Ideas Whose Time Has (Belatedly) Come: Or, Political Science

“Rich people rule!” Didja know? Of course you did. But, according to Larry Bartels, political scientists just proved it. Business Insider has just reported on the same study, one that proves that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” Sorry for blowing your minds, comrades. But you can’t silence an idea whose time has come, remember.

When I first read Bartels’ piece, I kind of just wrote it off as just another piece in the extensive pundit-class discourse of Liberal Eye-Opening. But then I re-read it. The problem, I realized, isn’t simply that Bartels is telling me what I already know. The piece isn’t useless; indeed, it has multiple effects, precisely to the extent that it tells me what I assumed as given. In telling me something I already know, Bartels’ piece is actually telling me that I never really knew what I thought. At stake in the piece, in other words, is a redistribution of the epistemic in which the kinds of knowledge I possess turn out to be non-knowledges. The real thesis of this piece—which thinks it’s telling us that economic elites have corrupted democratic governance—is that the demos isn’t equipped to know democracy’s destruction.

Let’s begin with the recognition of a simple fact. By grasping that the rich rule in Anno Domini 2014, it’s taken U.S. poli.sci departments a real long time to accord truth-value to something that pretty much every human being knows. Sure, people figure and operationalize this common knowledge in diverse, antagonistic ways; plenty of people are pretty okay with class rule. But anyone who has been conscious for an election cycle, say, or worked at a job—that is, depended on someone else for subsistence, submitted one’s bodily and cognitive dispositions to the commands of another—or realized that they’ll never golf with Barry knows that rich people rule. Almost everyone: political scientists, apparently, constitute the one exception. Luckily, though, due to a new “stunningly documented” study by Bartels’ friends, what everybody knows now counts as knowledge. Knowledge, friends. Shit you can cite.

By “documented,” of course, we’re talking about a translation of commonsense into data. To be sure, as Bartels recognizes, any freshman in any Intro to Theory course—from literary theory to anthropology to sociology to (maybe?) poli.sci—would know, through Hegel, Marx, or even ole Adam Smith, that “economic power” (I’ll get to this fine euphemism) is political power, functionally if not normatively. But the form of knowing set to work in this theory is not the way poli.sci knows now: “Qualitative studies of the political role of economic elites have mostly been relegated to the margins of the field.” It’s astonishing: the very belatedness of positivist methodologies to accede to the level of what-everyone-ever-already-knows doesn’t impel Bartels to reconsider the epistemic configuration of his field. Indeed, even as Bartels notes the belatedness of poli.sci to what-everyone-knows, he asserts the epistemic superiority of poli-sci’s methods: “political scientists are belatedly turning more systematic attention to the political impact of wealth, and their findings should reshape how we think about American democracy.” They are tardy to the party, sure, but quantitative political scientists have brought the dope dope—a capacity for “rigorous (meaning quantitative) scientific investigation.” (Hegel could barely count to three before it turned into one again; Poor Adam, meanwhile, didn’t give a fig for political arithmetic; and everyone from Engels on knows that Karl was just rubbish with his maths.)

My problem isn’t with numbers, pie charts, and databases as such. My problem, rather, is with this celebration of a depleted epistemological ecology—not because I love epistemological diversity as such, either, but because I think poli.sci’s ongoing and dead-on impression of an epistemological wasteland functions as a prophylactic against the immediacy, urgent, and (as Bartels would admit) valid claims made in other epistemic registers.

Think of it like this: the takeaway of Bartels’ post is that something like a 1% exists. (It’s actually more like a 10% for the purposes of the study he cites.) I refer back to Occupy’s figuration for two reasons. One, I imagine that Bartels would be rather sympathetic to the liberal-progressivist ends to which this slogan was put, or at least not hostile. Two, it’s a figure that drew upon pop economic knowledge, that attempted to derive from the latter the kind of epistemic aura that numbers hold for Serious People. It would have been utterly natural for Bartels to have referred to this figure, to the social movement that buoyed it, to the knowledges that sustained it. Instead, he directs us to “a flurry of commentary” surrounding McCutcheon v. FEC, a case adjudicated well, well after Occupy. If Occupy was a movement touting an idea whose time had come, Bartels refuses to validate forms of knowing that know too soon, forms of knowing that short circuit the positivist time of coming-to-know with the punctuality of a deeply plebeian “Shit’s fucked up and bullshit!”

