Mladen Dolar on Psychoanalysis and Politics

In a recent lecture, Mladen Dolar offers an instructive meditation on the (non-)relation of psychoanalysis and politics. He claims that psychoanalysis institutes a social bond on the basis of the death drive, as that negativity inscribed in every positive social relation, ultimately the potential unbinding or untying of these relations, their precariousness. In this way, psychoanalysis prepares the site of politics, which amounts to the rejection or suspension of substantial, conventional sociality, the interruption of the positive order. Yet in doing so, psychoanalysis cannot go any further than a 'preparation' - it cannot engage in a political struggle, cannot prescribe political commitments, or in other words, it can promote the interruption of these bonds, but cannot offer anything positive to replace them.

By way of contrast, if psychoanalysis falls short of political intervention, by preparing the political site, only to leave the intervention up to an extra-psychoanalytic moment of decision, then politics (in the Badiouian sense) goes too far, covering over or erasing the moment of negativity of the political site through the institution of a new positive social order, qua evental fidelity. Dolar seems to offer a kind of solution to that great problematic core of Badiou's doctrine of the Event, as noted by, among others, Adrian Johnston (PDF) and Levi Bryant (PDF) - the question of a pre-evental preparation, or of the intra-situational conditions of an Event. Badiou seems stuck in fundamental ambiguity between the claim that Events are entirely incalculable and unaccountable in terms of the situation in which they arise, and the claim that Events don't 'come from nowhere', that they are grounded in and conditioned by the spectral traces of effaced events, inertly circulating within existing situations (what he calls 'evental recurrence').

Dolar seems to offer up psychoanalysis as precisely a praxis of preparation, of bringing about the Evental site qua condition. In this way, we can easily understand psychoanalytic symptoms as symptoms of failed, effaced, or missed Events (this is how, for example, Eric Santner understands symptoms); and the Lacanian subject positions can be read as 'compromise formations' resulting from the failure of Evental fidelity, the products of failed subjectivation. The twist here is that, for psychoanalysis, there can only be 'failed subjectivations', the subject as such is a failure of the symbolic mandate, it is a way of coping with the imposibility of fully 'becoming what one is'. So while Dolar seems to propose, albeit problematically, that psychoanalysis can fill the missing role in Badiou's theory of a 'pre-evental discipline of time', as Johnston puts it, there is nonetheless a fundamental incongruity. If psychoanalysis 'merely' prepared the site for a proper Evental/political subjectivation, then it would seemingly be complicit in betraying its own definitive insight - that subjectivation is inherently 'improper', and that the subject is ultimately the result of a failure; the subject is intrinsically symptomatic, and so the failure cannot be 'undone' without the subject also coming undone.

Dolar already offers the key to this deadlock, when he describes both psychoanalysis and Badiouian politics as circling around the political site of pure unbinding, the former falling short of it, the latter going too far beyond it. Can we envision a political praxis that seeks, like psychoanalysis, to open up this site, but rather than instrumentalizing this site as the means to some specific political end, makes the opening and holding-open of this site its explicit goal? This is something Zizek has been hinting at for quite some time, and the he, in his lecture following Dolar's, continues to foreshadow.

For anyone familiar with this blog, my answer should come as no surprise: the name of such a praxis is schizoanalysis. Dolar, in his lecture, does briefly touch upon Deleuze and Guattari, if only to implicitly suggest that Guattari's politicization of analytic practice, in subordinating the political site of 'unbinding' to explicit political goals, thereby misses the crucial dimension of analysis in the same way as Badiou. To put it in schizoanalytic terms, Dolar criticizes schizoanalysis as subordinating analytic deterritorialization to a corresponding political reterritorialization. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, by remaining an eternal 'prelude' to politics, seeks to attain 'absolute detteritorialization', in a desire for 'pure difference'.

Yet such a criticism misses the point. Wherein lies the 'political' dimension of schizoanalysis, the sense in which it 'politicizes' Lacan? Schizoanalysis does not make analysis a means of promoting this or that political agenda, but rather makes the multiplication, promulgation, and perpetuation of analytic instances itself the political agenda. Rather than making politics a secondary moment, derived from the opening of the political site, schizoanalysis makes the opening/unbinding analytic operation as the political instance par excellence. If schizoanalysis is militant, it is in the spreading of analytic practice, installing analytic units wherever possible, opening political sites in every amenable situation. Schizoanalytic practice, then, involves a missionary ethics of promulgation, of 'spreading the good news', in the tradition of St. Paul. Paradoxically, schizoanalysis reproaches Lacanian psychoanalysis, not because it is too 'church-like', but because it isn't church-like enough, it is content to practice analysis where it is already comfortably accepted, rather than attempting to spread its word everywhere.

Where Dolar does explicitly criticize Deleuze and Guattari, he claims that their denunciation of Oedipus in the name of an unconscious that is already social misses the point. Oedipus names the fact that the formation of the ego already depends on social relations (those of the family, et cetera). But moreover, Oedipus is not the name of a conservative familialism - the Oedipus complex is that which ceaselessly undermines traditional paternal authority, disturbing the consistency of the familial triangle from within. This internal moment of negativity or inconsistency, moreover, attests to the social - or rather, political - nature of the unconscious, which already undermines familial and all other form of authority, rather than assuming or reinforcing them.

Dolar's criticism, however, itself seems to miss the point. Deleuze and Guattari clearly accept that castration and Oedipus are given facts of our current predicament. Their reproach is not that psychoanalysis accepts these coordinates, but rather, that it limits analytic practice to these coordinates, rather than generalizing itself. What does this mean? Oedipus and familialism, for Deleuze and Guattari, amount in the last instance to figures of the linguistic structure of the signifier. Their criticism is that psychoanalysis restricts its structuralism to that of the signifier, rather than generalizing itself to differential structures of different orders. Practically speaking, psychoanalysis takes the subject (of the signifier) for granted, as given in the analysand, whereas schizoanalysis seeks to analyze, within collective social arrangements, the emergence of instances of subjectivation at the intersection of several structural orders - physical-mechanical, biological-genetic, cognitive, linguistic, politico-economic, artistic, digital-technological, et cetera. On the specificities of this praxis, I can for now only hint.

If schizoanalysis is a political radicalization of psychoanalysis, this is not because it seeks to enlist analysis in the service of some overt political end, but rather, because it makes analysis itself - its promulgation and promotion - the only political end, with all other political projects and goals as themselves experimental figures within a greater analytic movement.

Zizek Responds to Kirsch

Zizek opens this recent lecture by discussing Kirsch's previously mentioned attack in the New Republic. It's a somewhat oblique response, segueing into a discussion of fascism/fundamentalism as a symptom of the liberal order's foreclosure of radical leftist politics. Nonetheless, it makes the point that Kirsch is not simply willfully misreading him, he is exemplifying a very clear ideological operation, one that seeks to confuse leftist and rightist radicalism as two species of the same 'totalitarian' tendency.

The lecture is quite good, the basic theme being a concrete engagement with Marx's critique of political economy, against the purely culture-critical use of Marx (a tendency of which Zizek admits being guilty). He seems to finally be working on some new material rather than just constantly rehashing and rearranging old themes, as he has been wont to do in lectures the past year or so at least.

As the superego says: Enjoy!

Shameless Self Promotion

So I had to go to the hospital for a minor procedure, and then stayed up all night making music. I haven't done that in years, and it felt good. If anyone is interested, I posted the album here. It's called Taxonomies, mostly weird drone and ghost-rock (minus the rock). [Note: all the song titles were lifted from Agamben's The Open: Man and Animal, because I was reading it at the time.]

On Zizek and Consequences

The recent controversy in the blogosphere, provoked by this critical review of Zizek in The New Republic, has me somewhat confused. It seems that the unanimous response is that the review is unfair, highly impoverished, and generally poor academic work. Yet branching from this central position, we get two qualifications. The first is critical of Zizek, and claims that, while Kirsch's article is a failure, we should nonetheless be skeptical of Zizek's apparent romantic adoration for totalitarian violence. The second, exemplified by Larval Subjects here, defends Zizek against this criticism, claiming that he is thoroughly an ironist, opting to defend the 'worst' option of totalitarianism in order to force us to reevaluate the basic ideological assumptions structuring the choice between political alternatives. The critical rejoinder to this defense is that, while irony is all well and good, we must be wary of the potential consequences of this 'worse choice', as the alternative potentials of traversing the ideological fantasy could be horrific. (For more on this debate, see the comments on LS's post.)

