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.