Planomenology

Abandon Blog!

2009-01-22T19:21:00.004-05:00

This will be my last post at the Blogspot address. I'm moving Planomenology over to Wordpress for a variety of reasons, so you can find me there, complete with my first post on the new site, "Cloning Levi".

I've also added a great deal of additional goodies, besides retaining the posts from this site that don't embarrass me, so poke around. Most of the new pages are under construction, but you'll get the idea.

See you on the other side!

Object-ions: Cutting the Cord

2009-01-11T12:02:00.010-05:00

Between Levi Bryant's fascinating posts on what he call's "The Ontic Principle", and Graham Harman's new blog "Object-Oriented Philosophy", I've found myself mulling over some objections. Now, I'm not yet familiar enough with either Harman or Latour, so perhaps these objections have already been anticipated, and if anyone can point me toward the relevant literature I'd appreciate it. But it strikes me that 'object-oriented philosophy' is missing something crucial. I touched upon this a bit in my last post, but there I was more concerned with sketching my own concepts, whereas here I'm a bit more critical.

First of all, while I have some sympathy for the urge to simply forget about correlationsim and pounce on the things themselves, I worry that this may be hasty and somewhat reckless. We can raise here a whole set of problems. Firstly, can we simply forget about Kant, who so famously demonstrated our consignment to the phenomenal world of access, and exlcusion from the in-itself? Secondly, who is to say that 'object' is an appropriate way of speaking about the in-itself? Are not objects the specific way things show up for us? If we subtract ourselves from the equation, what reason do we have to believe that objects will remain as objects?

Again, I'm not familiar enough with Harman to know how he would respond, but I am a bit confused by Levi's willingness to embrace objects as the form of the in-itself. This confusion stems from the high regard I have for his fantastic book on Deleuze, which, among other things, critiques any approach to the given that takes it as it is, rather than accounting for the genesis of that given. It seems to me that, from this position, we should arrive not at an object oriented philosophy any more than a subject oriented philosophy, but rather, at a genesis oriented philosophy, aiming to account for the givenness of the in-itself as objectal and accessible or inaccessible.

Now, Levi does lean in this direction with his explicit formulations, but I don't think he's yet made it altogther clear where he stands. For example, his ontic principle claims that "there is no difference that does not make a difference". He explicates this in conversation with Harman by saying that the object is the difference it produces in relation with objects, and moreover, that this differenciation is inexhaustible, the very inexhaustable being of the object in-itself. The object is nothing more than its potential to produce difference, its virtual power to differenciate. Harman, however, responds by claiming that there would still be something of the object even if it produced no difference, even if it was entirely without relation.

It is still unclear whether Levi thinks there is no object apart from its relations, that it is retroactively produced by its differenciation, or whether there is some substantial being of difference behind it; he has said of the virtual that it is nothing but relations amongst actualities, so the latter option seems unlikely. The option I assume he'd vie for, given his definition of the object as act-uality, is that the object is the difference produced in the wake of an event (in Deleuze's sense), and that this event is the only 'substantial' thing there (although substantial is the wrong term).

This ambiguity is clear in the very formulation of the ontic principle: there is no difference that does not make a difference. This is a negative existential statement, making a definite claim about what does not exist. So, what does exist would have to meet the following criteria: if it is a difference, it would have to make a difference. How do we read this? On the one hand, it could mean that a difference always produces another difference, and difference itself minimally occurs between two differences (this is not to be read as external or empirical difference, but the between of a mutual production, as the space between two connected singularities). On the other hand, it could mean that a difference, as a difference, produces itself as a difference. To be clear, this would mean that something different, by virtue of being different, produces the very difference that defines it as a being. In other words, the object-difference produces itself not only as a specific difference in relations with other objects, but, qua difference, as an existing object.

Both readings seem close to Levi's explication, but both have problems. With the first, we have the problem of an ulterior condition: if an object-difference, i.e. an existing being, by virtue of existing, produces other differences, which, again, by virtue of existing, produce other differences, we seem to be dangerously close to lapsing into the kind of transitive causality that Levi's Spinozism should avoid. If we are to avoid it, we must refer to an ulterior condition or immanent causality by which a difference produces itself as difference. Yet this would mean that, in producing itself, the ulterior condition is one of identity, in which the difference makes a non-difference, produces what already is - itself qua object-difference. Now I think these problems can be countered by reference to Deleuze's model of repetition and identity qua product, but this leads us to the second problem.