But that’s what liberalism is, really: the absorption of the immediacy of a political sense into the studied, slow time of useless intellection, the conflation of taking-time and having-a-(truer-)thought. The bourgeois public sphere, the Parliamentary Blue Book, the parliamentary labyrinth of US congressional procedure, the ballot box, and, sure, contemporary political-scientific methods—all of these liberal forms articulate a slowing of time to a production of thought in the name of optimizing a decision that will never come. Just think about statistical methodologies, the kinds of datasets that would be required to prove that, yes, class power is political power: the study Bartels cites involves 1779 policy outcomes from over a period of twenty years just to make the minimal suggestion that things work out, probably, politically speaking, maybe, for rich folk. (Intriguingly, neither Bartels nor the study incorporate the fact that no one has done such a study into their understanding of class power. The fact that scholars assume, against empirical reality, a liberal-inflected “Majoritarian Electoral Democracy” as their primary analytic framework doesn’t register as an index of the functioning of class rule. Instead, they code the qualitative effectivity of bourgeois ideology as nothing more than a poor analytic frame for marshaling quantitative empirics.) How big of a dataset would be required to suggest that capitalism, class power, and the liberal-democratic state all have something to do with one another? (Of course, Bartels doesn’t’ say capitalism or class power—he speaks of a bland “economic power,” as if plutocrats could be deriving their dough from a super-successful autonomous workers’ collectivity they’re members of just as easily as from heavily financialized capitalist exploitation.)

As a speech act, then, Bartels’ post’s primary effect isn’t simply to affirm plebeian sense, to say, “You guys were right; class power is a thing; sorry for our belatedness.” Rather, its primary effect is to assert the deficiency of plebeian sense even when it is right. You didn’t know what you know until rigorous poli.sci people knew it. The effect is to delaminate political knowledge from the polis, democratic sense from the demos. We’ll only know that democracy is fucked when experts mathematize it. Until the datasets come in, chill out—we don’t know anything yet.

I used to giggle at the scientism of early Marxism—Marx and Engels, Lenin and Luxemburg, Lukacs and Althusser, on and on. But now I’m beginning to think that this scientism wasn’t supposed to achieve any kind of scientific positivity, that Marxism’s valorization of the scientific didn’t intend a valorization of positive knowledges. (Stalin, we might say, wasn’t part of the plan.) What Marx desired in seizing hold of the term “science” was to create and defend a space in which plebeian forms of knowing could be entertained as knowledge—a knowledge that doesn’t require validation from positive or theoretical science, but rather productive transcription into it. This is what Marx does in what have become my favorite paragraphs in volume one of Capital. It’s the “Working Day” chapter, a few pages in. Marx has just exfoliated the capitalist’s sense of work-time. And then, dramatically, the worker enters the scene of knowledge production:

“Suddenly, however, there arises the voice of the worker, which had previously been stifled in the sound and fury of the production process: ‘The commodity I have sold you differs from the ordinary crowd of commodities in that its use creates value, a greater value than it costs…’” (342)

And the worker continues, making fine conceptual distinctions, offering mathematical examples, and generally talking the language of political economy. Lest you think Marx is simply ventriloquizing a worker to ground his theory, he assures us in a footnote, “During the great strike of the London building workers…their committee published a manifesto that contained, to some extent, the plea of our worker” (343). This is knowledge from the streets, as it were, but what Marx is working us toward is a disposition where we can treat it as knowledge, knowledge as such, without reservations.

We need to follow Marx in defending the discursive space in which the plebeian voice “suddenly” appears, to follow Marx in holding onto knowledge charged by forms of urgency that can’t settle themselves into a dataset, a Blue Book, a Parliamentary inquiry. To open space where another’s words can erupt as knowledge is to begin a communization of the epistemic. We need, I think to begin to trust that what we do on picket lines and in occupations, at meetings and in workshops, on Twitter and on blogs, is in fact productive of knowledges we need to have—urgent knowledges, sudden knowledges that can’t wait for positivist transcription. Knowledges whose time has not yet come.

