“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

A Post In Which I Actually Discuss CLR James!

If you're so interested, here's a link to an article I just published in Social Text on CLR James. A  brief word on the article. I initially wrote it with the aim of critiquing the ontological status that Italian Marxism accords to Marx's analytics of formal and real subsumption. Simply put, I think it is a methodologically suspect move. The determination of a tendency--e.g., capitalism's tendency toward the real subsumption of labor processes--is useful only to the extent that it provides a hermeneutic that potentiates practio-theoretical interventions. But the moment that the tendency is hypostatized into a claim about actuality, a sleight of hand is taking place. In the case of Italomarxism, this involves rethinking the entirety of global resistance to capitalism from the perspective of the really subsumed sociality of post-Fordism. This synecdoche has practical political consequences: the vast majority of the world's non-post-Fordist laborers do not seem to contribute to the material and ontological frame that will have enabled a post-capitalism world. So, a kind of first-worldist vanguardism. What such hypostatized tendentialism centered on post-Fordism will miss, precisely because it needs all sociality to have been subsumed into capital, is how the non-subsumed socialities of most-of-the-world can be potentiated as points to interrupt capitalism. (What would happen if Negri read the world from the perspective of the late late Marx, the Marx who wrote about the Russian commune? Check out Shanin's Late Marx and the Russian Road for this.) None of this made it into the article. But I wrote it to explore how non-subsumed socialities, at the moment that they are threatened with real subsumption into (in this case, Fordist) capitalism, can be set to work to potentiate new futures.

But it reads differently to me now, as it did as I prepared final edits. The article is about James' writings on a group of sharecroppers in Missouri who were evicted from their lands in the 30s and 40s. What did the sharecroppers do? Well...

...they occupied. A roadside. The whole apparatus of the state was called in against them. Occupy is familiar with the claims the state made to justify its intervention: their encampment posed a public health risk. They refused to move, but were eventually carted away. Bloomberg style.

My point here, I guess--and it's also another point of the article, which explores transnational networks of activist epistemologies--is that Occupy might find its roots in movements such as these. We don't need the fictive refusal of St Bartleby, the image of the chap who refuses to labor from the inside of finance capital. Let's look away from Wall Street and think the refusal of those who won't let go of the a-capitalist socialities that they shared, who auto-immobilize these socialities in the name of resisting their reconstitution for capitalism. Indeed, we who Occupy might de-center our resistance to capitalism and begin to think anti-capitalist futures from "peripheral" socialities that are formally and unevenly articulated to capitalist markets. What if we were to place Occupations in a line with Marx's Russian commune, James' sharecroppers cooperatives, Mariategui's allyus, and so on? What links these social modalities is that, in one way or another, they are defective for capitalism--they require reconstitution to work for it. I want to suggest that Occupy shows us how truly possible it is to produce, in our present, modalities of being-with that are similarly defective for capitalism. Anti-capitalist futures are literally all around us--or, rather, between us, inhering in the open potentiality that characterizes being-with. Wherever one is: on a roadside in Missouri, in front of City Hall in Philly, or perhaps even on Wall Street or the Google Campus. 

The Neoliberal University, Penn, and Flying by Philly

Let’s begin with the flyleaf from a fictive schoolboy’s geography textbook:

Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe

Joyce offers us a spatial imaginary constituted by nested scales. If Stephen’s namesake, the old artificer, built wings to enable him to jump scales and fly from Crete to the world, Joyce’s Dedalus scales up as if ascending a ladder. Some rungs appear to have been knocked out (e.g., Ireland is not nested in the British Empire but jumps into Europe), but the ladder remains largely intact. One effect of this imaginative nesting of spatial scales is a multiform localization that diminishes as one scales up: personal names give way to institutional names give way to proper names give way to common names. Each named scale corresponds to a distinct social and institutional form. These nested forms conduct Stephen’s imagination; they mediate his relationship to the world, generating relations of responsibility, of debt, of guilt. Portrait of the Artist is, in many ways, a novel about unlearning this imaginary of nested scales. Thus we find Stephen, at the end of his Bildung, declaring, “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.” His solution to this ensnaring is Daedalian: “I shall try to fly by those nets.” Nets, or nests, those nested scales he had described as a schoolboy? Our young man will jump scales, leaping from Dublin to Europe, to what passed as “the world.” Biographical diachrony encourages us to see this movement as freeing; with Stephen, we shout, “Welcome, O life!” But what if we read these two relations to space—the schoolboy’s nested scales and the university’s scholar’s scale jumping—synchronically? What might we gain from thinking together, in a single moment of social time, the schoolchild’s and the university student’s spatial imagination? We would gain insight, I think, into how the spatial imaginary promoted by today’s neoliberal university promotes an irresponsible relation to the spaces in which the university is in fact embedded.