The second reading seems to refer to such an ulterior condition in which a difference is its own immanent cause, producing itself as an identity, as an identifiable object(-difference). Yet here we have the problem of treating a difference as object - the object-difference must preexist itself in some fashion, it must produce itself, which means it must exist before it exists. On the one hand, the difference must already be there to produce itself as object-difference. On the other hand, the object-difference must retroactively posit itself as its own cause, there at its own birth, so to speak. This temporal paradox will lead us back to a kind of transitive causation, unless we can provide a non-chronological account of production, an immanent production that occurs in being. Here, again, I think Deleuze can help answer these problems with his account of static genesis, and Levi surely knows this if anyone does.

Yet there is a third reading of the ontic principle that could undermine the apparent consistency of the Deleuzian approach, and I believe it is a reading that would fit Harman's own variant of object-orientation. If there does not exist a difference that does not make a difference, that nonetheless means that there could exist a non-difference that does not make a difference. Levi's ontic principle says nothing about the non-existence of non-differences (and here I suspend the strict identification of non-difference and identity). If Levi is attempting to provide a robust, and parsimonius, theory of object-differences, he nonetheless opens the gateway for a different kind of ontic being, an indifferent-object, and object that does not have any impact on other objects, about which we can say that 'it makes no difference whether or not it exists'. For Harman, I think, objects possess a kind of subterranean indifferent-objectality, a being to which other beings are indifferent, regardless of what kind of difference they may or may not make as object-differences.

If an indifferent-object does exist, we apparently have no way of knowing it - or, to generalize this statement for non-subject objects, objects are generally indifferent to the existence of indifferent-objects, which have no impact upon them. So we can really say nothing about indifferent-objects, except that we cannot say whether or not they exist. As far as I know, from the little I've gleaned thus far, Harman does want to claim not only that indifferent-objects exist, but that they are substantial and qualitatively unique. Levi, on the other hand, despite the ambiguity of his formulation, seems quite antithetical to the idea of indifferent-objects. I don't yet know how Harman justifies these claims, if they do accurately capture his position; but I also don't really know how Levi justifies his opposition, and I'm unclear as to how Deleuze's metaphysics leads to the conclusion of the non-existence of indifferent-objects. At best, it seems to me that both Levi and Deleuze would have to leave the question open and unanswerable, perhaps a poorly-stated problem. If so, maybe the ontic principle is itself poorly stated.

In any case, I have a theory regarding all this. Let's take it step by step. In my (potentially straw-man) description of Harman, we have a twofold structure of the object: there is the object-difference, as the difference produced between an object and other objects; and there is the indifferent-object, its subterranean, non-relational inner-being, the in-itself of the object. While this inner-being is indifferent from the perspective of other objects, it is nonetheless a substantial and fully existing sub-stratum.

In an explicitly structuralist variation of Levi's position, the object is nothing but the first level, the object-difference, and in-itself is the pure void of its place of inscription. The object does not exist apart from its differential relations with other objects, but we can nonetheless subtract the totality of these differences, and leave ourselves with a void place. This is also a somewhat Hegelian position, in that 'there is nothing behind the veil but what we put there'.

My position would be this, and it is still kind of sketchy, so bear with me: the in-itself of the object-difference, as that level of indifferent-objectality about whose existence we can only speculate, unable to decide one way or another, is precisely the negative mark left on the thing by its own genesis. It is the 'navel' of the thing (and we can take this in Freud's sense of the 'navel' of a dream-work). If I may refer to my last post, this indifference is precisely that of something that had to necessarily be so that the object-difference could contingently come-into-being, but that in no way necessitated that contingent outcome. And moreover, this mark is that of the lost contingency foreclosed by the necessary anterior condition. The indifferent-object is nothing less than the ancestral inexistence, that which could not have been so that what is could have been. The ancestral meets all the criteria of the indifferent-object: it does not make a difference, does not relate to or affect anything; and we can not decide on whether it it exists or non-exists, it is excluded from this very dyad. (Are my Laurellian leanings showing here?)

To conclude, I think any object-oriented philosophy must take into account the genesis of objects, which in turn refers to the paradoxical status of something that neither exists nor does not exist, but rather, is foreclosed by the ontic realm of actual objects.