Notes on the Coming Progressive Kristallnacht

A progressive Kristallnacht is coming. That’s the earnest warning issued by Tom Perkins—venture capitalist and historical parallelist extraordinarie—in a letter to the Wall Street Journal. In Perkins’ world, Occupy was a dress rehearsal for fascism, and at any minute dreadlocked smelly stormtroopers are going to get all smashy-smashy on the property of today’s “Jews”—that is, on the property of what Perkins calls, following Occupy’s rhetoric, the “1%”. We could say so many things: about the anti-Semitic conflation of being wealthy with being Jewish as a means of coding being against the rich as being against Jews; about how Tom is so distanced from his Bay Area locality—or is just generally an unimaginative bloke—that he didn’t think to mobilize the fact that anarchists have smashed windows aplenty in his surrounds, but instead hears the jangling of shattering glass in the public reaction to Google buses; about the impoverished imaginaries of the world’s elite, who need to deck themselves out in the borrowed garments of histories past so as to steel themselves against the impossibility of their having a future; about the fact that WSJ editorial standards seem so minimal that, shucks, all of us might as well dust off old poems written in high school and submit them for the journal’s august consideration. (Direct action: overload the WSJ editorial mailbox with re-writings of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”!!!!!)

But what if we said that Perkins, in some bizarre way, is right?

Mightn’t there by a creeping tendency within liberal progressivism—whatever that is—toward something like fascism? I live in Chicago, where an authoritarian state buoying itself on a fictive liberal populism is part of the political ordinary, but this emergent articulation is evident elsewhere in the wacky world of liberal letters. Consider Sean Wilentz’s recent nonsense, which basically encouraged us to defend the state’s agglomeration of massive surveillance powers as a requirement for defending the thin slivers of the welfare state that remain. (In the interests of asserting the epistemological soundness of Marxist futurology, I’ll note that I argued that this was going to be the liberal response last June.) But it’s not just the statist turn—or, if not turn, the statist standing-in-place—of liberal publics that comes to mind as I think through the articulation of liberalism and fascism. As venture capitalist and social theorist Tom Perkins insists, Occupy was and is in some sense functional for what we might think of, however loosely, as fascism.

My thinking on this got started with a tweet from a pal:

The thing about the 99% is that it encompasses most fascists and now well meaning, unthinking people are super hyped about bad politics.
— l.e. sunnyside long (@beingtherewith) January 25, 2014

And she’s right. Most of us intuited this Septembers ago. I mean, come on, who of us were able to chant “We are the 99%!” without bile rising in the throat? Who of us didn’t find the obsession with finance capital, Wall Street, and what bonuses rich morons receive to miss the point? We could ignore all this when the occupations existed, when the positivity of the social world we were forming overwhelmed the problematic negativity of the imaginary that got most of us on the streets in the first place. But what work does the ideological negation of the “1%” do when there is not a positive, material, social force behind this negation, a force for which negation is simply a derived effect of world-building?

Let’s say that the politico-cultural life of fascism consists in the articulation of a populism for which the negation of a fabulated class enemy functions as a means of obfuscating its internal unmooring from the materiality of a class that would give it actual consistency.  It is only this fabulation that coheres the set of the “99%” nowadays. Indeed, occupations were so crucial to Occupy because without them—without the forms of association, socialization, and politicization they enabled—we actually need the “1%” to make us a thing. Lacking the material positivity of class formation that Marx and Engels called “association,” we ground our non-class first in imaginary acts of negation (the “1%”) and then, creepingly, more and more and more, we attempt to positivize this negation through a turn toward the state, by finding in the state a source of transcendence that will cohere us in and out of our incoherence, even when this transcendence sucks. Think Wilentz.  

Association is hard. That is the entire point of Marx and Engel’s political work. But it’s an end in itself, an end whose material positivity exceeds the politics of negation we get trapped in when we structure our political imaginaries through the party, the state, capital, and so on. In the well-known words of the young Marx:

When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is instruction, propaganda, etc. But at the same time they acquire a new need—the need for society—and what appears as a means has become an end. The practical development can be most strikingly observed in the gatherings of French socialist workers. Smoking, eating and drinking, etc., are no longer means of creating links between people. Company, association, conversation, which in its turn has society as its goal, is enough for them.