Where, for example, is the University of Pennsylvania? The postal address of the English Department shows the scales in which the university is nested. Abstracting from this address, we get a sequence of scales that mirrors the spatial imaginary of young Stephen:

Christopher Taylor

Department of English

University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia

Pennsylvania

United States of America

Every job application I sent off involved me, in some manner, reinscribing the university—and myself—within these nested scales. To get to me, letters need to move through the U.S., Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia; each scalar mediation localizes me, places me within that space. Yet, this postal perception of space is discontinuous with the modalities by which the university produces lived and imagined relations to space. We might locate Penn, in a formal cartographic sense, within Philadelphia or even Pennsylvania; institutionally, however, Penn has been disembedding itself from the pesky scales that get between it and the world. Like the university student Stephen, Penn tries scale jumping, “fly[ing] by” Philadelphia in order to directly access the world.

How does it attempt flying by Philly? On one hand, the university has committed itself to a process of hyperlocalization—it is committed to becoming an autonomous locale. This happens through naming (“University City”), through property ownership (Penn is only growing), and through providing quasi-public “services” (a private police force). It happens through differentially treating residents of “University City”: when the racist curfew laws were passed, incoming Penn students who arrived during the summer who were under 18 were ensured that they would not be targets of enforcement. We see, then, the emergence of a kind of University Citizenship, one that interacts unevenly with the bundle of rights and expectations accorded to everyone in public space. Jurisdictions are becoming mixed, rules are unevenly enforced, and the protocols of enforcement are not formal and abstract but stick to particularized bodies. Neoliberal universities’ privatization of governance results in the neofeudalization of the city.

On the other hand, this process of hyperlocalization has its dialectical counterpart in processes of scalar separation. There is quite literally a western boundary to University City: if you cross 50^th Street, you won’t see any more Penn security, nor will the university provide incentives to employees to get them to buy houses. If you cross 50^th Street, you’ll be in Philadelphia. Moreover—and this is the thing motivating my critique right now, and which will bring us back to the schoolchild—Penn doesn’t pay taxes, nor does it any longer pay a “voluntary contribution” in the form of PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) contributions to Philadelphia. In effect, Penn is so institutionally and imaginatively separated from Philadelphia that it can choose the precise modality of its interaction with the city and its inhabitants. It can voluntarily give a paltry sum to the city coffers, it can voluntarily build a charter school in West Philly, it can voluntarily criminalize black youth in the neighborhood—or it can choose not to participate in Philadelphia life. Meanwhile, city residents living in University City have no meaningful way of shaping the decisions that Penn makes with regards to their neighborhoods or Philadelphia more broadly. They’re decision-takers.

Democracy begins with the co-recognition of one’s heteronomous co-belonging in a given space. It emerges out of a condition of fundamental non-choice, out of the simple fact that one is there-with. With a deliberative democrat at the helm, Penn has undertaken ludicrously anti-democratic policies—policies that rethink the “there” of Penn in order to hide from view the non-Penn people whom it is constitutively “with.” This capacity to dissolve the ties of withness, to absolve oneself from responsibility to one’s given locale, is a mark of neofeudal sovereignty. Penn is flying by Philadelphia, leaping into the areality of global capital. There’s no democracy there. And it is this undemocratic disposition that our neoliberal universities are instilling in our students. Our students fly by nested localities; they jump from the university to the world. As I said in a Daily Pennsylvanian interview last fall, it is unsurprising that so few Penn students participated in Occupy Philly—they don’t live in Philly, they live at Penn.