Speculative Unrealism

2009-01-07T20:13:00.012-05:00

The basic commonality that allows us to group such disparate lines of thought under the name of Speculative Realism is the assertion that, in short, there in fact exists something apart from our subjective access to its existence. As Graham Harman puts it, the move here is from subject-oriented philosophy toward an object-oriented philosophy. While there are likely very few philosophers who would openly identify with the term 'anti-realism' (a pejorative label primarily used by Analytic philosophers to describe their Continental counterparts), the fact is that philosophy has been generally enamored of our relationship to existence, caring little, if at all, about that which exists - and, at the limit, denying any such externality (anti-realism proper, what Meillassoux calls 'strong correlationism'). If there is a real shift going on, it is that of a speculative leap into the outside.

I want to make two points. First of all, I think there is a sense in which the new realism should learn from strong anti-realism's denial of a world outside the subject, or to be more precise, the subject's access to an outside (language). We of course must be wary of the implicit or explicit solipsism of language, if for no other reason, because it betrays a startling political attitude of indifference towards that which is invisible or unknown (or better, whose invisibility is invisible, or whose unknownness is unknown). Yet there is nonetheless a lesson here, one which only comes once we 'take the leap'. While we shouldn't privilege mediation to the detriment of the mediated-immediate, we should nonetheless not ignore the mediation altogether. Rather, the mediation we call subjectivity - our knowledge of, relations with, and actions upon objects - should rather be treated as itself an object, imbricated in the network of objects we call world. The subject, or subjectivity, is itself an object, on the same level as objects, and objectivity should be said univocally of subject and object. The subject is a subject-object. (This is obviously close to the neuro-philosophical position, but I'm not prepared to go any further in describing this relation.)

Second, besides the speculative shift towards object-orientation, there is nonetheless something 'unreal' and non-objectal that must not be neglected. There is a sense in which existing objects, and objectality in general (here including subject-objectality), always bear the mark of that which does not exist. Or rather, reality in general, including both existing objects and non-existing objects (fictions, illusions, potential objects, et cetera), bears with it a certain mark of the unreal, unrealizable. That which could not have existed. The unreal, as I refer to it, is the ancestral. And to specify where precisely my concept of ancestrality departs from Meillassoux, he uses the term to refer to that which is absolutely outside subjective-mediation - facts that are anterior to any access. Yet, if we are to apply his criterion of absolute contingency here, we come upon a strange temporal paradox - while for Meillassoux, everything that exists is necessarily contingent, ancestral facts are, qua ancestral, not contingent, they could not have been otherwise, they must be what they were.

There is, in short, a necessary existence: the past was necessarily what it was, even if it could have been otherwise at the time. The being-otherwise of the past is necessarily foreclosed, left out of reality. In other words, the contingency of the present is grounded upon the necessity of the past - the past in its becoming could have been otherwise, but as past, it can no longer be otherwise. Ancestrality, as I understand it, refers less to anterior - or exterior - facts than to the necessarily lost contingency they bear. It is the unreality of anterior contingency that is, for me, the crucial dimension of ancestrality, and indeed, objectality in general. Each object may be contingent, but with regards to its genesis, the past it carries with it, it bears the lost contingency of that past. While its own past could have been otherwise, it in fact could not have been otherwise so long as that object could be.

So, if we are to take the speculative leap, we must bear in mind the implications of the unreal, unrealized, and indeed lost contingency of what could not have been, so that what is can in fact be. Speculative Realism must also be a Speculative Unrealism.

Mladen Dolar on Psychoanalysis and Politics

2008-12-22T15:08:00.008-05:00

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

2008-12-20T00:13:00.004-05:00

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

2008-12-16T01:46:00.005-05:00

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

2008-12-03T14:59:00.011-05:00

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

2008-11-22T14:06:00.004-05:00

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!"

2008-11-14T23:03:00.012-05:00

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

2008-11-14T01:42:00.000-05:00

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

2008-11-03T06:10:00.008-05:00

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

2008-10-27T11:55:00.010-05:00

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)

2008-10-20T12:11:00.013-05:00

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)

2008-10-14T11:58:00.014-05:00

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.

Can We Go Forward If We Fear To Advance Toward Capitalism?

2008-10-10T15:14:00.007-05:00

During the second presidential debate, on October 7, 2008, there was a point where Tom Brokaw asked both candidates whether they thought the economy was going to get worse before it got better. Each responded by essentially saying that no, things would not get worse, so long as he was elected president. They both lacked the courage to say what we all needed to hear: yes, things are going to get worse. A lot worse. I say this not only because of the clear pragmatic value of such a statement, in that things likely will get worse, and in promising the contrary, whoever is elected will be set up for a harsh backlash.