I don't think either position gets it right. First of all, for all the out-of-hand rejection of Kirsch's article, everyone seems to nonetheless accept its basic point - that Zizek is an apologist for, or even an advocate of, totalitarian violence. Yet anyone with a more than superficial familiarity with Zizek's work should know that, despite (or rather, because of) his championing of ruthless political Terror, and his praise of figures like Robespierre, Lenin, and Mao, his analyses of the latter are thoroughly critical. He does not advocate what they did, but attempts to show 1) what potentials still live on in the legacy of these figures, and 2) how these potentials were betrayed by the admittedly catastrophic outcomes of their actualization.

This criticism is captured in his seemingly tasteless claim that, while Hitler was a monster, and the genocide he presided over was one of the most disgusting episodes in human history, the problem with Hitler's 'revolution' was that it was not violent enough, in that it failed to undermine the basic symbolic coordinates of the situation. The shoah was hence an impotent passage à l'acte, a hideous acting out that only served to sustain the status quo. His praise of figures like Stalin and Mao, despite similar crimes on their parts, roots from the fact that they headed abortive, but nonetheless real and important, attempts to intervene at the level of the symbolic coordinates of the possible. The totalitarian repression and purges they carried out were symptoms of the failure of these attempts. The violent terror Zizek is advocating has nothing to do with these disgusting displays, and in fact, they would be proof that a Zizekian politics has failed to come to fruition.

The basic tenet of Zizek's conception of revolutionary politics is that, if a movement has to resort to murder, genocide, torture, and the like, then it's not a revolution at all. The revolutionary shift must occur at the level of symbolic foundations, such that enemies of the revolution wouldn't have to be forcibly silenced, as they would be fundamentally excluded from the field of discourse, such that their words and actions would have no more weight than those of a schizophrenic babbling to himself about conspiracies. In other words, the violence Zizek advocates is a kind of symbolic violence, and any resort to what he calls subjective violence, literally, injury and abuse sustained by actual persons, would be a sure sign of the failure of the former.

Does this amount to a prohibition of violent tactics altogether? Doesn't this conflict with his valorization of, for example, the looting and burning of supermarkets by the favela-dwellers in Rio de Janeiro as an instance of 'divine violence'? Here we must be clear: while we cannot rule out violence altogether, it should not be included in our tactical repertoire, but should be a desperate last resort, in the same way that a pro-choice advocate of sex-ed would not include abortion amongst the litany of birth control methods, but would reserve it for desperate situations. As for the example of Rio, or the Revolutionary Terror of 1792-4, how do we reconcile these with this logic?

The answer lies in the conception of divine violence as a break with the cycle of mythic violence, in which the revolutionary dissolution of an existing politico-legal structure is reduced to a means of establishing another to replace it. Yet if such a dissolution does not conclude with the institution of a new positive social order, how could it be more than a purely negative gesture? What is the future of a divine violence? In principle, the answer is that the very organization and mobilization that produces this dissolution must already be in-itself a new social bond, it must be enough to sustain society, as the 'embodiment of negativity'. In this way, the dissolution is not instrumentalized, reduced to being a means to some external end - the means should be enough.

The trouble with Zizek's examples is that they do not produce such results: they either collapse back into the previous order, as in Rio, or succeed in establishing a new Law, as in the French Revolution; or, where they do succeed, it is only temporary, as with the Shanghai Commune. Yet Zizek's point is more nuanced than such positivism. His point is that, even where divine violence is reduced to mythic violence, as a 'vanishing mediator', there is nonetheless a spectral remainder, a virtual element irreducible to its actualization - Kant calls it 'enthusiasm', Robespierre calls it 'generous ambition'. Moreover, it is the redemption of this spectral remainder that must serve, for Zizek, as the basis of any social bond that would escape the cycle of mythic violence. Here, Zizek is thoroughly Benjaminian. [Narcissistic side-note: if you've been following my blog, you'll recognize in this 'spectral remainder' precisely what I've been referring to as the 'ancestral dimension'.]

When Zizek does praise Terror, as in the cases of the French, October, or Cultural Revolutions, he is quite clear that his praise is aimed not at massive slaughter and repression, but rather, at the attempts at inventing new modes of sociality, new habits and rituals, to replace what had to be done with. He makes this point quite clearly in his recent work, In Defense of Lost Causes:

It is at this level that one should search for the decisive moment of a revolutionary process: say, in the case of the October Revolution, not the explosion of 1917-18, not even the civil war that followed, but the intense experimentation of the early 1920s, the (desperate, often ridiculous) attempts to invent new rituals of daily life: how to replace the pre-revolutionary marriage and funeral rites? How to organize the most commonplace interaction in a factory, in an apartment block? It is at this level of what, as opposed to the "abstract terror" of the "great" political revolution, one is tempted to call the "concrete terror" of imposing a new order on quotidian reality, that the Jacobins and both the Soviet and the Chinese revolutions ultimately failed - not for lack of attempts in this direction, for sure. The Jacobins were at their best not in the theatrics of Terror, but in the utopian explosions of political imagination apropos the reorganization of the everyday: everything was there, proposed in the course of the frantic activity condensed into a couple of years, from the self-organization of women to communal homes in which the old were to be able to spend their last years in peace and dignity. (Lost Causes, p 174-5)

When Zizek praises these revolutions, and champions political terror, he is not referring to the 'abstract terror' of mass murder and totalitarian repression, but to the concrete terror of the reorganization of basic social relations. This, he claims, is the ultimate lesson of the Cultural Revolution:

Although a failure, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) was unique in attacking the key point: not just the takeover of state power, but the new economic organization and reorganization of daily life. Its failure was precisely the failure to create a new form of everyday life... (LC, p 205)

Despite his recent claims that the Left should not shy away from appropriating State power, his point is that such actions must have a concrete transformation of the social bond as their 'base'. This is, consequently, how we can reconcile his notion of 'Bartleby politics' with the seemingly contradictory valorization of the 'great revolutions': withdrawal from activity means we must fundamentally reorganize the social substance of habits and rituals, organizations of jouissance, if active intervention is to be more than impotent acting out, or some custodial 'cleaning up after' capitalist excess.

Concrete terror, then, means immersing ourselves in a total experimentation with our social organization and habits. This follows from Zizek's definition of terror, which is basically that 'there is no going back':

Terror is this 'self-related' or 'self-negated' fear: it is what fear changes into once we accept that there is no way back, that what we are afraid to lose, what is threatened by what we are afraid of (nature, the life-world, the symbolic substance of our community...) has always-already been lost. (LC, p 434)

Bartleby politics is thus not simply abstinence, not simply doing nothing, it is rather a matter of being nothing, of coming to embody this radical loss of ground or symbolic support, of becoming that intolerable, unproductive kernel inappropriable by Capital.

This reading of Zizek can also help shed light on the apparent hypocrisy of his advocacy of revolutionary politics, despite his complacent position as a well-off, jet-setting bourgeois intellectual. While I'm not denying this hypocrisy, I think we should recognize in it what he has referred to as a 'sincere hypocrisy': he is obliged to work explicitly in cultural theory and philosophy because intervention in the symbolic substance of culture must precede and 'ground' any potent political action. Here, I have great affinity with Levi Bryant's reading of Zizek as ironist, in his paper "Symptomal Knots and Evental Ruptures", and over at Larval Subjects. Moreover, despite his immense disdain for Guattari's influence on Deleuze, this is why I see Zizek as an important influence on schizoanalysis, as I understand it. Reorganization of social relations should not be imposed after the fact by a political regime, but must be the base and support preceding any mass political mobilization.

Paper Abstract - Strange Times: Aliens, Ghosts, and the Non-Event

This is my paper proposal for the CFP here, for the conference Affirmation, Negation, and the Politics of Late-Capitalism. Any questions or comments on the project are welcome.

"Strange Times: Aliens, Ghosts, and the Non-Event".

This paper will develop the concept xenoeconomics by way of a theory of temporality. This will proceed in three parts.

First, I will analyze Jacques Derrida's discussion of spectrality in Specters of Marx as a way of conceiving the time of speculative finance capital, which determines value as an infinitely postponed realization or redemption of debt. I will demonstrate the inadequacy of his formulation of the spectral dimension, and the necessity of supplementing it with another mode of spectrality. I will conjure this 'other specter' by way of challenging Derrida's readings of both Marx and Benjamin, and by drawing from their work, as well as that of Quentin Meillassoux.