Occupying Penn would entail making Penn institutionally occupy Philly. To do so, we might adopt the perspective of nested scales delineated by Stephen—not Stephen, the cosmopolitan university student, but Stephen the schoolboy. We’ve read our Massey and our Sassen; we know that global capital has scrambled scales and that nested imaginaries never made much sense, anyhow. But this schoolchild’s epistemology of space can provide the basis for the polemical demand that Penn recognize itself as a co-sharer in the city, and act accordingly. And it’s the Philadelphia schoolchild who might stand to benefit, most of all, from such recognition. The school district of Philadelphia is about to undergo another round of neoliberalization and restructuring—66 schools to be closed by 2017, the wholesale layoff of service union employees, and so on. This is being passed off as a fiscal necessity. As Daniel Denvir has written, the budgetary crisis could be resolved (thereby removing justification for the move to restructure and privatize) if Penn could be made to pay. Penn’s anti-democratic decision to fly by Philadelphia is helping to perpetuate a social logic in which the urban poor will never have access to the cosmopolitan university culture—a culture that currently teaches students, first and foremost, to unlearn social responsibilities that inhere to the simple fact of being-there-with. The commodity of social-spatial irresponsibility is expensive. Against the sophisticated analytics that posit scrambled scales and that provide an alibi for local indifference, we might discover a politics of spatial re-embedding in the seemingly naïve spatial ladder of the schoolchild. We might craft nets to catch neoliberal institutions as they try flying by us into the non-world of capitalism.

Christopher Taylor

Department of English

University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia

Corbett, the Starving State, and Anorexics against Austerity

Yesterday, at the end of Tom Corbett’s “conversation” with the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, the moderator asked the Pennsylvania governor what he would say to the protestors gathered outside. Before getting to his response, two points: First, as demonstrators, we succeeded in impacting the tête-à-tête between a neoliberal governor and his neoliberal business chums. Our chants, the pounding of the drums, and the fact that everyone entering had to pass by us shaped the conversation: our demands could be neglected, but this neglect would be an active process, the willed refusal of the governor to admit our claims as deserving response. And so the second point: Corbett could have spoken to us, he could have directly dispensed to us the neoliberal claptrap he would give freely to the Chamber. The governor, it seems, is so taken with austerity measures that he must also economize his words, his appearances. Indeed, Corbett (with assistance from the PPD) had to take extreme pains to not talk to us. Protestors blocked every point of egress from the venue. Corbett would avoid an encounter with us by exiting through the rear and driving the wrong way on Sansom Street. (We had this point covered, too, but it was the thinnest point, and I don’t think people were much up for getting arrested.) So keep this image in your head: A governor fleeing the people by driving the wrong way on a one-way street. Against the Einbahnstraße of revolution, perhaps.

But what would he have told us? First, Corbett would tell us that our desires are out of sync with mechanisms for their realization. “They want good jobs,” Corbett said of the protesters. “But they want to tax the corporations. If you ask the business people here, that’s incongruous.” Tom is doubly stupid here: aside from the nonsense economics subtending his claim, the desire Corbett ascribed to the protestors was not, in fact, the desire that brought us out. We were out to protest a budget that a) slashes funding for schools and b) increases funding for prisons. If Tom had bothered to read a sign, he wouldn’t have seen shit about jobs; instead, he would have read any number of demands that we decarcerate Pennsylvania, fund the schools, and (linking the two) abolish the school-to-prison pipeline. So Tom ascribed a desire to our protest that we did not articulate so as to place us firmly in a terrain where neoliberal slogans might control the discursive field. 

Second, after telling us that we’re all stupid and don’t understand the way of the world like Philly’s illustrious Chamber of Commerce, Corbett would give moral advice to the protestors. “I understand that you’re upset because we’ve had to put the state on a diet, for want of a better description,” Corbett said. “I haven’t met anybody who likes to go on diets. It is not easy. It is not what we want to do.” Note how the mood of the utterance and pronominal shifts strive to achieve a consensus from above. First, Corbett inscribes himself into the utterance: he hears, he understands, he gets us. Then he addresses us in the second person indicative, as if we are actually in hearing-distance, as if he actually addresses us. He then presents an experiential fact (who likes diets?) to simulate a consensus: thus, when Corbett says “It’s not what we want to do,” it is unclear if the “we” refers to state agents of austerity or a human collectivity who hates dieting, a collectivity that would include the protestors. Corbett’s shifts—from self-representation (“I”) to a particularized address (“you”) to a generalized collectivity (“we”)—corresponds to the jump in scale that his metaphor enacts. Really, could the individualized, embodied logics of restricted consumption that we call “dieting” really be isomorphic with the logics of state austerity? The metaphor isn’t quite accurate, anyhow. Dieting is an ends-oriented practice that presumes a quantifiable moment of completion (five pounds, ten pounds, etc.) Tom’s state now diets for the sake of dieting and without stating a terminal point. “I will lose x+1 pounds!” swears the neoliberal dieter. When restricted consumption without end defines one’s mode of life, we’re not talking about dieting anymore. We’re talking about anorexia, an anorectic state. The state needs to be as slim as possible, irrationally slim—its bones jutting out, the fat melted off. Lean unto death.