Why do I say we need to hear that things will get worse? Because, so long as we imagine everything will be fine, that no matter how bad it gets everything will ultimately stay the same, we will miss the great opportunity we are facing. The political question this crisis should be begging, and that may still find articulation in the weeks and months to come, is whether the very standard by which we can recognize better and worse, beneficial and harmful, status quo and crisis, should be replaced. Perhaps it is the standard itself, and not this situation to which we apply it, that is the true catastrophe. I am tempted to recall the Joker's quasi-Benjaminian rant from The Dark Knight:

I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drops of gas and a couple bullets. You know what, you know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that like a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because that’s all part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everybody loses their minds!

The point is not that this crisis is some karmic restoration of balance, repaying capitalism for its wild excesses, giving the reckless speculators 'what they deserved'. There is no homeostatic balance that speculators violated; rather, capitalism was always excessive, it was spiraling out of control from the beginning, even when things seemed their most normal and stable. And when this excessiveness is registered in such crises, there is no balanced leveling of punishments. No, we will all suffer, we will all go down with it, explicitly guilty or ostensibly innocent. We were all complicit with the plan from the beginning, and this crisis is only the fulfillment of that plan.

What we are lacking now is not the expertise necessary to 'fix the plan', to get us back on track, curbing the excesses and preventing catastrophe. What we lack is the courage to follow this plan to the bitter end, to accept that there is no going back, there is no other way, and that all we can do is live with the consequences. Every 'political' measure to fix the crisis, to rescue the economy and restore the run of things, as far as possible, to the way it was - this is cowardice, in that it refuses to follow the plan to the end and own up to its consequences. To paraphrase the Joker: If tomorrow I tell the press that like a factory will be closed, or the workforce of a small town will be laid off, nobody panics, because that’s all part of the plan. But when I say that one little old bank will collapse, well then everybody loses their minds! This whole mindset, seized by utter fear and panic, is the result of the refusal to accept that this was the plan all along, that a deregulated economy would inevitably lead to monstrous excesses, whose unsustainability would eventually catch up with it and destroy those coroporate entities that had grown too fat and careless, making way for a new breed of organization and a new mode of economy.

Of course it is easy to be a capitalist when the economy is booming, when we are prospering and happy. What takes courage is adhering to capitalism when the crisis comes. We must stand up and say Yes, this was bound to happen, and now we must see it through to the end. Many of those who oppose the bailout plan claim that we should just let the market correct itself, wiping away those banks and institutions that can no longer support themselves, and why not, even the very mode of exchange that allowed such institutions to exist and grow. The ethical dilemma here is that it is not enough to see the greedy speculators punished, because if Wall Street falls, so will we all. Yet perhaps this is what we must accept, this is the real ethical position: it is not that 'the ingenuity and strength of the American workforce will see us through it', because the result will be the dissolution of much of what remains of this workforce; without capital, there is no worker, because no one will employ him as such.

It is here, in such a collapse of the economic infrastructure, that we have the opportunity for a new solidarity to take root, a solidarity on the basis of utter abandonment to that no-man's-land of capitalism sans capital. We must reject all compromise that would attempt to restore or rescue the last vestiges of this system, and insodoing, refuse to maintain those compromises that have held us together thus far. If it is funamentally contradictory to promote the free market, and at the same time to allow the goverment to prop up industrial agriculture through massive subsidies, and to allow giant corporate entities to evade taxation, and to save a failing banking system with a 'socializing' bailout, then so be it - we must reject all of this. The problem is not that we have not been truly capitalist, not capitalist enough, but that capitalism by definition constantly averts its own intrinsic tendency toward self-destruction. And so a 'true capitalism' would amount to the end of capitalism.

Here, Slavoj Zizek's infamous call to fully identify with the symbolic mandate, to reject the cynical/ironic distance that has passed for resistance thus far, gains a new meaning. We shouldn't any longer try to resist capitalism, or try to live outside of capitalism, to show that 'another world is possible'. Capitalism has only been able to sustain itself thus far by always resisting itself, by cyncially applying a double standard to the developed and underdeveloped world, to capital and workers. We shouldn't try to restrict the free flow of capital, but claim that real capitalism would grant just as much freedom of movement to workers. We shouldn't strive for the right of greater subsidization and protection for underdeveloped countries, but totally reject the privilege of doing so that developed countries grant themselves. We shouldn't prove we can live comfortably without engaging in capitalism, but accept that capitalism works by 'refusing to engage in capitalism'. We must no longer deny our thorough complicity with capitalism, and insodoing, deprive capital of its greatest defense mechanism.

