Lincoln and the Ugly Origins of the 13th Amendment

It’s the most shocking scene in Spielberg’s Lincoln. After a dramatic climax in the House chamber, Thaddeus Stevens returns to his home, bearing the official copy of the 13^th Amendment. Stevens eventually makes it to bed, with his mulatto housekeeper, friend, and romantic partner, Lydia Smith. And here’s where it gets shocking: In their shared bed, Stevens gives Smith the text of the amendment, and Smith reads it. Aloud. For Stevens and for us, the audience.

Why is this shocking? I want to suggest that the condition of possibility for the dramatics of the narrative to be dramatic, the condition of possibility for the story to lovingly depict the parliamentary machinations required to emancipate slaves, is that this amendment, its very text, not be read. The amendment cannot be read if we are to affectively invest in the story, if we are to read this as a story of the generalization of juridical freedom. And that’s because, well, if you were to rip the amendment out of context, if you were to read or hear the text from the very beginning of the play, you might become confused, you might decide that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, you might think, “Wait, I thought we were trying to abolish slavery, not provide positive constitutional mechanisms for establishing it.” So, let’s read it:

“Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

“…except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Let’s leave this clause hanging, and think about the varied ways in which Lincoln has been criticized from the left. (I want to note, at the outset, that I’m in full sympathy with these critiques.) Kate Masur has critiqued this scene for staging in micro the film’s general assumption that freedom was a gift handed over to passive blacks by do-gooder whites; Steven literally hands freedom to Stevens. Masur directs our attention to the public and activist lives of the black characters whom Lincoln treats as bit players (Keckley, Smith) in order to recover black agency in the work of antislavery. Others have extended and intensified Masur’s critique, with Aaron Bady in particular showing how the film’s investment in not foregrounding black emancipationist agency derives from its “realist” optimism in liberal reformism. Bady directs us toward more radical interpretations of the 13^th Amendment and Reconstruction—Du Bois and Foner, mostly. Foner himself makes the point that slavery was already dying if not dead; the 13^th Amendment is a juridical-textual inscription of an accomplished social movement, the Du Boisian “general strike” of slaves fleeing toward Union lines. All of these critiques want to locate the social and political origins in the amendment in black (and feminist) social movements, and surely they’re correct: emancipation became a juridical necessity as a consequence of such movements. But if the impulse to generalized emancipation derived from black self-activity, where might we locate the origins of the emancipatory text itself? And why—given that the text actually enables positive legal arguments for slavery—do we think of this amendment as actually emancipatory? Between on-the-ground emancipatory self-activity and its legal inscription, something got in the way, some kind of legal reasoning that translated an absolute refusal of servitude into a conditional refusal: “…except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Where did this legal reasoning originate?

We need to keep in mind that positive-legal authorizations of slavery from the federal legislature were rather scant. Federal statute laws that took “slave” as a juridical category typically operated according to a principle of comity: If the legal regime of x state treated a black person as property, the legal apparatus of y state would need to so treat that property in the event of, say, the capture of a fugitive. Massachusetts would have to respect Carolinian law. That’s not the same thing as the production of a positive federal law authorizing slavery—it rather places the burden of legitimation on a given state. Broadly speaking, federal law treated slavery in a de facto fashion; its juridical positivity was a state-based affair. And thus the strangeness of the 13^th Amendment: in consolidating a national legal regime, it actually produces a positive legal rule for enslavement: “…except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

Why this clause? Where did it come from? As it appears in the film, particularly at the moment of its reading, the amendment is a highly localized, domestic affair. In Smith’s mouth, the amendment does double work: it functions simultaneously as public/legal and private/intimate speech, even as the physical circulation of the document articulates the congressional chamber with the congressman’s bedchamber. And, indeed, it’s only within this domestic context that the text is legible as an antislavery instrument—we need to know that the do-gooders in the film will not use this amendment as a legal argument for enslaving blacks. We need to know, through constant assertions, that this is an instrument of freedom—as, indeed, it was. But what if we pry this amendment from its domestic moorings, if we set it adrift in a field of international legal reasoning?

We would actually see that the legal instrument of the 13^th Amendment, the Amendment of Emancipation, draws upon the legal reasoning of slavery. Writ positively, the amendment might read: “Slavery shall exist only on condition that the party shall have been duly convicted of a crime.” But that is precisely the mode of legal argumentation used to justify slavery and, moreover, the slave trade. Enslaved Africans were already convicted, as a proslavery jurisprudence had it. This conviction might have been theological and racial in origin—the curse of Ham. But there were non-theological legal arguments made as well. Slavery, apologists argued, was a recognized feature of African legal regimes. Persons could be enslaved under African commercial law (debt law, for instance), under African criminal law (as a punishment), or under African jus gentium (as a mode of humanely dealing with prisoners of war). Curiously, these apologists—elsewhere and always ready to cast Africans as decultured, uncivilized, as lacking anything like a state—understood Atlantic slavery as the effect of a kind of comity, of Atlantic legal regimes accepting juridical distinctions made in Africa by Africans. (These arguments, of course, tended to break down once the inheritability of the status of slave required defending.) I’m suggesting, though, that the amendment itself draws upon a mode of international legal reasoning that was always functional for the maintenance of slavery.