The fact that Tom’s pedagogy of austerity is organized by a metaphoric embrace of anorectic under-consumption is intriguing. Let’s be clear: Yankees are not used to talking about fiscal austerity. At least, popular willingness to give the name “austerity” to programs to slim U.S. states’ budgets is, I think, somewhat novel. Austerity happened elsewhere sometime in the 70s and 80s and 90s, in the Global South, where IMF and World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs decimated post-colonial social programs that supported social consumption. Our state wasn’t austere—no! It was efficient, and state austerity through the years of the Washington Consensus simply facilitated tax breaks that would, in fact, promote consumption. Indeed, the transfer of wealth from the South to the North through the Reagan-era and the concomitant availability of easy credit actually produced a cultural phenomenon of people anxious about the possibility of consuming too much. (Of course the individual etiology of disordered eating is way more complicated than this.) The modern figure of the anorexic was born in the 80s and 90s, the perverse double of those whose consumption was restricted by state austerity measures. Landmark scholarly and popular research into anorexia—such as Hilde Bruch’s Eating Disorders (1973) and Kim Chernin’s The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (1981)—emerged at the same moment that IMF SAPs were setting off food riots in lands where lives were adjusted by austerity measures. We might think of anorexia and food riots as two split registers of by which the possibilities of over- and under-consumption were managed—utterly distinct, differently impacted by neoliberal policies and the uneven geography of capitalism. But we can also see something of a structural link that articulates these practices at a world-systemic level. The austerity measures in SAPed states induced food riots that challenged the mechanisms by which capital and commodities flowed to the global north; anorexia here might appear as an ethical refusal to consume via the structured starvation of others. And, as we know, both responses to neoliberal restructuring are deeply gendered, women filling the ranks of food rioters and (for reasons that are of course irreducible to neoliberal capitalism) anorexics.

My point here is that concerns about individual under-consumption in the form of disordered eating are somehow linked to state under-consumption in the form of austerity measures. Culturally, Yankees are more familiar with the former than the latter, and for this reason the latter provides the legitimating cultural logic in which austerity measures are grounded.  (In SAPed places, on the other hand, austerity has a much livelier cultural life; see, e.g., Balogun’s Adjusted Lives.) Tom invoked a “diet” for “want of a better description” of neoliberal reform. Bullshit: of course other and better descriptions are available to explain austerity. For instance, the sum total of historical experiences of SAPed nations. But these experiences, of course, do not in any way legitimate contemporary austerity measures; they do quite the opposite. Austerity is thus filtered through the logic of the anorexic because a) gestures to “better descriptions” based on history would erode the legitimacy of austerity measures and b) as a keyword, “austerity” has not accrued cultural meanings in the U.S. and so requires a mediating logic for the ideology of austerity to make sense. Whatever radical implications the figure of the anorexic might have possessed are being repurposed to facilitate the legitimation of neoliberal restrictions on social consumption. Tom probably imagines the dieter, in fact, as an ideal liberal subject, a good business, one who could hang out in the Chamber of Commerce: He keeps careful accounts of calories, striving to maintain the proper balance between debits and credits, always afraid of consuming too much. The state is incorporating the biopolitical accountancy of the anorexic and transforming it into a logic of neoliberal rule. We know how to “starve the beast” because we know how to starve ourselves. If you’ve ever dieted, you can be governor.