Like the Joker says, we should take this plan - capitalism - and turn it on itself. We should follow the plan through to the bitter end. If this leads to massive unemployment, to increasing foreclosures, to an even more immense loss of wealth from retirement savings, to astronomical health care costs, then maybe the bailout should be one focused on investing in the lives of those who, now abandonned by capital, must begin to live outside it. In his recent essay on the crisis, Zizek says,

The real dilemma is not ‘state intervention or not?’ but ‘what kind of state intervention?’ And this is true politics: the struggle to define the conditions that govern our lives. The debate about the bailout deals with decisions about the fundamental features of our social and economic life, even mobilising the ghost of class struggle.

If we were to follow the prescriptions of 'die-hard' capitalists, and let the banks collapse, then this would inevitably leave workers and the so-called middle class in a terrifyingly precarious position. What we should say, with courage, is that we do not need to be rescued from this new position, but that state intervention should aim to allow us to live there, on the periphery, as we begin to rebuild our world anew.

Schizoanalysis 1: Infancy, Ancestrality, and the Non-Signifier

2008-10-03T14:17:00.013-05:00

A child is born into language, and is from the outset a speech-being, a speaking thing. The child is not without language, and does not have to be led to language, taught to acquire language, nor does it have already the innate capacity for language that has only to be activated. The child is already a speaking thing, not by virtue of speaking or being able to speak, but by already being claimed by language and in language, by belonging in language, having a place there for it. The name, but also the very noun - a child, a life - impregnates language with the child, and language will carry it to term, developing it in all of its unique predicability.

The paradox is that the child already belongs to and in language, it is already spoken of and awaited as the absent partner of a conversation. The child does not acquire language, we do not acquire language: language has already acquired us from birth. The trauma of this claim of language on the child is that there is no opportunity, no possibility of the pure incarnation of biological life, an unqualified, bare life; life is qualified from its outset, and biological life is overdetermined from the instant of conception by symbolic life, as its mere occasional cause and support.

Ancestrality, as the dimension of an existence unqualified by givenness in language, unfettered by the trappings of the symbolic, is nonetheless held hostage by its pre-appropriation in language. Yet we can say that the ancestrality of a life is, if not pre-given and auto-donated, certainly taken, taken over by and taken over to language, it is stolen, mis-taken and held inappropriately. It inheres in language as the inappropriate, the inappropriateness of language. Not the inadequateness of a representation to its object, but the fact that language now possesses the ancestral as its property, and yet it is not properly of language, it is wrongly taken by language or taken to be of language.

As a dimension not attributable to a relation to language, but that dimension existing absolutely independently of such relation, radically indifferent to such a relation, foreclosed to language, radically left out of and even inexistent for language, it would seem contradictory to call it a 'property' of language, even if this is an illegitimate propriety, a theft. Yet this means precisely that the foreclosure of the ancestral necessary for langauge nonetheless inheres negatively in language, as a hole in the very fabric of the symbolic (differential relations between signifiers). The ancestral inheres in language, but this inherence must be enacted through the circulation of some non-signifier, a symbol deprived of any possible signfying relation (direction toward a concept - signified - even if it be indeterminate or displaced), purely embodying the hole in this fabric, not only 'standing in for it' but enacting it. The hole is not something that cannot be signified by any signifier, but rather, a signifier that cannot signify anything, nor even appear to signify anything. The non-signifier simply explicates this hole of the foreclosure that is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition of the symbolic, radically psychoticizing the symbolic itself. It is the signifier of the fact that it is not a signifier, a kind of symbolic ouroboros.