So, one effect of the Amendment’s passage was, strangely, to deactivate a mode of legal reasoning that ascribed legal reasoning to African polities—that saw Africans, and not just those in Sierra Leone or Liberia, as inhabiting thick legal regimes that operated at multiple scales. Another effect is that, well, the Amendment only makes sense as an instrument of freedom provided that it is insistently embedded within a nation-centered mode of legal reasoning and legal practice. And, indeed, the film works to insistently elide any mention of the world beyond, which is nonsense. As a point of fact, emancipation in the U.S. was thought about in expansive, transnational terms. Latecomers to emancipation, U.S. politicians, administrators, and the general public had at their disposal a whole repertoire of examples of programs for the abolition of slavery—Haiti in the revolutionary era, the British West Indies in 1834/8, the French Antilles in 1848, and much of postimperial Spanish America through the early to mid nineteenth century. We know that these examples did a great deal of work for both pro- and anti-slavery thinkers. We know that public chaps in the U.S. borrowed freely from the legal, administrative, and economic discursive resources of the British, in particular. We know that a whole series of practical, on-the-ground exchanges between do-gooders and freedpeople in the West Indies and their counterparts in the U.S. lent a concreteness to the abstract comparisons that circulated through Northern and Southern print worlds.

But we also know, I think why these transnational and international exchanges need to be ignored. On one hand, Lincoln can’t really appear too unique when you realize that lots of places had already outlawed slavery. On the other hand, we can’t look too deeply into the ugly origins of the 13^th Amendment’s mode of legal reasoning. It would be disconcerting, after all, for good pious citizens to realize that something like the 13^th Amendment could have been written and read on the shores of Africa by a slave-trader who, upon concluding negotiations with a local ruler, prepared to load his cargo of criminals aboard his slave ship.  

Electoral Maps, Antebellum Maps: Or, How Liberal Self-Satisfaction Dissolves History into a Racist Mess

You’ve probably seen this image. Juxtaposing “Free States and Slave States, before the Civil War” alongside a red/blue breakdown of voting in the 2012 election, the image asserts a kind of continuity—if not a direct causality—between contemporary geographies of party affiliation and antebellum geographies of slavery. You might have smirked. You might have found it revealing. Maybe—as it did me—the image left you with an uneasy feeling, the felt beginnings of a refusal of the claim that the image would like to make.

A full disclaimer: I’m an anarcho-Marxist; I don’t vote; I’m not invested in blue-state- versus-red-state nonsense; my political position does not register on this map. I do, however, study nineteenth-century cultures of slavery and freedom in the Americas. I write about the strange cartographies generated by ordinary black subjects who sought to live free lives—however they defined that freedom—in a hemisphere structured to deny them personal and collective autonomy. I find myself responding to this image not just as a scholar, but as someone with some kind of a felt relationship to the stories I read and recover, someone constantly awed by the resilience and creativity of these people, someone who thinks there’s a future to-come for these myriad freedoms that survive, obscured and only partially legible to us today, in the archive.

This image pulverizes history, transforming histories of slavery into the stuff of cheap political potshots. It shouldn’t need saying, but alas: Voting for Mitt Romney is NOT akin to maintaining juridical support for slavery—an analogy or commensurability that the synchronic axis of the image suggests. This mobilization of an affectively saturated history is repulsive not only for its cheapening of the deep violence of slavery, but also for the way in which it dissolves the instabilities of historical time into a simple one-two diachrony. If we actually look into these instabilities—that is, if we fucking take the politics of slavery seriously—these maps, and the historical narrative that their juxtaposition implies, comes apart.

This image attempts to draw on a historical juridical distinction between slave and free state in order to offer a snarky commentary on the contemporary distinction between red and blue state. This distinction no doubt flatters liberals, ever on the side of progress. But what if we chose another cartographic heuristic? What if we compared the electoral breakdown of 2012 with a map colored according to polities wherein free blacks could vote in the antebellum U.S.? Antebellum “blue states” would shrink to a handful. What if we compared the electoral breakdown of 2012 with a map colored according to polities wherein African Americans faced some form of legal disability? And what if we compared the electoral breakdown of 2012 with a map colored according to, not slave states, but states wherein blacks were enslaveable—that is, states wherein New World blacks, provided a however tenuous legal title could be shown, were susceptible to being seized and carried to a slave state? The map would bleed a bright red, the whole of it.

In 1850, there were no “free states” in the U.S., if by “free” we mean a state wherein an ordinary black subject could live free from the threat of unfreedom, from civil and legal disability. And more: this realm of unfreedom, even when dragging as freedom, was only expanding in the nineteenth century. Indeed, our good liberal mapmaker’s decision to show us a map from a decade or so prior to the outbreak of the Civil War allows him or her to get around the disconcerting fact that the map of the United States would have had far fewer states only a handful of years prior to 1850. (It's unclear to me why the map is dated to 1846.) The map thus elides histories of imperial expansion—into Indian territory, into Mexico, and earlier into Florida and into the Louisiana territory—and thus elides “blue state” connivance in the extension and maintenance of slavery, the North’s compromises and its cowardice. It elides how our proto-Obama-voting “blue states” actively profited from slavery both within the U.S. and throughout the hemisphere, by financing plantations and engaging in the (illegal) slave trade. It ignores how the dynamics of capitalist accumulation—which, in the nineteenth century, ALWAYS implied some form of bonded labor, some form of slavery—cut across sectional lines.  