Second, I will turn a closer eye on Meillassoux, and distinguish this other mode of spectrality, which I will also call ancestrality, from his version of the latter. I will bring up several points in After Finitude, concerning the temporal modality of the ancestral, that will lead me to complicate, if not disagree with, his arguments. I will then attempt to resolve this complication by reference to Giorgio Agamben's concept of operational time in The Time That Remains. This will allow me to present a consistent formulation of ancestral time, as distinct from correlational time, and the political consequences of this distinction.

Finally, I will bring the preceding analyses to bear on certain questions Adrian Johnston has raised concerning Alain Badiou's political ontology, and what he calls a ‘pre-evental discipline of time’. Xenoeconomic temporality, as I formulate it, can help us treat this problem, and the concrete issues of political praxis it entails. I will conclude by proposing a concept of the operational time of intervention, which will form the groundwork for a future critical engagement with Badiou, and for a political praxis indebted to his theory of the event, as well as to speculative realist philosophy.

"I'm an anarchist. Power to the people!"

There is a truth to the cliche, popular amongst centrist politicians in these woeful economic times, that economic stability and ecological health are elements of national security. McCain said it, Obama said it, even Bush started leaning in this direction after Iraq began looking like a catastrophe.

If there is a significant threat of external violence against the United States, be it posed by terrorism or another State, then yes, of course it is the responsibility of the State to protect the people against these threats. This responsibility lies in the fact that it is the State itself, and not any local group of people, that is involved in such antagonisms, and so these people are essentially innocent bystanders so far as such violence is concerned. The State, as the intended target, cannot help be feel responsible, ashamed, guilty, and hence obligated to avert civilian casualties.

Okay, but the Right has not been arguing that the government is obligated to protect its people from external violence - they have been arguing, from Ayn Rand to the neocons, that this is all the government should do. Anything beyond providing a minimal stable infrastructure, and defending it at all costs, would be out of bounds for the State. This is because any function the State would provide could be outsourced to the private sector, and it would be cheaper, faster, and more efficient.

This is why the remarkable fervor with which Fox News and other conservative media has declared utter terror about the Obama presidency is nonetheless wholly understandable. They say, explicitly, that they are afraid Obama is a Marxist, that this was some kind of socialist coup, that Obama will be a puppet for the radical left, unions, and the like. They are afraid that, in the guise of a modest shift from the (not-so-)center-right to the center left, a return to a government aiming at economic transformation will take place, opening the door for God-knows what kind of totalitarianism.

I get the sense that, throughout the campaign, the words 'economy' and 'security' functioned as a general code for the the candidates positions. In the simplest sense, '(national) security' defends against an external threat, whereas focusing on the economy is a defense against an internal threat. Moreover, security simply attempts to preserve what we have now against danger, whereas the latter claims what we have now is the danger, and it is only through fundamental change that we can reach a secure formation. McCain, no matter what he did, remained the national security candidate, and Obama won because the economy became the clearest, most immediate threat as the campaign neared its end.

When Bill O'Reilly appeared on the Daily Show, there was an bizarre, even sublime moment in which he declared: "I'm an anarachist. Power to the people!" Of course, we know what he meant; that he is an anti-big government libertarian/conservative, that for him, the government that governs best governs least. This is the dirty truth of the neoconservative legacy: preemptive war and global American hegemony were not (merely) elements of a renewed imperialism, they were rather attempts to focus all attention and energy on an external enemy, instead of recognizing the source of one's problems immanently, as internal antagonisms in the very structure of economy and society. Bush and Co. had to build up a big government to prevent an attack from outside, so that we ultimately could be safe, and live as if 'there is no government to get in our way'.

The alternative to this approach is to say that our greatest danger is the antagonism within our society, and not between our society and another. This is the antagonism of class, of oppression and inequality, of exploitation and alienation. Our security not only involves, but depends on a reformulation of the economy and the energy sector specifically, insofar as these are the sites of an inner-splitting of society - the points at which we are the threat to our own existence. The economy thus is not simply an element of national security, it is the element, it is that which undermines security in itself, over and above external threats.

Now of course, Obama is not committed to such a perspective, but there is nonetheless something to seize upon in his platform - we must fundamentally change that which we would aim to secure, because it is itself not secure, it is a threat to itself. What this change means is a huge practical question, one that will surely be answered inadequately by the Obama administration. The bigger question, however, is not how to create a stable economy as opposed to a volatile one, but whether economic stability is a possible, or desirable, goal. Perhaps the true change would amount to an acceptance that the economy is that which prevents a society from attaining a stable, secure balance, and a grounding of society on the basis of such a realization.

Isn't this what capitalism achieves? Yes and no. Capitalism does install an uncontrolled, unpredictable economy as the basis of society, rejecting all attempts to regulate and stabilize it, on the grounds that this would destroy its positive effects. However unstable the free market may be, it nonetheless provides us with a great abundance of wealth, infrastructure, power, and it generally improves the quality of life of the people. Yet where capitalism falls short as an economic system is basically in claiming that instability is only a means to a greater stability, economic insecurity will lead to political and social security, and so on. What would it mean for an economic system to seize upon the insecurity, instability, and general impermanence of social relations as a virtue, as the very goal of political-social existence? What if intervention in the economy is not a means to greater security, but a means of unsuturing political life from security as an end?

Schizoanalysis 2.5: Notes on Organization

I just want to add a few brief points to clarify the conclusion of this post. So to sum up, I see schizoanalysis as a method of developing new organizational structures within existing social groups, on the basis of a new social bond. This bond is based on what I call the ancestral, what Marx calls the proletariat, what Benjamin calls the oppressed of history.

I concluded that post by discussing Wolff's proposal for a new kind of socialism, based not in state control of the economy, but in collective appropriation of businesses by the working class. His model is one in which the employees of a company would become its 'collective board of directors', on a similar model as Silicon Valley upstarts during the 80s and 90s. I have two problems here:

1) There is a reason 'classical' socialists emphasized the necessity of seizing state power, namely, that one will not get very far in attempting to develop new economic organizations if the state is not on your side. While the argument is flawed, there is a truth to that neoclassical evolutionist dogma that claims that, if collective enterprises were really preferable over corporations, then they would have a far greater market share, they would have displaced corporate business and become the dominant model. In other words, the market would have 'selected' them. The truth here is that, while the former may in fact be the better model (or genre of models), it can not gain much ground, it cannot assert itself, because the market is already configured in favor of corporate business.

Every market, however 'free', presupposes a certain level of politico-legal support and foundation, and our foundation slants the market dramatically in favor of capitalist enterprise, making collective enterprise inefficient, not preferable. Therefore, of course, the former is clearly the superior model. So we cannot absent the question of state power: if we want to develop radical economic organizations that break with capitalism, we must intervene in the politico-legal foundations of economy, and this can only be done by means of the state. It is not enough to say, as Wolff does, that economic democracy must be the foundation for political democracy: political organization is already the foundation of economic organization. I do not have any direct answers or approaches to the question of state power at the moment, but I think we can here learn a lot from Zizek's recent work on the matter, particularly in his In Defense of Lost Causes.

[But doesn't this contradict a fundamental principle of Marxism, that of the determining role of the economy over political 'superstructures'? In fact, as Zizek describes in his The Parallax View, the point is not that politics determines the economy rather than vice versa; politics names - over and above constitutional-state superstructures, juridical/oppressive apparatuses - the antagonism at the heart of economy, class struggle.]

2) It is an easy gesture to say that the workers should be their own collective board of directors, but it is also an empty one, in that it begs the basic organizational question: how? How does a group of workers direct themselves? Now there are many models, in practice or not, of such self-direction, and so there is plenty to draw on. But this can only take us so far, for two reasons. First of all, many existing collective businesses, for the most part, are quite small and localized. So there is very little from which to learn concerning large-scale - regional, national, international - collectivization. And we may confront this problem on three fronts: converting large corporations to collective structures, breaking up large corporations into smaller collective bodies, and integrating small collective operations into some kind of larger federate body. Overall, we can put it quite simply: with many businesses, you'd never be able to get the entire workforce into a boardroom, much less conduct an orderly meeting to decide upon direction.