The ancestral dimension of life, when seized upon by the symbolic, interpellated by it, decided upon by it, devolves into creaturely life (Santner), that life held in exception in law, subject to the force-of-law but unqualified by law. This is, we might say, the ancestral as such, distinct from the ancestral itself (Brassier, Laurelle). What law/language cannot speak to is the indistinction itself, it cannot think the creature/ancestor without its distinction and separation from the legible/legitimate. In other words, the ancestral itself is posited as unthinkable, only thinkable as such, that is, as distinct from the symbolic. It cannot think the radical expropiation undergone here: the ancestral no longer has a proper owner, being stolen and now owned inappropriately by language. We directly posit this necessary expropriation, this foreclosure of propriety to language. This is not to say that there is a proper being of the ancestral apart from language - this is the very decisional operation of language. Rather, what we are saying is that propriety itself is dependent upon determination by langauge, and at the same time the ancestral is necessarily determined in langauage by expropriation, determined as inappropriate.

This expropriation or foreclosure to language of the ancestral is enacted in language through the circulation of non-signifiers, or a-signifying signs that are not signifiers of a loss, even of something that exists qua signified/signifiable only as lost (the signified lost-object is the ancestral itself, the signifier of loss the ancestral as such); rather, the (non)-signifier is directly the loss itself, it embodies the foreclosure of the ancestral, and the hole this leaves in the symbolic, or rather, it enacts them, it brings them into (linguistic) being. This enacting of foreclosure, refusing to forget/overlook it and retaining it as unforgotten, repeating the founding decision of a linguistic social bond and recovering it from abandonment in an eternal past - this is the elementary task of schizoanalysis as an applied non-philosophy. Schizoanalysis accomplishes this task through the proliferation and circulation of non-signifiers or a-signifying signs.

We should see how, in the infant's appropriation by language, we nonetheless can identify a dimension of ancestral time, the time of an absolute anteriority, a time foreclosed to thought. We can take here as our model what Giorgio Agamben calls, in The Time that Remains, operational time. If we only ever experience time as schematized and organized into a past, present, and future, operational time is precisely the time it takes to apply this schema to intuition and hence experience time as such. Because this time is necessarily anterior to schematic time, it is foreclosed to schematic time, but nonetheless inheres negatively within it. The infant, who exists only as already symbolized, nonetheless is submitted to the operation of symbolization, and hence embodies a residual anteriority to the symbolic schematism. This is not pre-symbolic any more than operational time is pre-temporal. It is rather the symbolic itself as separated-without-separation from the symbolic schematized as such, which is to say, in thought.

Here we have, directly embodied in the infant (though negatively embodied), the ancestral dimension of language - the hieroglyph. This is a sign that acts a cipher, a code, but which obscures not some hidden content, but the very fact that nothing is hidden. It is a cipher of a cipher, a sign that disguises the very fact that it is a sign, or disguises the fact that it says anything (or nothing). This is a ruin of language, an artifact, a language without any connection to its ability to communicate. This hieroglyphic character is the original character of infant-speech, which only secondarily gives way to communication. Rather, the infant says language itself, as a pure impartibility without object. It is this character that we seek to recover through the use of the non-signifier, or the transfiguration of signifiers into non-signifiers.

Immanence 2: Returning Home

2008-08-09T19:14:00.002-05:00

Immanence is what remains in its place, even when what had once occupied that place has departed. It is the remnant of a transcendence. Yet, to be cautious, we must make this relation clear. In a movement of transcendence, that which is in-itself passes beyond itself, steps outside of itself, leaves itself vacated. And yet this outside-itself of the thing does not split it into two different entities, an empty container and an uncontained object, or rather, these two resultant elements are really the same thing, a thing whose paradoxical status makes a unified perspective upon it impossible, thereby necessitating the parallax structure.

In other words, the product of the movement of transcendence is properly a split, a two-fold articulation of things such that it cannot be reconciled. The thing outside-itself is not distinct from the empty itself, the empty place; it is rather the empty place seen from outside, in its opacity - the place is not seen as empty, but its contents cannot be seen; the thing for-us obscures what would be or might be in-itself. Hence, the thing outside-itself is the same as the outside of itself, the place as seen without reference to its occupation. The fact is that the vacuity produced by the moment of transcendence is indifferent to the presence or absence of an occupant or content; it is the vacuity or void of an interior whose interiority is already a primary datum, as that which cannot be seen or cannot be known. This is not simply a negative datum, but is expressed in the positive condition of the thing outside-itself or for us.

The movement of transcendence hence produces the thing as outside-itself along with a collateral negativity that is expressed in the positive, constituted thing. This negativity or 'withdrawal' of the interior is coextensive with the constitution of the thing for-us, or outside itself, and hence the giving of the given cannot itself be given, but is the necessarily opaque interiority that has been left behind, 'transcended'. The question of immanence is, then, whether there is a sense of the interior or the vacant place that does not make reference to the movement that produces it, that does not become a supposition of transcendence, and that is more than the unknowability of the interior from the purview of the outside.