I’m suggesting, in short, that the cultural phenomenon of (pathologized) anorexia makes austerity thinkable today. This, despite the nonsense scale jump required to think patterns of individual action (pathological or not) as the basis for state rule. Of course, that is precisely what liberalism from Smith through the marginalists up to today's neolibs do: they isolate a single privileged figure and, through a cursory demonstration of the formal logic impelling that figure's activity, establish the rules for collective activity. The rational entrepreneur and the pathologized anorexic now form the dual figure that grounds the logic of neoliberalism. We need to refuse this state instrumentalization of what is taken to be a social pathology. As someone with a history of (at best) disordered eating, I’m imagining the formation of a group of ana-anarchists, named “Anorexics against Austerity.” On one hand, our work would consist in refusing the conflation of individual and state habits of restricted consumption; our practices of self can in no way subtend, organize, or provide a logic that enables the state to snatch food from the mouths of others. On the other hand, we would strive to re-positivize the anti-austerity social meanings that anorectic practices might once have possessed. Is there a way of thinking anorectic freedom that does not reinforce neoliberal ideologies in which austerity and induced under-consumption read as freedom from the state? I think so. It would take too long—and be too phenomenological in orientation, too personal—to recover the political potentialities that inhere in consumption practices that now register as “disordered.” But let’s recall Coetzee’s Michael K, who refuses to consume as a means of refusing the corrupted sociality that surrounds him, who refuses to consume that which he does not grow—but who takes joy in the simple taste of his homegrown pumpkins, who has developed a mouth for a different kind of consumption. With Michael K, we see how an apparently anorectic refusal of consumption in one modality actually opens a space for a different kind of consumption, a different relation to food—a space, indeed, in which food sovereignty becomes thinkable, practicable. In truth, we’ve already seen this: life at Occupy encampments was nothing if not austere, and this austerity involved a reduction of access to food (no matter how awesome—and they were awesome—the food committees were). This willed austerity touched on the logic of the anorexic, sure; our consumption there could only appear as “disordered” to the dominant. But we can thus see how the anorectic logic of occupation touches on communal freedom. The very materiality of food—how it was cooked, how it was distributed, how it was consumed—was present as an object of political consensus. If the austerity of the encampment can be metaphorized as anorectic, this is not because Occupiers don’t like to eat, but because they refuse to consume in some ways and demand to consume in others. The anorectic freedom at work there did not demand that the people consume less (as austerity promotes)—even if, in fact, they did consume less. Rather, the anorectically free have developed a different kind of mouth, new sense organs, a la Michael K: we’re hungry, most of all, for the political.

Do You Believe in Life after Love (in the Era of Neoliberal Capitalism)?

“Occupy love!” So some tweeted following Obama’s announcement that some of his daughters’ friends’ parents are gay and that he (privately) supports same-sex marriage. But it makes me wonder (I’m such a Carrie): what would it mean to occupy love? At this point, the demand that we “occupy x” typically functions as a call to an affirmative deconstruction: we are to situate ourselves within the immanent plane by which x functions materially, institutionally, and discursively, and then expose x’s immanent functioning to alternative futures. So, to occupy love would be to get a read on how love functions within one system of predications (the heteronormative system of [neo]liberal capitalism) and displace these predications. In order to occupy love, then, we’d have to begin with a simple question: Why are neoliberal states so garrulous about love? Not just sex, not just reproduction, but love itself?

We have any number of critiques that demonstrate how love can be instrumentalized by states. It provides the affective charge that sutures subjects to more-or-less abstract, ideological structures, affect serving as the conduit by which the imaginary effectively materializes. But I think that the instrumentalization of love (whatever form this instrumentalization takes) is simply the way in which liberal states negotiate the scandal of love as such. Love is scandalous because it is an act of hyper-predication—that is, it is not simply a predication such as “x is someone I love” or “x is beautiful” but a pre-predication that makes x available for predication, a predication that predicates x as such—and liberal capitalism treats subjects as thought they are formally non-predicated. There will always be a deficit of sense between love and the world of liberalism.

Hegel introduces us to this predicate-less, sense-less, love-less world in his fragment “Love,” composed around 1798. Opening with a little existential Robinsonade—that is, a tale that assumes the presuppositions of liberal capitalism as an ontological condition—we find a non-predicated individual in an alien world. This individual is “an independent unit for whom everything else is a world external to him”; the “world is as eternal as he is”; and “objects…are there,” simply there, horrifyingly bereft of subjectivity, of animation. We see a world of sheer duration in which this young Robinson can’t seem to inscribe himself meaningfully; the eternal being-there of the world is impervious to his subjectivity. Everything—including the individual person—is just stuff, “indifferent matter.” This is a phenomenological moment, not a historical actuality; it can repeat itself whenever the world-as-such is not structured as a horizon of thick meaning, a world in which matter matters indifferently. It’s simultaneously a pre-historical world and a post-historical world; it’s a world in which the sense of the world has withdrawn: the world simply endures, and the individual survives. This individual, who, given the narrative logic of Hegel, seems like a first-man, a pre-historic man, is just as easily the last man, the man at the end of the sense of the world, Fukuyama’s hero.