Second, you can do all the research in the world, but it still begs the practical question: how do I do it here, now? The problem further multiplies. For the most part, collective businesses are founded as such, so we have little to go on when we are talking about converting existing corporate business to a collective structure. Moreover, besides the issue of size, the entire range of characteristics of the business in question present problems for its collectivization: location, regional values and customs, industry, peculiarities of the workforce, competition, history, et cetera. There is no general model that can be unproblematically applied; in every instance, collectivization must not only deal with these specificities, but use them to develop an organization unique to the constitution of the group, that uses these traits as assets rather than impediments.

Schizoanalysis, as a kind of institutional self-analysis and transformation, can offer an approach to these problems of organization, using the unique characteristics of the group in question as support and material for the creation of new arrangements and programs. This is an approach that both avoids the urge to propose a general model, and that bypasses the impasses of democracy, as outlined in the aforementioned post. Analysis is not simply a reflective, theoretical exercise, but an exercise in organization and self-direction of collective social arrangements.

I'll briefly return to the question of state power. If an intervention in the politico-legal foundation of the economy is to effect a significant change, it cannot simply change the value of what we strive to realize by way of law, 'the good life'; it must moreover base itself on a change in the way we relate to that for which we strive. The good life can no longer be the end or telos of life, it must become the presupposition of life, we must already be the achievement of this end, we must be the realization of this good life. Here I am referring to what I call the ancestral dimension: the sense in which our very capacity to exist is the result of the self-exclusion of those who gave everything for us, those who could never live to see the day that we would inherit the world they built. This shift from seeing ourselves as bare life absolutely separated from the good life (utopia), to seeing ourselves as the executors of the good life as the inheritance of a 'bare life' which is foreclosed upon, must become the ground of our relation to law, politico-juridical operations, et cetera.

I know this remains very theoretical, so let me offer two attempts at concrete proposals. First, substantively, the analytic relation as a new social bond would, on the one hand, seek to deprive group belonging of any groundedness in consistency, the quilting operation of the name of the father, and instead would seek to install non-signifiers (slogans, names, memes, values, projects...) that enact a continuous, consistent destabilization of such of group identification. On the other hand, if schizoanalysis shirks the traditional analyst-analysand dyad in favor of a collective relation mediated by an impersonal analytic machine or function, then how does the role of money in the analytic exchange figure? Some payment or investment must be made on the part of those undergoing analysis, but rather than this sum going to another individual or institution, it is invested in the name of the group that is instituted through analysis - the collective analytic machine of a pregiven group. (This could be read as a renewed concept of 'union dues'.)

This pool of liquid, unspent credit capital can then serve as a body without organs, in the same manner that finance capital becomes the BwO of the socius in Anti-Oedipus. This is not the same as the latter, however, because capital entails the extraction of surplus-value by exploitation, whereas this common credit pool would be separated from the group without any relation to an agency of separation - it is already separated, insofar as the group exists. Capital does not appropriate it from the workers, nor do they still possess it - neither group possess this power, they are adjacent to it. It is then question of the collective management of a fund that, while the result of a collective investment, does not furnish the group with any return other than the investment itself. This management could, for instance, take the form of a real estate investment that thereby could not only lead to a growing pool of liquid capital, but moreover, a service open to the group itself - affordable, secure, collectively managed housing. Or it could become a credit union providing its members with safe banking and cheap loans.

The second proposal concerns not a task, but a methodological point: how would the collective board of directors, or managers of the common BwO of capital, organize and effectively make decisions? If democracy is not the answer, then what? Now I'd never rule out a priori techniques like voting, parliamentary representation, consensus building, et cetera. But these cannot serve as the basis of the decision-making process, as the bond uniting the group that thereby decides. These should only be tactics.

My short answer is that the decision-making process would be determined by the formation of an analytic collective, a group whose relation is one of a continual and univocal auto-analysis, and hence that includes precise procedures for determining when something will follow or does follow from the analytic intervention. The group would exist, not on the basis of the interests, demands, or goals of the members, but rather, on the basis of an ongoing interrogation of what holds the group together, what constitutes the members as members, what led them to be claimed by this group (the analytic collective as sub-multiple of a given institution, be it a workplace, school, union, neighborhood, political party, et cetera). This would of course be an arbitrary sign, the non-signifier, enacting the collective solidarity in the face of the absolute loss of any necessary belonging or purpose, so that we might become the purpose whose contingent appearance will be the redemption of that loss (a loss of that which we never had). [Meta-note: this last sentence, a bizarre convolution of Badiou, Meillassoux, and Lacan should betray not only my current confusion, but the complex task of reconciliation that would be its resolution.]

The decision-making process would then be a complex operation of connection in Badiou's sense, determining the belonging or non-belonging of a given multiple to an event, that also determines the belonging of a given decision or legislation on the part of a group to the consequence of analytic intervention. How this operation would work I cannot say: because its formulation would always be determined by the local conditions of a given institutional multiple or group, as well as the evental traces within that multiple (name-of-the-father as sign of the count, the operation of the count as the exclusion of every event, name-of-the-father as symptom of evental inexistence); and because the operation can only be formulated in a terminology, a symbolic system or arrangement, specific to its event, coded by the circulation of the name of the event as non-signifier, and therefore indecipherable and meaningless to those not participating therein. Maybe some general remarks on this operation can be made eventually, I cannot say right now.

The Double Maverick

From the LA Times:

It was almost nine years ago that John McCain's quest for the White House began in the basement of Peterborough's town hall. McCain had held a few scattered town hall meetings in New Hampshire before then, but his candidacy in the 2000 Republican presidential primary generated such little interest that fewer than 20 people showed for the Peterborough event, even though his campaign distributed 1,000 fliers advertising free ice cream. And, as the Arizona senator recalled Sunday, his campaign "ate ice cream for the next two weeks."

McCain's anecdote appropriately summarizes his whole campaign thus far - in desperately trying to woo a reluctant and unenthusiastic populous to give him a chance, he pulled out all the stops, offering free ice cream to anyone who would just show up and listen; the result is a pathetic image of McCain sitting alone, surrounded by the unopened gallons of melting dessert. Ever since Obama became the presumptive Democratic candidate, McCain has offered every possible incentive for voters - from base Republican conservatives to moderate undecideds - to give him a chance, to question his opponent's appeal and hear him out. And now, at the end of the race, McCain is alone, surrounded by months of empty campaigning as his legacy.

Perhaps this is what makes McCain's appearance on Saturday Night Live last week so uncannily appropriate. It's not simply that he is being a 'good sport', showing off his sense of humor in the face of ridicule and nearly inevitable defeat. The uncanny comedic air comes from the kind of pathetic resignation that has been a latent destiny for his campaign, ever since he relinquished his famed high moral standards, his respect for opponents, his dignity. How can one help but get the sense that, standing next to Tina Fey's Sarah Palin, McCain was receiving the message of his presidential bid back in its inverted (true) form - Palin was always a caricature, and so was the whole campaign.



We shouldn't praise McCain for being 'in on the joke', as opposed to Palin, who, in her appearance on SNL a few weeks prior, seemed oblivious. The fact is that McCain can only maintain such a sense of humor because he is disconnected from his campaign on a level of principle, he fundamentally can't identify with his candidate persona. Palin, on the other hand, may not understand (or even if she does get the joke, she certainly doesn't seem to find the humor in it), but she did as she was told, she went along with it anyway. McCain's disingenuous alienation and Palin's naive humorlessness have gone hand in hand from the beginning, making the ticket intriguingly imbalanced.

The uncanniness, which builds to the point of an uncomfortable brush with the truth (to say the least), culminates in McCain's segment on Weekend Update, in which he self-mockingly enumerates some 'radical last minute strategies':



Before the series spirals off into absurdities, he lists two 'strategies' that reveal nothing less than the not-so-secret logic of his campaign. First, there is the 'reverse maverick', where he would do whatever anyone tells him. "I don't ask questions, I just go with the flow." Yet isn't this what he has been doing all along? Following the directions of his campaign organizers and the GOP, giving up on positions that had once defined his alleged 'maverick' status, doing what he is told...