This image posits that the juridical distinction between slave and free is isomorphic with today’s cartographies of parliamentary politics; it implies that today’s Northern liberals have inherited, and protect, the precious freedom(s) denied to so many in the antebellum world. It implies that the rupture of the Civil War was not much of a rupture—continuity is the name of the game here. It thus elides the discontinuous rupture of black political subjectivity: the image would have us believe that today’s political cartography retains the form adjudicated 162 years ago by the desires and compromises of (mostly) white men, all of whom in some fashion profited from the political and juridical de-subjectification of blacks throughout the Americas.

Perhaps most insidiously, by posing electoral politics as the inheritor of antebellum politics of freedom and slavery, this map implies that the political unconscious of freedom and antislavery was always already preformed by the parliamentary cartography of the nation-state.  In other words, the image not only disavows imperial histories of expansion, the ways in which the U.S. electoral map was always on the move; it also elides alternative cartographies and trajectories of freedom, however fragile and ephemeral, established by blacks who recognized the difficulties of achieving autonomy in any state, North or South. The nation comes to appear as the natural container of relations of freedom and servitude, of progress and regress. The image doesn’t care about the alternative modalities of being-free that were sought outside of the institutional parameters and geographic boundaries of the parliamentary state; it doesn’t care about modalities of human freedom that cannot be contained or enumerated by ballots. It simply doesn’t matter to this image that blacks in those anachronistically blue states formed political subjectivities around August First or celebrations of the Haitian Revolution, not some act on a Tuesday in November most couldn’t participate in, anyhow.

The radical promise of antislavery—substantive antislavery, the material practices of freedom undertaken by New World blacks—has as little in common with the reduced notions of formal freedom available in the antebellum North as it does with the reduced notion of political freedom enshrined in parliamentary politics. Celebrating liberalism’s present, lambasting remnants of the South’s (but only the South's?) past, this racist image transforms the awesome, terrible, unfinished history of freedom into a persistent structure—one assembled by white men, for white men. But this is what the image, fixated on juridical and electoral geographies, cannot reveal. Even as it tries mobilizing the affectivity of the term, the discontinuous, unemplottable subjectivity of freedom remains elsewhere. 

Mr. Bloomberg, Tear Down This Wall: #S17, Police, and Constituent Power

In response to OWS’s plans to reassemble on its anniversary (#S17) to shut down Wall Street, the forces of order took the unimaginative step of quite literally walling the street. Mikey B is a no nonsense kind of guy. Zuccotti Park and the Stock Exchange are now enclosed by lines of concrete, aluminum, and steel; atop some of these formations perches an NYPD observation post. Humorous preparations for a movement declared long dead, no doubt.

The enclosure of Zuccotti is intriguing for the light it sheds on the processes by which social symbols are formed. No doubt there are tactical reasons that motivated the police to enclose Zuccotti—a rare open space downtown, it is an ideal convergence point for mass actions. But there are others in the vicinity, others that OWS will be using on Monday. It’s clear, I think, that the social-symbolic role of Zuccotti exceeds its possible tactical function. To be sure, the becoming-symbol of the park does not mean that it utterly abstracts or detaches itself from the non-symbolic. Rather, the symbol of the park always refers us back to tactics, to struggle and antagonism: this symbol is the sedimentation of past and projected/future social confrontations. The tactical and the symbolic, the material and the discursive co-constitute one another, interpenetrate: the wall around Zuccotti is both a wall and something-more, but this excess of meaning is not separable from the wall’s construction in the first place. Discourse moves matter, matter moves discourse, each movement indexing the intensification of social antagonisms. I’m interested, here, in how the wall attempts policing—policing in a broad sense of an entire material-discursive coding apparatus—and thus re-coding this antagonism, and re-coding it is non-antagonistic.

First reading: The construction of the wall amounts to a tactical-symbolic inversion of the intentions of OWS. Looking at the wall, one gets a sense that the police are keeping the plebes of Occupy from accessing a space reserved for powerful patricians. This is no doubt true, as we will see. But the concrete-symbolic practice of keeping-out inverts the deeper structure of the intentionality of OWS and of the police. Simply put, OWS does not want to inscribe itself into a space of power, it does not want to enter capitalism—rather, it wants to force an exit, to detach itself from capitalism, to separate itself utterly and completely from power. It is rather the state that wishes to keep us inside of capital, immanent to the relations of command that constitute it. The construction of the wall and the social choreography that the wall invites—demonstrators clamoring to get inside of the park, as they entered it last night at the end of a march, as they sat in it tonight, after filing in one by one, for a Rosh Hashanah celebration—inverts the orientation and directionality of the antagonism.

Second reading: The construction of the wall amounts to a tactical-symbolic ironization of the intentions of OWS. Looking at the space enclosed by the wall, one gets a sense that there is no there there—that conquering this space would not be worth the fight, and any attempt to seize this space would simply be the result of a few bad eggs bloc’ed up and looking for a confrontation. The empty space enclosed by the wall nullifies and expresses the nullity of the desires of OWS; the desire of the plebes to enter the park seems devoid of content, as empty as the empty park they would try to occupy. The wall, in short, encloses a non-target; the intentionality of OWS is non-targeted, its aims at best contrarian, purely formal and reactive to a Power that says No, You Can’t Enter Here. The construction of the park as a targeted non-target de-positivizes the telos of OWS.

