex organism, comprising relations of production, commercial relations, scientific investigation, the highly scientific organizations of certain aspects of industry itself (such as for instance the production and use of atomic energy). The means of communication of information and ideas play an enormous role in the routine of today’s society. There is the organization of political life, the creation of literature and art at various levels. But despite all the complexity, there are clear, unmistakable, irrefutable patterns and laws which allow us to understand the general movement. (James 2006, 47)

How do we read this “organism of society in light of James’ previous philosophy of organisms? Here, the organicism of the proletariat producing itself in the factory emerges as an organizing (if not organicizing) figure for the organism of society:

If we have based our concept of the future of society upon the working class in the social relations of production, it is because it is the single stable, unifying, and integrating element in […] society. (James 2006, 47)

This is Bildung from below. The worker does not merely provide the material base for the civil social world of bourgeois exchange and sociality; in James' view, the worker is actively constructing a new type of Bildung that is centered on the production of the social itself. This social is responsive to the auto-causality of labor; the social is not a set of reified positions or a network of exchange relations, but the constantly deterritorialized expression of the productive capacities of workers themselves.

If only, right?

***

On preview: moving from the factory to the plantation, I will track the differential meanings that arise when Facing Reality was read in America, and when it was read (after James sent copies to piss off Eric Williams) in Trinidad.

James, Virno, Bildung

2008-09-12T23:03:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I noted that for Virno, as for C.L.R. James, culture (or cultural production) provides the ontological paradigm for production-in-general. As a note, one could, I think, make a similar claim about Hardt and Negri: their notion of “biopolitical production of subjectivity” is, for me, a merely to say that culture and subjectivity is directly included in, and produced through, labor.

The phrase “ontological paradigm for production-in-general” is grotesque, but couldn’t be helped. That is to say, the production of aesthetic/communicative objects or virtuosities (a product without end product, a valued performance) is at once the historically real foundation for the current cycle of production, as well as the philosophical figure for production-in-general. As Virno argues (with Debord’s “spectacle” standing as a metonym for the culture/communications industry):

[Spectacle] is the reigning productive force, something that goes beyond the domain of its own sphere, pertaining, instead, to the industry as a whole, to poiesis in its totality. In the spectacle we find exhibited … the most relevant productive forces of society, those productive forces on which every contemporary process must draw: linguistic competence, knowledge, imagination, etc. Thus, the spectacle has a double nature: a specific product of a particular industry, but also, at the same time, the quintessence of the mode of production in its entirety. (60)

So, culture – as the “common” repository of language, knowledge, imagination, etc. – becomes increasingly integrated into production, not merely as a product, but as a functioning aspect of production itself. According to Virno, the post-Fordist relations of work move in such a direction that base/superstructure arguments are not only dinosaur skeletons best left buried in hard soil, but rendered absolutely absurd. Culture is no longer to be conceived of as a product of the relations of production; rather, production-as-labor comes to be one moment of cultural activity. In this sense, labor becomes a modality of culture:

The general intellect is the foundation of a social cooperation broader than that cooperation which is specifically related to labour. Broader and, at the same time, totally heterogeneous. (67)

There thus emerges a tension between the multitudinous commons, the amorphousness of its presence, and the state and factory: the culture of the multitude exceeds the site of labor, but the factory, through adjusting its mode of production to incorporate and profit from linguistic, intellectual, and cultural training away from the factory, is able to profit. Essentially, socialization that occurs outside of labor functions to train workers for labor in the post-Fordist world:

Since the appearance of the Intellect becomes the technical prerequisite of Labor, the acting in concert beyond labor which it [intellect-in-common] brings about is in turn subsumed into the criteria and hierarchies which characterize the regime of the factory. (67)

The current regime of production, then, incorporates the “whole” of the human: its language, its affects, its knowledge, and so on. The human worker is no longer split from himself when he labors: his entire being, and not merely an abstract quantum of socially averaged brute force, is put to work. There is no longer any concrete distinction between labor in the factory and living in the world; work (labor) and living (culture) mirror one another. The full field of the human, as a cultural being with communicate-social abilities, is put to work:

Labor-power incarnates (literally) a fundamental category of philosophical thought: specifically, the potential, the dynamis. (82)

Of course, the wage- and state-forms channel and determine the flow and actual appearance of this newfound dynamism. The important thing here is that the dynamism of the potential is not predetermined in the form of an abstract social quantum (or, rather, it needn’t be). The entirety of the human enters as a possible input into the production process. In this way, labor as work (in the office, in the factory) becomes a subset of common labor, common knowledge – culture. The problem now centers on incarnation: the sensuous means of presenting a form. Capitalism as a system (pre)determines the specific modalities of incarnation. What James will encourage us to imagine is: is it economically and socially possible to construct a system wherein the mode of incarnation (which will register as genre in the literary sphere, and relations of production in the economic) is not predetermined? That is to say: can we construct a new, as yet unthought mode of incarnation?

This question, the question that James will pose, which I will address in my next post, centers around this network of ideas: If, in Euro-American modernity, theories of development centered largely on the development of potential itself, what happens when potential is developed to its fullest potential, but humans still are not free? The issue centers on the notion of Bildung. Bildung, as development, formation, culture, forming, and image-ing, encapsulates the problematic of Euro-American modernity. For James, as we will see, and for Virno, as I hope I showed, the Bildung of potential reaches its terminal point when the full culture of the human is available for sensuous incarnation in the process of labor. If potential has fully developed itself as potential, the actualization of potential, James will argue, is impoverished due to the capitalist value form itself. Capitalism develops potential but cannot, of itself, develop a means of incarnation, a form of sensuous manifestation, adequate to this potential. In short, the old problematic returns: capitalism limits itself of itself. The intolerable thing, for James, is that now more than ever the disparity between potential and incarnation is more keenly visible and felt than ever. And so James embarks on his impossible project: to develop a form of incarnation adequate to the ever-exceeding, though totally immanent, power of people in associated, culture-d labor.