Next, there is the 'double maverick': "That's where I go totally berzerker and just freak everybody out." Yet with the intense negativity that has characterized the late campaign, namely the allegations of Obama's affiliation with terrorists and secret socialist agenda, McCain has indeed freaked a lot of people out. On top of that, his own supporters, in the insane fervor these allegations provoked, became increasingly out of control at rallies, to the point of concerning cries of 'Terrorist!', 'Kill him!', and the like, being raised at the very mention of his opponent. McCain struggled to keep these sentiments under control, as he became the 'regular maverick' who was spooked by the 'double maverick' he had unleashed in his supporters.

When McCain characterizes these strategies as bad, its hard not to hear a note of implicit self-criticism. This is only confirmed by the next 'bad strategy' he offers, one his campaign explicitly resorted to the week before: the 'sad grandpa', in which McCain would plead with voters that Obama, being young, would have plenty of chances to be president, and that they should give him his last chance. Isn't this the not-so-subtle message of the recent McCain ad that claimed Obama 'isn't ready to be president...yet'? Or again: at the same rally in Peterborough, New Hampshire, that McCain told the ice cream anecdote, he said, “I come to the people of New Hampshire … and ask again to let me go on one more mission." [reported by Reuters here] It seems plain that he is criticizing the very 'bad strategies' to which he has nonetheless resorted.

Here we should prefer Obama's blatant pandering to undecided voters, exemplified in his infomercial, over McCain's cynical reliance on fear and distrust. While Obama's message of hope and change may be more talk than walk, hiding a more or less standard liberal-centrist program, he is at the very least offering people some kind of overarching moral framework, some standard to live up to, some goal to achieve. US Presidential elections, at least since Reagan, have basically been contested over which candidate's platform will make us better off - no ideological obfuscation, let's look at the facts: who will give me lower taxes, more security, et cetera (recall Reagan's famous quip, "Ask yourselves, are you better off now than you were four years ago?"). Obama's significant departure is to break with this logic (not always, but enough to matter), renewing the approach to politics in which what is at stake in an election is not simply a set of factual circumstances, wherein we are 'better or worse off', but the very standards by which we identify what is 'good' or 'bad', what constitutes 'better' or 'worse'.

Of course, this cynical politics of the facts has always relied on its own implicit moral standard, one in which it is immoral to decide what is good or bad for anyone but yourself, and in which you must focus solely on your own benefit. This is why the 'culture wars' elements of political platforms, issues like abortion and gay marriage, feel tacked on, and don't amount to a consistent moral framework; they are only concessions, opportunistic compromises. Yet perhaps it is the insufficiency of these compromises that has, in part, given such a broad appeal to the Obama campaign.

We can recognize, in the series of attacks McCain supporters have leveled against Obama, evidence of a telling ideological shift on this level: from 'secret Muslim', to radical black militant, to domestic terrorist/anarchist, and finally to socialist or even Marxist. First he represents the particularist program of a theocratic proto-fascism; then, a separatist rejection of society in the name of, again, group-specific interests; then a complete rejection of society in the name of a global, even universal rejection of authority; finally, a universal and positive program for a new society, this time proto-communist. This chain of equivocations is striking, but understandable from the prerogative of conservative-liberal politics: they all share in common the imposition of an over-arching moral framework that breaks with rational self-interest. Yet from the communist perspective, this Obama-effigy has made a progression from the worst to the best of anti-liberal political positions.

What must truly frighten the McCain-loyal is not the prospect of an unprepared president, but rather, the stunning enthusiasm exhibited on behalf of a moral framework with the potential of breaking with that of the unholy neoliberal-social conservative alliance. This framework is based on notions of participation, faith in the people, service and sacrifice. And not sacrifice 'for the greater good', but more importantly, sacrifice so that there might be a 'good' at all, a good that is not the shallow copy thereof that is rational self-interest. What Obama is calling on people to do is to work, to participate, to join the Peace Corps or Americorps, to get involved with the new 'green economy', to organize, so that we can change the very meaning of what 'good' is. We must enact this good, and cannot wait for it to be handed to us in a press release. The republican criticism that Obama talks a lot about change, but doesn't tell us what exactly this change is, is thus poorly aimed: it is by virtue of leaving the goal of this change open, by entrusting us with its realization, that Obama's message is truly effective.


Ultimately, if Obama is elected, he will not live up to the hype, he will disappoint the enthusiastic to some extent at least. Yet a politician's platform should not be measured by its effectiveness first and popularity second, but the reverse. If the cliche that electoral politics is theater teaches us anything, it is this. The effectiveness of a given political platform is only a secondary effect of its capacity to mobilize people, to really move its audience. If the slogan of 'change' is to mean anything, it won't receive this meaning from policies, but from the people. As Obama said, in his speech at the DNC, "change doesn't come from Washington, change comes to Washington." And moreover, "This campaign was never about me. It was about you."

So when we are disappointed, when the dream does collapse into the sobering morning after, the question is precisely in which direction the dominos will fall. Will the people be awoken to the cynical realization that great plans for change inevitably fail under their own weight, and that we should stick to modest, pragmatic reforms? Will the ideal die in favor of a cynical Realpolitik? Or will we see this disappointment as the failure of reality to live up to our ideal? In other words, will the slogan of change outlive the failure of Obama's concrete platform? Will we accept the loss of the factual battle, so that we might win the war over morality? It is preserving and encouraging this latter sentiment, and drawing it out from the former wherever it arises, that will become our task after election day.

Notes for the Debate: Alien vs. Specter

I want to briefly sketch out how hauntology, or the particular revision of it I have been working on, not only relates to but is ultimately indispensable for a xenoeconomic approach to capitalism. I am still finishing a more detailed post working this question out in relation to finance capital and speculation, but I feel the need to provide an abstract of my position, so as to build upon the debate that naughtthought has so pertinently outlined.

My point of departure was Rough Theory's critique of Derrida's Specters of Marx, the text in which hauntology was first developed. Derrida's approach here in large part continues his formalization of Benjamin's Marxism, resulting in a 'Messianic without messianism', a messianic promise emptied of every content, every substantial identification of the messiah or messianic time. Yet, following Agamben, I found this hollowed out version of Benjamin thoroughly unsatisfying, and this was only emphasized when Derrida applies the same operation to Marx, claiming that any substantial ontologization of the spectral - be it the proletariat, communism, the commodity-form, et cetera - is self-defeating, leading us to lose the truly subversive core of Marxism, which is the revelation of the spectral inherence/inheritance in and of existence. Derrida claims that any such ontologization is in the service of a conjuration seeking to rid us of the spectral, to lead us back to its real source in material existence.

My claim is that this completely misses the point of both Benjamin and Marx. Whereas Derrida seems completely preoccupied by apparitions, returns, revenants, hauntings, and so on, I claim that what Marx accomplishes with the notion of proletariat is a break with this logic. My thesis develops this in greater detail, but the basic point is that we can find in Marx hints that proletariat names not an existing social group amongst others, but moreover, a spectral inherence in politico-economic reality. The difference between this spectrality and those that Derrida analyzes, however, is that the proletariat is characterized not by incessant apparitions, hauntings, and so on, but rather, by an incessant failure to appear, an inapparation and absence. Unlike other ghosts, the proletariat haunts us by not appearing, not returning, despite our expectations and longing.

It is this spectral absence that is attested to in the whole symptomatology of failed revolutionary attempts and experiments. My point is that the proletariat is the name (or, to borrow a locution from Brassier or Laurelle, the non-conceptual symbol) of that which must remain inexistent, absolutely absented from the capitalist world. Inexistence here does not simply mean not existing as opposed to existing, but rather, something that neither exists nor doesn't exist for capitalism, something that cannot even enter the capitalist frame, something irreparably foreclosed to capital. Because existence or non-existence depends upon determination within a world, and the inexistent can never enter into such a world but is always rejected, left out and dispossessed, inexistence then characterizes something utterly indifferent to existence or non-existence, to any determination of existence.

The proletariat is then a peculiar kind of spectrality, that of the ancestral. (I started using this locution before reading Meillassoux, as a reference to the oppressed class of history in Benjamin's theses. Now that I have read After Finitude, my version of this concept has significantly deepened, and I have been working on a critical assessment of his work on the basis of what I'm doing here. So this is the first intersection between hauntology and specualtive realism.) The ancestral as I define it is that which is absolutely anterior to a world, that which must have been left out of a world so that it could have been, something that absolutely must not be (or moreover, that absolutely must not not-be either). The proletariat, as the revolutionary subject position generated by the very antagonistic structure of capitalism, must have been necessarily left out, a-voided, neutralized from the outset. So the question of contemporary Marxism is not, why did the revolution fail to happen, why did the proletariat act against its class interests?; the starting point must be the assertion that the proletariat does not exist.