The wall, then, attempts two coding operations: On one hand, it accords a substantive rationality to radical intentionality, but it attempts to conduct it, to transform the directionality of struggle: the will to flee capital reappears as the will to get inside it. On the other hand, by constructing the park as a targetable and targeted non-target, it declares the intentionality of OWS to be merely formal and reactive: OWS would not know what it wanted if the walls disappeared. If the state said, sure, okay, have the park, pitch a tent if you want, then OWS would be revealed to lack an aim. The police, with their wall, are both directors of and actors in an insubstantial social drama, self-consciously constructing the possibility of a drama, but a drama about nothing, with no stakes, in which to win is to display the insubstantiality of the victory. In aiming for the park, OWS either aims for capital or for nothing.

Let’s note one bizarre and frightening effect of this ambidextrous coding operation. This concrete repressive apparatus of the police radiates the claim that it is repressing nothing. It redirects and conforms our aims with the dominant or it exposes the utter non-positivity of our aims—but repress? No way. Oddly, this understanding of police has percolated through the movement; when police repression is discussed, it is addressed on a level of pure formality, as the police’s violation of liberal-democratic rights—to gather and assemble, to speak and to express oneself collectively. We become more concerned about the violation of constitutional principles than about the violation of ourselves, of activists gathered-there-together. And so, in effect, the intentionality of Occupy is conducted toward liberal capitalism, its rights guarantees and its constitutional state; and so, in effect, Occupy events seem increasingly to be merely reactive to a power that willfully and eagerly oversteps legal restraints, a power to which we cry “shame shame shame” and “who do you protect” etc as if that were the full point of the action. The aim of our actions, in short, becomes staging situations in which it becomes proper to demand that the liberal-capitalist state and its constitutional guarantees protect us from its armed minions.

The Wall Effect, then: it encourages us to place our faith in constituted, constitutional power. Even as we’re cynical about the intentions of that power, demanding and petitioning become the sole modes of self-help available to us: “Mr Bloomberg, tear down this wall…” We thus ignore the extent to which the wall, the entire material-discursive apparatus of the police, does in fact repress something: our substantive and virtual potential, our constitutive and constituent power that, in its extensive and intensive mobility, exceeds the formalism of constituted Power, its mechanisms of control, capture, and reform. It represses us from moving into that time-space just before us, a field of potential that was once named Liberty Square.

And, so, a third reading, one that adopts the antagonistic perspective of constituted versus constituent power, of Power (calcified and senescent) versus power—mobile and youthful, filled with potential: The wall is just a fucking wall, a contraption of metal and concrete designed to inhibit the construction and realization of alternative modalities of being in the world. It is the vulgarity and stupidity of power, the concretion of the sheer barbarism and brutality required to keep people in their places. It’s not a sign of anything; it is repression, violence, and another brick in the wall of a whole state apparatus. Dividing us from our world-making force, just a fucking wall.

Smashing it would almost accord it too high an honor.

The Pedagogy of Pickets; Or, Let's Do It for the Kids!

The struggle against austerity continues. With the struggle comes the whole set of neoliberal discursive maneuvers through which mouthpieces of capital attempt proving that tight fiscality is coterminous with a loving sentimentality. Not only are teachers’ demands opposed to anything like fiscal discipline, but the very articulation of these demands shows that, well, they just don’t care. Relations of care are best derived from the calculations of accountants. The Chicago Teachers Union, Mittens tells us, has “turn[ed] its back” on “the hundreds of thousands of children in the city’s public schools to provide them a safe place to receive a strong education.”  Fiscality and sentimentality operate conjointly to effect a decisive displacement: they serve to depoliticize the antagonism between State-capital and labor. The necessity of caring for children, like the necessity—not matter how hard it is, how tight the belt becomes—to follow rigorously the demands of stingy accountancy, trumps any assertion of autonomous will, of freedom. Within this discursive field, the assertion of any political subjectivity requires, as a prior movement, the cultivation of an indifference toward the Child and the city’s Books—a turning-away, a turning-one’s-back-on, a willful neglect of one’s duties to Capital and Kids. Neglecting fiscal necessities is coterminous with neglecting one’s pedagogical duties to children; to resist the one is to attack the other; “[t]eachers unions have too often made plain that their interests conflict with those of our children.”

Obviously, this is all horseshit, but that doesn’t mean that the figure of the Child, of the Children—all 400,000 of them, deprived of any adult care, left out on those dangerous Chicago streets—hasn’t been and won’t continue to be effective in determining public response to the strike. Much of the CTU’s defense of its action necessarily stakes a claim to being in the Child’s best interests: teachers’ conditions are students’ conditions, small classrooms benefits everyone, and so on. These claims are, I think, true, and they are important claims to make. But what really intrigues me, here, is the absurdly reductive concept of pedagogy that organizes responses to the teachers’ decision to strike. “Teaching” seems to be isolated to the slice of space-time we call the classroom; it only takes place during the school year, when performance can be enumerated and evaluated with faux precision. We already know that this definition of teaching is made in something like bad faith. After all, “teaching” is seen as a vocation that extends beyond the confines of the classroom to wider networks of sociality and identity formation. A “caring” teacher is the one who works beyond the actual scene of pedagogical production—that is, one who hyper-exploits herself by working outside of the education factory in the social factory more broadly writ: coaching teams, advising clubs, writing recommendations, being a mentor, and being, in general, a role model. As a disciplinary norm, “teaching” demands a set of behaviors that extend beyond the circuit of educative production into the circuit of social reproduction. Yet, the fact of this extension is carefully elided when minimalist definitions of pedagogy are proposed so as to chastise teachers for not caring about their kids. Anyone, however, who has walked by or walked in a picket line knows that teachers are not “turning their backs” on children—they’re facing the street, addressing the public at large, and are more than willing to explain to anyone—children such as their students or childish brats like Rahm—why they’re striking.