For Marx, the desire for tools with which to negate the transcendent rule of capital (“instruction, propaganda, etc.”) converts into a plane of immanent sociality where, quite simply, the workers couldn’t give a fuck about party, state, or capital—they’re drinking, conversing, associating. It’s at this level of sociality that Marx pegs his hopes for the future. And us too, I think. Most of the demos, marches, and protests Occupy put together had as their aim some negation of the capitalist given, but most of us stuck around for one another. I was always more trilled that we were shouting together than shouting at anything. And just think of the nonsense chants, how they expose a pure sociality that is indifferent to the world that is supposed to be its addressee.

So, let’s say this: Occupy began as a movement intending the control, regulation, or (in radical cases) the dismantling of capital, but its radical core consisted in the structured intuition that all it needed was to intend itself and materially maintain this intention in time. Communism is that thing where you actually don’t give a fuck about the rich, and you realize this world to the extent that you retrain your attention from the pornography of power toward associating—and maintaining association—with others. It’s hard, sure: yelling at a bank is way easier than sincerely working through a general assembly. So is yelling to the state to protect us from the depredations of finance bros. But the real movement of communism is a movement away from the state and capital and toward one another.

I don’t really like engaging with or replicating the overburdened symbolics of fascism, but what Perkins gives us in his hyperbolic invocation of the Reich is a distorted measure of our failure to materialize ourselves without recourse to a social poetics of negation or through the transcendent recoding of the state. The trick, I guess I’m saying, is to start building a world in which I encounter you without first having to negate the words of a finance bro, a world in which I simply ignore the hilarious screeds of a class walking on stilts because we’re elsewhere, doing other things. This isn’t to ignore the work of negativity that necessarily inheres within any anarchist/communist movement: the capitalist state doesn’t let us abandon it so easily. The point, rather, is that we will only be able to contend against this state to the extent that we don’t care about it, that we materialize the positivity of our sociality in such an overwhelming fashion that negating state violence is a (necessary) afterthought. Movements that begin in ideological negation wind up materially negated: when the militarized thugs of the proto-fascist state broke up occupation after occupation, how many 99%ers felt so positively attached to the world they helped make that they stuck around to defend it? Indeed, the conditions of possibility for Perkins’ future fascism are identical to the conditions of possibility for Occupy’s historical defeat: our failure to materialize our social positivity. Negating “the 1%” can become an alibi for fascism when the only object materializing the negative will of “99%” is the state; “the 99%” is nothing when it fabulates its existence through the negation of the “1%”. What remains to us, then, as we navigate these troubled seas, as we try tacking between the Scylla of capital and the Charybdis of statism, is the work of association. Drinking smoking conversing. Working reading arguing. 

And Then Theory Wept: Precarity Talk and Miley's Sadness

* Who better to reveal our generalized inability to find joy in autonomy than Miley Cyrus? I was at a bar with some friends after a day of MLA and “We Can’t Stop” came on and I was drunk and relieved.  It’s our party we can do what we want / It’s our party we can do what we want. It was like us! So I had more Jameson and was happy to be away from work and with old friends and with silly pop. I began gushing about the Miley of that song as a nouveau phalansterian. “A pre-critical socialist!” I think I said—but a socialist nonetheless. Bodies creeping into a scene away from wherever, sweating in mad high contact. Bodies doing whatever, embodying pure whateverness. Miley the Queen of Quodlibet!

            -----“But it’s a really sad song,” my friend said.

            And he’s right. The repetition, the minor key, the desperate wailing at the end, the generalized sense of Fuck, we can’t stop!—it’s a really sad song. The best party in the world, the party of pure whatever-being, the party where want is act and “we run things / things don’t run we”—this party’s anthem is a dirge that cuts out right before the tears kick in.

            If Miley can’t revel in her autonomy, people, we’re fucked.