To clarify: the thing outside-itself is constituted in the movement of departing or imparting whereby it leaves the very constituting movement obscured. The movement of constitution is also the movement of rendering this very movement unknowable, in rendering the point of departure unknowable. So the constituting or giving or the thing outside-itself, the movement of transcendence, is itself rendered transcendent in this movement. And yet the constituting movement also, simultaneously, constitutes or gives the interiority of the point of departure, it gives the in-itself as unknowable. The opacity that is thereby generated is thus that of both the movement of transcendence or giving, and of the immanence of the in-itself as such, as interior, given as such.

The point here is that the movement of transcendence essentially distinguishes itself from immanence, in its very giving of the thing outside-itself, its relation to this thing, whereas immanence cannot distinguish itself from this movement, it is constituted as such in this very movement, and is indifferent to any relation with the thing outside-itself aside from being given as without-relation to this thing. (This is close to Michel Henry's notion of immanence.)

Our question now is, in what sense can the thing outside-itself be reconciled with the immanence of itself, without reference to the movement of transcendence that relates them across a non-relation? Is there a sense of this immanence itself, without the givenness of its being as-such? Can you go home again?

The paradox here is that the immanence of the thing itself, the remaining-in of the interiority irrespective of a content, cannot simply be reduced to immanence 'as such', constituted as such in the movement of transcendence. But it can no more be immanence itself, devoid of transcendental determination, as purely given-without-givenness, foreclosed and indifferent to the movement of transcendence. (This is close to Francois Laurelle's notion of immanence.) The reason for this is that immanence already cannot be itself, as it is what remains-in itself and remains in-itself. It is the very impossibility of determining a content - or lack thereof - of this ipseity.

The itself must remain vacant and destitute, not even lacking a content, but indifferent to and independent of any content or lack thereof. There is no immanence 'itself' because immanence is the itself deprived of what is itself. It is a remaining-in or interiority without being-in; it is not given-without-givenness or there-without-disclosure, but is strictly indifferent even to a being-given or being-there. It is this impossibility of reconciling ipseity that immanence names. And the question of returning, or repetition, is not one of rendering the immanence perfectly reverisible or indiscernible with the movement of transcendence, but rather, of passing from a content toward which one's place is purely indifferent, to becoming the vacuous interiority of the place that undermines its ipseity, becoming the not-itself of what one is, in being-therein. Becoming the in-and-not-itself of the place and position one is given and to which one is given.

Immanence 1: Departing, Remaining, and Abandoned Homes

2008-08-08T13:23:00.004-05:00

Immanence: to remain in... Immanence is not and can not be presence, which is simply to be, to be there, to be therein. Im-manence: to remain in, therein, which already refers to contrast with departing, imparting, or parting-with. Immanence remains in, rather than departing, stepping out. And in this sense, immanence already includes something which does or has passed, has departed or left behind its there, its presence. Not absence, not necessarily a being which was and now is not present, but a presence, a therein (a being that is in what it is) that passes outside itself, that is no longer in what it is, but is outside what it is, that is outside itself. Does this mean in another? Or is it already in-nothing, outside of everything, standing at the limit of all inclusion? This is the question of transcendence, of going beyond or stepping out, of leaving, departing, escaping.

Immanence thus cannot do without reference to a movement of transcendence by which something has departed and gone outside itself, leaving that which it was in, that is to say, leaving itself (an in-itself that has left itself, leaving itself empty). Immanence is that which, in regards to this movement of departing, nonetheless remains in. It is what stays behind, is left or abandoned. Yet it is not simply there, simply present. It is only there as left there by something that has gone. And, in leaving itself, the being leaves only an empty therein, wherein nothing remains, an empty itself without that which is itself and is in-itself. So we can propose that immanence is that pure therein that is no longer a being-in, as the presence of the being within has been evacuated.

This does not leave us with an absence, but with an abandon which is not the lack of presence, but a presence which gives only the loss of presence, a presence of the place itself without that which was in it. Absence prefers the place as emptied container, a pure, neutral recepticle. Abandon is, rather, the place as itself presence, now visible as itself in the lack of what occupied it. This is immanence: the abandon that resides in the vacated residence itself, the homelessness not of the being that has gone, but of the now unoccupied home that cannot be itself for lack of those it would keep in dwelling. Immanence is what remains in when no one is home.