The picket is a pedagogical scene. So, what does it teach?

Let’s see if we can derive any lessons from the manner in which Rahm encodes the strike: “This is not a strike I wanted,” Emanuel said. “It was a strike of choice … it’s unnecessary, it’s avoidable and it’s wrong.“ Clearly, Rahm refuses to understand the centrality of disappointment to democracy, to understand democracy as a mode of living-through the non-conformity of wills. But let’s stick with these middle modifiers, “unnecessary” and “avoidable.” The question, of course, is: unnecessary for whom? Obviously, the strike is only “unnecessary” and “avoidable” from the perspective of a neoliberal accountancy operation that is willing to continually subtract the value of labor in order to enhance the freedom and value of capital. But this perspective is posed as delinked from any political subjectivity: it’s not Rahm the neoliberal opposed to the strikers, it’s just good economic sense (supplemented by a sentimental care for displaced kids) that determines the strike as “wrong.” By declaring the strike unnecessary and avoidable, Rahm gestures to a rationality exorbitant to the interests of both the city and the teachers—a fiscal causality that should coordinate the entirety of social life, a causality that is well nigh natural and objective. The teachers are, in effect, narcissistically fighting the way of the world.

Let’s agree with Rahm. Let’s say, indeed, that the strike is “unnecessary,” “avoidable”; let’s say that we will never be able to derive with any kind of scientific or apodictic certainty—calculate and compute as much as you will—the eruption of a strike. A brief course through history shows that submission to the heteronomous compulsion of economic necessity is the norm: subsistence limits have always been downwardly flexible, and real wage packages have been on a decline for centuries. It is this fact that precisely constitutes the eventalness of working-class revolt. Despite our habituation to heteronomy, it remains the case that the Atlantic world has—for centuries—seen action underived from necessity as the paradigm of ethico-political freedom. Freedom begins in the nonlinearity of the unnecessary, in the space of compossibility opened by the co-presence of the “avoidable” action with other courses of being. What Rahm is telling us, in short, is that the striking teachers, having set upon an unnecessary and avoidable course, are operating according to a self-given teleology of freedom.

It seems clear to me, at least, that the cultivation of a taste for freedom is a primary pedagogical responsibility of teachers. (Even a gross, reactionary, conservative ass would agree with that; it’s the Enlightenment-era genetic code of instituted learning.) This cultivation will not (and cannot) always take place in a classroom, particularly when classrooms are defined (as by Mittens above, and many others worried about 400,000 kids on the street) as little more than daycare centers (or prison cells). The picket line generates a new pedagogical scene, and, ultimately, establishes the same breach in our understandings of freedom as the third antinomy Kant draws in the third critique. On one side, we have those who believe that the movement of the world should be organized simply be natural-economic rationalities, laws. On the other side, those who know that natural-economic rationalities are not the sole determinants of human action—that there’s another causality, vague and obscure, that begins when a subject “turns her back” on necessity and lives the irreducible possibility of making an event. The Child, that figure derived from neoliberal accountancy, might feel neglected by this inaugural neglect of necessity. Actual children, however, might be getting a lesson in the (a)causality of freedom.

“What do we want? Time travel! When do we want it? It’s irrelevant!”

We'll leave this chap in reserve for a moment.

So, the National Gathering came and went. I wasn’t in attendance for most of it: I was out of town. (Anyhow, the Philly Radical Convergence was running concurrently, and I would’ve gone to the latter, circumstances permitting.) With NatGat and the “return of Occupy” came the return of the utterly predictable ways by which Occupy is discussed in official and unofficial media outlets. No demands, no organization, etc. etc. One writer at The Guardian declares, simply, that the “The Philadelphia national gathering reveals Occupy’s law of entropy.” The reason he gives is simple: Occupy’s mode of consensus formation actually spawns dissensus. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—dissensus (he calls it “conflict”) is the condition of the political—but, alas, the movement lacks an instituted mode of regulating conflicting (what he calls) “rights” to public speech.  No durable structure, in short, regulates or economizes the political space of Occupy. Without this police-function, the polis of Occupy dissipates into endless and frustrating quasi-polemical debate, leaving as its trace a utopian dream of consensus without friction. A good Rancierean Arun Gupta is not. He thus concludes, “for the idealistic core of Occupy, its original flowering was like a Fourth of July firework display: something dramatic and beautiful, but ultimately ephemeral.”