* It’s like so much theory today is just another weapon in a growing arsenal of less lethal weapons, the emotechnics and lachrymators set to work by the state. The theme of this year’s MLA was “Vulnerable Times,” and a torrent of terms flow from the title like so many tears: abandonment, precarity, bare life, dispossession… And then theory wept. My problem isn’t that states of existential depletion, vital neglect, and necropolitical pulverization aren’t real. They are. Nor is my problem that some thinkers haven’t thought through the exposure of abandonment to the kinds of lives that get lived when bareness is what you got, when dispossession augurs an entrance into an undercommon sociality from which something new might come. They have. Even the MLA program wanted to see vulnerability “not as weakness or victimhood but as a space for engagement and resistance emerging from a sense of fundamental openness, interdependence, and solidarity.” Exposed in and through the implosion of liberal governance, vulnerability appears as an ontological condition (“fundamental openness”) that is always already post-liberal.

But what’s the payoff in recognizing that bodies can’t sustain neoliberalism, that the current iteration of the world effects an unworlding? We already knew that liberalism cannot be lived; we’re just proliferating new figures for its unlivability. Given that so much of this precarity talk is premised on narratives of the state’s devastating withdrawal, its neglect of its redistributive promise or project, theory’s tears produce an affective reinvestment in a state we will never have. But more: the functionality of much precarity talk for statist imaginaries is best evident in the fact that we rarely think of the state as such as vulnerable or abandonable. We never figure precarity as the state; we imagine that, somehow, the cold monster will endure long after it has abandoned you and me and everyone.

So this is how theory is an emotechnic of the state:  We think we’re weeping for populations abandoned by the state. We never ask: what if we’re weeping as the state abandoned by the populations it thought it had abandoned? Crying tears that Hobbes’ frontispiece sovereign might cry if it suddenly found its body depopulated by the bodies that once filled it? Crying the tears of an old lonely abandoned monster?

* Remember that crying cop, sad that he had to club kids eager to make a break for it back into the state’s arms?

* I’m writing this in the wake of the acquittal of Kelly Thomas’ murderers, the homeless ill man killed twice or thrice or countless times by the state. I’m writing this out of a feeling of fecklessness and sadness, an acute consciousness of not having done anything and not knowing what could be done. I’m writing this because abandonment is a fact, because vulnerability and precarity are differentially distributed and embodied. But I’m mostly writing it because, in the syncope of consciousness separating my recognition of the maldistribution of bodily vulnerability and my awareness of the disembodied nature of my response to this fact, I will have already forgotten what our bodies—yours and mine—can do. I’m sad that I’ve lived this forgetting as a concession to the specularity of merely witnessing what we all already know. I’m sad that I haven’t tested my bodily competency, my bodily power, that we haven’t tested our bodily competency, our bodily power, to do something about this, to fuck shit up, to go somewhere else or make something new. And I’m sad—though you might laugh at this next sadness, finding it an inevitable sadness, citing thesis 11 to tell me to get over it—that that most contemporary theory, the kind of theory that yields “Vulnerable Times” thematics, the theory I read with love everyday, hasn’t enjoined us to enjoy this power. I’m sad that one of the most important theoretical texts of our moment is frequently read as an incitement to participate in sadness rather than as an attempt to measure our capacities to unbind ourselves from it. I’m sad that theory won’t help my sadness resolve into a great burst of embodied laughter or turn into a kind of anarchist wake where we remember the dead but fight like hell for the living—and, yes, of course, always, the dead.

* I’m sad that theory never tells us what my comrades do—except that theory, that is, that doesn’t count as theory, the kind of theory read by rad grads and the odd prof, the kind of theory that you can’t even really cite, the kind that keeps faith with the possibility of radical autonomy, the kind that is less concerned with what the state does to us than what we can do to the state and more importantly with one another, the kind of theory that tells us that, when this shit happens, “we go”:

So we go. To the streets. To the occupations. To the marches – the seemingly banal and the potentially-insurrectionary alike. We go. To the barricades. Together. And if we have questions or doubts – we’ll figure it out when we get there. But we have to go. A las barricadas!

We go because we can, because we have that power, because we are abandoning as much as abandoned, and we live and act this doubleplay of refusing and being-refused together, in the joyous collective autonomy we might share after and through and within the bonecrunch of abject heteronomy.