In other words, the proletariat as ancestral is that which is necessarily foreclosed to capital; capital and its world only exist insofar as the proletariat is absolutely absented. [Here, the concept of foreclosure points toward another interesting intersection, between Laurelle's non-philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The crucial question is that of Lacan's later usage of this term, as it differs from his early work on psychosis, and primarily of the primordial foreclosure constitutive of the symbolic. As I understand it, if psychosis results when something foreclosed from the symbolic returns in the real, the ancestral involves something foreclosed from the real returning in the symbolic, as a non-conceptual symbol or non-signifier.] This brings up the matter of xenoeconomics: my point is that the non-correlational, non-decisional essence of capital is none other than the proletariat qua foreclosed ancestrality.

Capital only becomes capital, that is, it only admits the power to create value, once labor-power has been completely absented and dispossessed, that is, once it 'never existed in the first place', at least not as the original creative capacity to endow things with value. Labor-power is, for capitalism, only capable of investing objects with value insofar as capital first invests labor with this power, rather than the converse. By identifying the speculative Real of capital with the foreclosed proletariat, we are not secretly re-humanizing capital, because the proletariat is the complete loss of man, as Marx famously says. (This is not coincidently the title of my thesis.)

The political problem that arises from this is not one of reclaiming the power to create value from capital, or of becoming or reanimating or avenging the proletariat. It is a matter of redemption, which involves naming the proletariat as irreparably foreclosed to us. It is a matter of enacting the incompletion of capital by forcing into its texture the non-signifier of its foreclosed Real. Or, to be more concrete, it means organizing and reorganizing on the basis of a new social bond, or a shift within the existing social bond. If the capitalist social bond involves the already-accomplished foreclosure of the proletariat, then the bond I am describing simply means taking responsibility for this foreclosure, naming it rather than allowing it to go unspoken. The consequences, and concrete implementation, of this shift are precisely what I am trying to develop by way of a systematic explication of schizoanalytic practice.

So this is where I stand: xenoeconomics cannot do without a hauntology of the ancestral, a rigorous explication of the foreclosed Real of capital, which is to say, a forcing into existence of the inexistence of the proletariat. Perhaps this can lend a new ring to Marx's great task of the Communist party: to organize the proletariat as a class...To make a class of the non-class, so as to undermine class itself.

Economic Alien(ation)

With all of the philo-gossip about the crisis, the revenge of Marx, the relation between crisis and political transformation, blah blah blah, I think the most thrilling echo I've heard came by way of Mark at k-punk, in his post "Nihilism without Negativity". That post led me to discover two blogs that seem quite exciting, Splintering Bone Ashes and No Useless Leniency, who have set us all up for a new cold war: no longer Soviet Communism vs Liberal Capitalism, we now have Hauntological Eventalism vs Accelerationist Xenoeconomics.

[To clarify, SBA opposes what he understands as hauntology with two positive options, either accelerationism or Badiou-style eventalism. I think there are compelling reasons to see the latter as far more in line with hauntology, however, if we understand the absently insisting object of hauntology (as Mark so eloquently put it) as closely related to the void of the situation, that which is included without belonging, an invisible part which exists only as absented from representation. This is obviously a speculative identity and needs more support, which I won't provide now but will attempt in a following post.]

I'm being cute, but I don't think it's far-fetched to say there is far more at stake here, theoretically, than there ever was in the Cold War, and not only because it involves an absolute radicalization of the two positions. Of course, this isn't really a debate, we don't even really know yet what xenoeconomics involves, or what hauntology will be once liberated from Derrida's sleight-of-hand conservativism, nor have we seen the possible consequences of a contemporary, post-Soviet Event, or an absolute acceleration of capitalism. We don't really know what is at stake. Yet imagine my surprise, in discovering that my recent posts on the crisis have advocated accelerationist thought experiments, and even a kind of hauntological-xenoeconomic hybrid, whose roots are in my thesis (soon to come).

An upcoming post on spectrality and speculation should clarify these matters to some extent, at least on my part. To offer a brief, very brief idea, I believe the alien, radically non-decisional element of capitalism, which is at the heart its power to create value, must be tied to the concept of the ancestral as I've been developing it (the ancestral as I conceive it is related to, but distinct, from Meillassoux's ancestral, and is indebted to Agamben's operational time, Benjamin's concept of history, Derrida's spectrality, Santner's creaturely life, and foreclosure in both Lacan and Laurelle).

We can divide capital into 1) invested capital, and the returns it procures in the form of surplus value, a value created in excess of the value invested - this is capital as such, capital that becomes capital in acquiring a return in excess of investment; and 2) uninvested, liquid capital, capital with the potential to create value and add it to itself, in other words, capital that does not yet exist as capital, but that is nonetheless the potential for capital to exist - capital itself, in itself but not yet for itself. (I recall a discussion of this in Anti-Oedipus that went over my head at the time. May be time to return there.) Yet these two moments of capital are posited as mutually implicated and reciprocally presupposed, that is, you do not have one without the other. Obviously, you do not get a return of surplus value without the initial investment, you do not get the for-itself without the in-itself. But moreover, the liquid or virtual capital doesn't come from nowhere, and its accumulation presupposes an already-appropriated surplus.

What SBA seems to be proposing with xenoeconomics is an approach to capital itself as radically foreclosed to this implication, completely divested of any relation to actual investment - a propriety-without-appropriation, or surplus-without-investment. Capital itself, in this sense, is no longer simply presupposed by the creation of value, as the potential to do so, but rather is radically indifferent to instances of investment or to actual creation of value. Anyone familiar with non-philosophy will get the gist of what I'm claiming here. And wouldn't the non-conceptual symbol, enacting the foreclosure of this pure, indifferent creative power, be nothing less than labor-power, and the Stranger-subject who performs this symbolization (cloning) while not pre-existing this operation, be none other than the Proletarian-subject?

The proletariat as revolutionary subject of capital only exists, I claim, by rejecting the wage relation as just compensation, and enacting the foreclosure of that priceless power of labor to actually create (through work) a potential exchange value. Capital, on the contrary, maintains a potential power to create actual exchange value, occasioned by productive labor as its support. Exploitation is that relation of the capitalist dyad whereby the power to create a potential value, labor-power, is wholly assimilated to value qua exchange value, and hence any potential value not homologous to this relation is foreclosed, rejected, unsymbolizable. In this way, not only is the potential value produced by labor only actualized through exchange, but this potential is only granted to labor by investment in production. Capital simultaneously appropriates and forecloses the creative power of labor.

What is left out of the capitalist dyad, liquid and invested capital, or potential and actual creation of value, is a potential value that is radically indifferent to its form of actualization, and an actual creation radically indifferent to a potential it realizes in its product - the Identity-without-unity and Duality-without-distinction of these. As far as I'm concerned, xenoeconomics must seize upon this foreclosure, this extimate alien at the heart of the capitalist dyad, which is none other than the ex-appropriated labor-power of the Proletarian-subject. (For more on this ex-appropriation, an appropriation that is also a foreclosure of the appropriated, see my discussion of ancestrality and language in this post.)

As I've made clear in my accelerationist thought experiments, pushing capitalism beyond its ultimate limit - capital itself - and hence leading it into auto-disintegration, would either swallow up the state as well and lead to catastrophic social chaos (warlordism, et cetera), or short of this, would force the state to intervene at the level of economic life (as opposed to capitalist life, in Braudel's terms). Now the latter, I propose, could take the form of an investment in the genesis of new forms of collective organization of economic functions, but these are only dreams, fantasies: the state will only reproduce its own social bond (and even the former option would only be a regression to the base level of this bond, i.e. masculine sexuation). If we want to generate a new social bond, we must not wait for the state - this was the failure of Bolshevism, of course - we must do it now, we must act whether the situation is ripe or not, in the spirit of Lenin and Luxemburg. Schizoanalysis, as I understand it, is the practical generation of this new bond.