Love saves this individual from senselessness. There’s a theological grounding to all this, but what is important is the way in which the very possibility of sensing a sense-full, animate world is named “love.” Love, Hegel writes, “is a feeling, yet not a single feeling”—it is not one affect among others, but that which organizes affectivity in general. Love is the groundless ground by which the world grounds itself in meaning, incorporating even indifferent matter into lived meaning. Thus, “in love…life senses life”—a circular affectivity generated in the circulating love between his couple that has the effect of encircling the material world in a halo of affect. “In the lovers there is no matter…” By loving the beloved, in effect, the lover convokes the world as lovable—that is to say, as sensible and sense-full. So, what Hegel names “love” is a pre-predicative act that makes the world available for predication; it gives meaningful being to a world that seemed to resist Robinson’s attempt to find himself at home there. So, love makes the world and makes it through another—one-other, in fact. The world becomes senseless the moment the hyper-predication of love fails; the moment the lover is no longer in-love, the world collapses, and the lover becomes Robinson again. (This same narrative will be replayed in the Phenomenology, subbing love out for labor.)

It’s more complicated, though. Given the narrative logic of the fragment, it seems as if love (and a meaningful world) and lovelessness (and a senseless world) are simply diachronically separated. Yet, there is also a synchronic relationship between love and the loveless, the intimate world and the worldless world-beyond. The intimate world of love is always impinged upon by its exterior. These lovers would like to enclose themselves from the outside world, from the extensive sociality of indifferent persons and matter from which they emerged, but, in fact, they cannot: “the lovers are in connection with much that is dead; external objects belong to each of them.” The lovers don’t halo the world in meaning; rather, they striate a space of meaning in the alieness of materiality. In effect, wider circuits of sociality—here metonymized by property—constantly pluck the lovers from the intimacy of their world. The autology of the at-home gives way to the heteronomy of the more-than-one, more-than-two.

Certainly, no one is surprised that the intimate is interrupted by the social. Haven in a heartless world or not, lovers have to talk about bills. What Hegel outlines, however, is the gap between the subject and the alien world once love has advened. When Robinson leaves his lover’s arms and goes forth into the crass indifferent world of matter so as to maintain his intimate world, what effect will the experience of sense-full-ness have on his ability to be in that indifferent world? Or, after Robinson has been loved by another, how are we to treat him, and how would he treat all the others, the others who are not the one-other? It’s here that love introjects a rupture in liberal capitalism. As Hegel writes, monogamous love functions as a giving-over of one’s being to a single predication (being-loved by another), and this giving-over of one’s being is necessary precisely because one’s world has no meaningful being without this predication. But one cannot appear in the world of liberal capitalism as predicated by another; one has to appear without predications, as a formally abstract person; one has to relate to all others via mechanisms of sociality that equate equality with indifference. Robinson’s impossible task: To learn indifference after love…

We know how liberal capitalism has managed this necessity: through gendered space thinking. The hyper-predication we call love is denigrated along a gendered axis as merely private: men in public are formally non-predicated. The masculinity of the liberal Everybody was a feature of liberalism’s attempt to think pure form without letting go of a vibrant concreteness it could never directly offer. It’s not that liberal capitalism does not particularize and predicate subjects—it does constantly, but always in the name of producing spheres of sociality in which subjects are freed from such predications. (The neoclassical market is that utopian place where everyone is freed from such predications, and it’s a wretchedly meaningless place, of course.) This casts Robinson’s necessary attempt to access wider spheres of sociality in a peculiar light. Bluntly, the de-predicating mode of liberal sociality, its freedom, is freeing only in the momentary affective rush of leaving predication behind—one feels the thrill of formal freedom…right before one ends up as Robinson again. Tonally, the technologies of liberal de-predication are always right at the tense excitement of infidelity: one leaves one’s beloved behind, leaves one’s being-loved behind, and enters into an anonymous, formal sociality with many-others. An orgy of senselessness.