* Nothing heroic. No Vince Lombardi speeches. That’s not what I want. Just a recognition that we still don’t know what our bodies can do, that our exposure to violence or our dispossession or bareness doesn’t exhaust or even begin to describe our potential, that we can run, walk, and wheel from a world that crushes (our very faith in) our collective autonomy because, well, we still got it, it’s still there. At this point, there’s more revolutionary value in reading descriptions of people getting up from chairs than in continuing to write power’s autobiography. Getting up from chairs: philosophy’s oldest standup routine. Kant, the third antinomy:

When, for example, I, completely of my own free will, and independently of the necessarily determinative influence of natural causes, rise from my chair, there commences with this event, including its material consequences in infinitum, an absolutely new series…

I’m not invested in a metaphysics of the will or whatever. I’m just laughing with Kant, at Kant, through Kant, at the amazing fact that some of us get up from chairs, at the amazing fact that freedom is right there—a freedom that, if not a “first beginning,” is nonetheless absolute, part of an “absolutely new series.” We run things / things don’t run we.

* So Kant goes. No doubt through Königsberg on one of his clockwork walks. But how might we rethink the current scene of social theory if we put Kant in his chair in the space of our abandoned present, and followed him from the spontaneity of a freedom that can’t be exhausted to the demo or occupation? Kant a las barricadas? What if we learned, with Kant, to take a kind of pleasure in the inherence of freedom in the ordinariness of our variegated and differentiated bodies’ praxis? I’m engaging the unfortunately ableist metaphorics of getting up from a chair not to promote a paradigm of action but to generate a new attunement of thought, one that gets up and over our contemporary inability to find joy in our autonomy.

* While the MLA vulnerability theme was playing out, a subconference of vulnerable people gathered autonomously to share and develop technologies of autonomy. I couldn't make any of it, but I heard it was a brilliant blast. 

* So, the minimal demand: Not a theory that reflects reality, that informs us of the shittiness of our present, that calculates the infinite modes by which power decimates us. We all know how shitty it is, how wasted and depleted. We want a theory that works to empower us to remake the real, that acts in the present as a force of and for affective recalibration, a theory that puts us into joyous contact with the bodily fact of inexhaustible—and therefore endlessly shareable—autonomy. A theory that puts us on the go. To the occupation, the demo, the barricades. To Miley’s party to tell her that it doesn’t have to be so fucking sad. To the MLA to tell them we get enough tear gas, thank you much, and we want a theory that joys in autonomy, the glimmers of it that remain—which might mean, sure, that for the present we just talk about vacating chairs. To the state to tell them that we’re going away for a while, probably forever, with one another. We will carry our wounded with us; sometimes they’ll carry us. We’ll pool our bodily resources and go along, laughing and dancing. We’ll let the state do the crying.

Going My Way? Anarchist Inclinations and Lorde

(I’m writing this in the wake of and as a way of thinking through a Twitter spat between a well-known blogger/postdoc and a very well known anthropologist who practices anarchism.)

It begins with a question, one rarely asked and so rarely responded to. Neither articulated nor answered, the question persists as an inchoate feeling for and vague orientation toward another. If we were to give voice to this question, to make it explicit, we would thematize the mystery of this orientation, this feeling-for-another that puts us in hesitant proximity with one another. The question might be phrased as “Going my way?” What this question inaugurates through its inarticulation is the astonishingly robust and ridiculously fragile collectivity that we are, whoever we are. In not asking this question explicitly, we refuse to ask it once and once only, we refuse to thematize a foundational orientation that would determine, once and for all, who we are. We’re not a party, no arche or nomos secures to us our identity as ourselves, and in refusing to ground our collectivity through an inaugural determination of who we are and what we want, we commit ourselves to the tense and uncertain work of feeling toward and with one another. We are nothing but the uncertain feeling that we’re oriented toward one another in our orientations toward something else. That we’re inclined toward one another in the multiplicity of our inclinations.