When Mark proposes that the acceleration of capitalism relies on the state, rather than being inhibited by it and antagonistic to it, he is absolutely right, but this is nonetheless a false problem. It is by virtue of providing an obstacle, an inhibition or prohibition, to accelerating capitalization that the state serves as its condition: the obstacle is at the same time the motor, the prohibited behavior is motivated, egged on, by the prohibition itself. Zizek makes this point again and again, that the dynamics of capitalist production are triggered by the very obstacle that limits them. Without some minimal level of restrictions, limitations, legal and institutional supports, the capitalist dynamic would never get off the ground.

In terms of this crisis, we can say that it is because of the state that acceleration reached such a vertiginous level, a level so great that it began to exceed the supports that allowed it to develop at all, and threatened to undermine its own conditions. Once the acceleration reaches a certain intensity, it becomes unsupportable, falls apart, and must be reconditioned, with a new set of regulations, a new configuration of the market and its politico-legal support. Now that we have reached such a threshold, withdrawal of the state would lead to disintegration immediately, so we don't need to intensify, accelerate, any further. The question of accelerationism is not one of removing the impediment of state regulation and support, so that the dynamics of capitalism can be fully unleashed. It is rather that of a dynamic that only grows in relation to a limit-condition, and that at a certain point undermines its own condition by exceeding its limit, threatening both condition and conditioned in the process. Again, we don't need to accelerate further, we've reached escape velocity, the only question is whether or not the mutually assured destruction of the state and capital is to be abated by a reconditioning of the dynamic and its limit.

So, to return to the question of my last post, what does this mean for those of us on the ground level, trying to enact a new praxical organization and a new social bond? We are at the point of maximum acceleration, or rather, it has just passed, and we are now suspended in a kind of vague, transitional space between reconditioning and collapse. This transition will doubtlessly be navigated by the state and the global finance apparatus, the limits displaced and reestablished, the dynamic recommenced. Yet we are all nonetheless witness to this eerie suspension of the capitalist dyad, in which investment (lending) is overwhelmingly frozen. The possibility this opens for ground level mobilization is significant, though slight: it is the possibility of installing an analytic function that would radicalize this suspension, by forcing into the socio-symbolic texture a potential value indifferent to any realization, a potential that was missed in actuality but nonetheless inheres therein as foreclosed, ancestral, spectral. The flip side of this forcing of a sterile potential is the genesis of an actual praxis or production radically indifferent to any determination by capital, investment or realized surplus.

To bring this out of such a top-heavy theoretical formulation, we can say that the crisis, in suspending the determining power of capital, can open for us all the way to a radically heterogeneous kind of solidarity or social bond. The basis of this bond is that, in admitting that capital determines value, we must have given up, before we were aware of doing so, on that power: we lost our relation to a value that has no relation to determination. In more concrete terms, every one of us, no matter what class or social standing, is only where she is, only enjoys the privileges she does, only has the chance to live, because of the sacrifices and struggles of our ancestors, who gave up everything so that we might inherit the world. This is not to say that every predecessor sacrificed for us, but that we all bear the mark of some sacrifice that was made on our behalf, and this is what I call the ancestral dimension. If a new social bond is to grow, it must abandon the selfish concern with ourselves and our contemporaries, as well as with our children, who are always our own, and instead seize upon our universally shared indebtedness to our ancestors, to those who wanted us to have a better world, a better life. Or rather, we are not indebted, we are ourselves the debt owed to them, despite their preclusion from any repayment.

This is all very rough at this point, but the gist of my claim is that this crisis can provide us with many opportunities to raise questions with the social bond of capitalism, which is basically the obliteration of the ancestral dimension. It is by intervening in such instances of suspension or deactivation of master-signifiers that schizoanalysis can enact their conversion into non-signifiers, which can then become the raw materials of analytic machines. An analytic machine is a collective arrangement within an existing institution or social body that reorients the latter's praxis on the basis of a continuous experimentation with organizational programs, materials, and productions. To be clear, I am not saying that capitalism is one such master-signifier that has now encountered a crisis by way of which we might appropriate it. My point is that the social bond of capital is instituted by master-signifiers, and that a crisis in capitalism will inevitably amount to a crisis in the stability of this social bond.

This is not to say that schizoanalysis can only operate in the wake of such global crises; a general crisis such as this one is only an example, and in fact, capital is constantly generating crises, every single day, although they are typically more local and specific. From crises in the personal finances of a family, to the potential failure of a business, the loss of jobs from a community due to outsourcing, the constant threat of nihilistic depression and detachment... Master-signifiers are constantly being threatened by the very order they instate and condition. The strategic question, then, is where to intervene, and how to develop the practical application of conversion, production and circulation of non-signifiers, installation and engineering of analytic machines, and so on.

In short, so long as the principle focus of xenoeconomics is on the global relation between capitalism and states, and not on concrete social arrangements, organizations, institutions, it will never amount to more than sterile theoretical speculation. Schizoanalysis seizes on the concrete questions raised by xenoeconomics - those of the relation between the social bond of capital and the necessary foreclosure of the ancestral - and incorporates them into a practical engagement with such arrangements, aiming at the genesis of new organizations of production and enunciation that enact a new social bond.

~

Finally, I want to thank Nicole at Rough Theory for her kind mention and recommendation of my blog. The thoughts I've been working on recently, including my thesis, are very much indebted to her fantastic reading of Marx, as well as her brilliant critique of Derrida's Specters of Marx. My work would not be the same without her inspiration and influence, and so it is quite an honor to have her support.

Bartleby on Main Street (Schizoanalysis 2)

How does this economic crisis, and crises more generally, relate to emancipatory change? There is a small contention concerning whether crisis can lead to a 'lack of faith' in capitalism, up to the point of breeding antipathy and discontent great enough to motivate opposition to it. The argument is that, following Marx, crisis is a structural function of capitalism, and in no way undermines it, rather constituting a crucial moment of its reproduction. Moreover, because crisis plunges the masses into despair and fear, they are less likely to question established values than to seek protection and stability from those in power. Following from this, we would be more likely to see oppositional sentiments grow in times of abundance and growth than times of crisis. Mark at k-punk summarizes this contention nicely here.

I think both positions are right, but for the wrong reasons. Periods of affluence certainly do breed oppositional sentiments - with the catch being that these sentiments are ultimately nothing more than that, impotent gestures of rejection without a concrete program. Even where we do see real, positive action taken on their behalf, and I refer here to the countless activist groups and movements that have been booming since, well, at least the mid-90's or so, culminating in events like Seattle or the anti-war protests that lead up to the invasion of Iraq, this action does not lead to a significant disruption of the operations of capital or the state. No governments fell (except, of course, Iraq), no significant restrictions or regulations were placed on capital, no new liberated territories were formed. What you get is Bush looking at the protesters and saying 'Someday, because of our invasion, the Iraqi people will be able to protest like that also!'

And as for the other position, periods of crisis do announce a significant threat to capital, but this threat is not the external one of a revolution or rejection of capitalism. The threat is the one capital itself poses to its own economic structure. This is not to say that the crisis itself threatens capitalism, but that it reveals the manner in which capital threatens itself. We can ask a very simple, empirical question: if the state did not intervene in this crisis, what would have happened? The total implosion of financial capital, and with it, a shockwave undermining capital invested in production and service as well. So if we did demand a pure capitalism, one in which the market was allowed to work out these problems itself, it would amount to a near-total devastation of existing capital, with defaults on debt leading to a massive implosion of existing wealth. But we cannot imagine a capitalism that did not require a minimal level of state intervention in the economy - property law, corporate law, bankruptcy law, state-backed currency... If we did demand a market with pure conditions, lacking any interference from the state, capital would collapse on itself (and so would the state, lacking some alternative economic program).

In these situations, when we are posed the alternative of 'le pere or le pire', the father or worse, the state or an uncontainable meltdown, we should chose the latter. The conditions in which capital can exist run counter to 'pure' capitalism, and hence the existence of capital is the ultimate limit to capitalism, as the famous formula goes. What the real 'anti-capitalist' should do is not demand some alternative socialist system, or create a space outside of capital, or otherwise reject capitalism outright: she should demand pure capitalism to be implemented directly, as this would deprive it of the existence of capital, and hence lead it to undermine itself, to pull the carpet from under its own feet, in a strange inversion of Baron Munchausen.

