A Squeeze of the Hand

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

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.

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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.