It’s a sympathetic article, but the demand remains the same: Occupy, turn into something! Don’t be ephemeral! And, protestations to the contrary, that’s kind of what NatGat was all about: building a “blueprint,” a “vision,” and so on. Articulating a sense of the social that is, a sense of the social that should be, and a means of realizing this sense-to-come. Not for nothing, of course, was NatGat held through the 4^th of July, and the drafters of the vision statement followed their patriotic forebears admirably. The document that they’ve left us is confused. After first declaring that “our process itself was [is?] our message,” the document then evacuates considerations of process in order to maintain the vision in a kind of utopian purity: “a vision points to the ‘what,’ not the ‘how.’” Moreover, as a means of disarming dissensus—or, alternately, as a means of forming consensus—points of vision are compiled and the number of people backing each point is listed. Enumeration disarming dissensus, police for the political. (Of course, dissensus still plays out across the content of the document; many of the demands are irreconcilable.) In short, the document is structured by the desire to produce a durable cognitive-sensual structure for action, but the modality of positive construction simply results in a lifeless tally in which all issues, rendered qualitatively commensurate, differ only in the magnitude of voices saying “Yea” to each proposed item. The quest for some kind of durable presence—if not as a state or a party than as a sense, a “vision”—has simply reproduced the hackneyed forms of liberal census taking (and consensus making).

This is in part an effect of political subjectivation exceeding available textual-generic resources: we need to come up with new ways of writing such that the representation of the polis is adequate to its democratic coming-to-presence. (Anyone who has ever tried collectively drafting a document knows what I mean—the end result always represents a certain betrayal.) But there are other discursive resources that a) refuse the conservative demand of institutional/organization/ideological durability and b) maintain a relation of adequation between political presentation and political re-presentation. I’m talking about the chant. After all, if our process is our message, we might as well look to the public speech genre with which activists are intimately familiar in order to see what our vision of democracy is or might be. And, let’s be clear, if the textual product of NatGat is rather stale and boring and liberal, the actual political event of NatGat—bodies arriving together, making space, fucking up our sense of the city—was as vibrant as any Occupy event. So, it’s to this repertoire of chants that I now want to turn in order to interrupt and look beyond the liberal form of consensus formation enshrined in the primary piece of NatGat’s textual archive.

Occupy’s repertoire of protest chants reveals most plainly the multiple and irreducibly conflictual strands of political thinking and practice that compose it. Each chant—through its imagined addressee, its content, its mode of articulation—draws on a particular lineage of practices that traverse anarchism, laborism, civil disobedience movements, and so on. Moreover, chants tend to encode, as their conditions of possibility, the precise social space from which they are articulated. Certain chants only become useful or usable as a march interacts with a space in a given manner—in an anarchist, CD, liberal, or laborist manner, for instance (this list is hardly exhaustive). For instance, “Whose streets? Our streets!” really only makes sense as a forceful claim when the march is not permitted. If you’re screaming “Our streets,” you’re probably not at a union-led action, for illegality marks one condition of possibility for the chant’s efficacy. At the other end of the spectrum is the utterly bland standby, “Hey hey, ho ho, xyz has got to go!” The chant could come from anywhere; it doesn’t entail a particular relation to space, except, maybe, the non-space of the liberal public sphere. We could keep going.  At the level of content, “A- / Anti- / Anticapitalista!” articulates an anarchist politics by eschewing a determinate addressee in favor of self-naming: there is no assumed “you,” no audience, just us, autonomically singing for ourselves. In terms of space, “Anticapitalista!” assumes the production of a temporary autonomous zone. More of a dance than a chant, “Anticapitalista” requires space for bodies-in-motion: clapping hands, jumping up-and-down, the beating of drums. It also produces (in the mouths of Occupiers in the anglophone-dominant public sphere of the US) an articulation, via language choice, with a globalized field of anticapitalist struggles. In short, chants can tell us a lot about social movements: not just what they want, but how they imagine, live, and produce their (sense of) space.

Some chants, however, refuse to make their political desires transparent. It’s in these absurdist chants that we can recover the much-cited anarchist roots of Occupy. The politics of “A- / Anti- / Anticapitalista!” are probably pretty clear to the onlooker caught in her car as demonstrators dance by; the political import of “I- / I need- / I need a piece of pizza!” is surely less clear. What would a good Habermasian say to the communicative irrationality of nonsense meta-chants such as “Three word chant! Three word chant!” or “Call! Response! Call! Response!” (see Graeber, Direct Action, 417). No doubt, such nonsense chants serve an immediate function for the marchers: marching is tiresome, intense, and marchers’ affect oscillates between exhilaration and boredom. Anticapitalism can be monotonous, but its important not to let this monotony show. These absurd chants thus enable a kind of affective recuperation: without leaving a vacuum, the specific target of the march is vacated of intense intention; at the same time, the humor of these chants produces a new kind of jolt, a different kind of intensity. The functionality of such chants for group formation should be clear: as ironic in-jokes, they produce a sense of belonging, of knowingness—one winks with one’s comrades. And this group is formed as a democratic, creative assembly. On one hand, the condition of possibility for such absurdist chants is the non-hierarchical nature of the march; no earnest march leader or chant master is going to start yelling, “Three word chant! Three word chant!” On the other hand, such chants, as jokes, can’t really be planned; they contingently bubble up as an effect of someone’s, anyone’s, creativity. During actions, twitter feeds buzz with the repetition of funny or ironic chants. The author can’t really be cited; there’s no author but the ephemeral creativity of the democratic anyone. As Graeber puts it, such chanting works through a “kind of democratization of effervescence.” We might also say that these chants work to make democracy effervescent, for many chants, of course, do not get picked up, repeated, shouted out--chants bubble up, contingently and randomly. Nothing guarantees—no census taking or consensus making—that an individual’s offering will be repeated save the intensifying acclaim of the demos that picks it up. Such an acclamatory model is, of course, starkly opposed to the kind of enumerative democracy of liberalism. (One finds here an ally in Schmitt in his Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy: “The will of the people can be expressed just as well and perhaps better through acclamation…than through the statistical apparatus that has been constructed with such meticulousness…)