I want to distinguish this position from that of the Chinese government's version of Marxism, which claims that the complete development of the capitalist mode of production must precede any utopian dreams of post-capitalist reality. This position takes Menshevik gradualism to an absurd extreme, claiming that in order to be a Marxist, we must advocate for capitalism's development. First of all, Chinese capitalism relies on an extreme level of state intervention, whereas I am claiming we should argue for total deregulation, a total lack of intervention, that we should deprive capital of every state support. Moreover, whereas the Chinese government says we need to gradually develop the capitalist mode of production, I am making the 'Leninist' demand that we must have pure capitalism now, whether the conditions are ripe or not. We must implement pure, 'abstract' capitalism regardless of the 'stage of development' at which we are.

Finally, I want to again discuss what a 'Bartleby politics' might look like, as regards this case of crisis. 'Doing nothing' here cannot mean simply not responding to the crisis, acting as if nothing was happening. Rather, for the state to do nothing, it must abandon every form of support and regulation, it must refuse to intervene to any extent, and this includes ceasing to provide any structural support to the capitalist economy: property law, bankruptcy protection, subsidies and tax-breaks, everything must go. Now, this is clearly a dream, there are basically no conditions under which the State would adopt such a program, not only because of the influence of capital on policy, but moreover because this would like lead to a catastrophe for the population in the form of unemployment, homelessness, poverty, and so on. But we can draw an insight from this self-destructive character of capitalism, and the preventative role played by the state. Ultimately, Marx was not naive to claim that the force capable of overcoming capitalism would develop directly out of capitalism: this force is capitalism itself, which seems to strive for the liquidation of its own support, that is, accumulated capital.

Okay, but this is a dream. What would Bartleby politics look like for us, here on the ground level of the economy? Nicole at Rough Theory weighs in on the debate concerning crisis and change, and her response is quite instructive for our problem. She reminds us that the crisis and contradictions generated by capitalism are, for Marx, not necessarily elements of its collapse or overcoming, but rather, only part of the reproduction of capital. The question of emancipatory change, which for her is bound to the standpoint of critique, the genesis of a position capable of really breaking with the logic of capital, cannot be posed abstractly; it is not a question of 'is this the right time?' or 'what kind of conditions does it require?'. It is a practical question of bringing about such positions through the reconfiguration of the 'materials' of social being - the 'social but non-intersubjective element' that she has previously discussed, which I would not hesitate to identify with the Symbolic order itself, or rather, the way subjects are bound up in it through organizations of jouissance. By intervening directly in the organization of collective praxis, which is to say, arrangements of enunciation and production, we can engender such a critical standpoint.

Or maybe I can put this another way. It is not that we must figure out some more radical form of organization, so as to bring about a break with capitalism. The question is how to organize collectively in line with a break that is already structurally presupposed in capitalism (the proletariat position), but that is at the same time rejected from assumption or possession, that is dis-inherited or foreclosed. It is not a question of bringing about a critical standpoint, but of enacting the necessary exclusion of its possibility, through the circulation of praxicals (indices of collective praxes, constellations of discursive and productive arrangements) that do not point toward capital as a pure possession of productivity, as the fullness of the yield of production. This latter notion is probably quite enigmatic at the moment, but it is what I am attempting to develop in my thesis (which is complete and will be posted here soon), and in my preliminary formulations of a practical model of schizoanalysis, which is, for me, a collective reorganization of the social/non-intersubjective materials of symbolic structures and relations of production. I will begin laying out a basic methodological elaboration of this model in following posts.

A top-down version of Bartleby politics, in which the state would abandon capital to capitalism, is clearly not only dramatically unlikely, but also probably not preferable for most workers. Even if such a politics did lead to a massive investment in the reorganization of economic life, it is expecting too much of the state. We will likely end up with some version of neo-Keynesianism, aimed at developing a set of regulations adequate to the contemporary excesses of financial capital. Yet as I said, we can learn something from such a thought experiment. What kind of investment would be required of the state to reorganize economic life in such a manner that avoided the reemergence or perseverance of capital? It would have to take the form of a radically different organization of production, productive relations and forces, that, in the absence of accumulated capital, would have to rely on the collective organization of workers themselves. It is this kind 'radical reorganization of production', such that the surplus is reinvested in and by a new social bond amongst (non-)workers, that would be necessary.

In a state-centered version of this story, we could quite easily imagine state funds, on the level of the recent bailout plan, being directed toward agricultural-, production-, and service-sector corporations that would inevitably crumble under the weight of a failed financial sector. This could either aim to rebuild and stabilize failing corporations, which would likely be next to impossible, or could invest in the appropriation of the business by employees now abandoned by investment and credit, with an eye toward a new kind of collective organization. Once such collective appropriations of businesses became profitable, they could buyout the state investment and begin from there. Although this version is only a dream, we can nonetheless imagine such a collective model emerging from the bottom up (and indeed, there are a great number of collective business models, in theory and practice, throughout the economy). Richard Wolff, with whom I had the pleasure of taking a course last year, presents a variation on such a model of reorganization on the basis of collective ownership by workers.



[I'm focusing here on the last ten minutes or so of Wolff's lecture.] Now I take issue with Wolff's proposal on many accounts, but here I want to focus on his claim that collectivization of enterprises amounts to their 'democratization', and that economic democracy must serve as the real substrate of any legitimate political democracy. The simplest way to explain this problem is that democracy, as a social bond, essentially maintains the very elements that make workers susceptible to exploitation. Here is a provisional list of such elements:

1) The gap between articulated positions and actualized policies, which always maintains the primacy of a majority or consensus over deviations, oppressed or dissenting positions. This gap is moreover a symptom of the necessary distance between all actually articulated positions, actual or potential, and the necessarily rejected or foreclosed position that is 'undemocratic' and hence incompatible, namely, the position of those who do not exist (yet, or anymore, or even those who do actually exist, but that are not accounted for, that do not 'belong' to the set).

2) The basic formal function of democracy is to reduce all members to abstract equivalents, 'votes'. This is true of everything from parliamentary democracy to 'authentic' direct democracy - we must be seen as equal in the eyes of the group (demos). Now besides the obvious technical problems with every form of voting, and the question of merit or weight of particular votes, both of which can to some degree be addressed, this nonetheless misses the crucial dimension of subjectivity, what I've been calling the ancestral dimension: the subject is not (only) a unified element that can be counted and equivocated in a set, but is moreover the symptomal expression of that which can not, and must not, be counted, registered, or legitimated in a set or group, in other words, that which had to not be so that the group could constitute itself.

3) Democracy, even in its most radical form (Laclau and Mouffe), relies upon the hegemonic articulation of a Master-signifier that stands for the inadequacy or incompletion of the existing bond, whether this consists in a fantasmatic assumption of some lost or possible fullness or completeness of the socius, or post-fantasmatic cyncism. It cannot break with the Master-signifier, with the masculine logic of exception, and it cannot reach the level of drive, in which the signifier that acts as social bond would directly enact the loss of such a completion, indeed, in which the social bond would directly be the loss of such a completion.

I could go on, I could clarify these points in less obscure terms, go into greater specificity, et cetera, but this account should be sufficient at the moment. What I am proposing is that the possibility of a new collective praxis, a new organization of productive and enuniciative relations, cannot rely on the existing symbolic configurations, the existing economy of asubjective-social materials. It must generate a new social bond through a reorgnization of this economy, or rather, of the relation between collective jouissance and its symbolic support/impediment.

This is more than a matter of figuring out a new way of socializing - it is a matter of rescuing from obscurity that necessarily missed potential of a different bond with others, and making this foreclosure itself the realization of the foreclosed. I understand this to be the objective of schizoanalysis. So such a practice should endeavor to develop a new collective organization of praxis, discursive and material production, that enacts this break that is simultaneously a bond, a pact or promise. Schizoanalysis is a method and science of reorganizing society, abandoned by capital (but aren't the workers always already abandoned by capital?), on the basis of a radical collective praxis, a collectivized production of existence.

So Bartleby politics, in 'doing nothing', forcing into the symbolic texture the intolerable void of the situation, cannot rely on the social bond of democracy. It must make this void, this nothingness, into the social bond itself, and this is precisely what schizoanalysis does, as I conceive it. It is not a matter of inaction, but of acting in a manner that capital cannot register, a manner that enacts a dimension foreclosed to capital from the outset. Any collective organization that seeks to overcome capital, in the wake of this startling crisis, must begin by thinking carefully about the nature of its social bond. To 'do nothing' for capital, we must become nothing to capital.