I’ve been thinking a lot about inclination recently. My thinking got started, believe it or not, with Lorde—or, rather, with a critique of Lorde that was making its rounds on the internet. It was a critique of the function of racial signifiers in Lorde’s “Royals,” concluding with a claim about Lorde’s functionality for a white supremacist patriarchal world. I didn’t have any problem with the specifics of the reading; it’s correct, as far as it goes. But I had the nagging suspicion that the critique was true to the extent that it was false, that the adoption of a hermeneutic of suspicion vis-à-vis Lorde was somehow inadequate. This, because I felt like the Lorde of Pure Heroine is, in some way, inclining toward me, toward us—that the speaker of the album is, in some way, a comrade-in-formation. Really truly. There’s too much class hatred and refusal in the lyrics that I can’t not. Silly stupid utopian perhaps. Culture industry people are free to laugh at me. But at stake for me here is the need to rethink the modes by which we orient ourselves to our cultural objects—and, in turn, to one another. (Let me keep talking about Lorde, but with the understanding that inquiry into cultural relations here functions as a propaedeutic for a consideration of political relations.) My worry is that we’re increasingly conflating the necessity of critique with the production of allergies, that critique has given way to simple criticism, that our critical performances are ultimately functional for liberalism’s pulverization of the political. The point here isn’t that Lorde’s lyrics in “Royals,” say, aren’t fucked up; they are, and should be treated as such. But to what end? What’s at stake in this critique? It’s striking to me that, while honest-to-Jesus political white supremacist movements are treated with a smirk, Lorde provokes outrage. It’s easy to ignore white supremacist movements or mock them away for the simple reason that we can’t imagine a world in which we would enter a political relation with them—that is, a political relation constituted by amity. (I would argue that liberals can’t really imagine a political relation of enmity with white supremacists either, and thus the predominance of irony in liberal approaches to these formations.) Simply put, we don’t share a world with white supremacists. For me, Lorde poses a different political and interpretive challenge, insofar as I can imagine sharing a world with her. (CLR JAMES READING GROUP WITH LORDE!) This possibility of world-sharing and world-forming, of politics, requires the adoption of an interpretive-critical mode that can simultaneously keep in view what I take to be the sincerity of her refusal of the given and the violence of the idiom through which she codes this refusal. We need, I think, a critical practice primed by the feeling of co-inclination.

And not just so we can read Lorde differently. Our impulse to critique, and our conversion of critique into mere criticism, is fucking us up. Sometimes I feel like we’ve imported modes of cultural critique subtended by a hermeneutics of suspicion into our relations with one another with the effect that we listen to one another to hear why we shouldn’t listen to one another. When I was thinking about the response to Lorde, I had this dream that we could shift the imagined scenography of cultural critique—that we could treat her less as an analysand rehashing symptomatic dreams on a Freudo-Marxian couch and more as a well-meaning subject who has found her way into a meeting of a radical collective but whose lack of an adequate idiom led her to mobilize a messed up metaphorics. What do we do—ideally—in these situations? As I understand the discourse ethics of such collectivities, the aim isn’t to reveal the fucked-up-ness of the person as an end in itself or in order to boot the person out, but to engage a practice of critique and correction with the assumption that there’s a commitment to the maintenance and flourishing of the relationship. Good intentions for bad actions don’t excuse anything, but remaining mindful of the former allows for the composition of a scene in which the latter can be refused and then repaired. It’s only our willingness to foster such scenes that distinguishes friends from enemies: we repair the fucked-up-ness of our friends, whereas we resist it in our enemies.

The decision to repair instead of reject, to treat as flawed friend rather than infallibly flawed enemy, to (re)produce a fraying relation instead of developing an allergy, is ultimately organized by fictions of intention, sincerity, possibility, and so on. We feel that we’re inclined toward one another, that we’re going the same way, and this basic affect/orientation makes non-allergic critique both possible and necessary. We imagine we’re going the same way even if we sometimes decline from one another or swerve away into terrible things. We survive through these fictions. We live on them and through them for the simple reason that we are all too wounded by this world to not carry fucked-up-ness with us in ways we can’t even know without the rigorous, critical, sustaining, and enriching help of our revolutionary friends. If you read this blog, you’ve probably experienced the extraordinary act of love that is getting called out by a comrade. I can recall vividly each time I’ve been so called out, and I’m deeply grateful for all of them—even if thinking about what precipitated them makes me shudder in embarrassment. We don’t need to worry that this fiction makes us stupid, less-than-critical; there are obviously firm limits to the fiction of co-inclination. I read with Lorde, for instance, whereas I wouldn’t read with Miley Cyrus. In terms of real people doing real things, there probably wasn’t an Occupy encampment in the U.S. that didn’t have one figure (almost certainly a white guy) so resistant to others’ labor of critique and repair that the fiction of co-inclination dropped and this figure converted into an enemy. We need to trust our feelings, to prioritize in practice the weird orientations toward others that we can’t fully explain or thematize. It’s this feeling of co-inclination that prevents every critique from becoming a collective crisis, that allows critique to become a means of collectivity formation.