So, these chants a) are functional for the continuance of a scene of democratic presentation; b) take a democratic assumption—that anyone can creatively present the demos—as a condition of their production; and c) take another democratic assumption—that others can decide in the immediate affectivity of the moment what presents democracy as it is—as a condition of their circulation. All these points are linked: the marching democracy endures (in its intensity, in its affectivity) by democratically distributing responsibility for (the effort of) making the demos appear. The “democratization of effervesence,” then, actually serves to ensure the democracy’s endurance. It’s in these emergent, contingent, ephemeral spaces, I suggest, that we should look to find adequate (re)presentations of democracy—what it demands, what it desires. I now want to read one (apparently absurd) chant to see what it can tell us about the coming democracy.

It’s straight-up nonsense. It began as a sign (written as a chant) and, in time, after it circulated as a picture and through twitter, was briefly enacted as a chant: “What do we want? Time travel! When do we want it? It’s irrelevant!” In case the joke isn’t clear, the chant-form it’s riffing on goes, “What do we want? X! When do we want it? Now!” Obviously, the time-travel chant works by noting that the realization of its demand—the traversability of time—renders the precise moment at which the demand is articulated a matter of indifference. The moment that one can travel through time, the precise moment when time travel was desired or realized as a possibility becomes just another moment through which one can travel. Time is thus derealized as a meaningful organizer of being in the world, for one could circulate through time in an atemporal fashion.  The “now” of the revolutionary demand loses its punctuality.

So, what’s at stake here? Well, for one, any theory of revolution is necessarily a theory of temporality, perhaps even a philosophy of history. Revolution is supposed to inaugurate a new order of time—shooting at clocks and all that other claptrap we’re all ready to cite from Benjamin. But, of course, revolutions are rarely punctual—the “Now!” that articulates the scene of revolutionary desire and activity requires, for its felicity, a labor of making that revolution, of bringing it about, of making it endure. Only then will the revolution unleashed in a given Now have actually unleashed a revolution. From the perspective of the revolutionary punctum, then, and as Derrida shows of the Declaration of Independence, all revolution exists in the future anterior—as a “what will have been” in order to render the inaugural moment of revolutionary action felicitous.

But that’s only if revolution is supposed to endure, if the “now” of our revolutionary desire is supposed to turn—revolve and evolve—into something. The chant above suggests something different about democratic revolution. The aim of revolution is not to inaugurate a new temporary, not to produce a structure that can endure. The aim is rather to transform the articulation of a demand into an effervescent happening that needn’t matter, that needn’t found a new regime—a punctual demand that endures by dissolving endurance’s value and desirability. We might say, then, that the non-enduring temporality of democracy consists in the capacity of the demos to traverse time as it will—to make and unmake the given as a sign of the effervescence of the will that once willed that given. Hegel hits on this radical effervescence in his critique of the French Revolution; he describes it as simply negativity, the “fury of destruction.” Critiquing indeterminate (or infinite or absolute) freedom as non-phenomenalizable and hence inherently negative, he writes, “This is why the people, during the French Revolution, decoyed once more the institutions they had themselves created, because all institutions are incompatible with the abstract self-consciousness of equality.” We're back to Gupta's "firework display," noted above, except Hegel doesn't see this "ultimately ephemeral" revolution "as dramatic and beautiful." Turn into something, Hegel says, or you'll turn into a furious nothing; turn into something, says Gupta, or you'll turn into an aesthetic spectacle, a meaningless burst of light and color. Following the time-travel chant, however, we might say that it is the durational temporality of any institution that inhibits the demos from making new time, from becoming democratically and freely effervescent. Ultimately, the time-travel of revolution does not consist in willing a new time once and once only; there will be no more Year Ones. Or--and this is the same thing--there will be as many of them as there are people.

Souls without Work: On Post-Fordist Labor and Student Debt

The soul is now at work. This is the refrain of a certain set of post-Marxists—Bifo, Virno, Negri, etc—who query the paradigm of labor central to post-Fordist capitalism. Affective laborers, intellectual laborers, the cognitariat: for these new figures of labor, work becomes more than ever the ontological substratum of life. No longer is labor a heteronomous necessity. Rather, the incorporation of cognition and affection into the labor process renders that which we preserved as the human fully immanent to production. The organic composition of capital thus undergoes a dramatic mutation. Indeed, it is unclear if the analytics of constant and variable capital have any purchase any longer, insofar as brains are directly plugged into the machine. A thrilling narrative: Marxian species-being may erupt, at any moment, from the new centers of capitalist control, insofar as the heteronomy of capitalist coordination and command seems superfluous to the labor process. We’re already autonomous, if only we knew it.