Alas, there are no orgies in Hegel, no scenes in which a de-predicated one takes leave of the one-other and knocks boots anonymously with just-anyone. No orgies, but there is the state. Indeed, Hegel will, in other texts, manage the crisis in sense occasioned by the gap between the world of lovers and the worldlessness of liberal capitalism by turning to the state as a new principle of unity. He doesn’t in “Love,” though—it’s a fragment, after all. We’re just left with two lovers, the one and the one-other, fretting about their exposure to a world of many-others, of materiality, of the social. We can take it as a moment of potentiality before the state arrives to manage the crisis of the sense/lessness of liberalism.

So, what’s a lover to do when confronted with the heteronomy of the social in conditions of liberal capitalism? Our lover, our Robinson, might attempt to reject the ontological premises of Hegel’s argument. There’s no reason, after all, why the sense of the world arrives through one, and only one, other; there’s no reason why the partition of sociality erected by liberalism should attain such ontological gravity. There’s really no reason to begin counting at one, with the “individual unit”; no reason why this one can only interact with the world in a meaningful fashion when he encounters one-other—and only one-other; no reason why the persistent interaction with the world beyond these two requires the production of a third figure that, ultimately, just becomes a new unit, a new one. No need to begin from the individual, the ego, Dasein, the autos, the ispe…No reason, no need, except that liberal capitalism is an ontological force, and we can’t in voluntaristic fashion assemble a new ontology, one premised one the priority of the more-than-one, the lovability of an open-ended Mitsein. To get out of the quandary—how does one live liberalism after one has loved?—without calling upon an apparatus to manage the crisis of sense/lessness, our lover will need to work with others at learning to love differently. To begin building a loving, sense-making sociality premised on the more-than-one.

Can we think of Occupy as an experiment in post-liberal love? Think about the encampments, those bizarre sites, which—being neither public nor private, neither intimate, nor extimate—take the more-than-one as its ontological, material, and social constitution. There, the meaningful world is not accessed through one-other but through constructing this world with many-others; these many-others can’t be stated in a unifying figure, but are dispersed in their multiplicity. Perhaps most importantly: the sense of the world at Occupy is produced through con-sensing, the con- marking an open-ended set of those who arrive, and arrive such as they are. Echoing Hegel, we might say that consensing is “a feeling, yet not a single feeling”—it’s the modality by which many-others make the world sense-full and full, primarily, with the sense of being-with-others. 

For What We Will: Echoes of May Day

“Do we who are to come have an ear for the resonance of the echo, which has to be made to resonate in the preparation for the other beginning?” So asks Heidegger in Contributions to Philosophy. Heidegger tells us that we must attune ourselves to this “echo”—a vague resonance of sound that does not simply emerge from a single identifiable source but that metaleptically produces a new origin, a “new beginning” from which it emanates. What echoes is an alternative past that generates a future collectivity “to come.” Should we not make ourselves resonate with this other-sound, we will simply hear what we have always heard, accessing the history we’ve always known. We can take Heidegger’s challenge as a means of rethinking the relationship between Occupy’s May Day and the whole host of May Days past that resonated through it. Echoed through it.

An echo, then. Let’s listen, and try to be affected by the tonalities of an other beginning as they emerge in and through slogans that seem to have no future. Let’s listen to Robert Owen, and see if his slogan resounds from an other beginning: “Eight hours labour, Eight hours recreation, Eight hours rest.” Circulating throughout the Atlantic world, Owen’s somewhat moralistic division of the day would be transformed in the 1860s, when I.G. Blanchard penned the lyrics to “Eight Hours,” a labor song that would be set to music in the 1880s by Jesse Jones. Note the difference: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.” The time of “recreation” mutates into a period in which laborers’ wills are asserted; it is formally structured as a time of self-activation. In the U.S., we tend to think of this time “for what we will” as having been earned in the latter part of the 19^th century following a series of mass marches and brutal repressions (e.g., Haymarket). Whether this in fact happened, whether we earned our eight hours for self-valorization, the demand is still with us; it echoes, faintly, up until today, May Day. And the echo changes—its intensity, its meaning—as it is received within different conjunctures. Even as recently as last year, this echo was heard in the mode of memorialization—a past with assignable limits and no future. (I had the fantastic fortune to be present for the re-dedication of the Haymarket memorial in Chicago.) Today it seems as if we are hearing this echo as a call to arms, Occupy answering the demand of those who struggled, and died, for something that many of us take for granted. Eight hours for what we will.