Key texts:
Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude
C.L.R. James, After Ten Years: On Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed [here]
C.L.R. James, Facing Reality
Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationalities

James and those Italians

2008-09-12T17:57:00.000-07:00

No need to begin grandly; let's set ourselves to work. Here's a large chunk of information of dubious importance. Pardon the style; it's a footnote from a recent paper on James, in which I attempt to work out his relationship to Hardt and Negri.

In addition to the theoretical similarities, a history of the exchange of ideas between these revolutionary coteries [Italian workerists and James' Johson-Forrest and Facing Reality groups] would be quite fascinating. In 1972, for instance, George Rawick published with Negri, among others, Operai e stato [Workers and the state] (Milan: Feltrinelli). In 1973, Rawick’s From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community was published as Lo schiavo americano dal tramonto all’alba (Milan: Feltrinelli). The speed of the translation (just one year after its American publication), and its publication with the same house as Operai e stato indicates a tight exchange of ideas. Alex Lichtenstein has documented the importance of C.L.R. James to Rawick’s work; Rawick met James in 1964. Martin Glaberman was another Jamesian, a leader of the Facing Reality Group, and the eventual editor of Marxism for Our Times: C.L.R. James on Revolutionary Organization. In 1976 he published Classe operaia, imperialismo, rivoluzione negli USA (Turin: Musolini). Jame himself was apparently published in Italian, co-writing Da schiavo a proletario with Harold Baron and Herbert Gutman. This was published in 1973, with the same publishing house as Glaberman. These connections of James to Italian workerism, and Negri more specifically, indicate that more work needs to be done in situating James – historically and theoretically – within the major currents of Western Marxism. See Ferdinando Fasce, “American Labor History, 1973-1983: Italian Perspectives,” Reviews in American History, 14.4 (1986); Alex Lichtenstein, “In Retrospect: George Rawick’s From Sundown to Sunup and the Dialectic of Marxiam Slave Studies,” Reviews in American History, 24.4 (1996), p. 712-13.

This small heap of publication data was intended to authorize a more theoretical inquiry. For those who have bothered to read James' (post-)trotskyist theoretical texts, a question quickly emerges: what is the theoretical relationship between James' politico-economico-cultural theory and Hardt and Negri's Empire? The comparison in scholarly work is almost becoming old hat:

In his review of Empire, Tim Watson writes that “Hardt and Negri recall the populist Marxism of C.L.R. James, who had a similar faith in the creative energies of the proletariat of all countries” (emphasis added). The reduction of James’ theoretical position to faith is an odious tendency in writing on James, who provided sustained arguments for his positions. Chamsy el-Ojeili laments the lack of influence that James and the Johnson-Forest had on Italian workerism, even while noting the exchanges (generally mediated through Castoriadis, who published with James as well as European groups) between these groups. Peter Hudis writes that “James’s emphasis on spontaneity can be seen as having influenced a number of currents in autonomous Marxism, including Negri and Hardt. At the same time, in regard to the problem of organization, they seem not to have gone beyond [James’s] stopping point, as seen from the conclusion of Empire.” See Tim Watson, “An American Empire?” Postcolonial Studies, 4.3 (2001), p. 355; “‘Many Flowers, Little Fruit’? the Dilemmas of Workerism,” Thesis Eleven, 79 (2004), especially pp. 114-16; Peter Hudis, “Workers as Reason: The Devleopment of a New Relation of Worker and Intellectual in American Marxist Humanism,” Historical Materialism, 11.4 (2003), p. 290.

So, a relationship clearly exists, both in terms of historical connections and in terms of theoretical positions. Unfortunately, writing on the relationship hasn't moved much beyond the simile: James is like Hardt and Negri. To add insult to injury: what could be worse than hearing that one's theory of the present has already been theorized as the present of a past? The problem cannot be resolved by claiming that Hardt and Negri complete and elaborate James's project (though, of course, such a claim would still require proving). Finally, it is my feeling that Virno (of The Grammar of the Multitude), and not Hardt and Negri, better mediates James' project from the position of the present. For one, Virno restricts himself to post-Fordist societies; the rule(s) of Empire are global in a way that James does not theorize. Secondly, Virno's understanding of culture and media is, as I hope to show in another post, closer to James' understanding. This distinction is important for two reasons: firstly, in both James and Virno cultural apparatuses are introjected into production; secondly, in James' and Virno's texts cultural production works as the ontological paradigm of production-in-general.

In the posts to follow, then, I want to trace the relationship of James to Virno/Hardt/Negri through his theory of culture and its relation to production. I do not have a ready answer to the question of the status of the relationship between James' theoretical work and the current theories of the multitude. In marxism, as ever, the lines between theory-of-history, theory-as-history, history-of-theory, and history-as-theory is too fraught to enable anything but the patient working-through of the texts themselves.

[A note: I do not have any Italian, and have been unable to verify, in any way to my liking, the bibliographic data above. If anyone is in the know, please drop your knowledge on me.]