I’ve always had problems with this narrative, and for a few reasons. The concern I want to address here relates to the formation of the cognitariat—that is, the apparatus that shapes the cognitive labor who realizes herself at the Google campus. The high theorists of post-Fordism tend to take the immanentization of cognition and affect into production as an accomplished fact: the cognitive factory calls upon a worker, who appears and is instantaneously enfolded into the social-productive fabric of the firm. That’s not necessarily untrue, but to focus solely on the unit of production elides the total cycle of social reproduction. At what point in the circuit of capital is this labor power formed? If capital has incorporated the soul into its labor process, where is labor power ensouled? Following Dalla Costa and Selma James on the social factory—a concept of course set to work by the line of post-Marxism I am critiquing—I want to suggest that cognitive laborers are ensouled outside of the actual unit of production. The composition of capital today presumes that the worker, even before she sets foot in the cognitive factory, has achieved a high level of technical competency, technical here including affective and intellectual skills. The level of presumed technical skill is, moreover, far higher than that which would previously have been presumed; that is, companies today comparatively invest less time in skilling their workers, in forming labor power, and so investing in variable capital. The site of investment in technical skill has been displaced to the cycle of reproduction, and this displacement of the site of investment has entailed a displacement of the subject responsible for such investments. Job skilling—or, in a post-Fordist paradigm, ensouling—now takes place outside of the site of production, at the university, and it is the student who is responsible for the costs of ensouling herself.

Putting this in Marx’s terms: The circuit of productive capital has externalized investment in variable capital. Marx describes the circuit of productive capital thusly: P (MP+L) - C' - M' - C' - P'. Productive capital, the means of production and labor, yields a commodity, the surplus value of which is realized as money, which is reinvested in more commodities to enabled expanded production. Over time, we have witnessed the transformation of the composition of productive capital P (means of production + labor). Between P and P', the capital that the firm invests in L has declined (human resources mumbo jumbo to the side) as the costs of valorizing L have been externalized and foisted upon the individual laborer. The point is thus not simply that variable capital tends to decrease in favor of constant capital in the organic composition of capital, as has been classically demonstrated regarding machination of production. The opposite obtains, I think: while the level of investment in enhancing L, in forming variable capital, might decrease for the firm, it remains the same (or increases) at a social level. But this investment is displaced from the circuit of production to the cycle of reproduction. Neoliberal governance intersects with this mutation to ensure that the subject responsible for this investment is the individuated student-laborer, not the collective social subject or the state. Prior to insertion within the circuit of productive capital, then, we have already worked, and worked on ourselves. We make ourselves potential-for-capital, to-hand should a capitalist decide to let us realize our values in the labor process.

The hyper-capitalized, neoliberal university is, ironically, a pre-capitalist economic form. It is a site in which (human) goods are valorized prior to incorporation within the circuit of capital—a valorization process presupposed by, but not immanent to, the processes of capitalist valorization and realization. I make this point so as to indicate the radical potentials that inhere in organizing around student debt. The one trillion dollars of debt confronting students in the U.S. indexes the displacement of the site and subject responsible for the formation of technical capacities required to valorize capital. The collapse of state schools has exacerbated this trend: if the state once absorbed part of the costs of the social valorization of labor power, the individual is now responsible, prior to entering the job market, for enhancing her technical skill set. Society—and especially the university—becomes a factory for souls. Yet, this does not mean that production has been rendered immanent to the social fabric. The one trillion of debt—a debt that is increasingly impossible to pay off—marks a yawning gap between individuated self-valorization (ensoulment, the increase in technical capacities) and the possibility of realizing these capacities through and for social production. There is a classical realization crisis taking place today, but it’s not one besetting big firms. Rather, it’s the neoliberal post-Fordist ensouled worker, the entrepreneurial self who invested first of all in herself, who cannot realize herself, her investment, her value, on the job market.

It’s this break—between the average technical capacity of an individual and her opportunity to set this capacity to work—that exposes how the cognitariat implies the precariat, how post-Fordism’s incorporation of the (pre-formed) human into labor processes implies its abandonment of large populations of would-be human workers. We need to catch up with all that this break implies. So far, student debt activism has adopted a rhetoric of the social contract: Students have indebted themselves with the understanding that they would be able to realize their investment in the labor market, that some agency would repair any break in the organic composition of social capital. This understanding is broadly Keynesian in its assumptions. But one trillion of debt for university education signifies, if nothing else proves it, capital’s movement beyond modalities of social-state embedding. The effect of neoliberal post-Fordism is not the putting-to-work of souls; or, at least, its broadest effects are irreducible to the 100,000 super-trained high-tech cats who generate 45989548 virtual ontologies before breakfast and signal our coming species-being. Rather, one trillion dollars of unresolvable debt is the halo of an immanent potentiality deprived of any means of achieving actuality, of potentiated souls unable to incarnate themselves in the social.

A new specter, then, haunts capitalism. The simplest point I want to make is this: A new student movement organized around unresolvable debt would have implications far beyond university financing. The break between auto-valorized variable capital and its ability to realize itself at work marks a crisis in the composition of capital. For this reason, the student debt movement has a generality and importance that extends beyond the university and could touch upon the general social terrain. The point is to make this articulation. Demands for debt forgiveness have provided a good slogan and inaugural program. However, when such demands are made on the state, we risk promoting a kind of retroactive Keynesianism; it might choose to perform a one-time absorption of the costs of social reproduction. This would leave the composition of capital mostly intact while simultaneously isolating the import of the student debt movement to the relationship between students and universities operating in a bad jobs climate. We need to stake out a position—cognitively and practically—in the broader terrain of social (re)production