How to hear this echo? Is it enough for Occupy to inscribe itself within this history of listeners and actors? Or might we not have to develop new ears to hear how we might push this slogan in the direction of new beginnings, and thus futures to come? Let’s be clear: In choosing May Day as a kickoff date for a spring offensive, Occupy has situated itself within this ongoing history of labor, within the space opened by the demand that workers have eight hours “for what we will.” And, in no small way, the slogan retains a radical force. “Eight hours for work,” for instance, might be a useful slogan for both affective/cognitive laborers, those whose jobs—like mine—seep into their lives, into the other sixteen hours, transforming all of life into a modality of labor. It might also be a useful slogan for those without work, or those whose work is not understood as susceptible to remuneration: the out-of-work, on one hand, and domestic labor, on the other. “Eight hours for rest,” similarly, might not only partition time, keeping sleep free from the demands of labor—it might also articulate a demand for a place to rest, for housing security. And so on.

On its own, the utility of the slogan is inexhaustible. But it seems unclear if we today inhabit the same social ontology of labor that made this call radical. As a transnationally-minded movement that—at least rhetorically—situates itself between Wall Street and the Global South, it seems to me that Occupy is situated between two new modalities of social being that are irreducible to a laborist ontology. On one hand, finance capital, as we know, has little to do with the form of capitalism enshrined in the process of valorization discussed in Capital vol. 1—one that we can figure in terms of its juridical, social, and political dynamics through the apparently voluntary contract between labor and owner. Finance is simply the agglomeration of the power to command that is indifferent to the wills of those whom it commands; finance does not need to simulate the voluntary conformation of wills of those whom it effects, be these wills those of individual people or entire states. We’re talking, quite simply, about a rent-seeking mode of accumulation articulated to an increasingly feudal power dynamic. On the other hand, the neoliberalization of the world has resulted, as Mike Davis puts it, in a billion people being expelled from productive participation (even exploitative participation) in the world-system. In this emergent planet of slums, the meaning of labor will alter beyond recognition as we try to get a read on the new forms of life being produced (or being survived). Labor, indeed, probably won’t serve as a meaningful category of being-in-the-world. This is because the Hegelian ontology of labor that programs the social consists in our ability to separate it from other modalities of being even as we might recognize the ontological priority of labor as such. Labor, as we know it, is a term that produces a set (the world) in which it is itself a member (just as, for Marx, production is a moment incorporated into the movement production-exchange-circulation-consumption even as it stands outside of it). Labor, as we knew it, thus engendered modes of being (resting, recreating, being-for-what-we-will) that are irreducible to it—ending with freedom. But none of that remains for the world’s abandoned, insofar as labor can’t engender the separations that made it, for Marx, a technology of becoming-free. Life doesn’t separate into ontologically thick regions when a survivalist battle with necropolitical accumulation is the law of the land. Labor no longer matters, because labor is embedded within a neo-feudal structure of command that, via structural abandonment, has commanded a billion people to die. We can get a sense of Occupy’s sense of this dual positioning in the rhetorical structure of Occupation. Just think: a tent city, a kind of village outside the castle, forms around Wall Street, and what this village manifests to Wall Street is nothing but the precarity of life exposed to pure heteronomy, lacking even the time-honored tool (i.e., labor) to transform this heteronomous condition into the substrate of a freedom to come.

If this slogan is to mean anything to us, if the location of ourselves in a history of May Days past is to do anything more than simply frighten wealthy folks by our deployment of Red signifiers, we need to become resonant in such a way that the alternative origins intimated in these slogans and signs echoes through us. And I think, to an extent, that Occupy has done a fantastic job in keeping the ontology of labor at arms length and in attempting to develop new modalities of being in the world. Note that, despite the verbal link, the practice of occupying is discontinuous with having an occupation. (No one in the future will mark down, under “Previous Employment,” “I occupied!”) And most of us don’t occupy to gain occupations, either—the social ontology Occupy thinks, materializes, and materialized from, is post-labor, post-work. For better or worse, we’re outside of the parameters that made “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will” a meaningful slogan. So what remains of it, what echoes? That last bit, that last prepositional clause—provided that we rip it from its temporal partitions and provided that we attempt determining relations of work and rest from the perspective of this last eight hours. An other beginning echoes here, the foundationless beginning of a self-constituting collectivity that aims only at constituting itself. The irreducible, aimless circularity of democratic self-production.

What, we will be asked, we have been asked, we will be asked, are we after? What is Occupy working for?

            For all time to be a period of self-activation. For all time to be for what we will.