We, whoever we are, are constituted by felt fictions of co-inclination. Without these felt fictions, we are probably little more than the gaggle of isolated and auto-isolating idiots that Yankee Leninists take us to be when we say things like “Check your privilege” or “That’s fucked up.” Critique can only be the antonym of collective corrosion when we recall that we’re going to get in one another’s way as we go on our way, together, maybe. Indeed, critique is a mode of collective augmentation when its animated by a commitment, however vague, to maintaining the world that we co-produce, that we’re on the way toward. So, let’s rewrite the dictum of Kant, the one he put in the emperor’s mouth, the one that serves as a mantra for liberals and Leninists alike, the one that goes, “Argue as much as you like about whatever you like, but obey!” Let’s rewrite it as, “Argue as much as you like about whatever you like, but incline!” Critique and critique hard. But never suppress the felt possibility that we, whoever we are, are going one another’s way.

A Brief Note on Why We’re Not in the Streets

The government “shut down,” and where are we? Not in the streets. My Twitter and Facebook feed are filled with people puzzling over this fact. We know the effects of the shutdown could be devastating for precarious populations—the poor, the food insecure, the sick. We know that the worst effects of the shutdown will be absorbed by raced, gendered, and classed subjects. We know that we’re angry. And we know that we’re not in the streets.

We’re being scolded for not being in the streets. We’re being told that Millennials aren’t serving their world-historical function of maintaining the liberal-capitalist state. We’re informed that we “should be vigorously protesting as the House GOP holds the state and the economy hostage.” We’re even offered a script: “It’s our government, they ought to declare.” We’re told that we are making “it harder for the progressives who do hold public office to do their jobs.”

But what if our puzzled self-descriptions index a political consciousness that all these pious prescriptions can’t want to think? What if we know something, we who don’t go out into the streets, what if we know something that we ourselves almost can’t let ourselves know, a knowledge that we can only become conscious of in the form of a half-shocked self-assessment: “We’re not in the streets?!”

What if we know that we Millennials were born into an already abandoned world? What if we only know the welfare state of yesteryear as a myth? What if we can only laugh when someone encourages us to declare, “it’s our government”? What if we only know a world of de-pegged dollars, of flexible production, of fast-moving finance? What if we only know a world in which the state at every turn functions to stack the world against us? What if we only know a world in which the state’s primary mode of being is as an agency dedicated to the proposition that black and brown people around the world should be incarcerated or killed? What if we only know a world in which our most “progressive” president was the one who gave us the horrible, racist Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act? What if we only know a world in which liberals justify the maintenance of the state by rhetorically gesturing to the very raced and gendered populations that the state only cares to fuck over? What if we know that the devastating abandonment to which precarious populations are now subject as a result of the “shutdown” is simply the agonizing materialization of an already established fact?

What if we’re not cruel optimists because we were never optimistic in the first place.

We want to be in the streets. We showed that. We want nothing more. We want to be in the streets. Dancing, laughing, arguing. Feeding one another, caring for one another, defending one another against the organs of the state that never shut down.  Shattering windows, tearing down fences, making the world our commons. We want to build worlds where the hungry can eat, where the sick can repair. Where black skin isn’t a marker of disposability and where bodies can embody as they like. Where the forms of ableism at times implied in the political shorthand of “the streets” are annulled.

For us, the streets are an impossible actuality. The streets are a place where the fantasy of contact and care becomes concrete. A place where we realize that we are abandoned to one another.  Where we hold on and hold together and, in so doing, get in touch with something new.

Why aren’t we in the streets? We’re already there, already in them, in and through our very withdrawal from them. We’re in them in our recognition that the state has always already abandoned us, that it has created a world in which speech cannot become act and our presence doesn’t matter. We’re in them in our decision to abandon the state in turn, in our refusal to participate in the statist scenography that congregates a crowd in order to re-ground itself.

We know this—vaguely, hazily, inchoately. The question, then, is not, “Why aren’t we in the streets?” It is, rather, “What will happen when we realize we’re already there?”

And we know this, too.