Not Not Philosophy

2008-08-06T22:43:00.003-05:00

The growing enthusiasm and interest around Speculative Realism and Laurelle's non-philosophy can not reasonably be ignored. I was indifferent at first, but my interest has been peaked after skimming Mullarkey's Post-Continental Philosophy, and more recently, having started reading Ray Brassier's Alien Theory and other available texts on the net. I do have certain reservations, especially concerning the apparent effacement of any discussion of language. One of the reasons non-philosophy interests me is its (maybe superficial) similarity to structuralism, which of course is born out of insights into the relation between being and language, or rather, differential structures as exemplified in language. I'm sure I will elaborate on this in the future, right now I can only note the thought. I'm also intrigued by Meillassoux's notion of 'ancestry', which seems quite close to the work I've been dong with Benjamin.

In my thesis, I deal with the question of materialism, and its ultimate point at which matter becomes the purely negative exclusion of any predication or conceptualization. So non-philosophy seems intriguing, if it indeed aims to develop the perspective of this pure void in thought, be it matter or whatever. Of course, this is not to say that the void is subjectived, that we aim to narrate its experience or some such nonsense. Rather, the subject as stranger occupies the place in which all thought, all predication and conceptualization, becomes excessive or superfluous, 'transcendent' in the sense of 'beside the fact' or 'after the fact'. It is not that the Real - the void of symbolization - is filled out, nor left empty, but rather becomes a kind of opening (to) or standing before the totality of empirical-predicable reality, a way toward phenomenality that nevertheless its outside, outside-looking-in, or even its internal-outside.

I am still quite ignorant, and these are brief speculations. But as I begin to research this already rich movement, a few questions to take into account:
- The prevalence of the prefix non-, and this in contrast to anti-. What are the different forms of negation, opposition, or refusal at work here?
- The 'non-dialectical' nature of the synthesis of Duality-without-difference and Identity-without-unity. Why the insistent need in philosophy (or non-philosophy) to reject Hegel, especially when one seems closest to Hegel?
- Is there a sense in which the non- of non-philosophy is a kind of Kanto-Hegelian infinite judgement - that is, not the negation of a predicate, but the affirmation of a non-predicate?
- Can we think of the relationship of non-philosophy with philosophy as the Pauline as not, in the sense of doing philosophy as not philosophy?
- How does Laurelle's theory of the philosophical Decision relate to Schimtt's theory of the sovereign decision?

Out Of It

2008-08-05T15:02:00.006-05:00

Today, it is commonplace to question identity, to insist upon its problematic and unstable character. And yet, who today has the courage to submit this question to its own test? Who will question the identity of this question, which is to say, in the persistence of its iteration, who will question its consistent direction at one same object? This is not the trivial point that identities are only temporary crystallizations in a constant flux of difference, and hence that the identical object is only ephemeral and apparent. It is not that, in aiming at identity itself, self-identity, the identity of identity with itself, we can only ever find particular things that are perhaps identical with themselves, but that are nonetheless not identical to identity itself. Identity in such cases is only an apparent effect of differential relations. (This is most certainly not what Deleuze is claiming in Difference and Repetition.)

No, the claim is that, in aiming at the identity of things with themselves, we only ever find identity itself with itself. Identity is that which is the same, and hence not sameness, the relation of sameness between two things, but is that which is the same, directly is the same as... Identity is the same as itself, it is this comparison given in a comparable figure itself. Identity is 'the same' as itself, it is 'the same' the being of the same, in its ipseity, its identity with itself, together with itself. Identity is the same as itself, it is the same thing as its self, it is that which directly is its own ipseity or being-with-itself.

Some-thing is the same as some-other. This is the formula.

First: Some-thing is. It is not given, but is like the gift in which one gives what one never had. One does not promise to give, nor does one owe the gift as a debt. Rather, it is a gift that repays a debt that could not be repaid, it is the return delivered to an infinite debt, not by erasing the debt, but in erasing ownership itself, such that nothing can be 'had' to be given, and nothing can be 'had' in accepting a given.

'Some-thing is': something is there, is given, that could not have been given, that was not there for giving. The given is not taken for granted, as merely given, but that by which the given is given, the giving of givenness, is also not given nor is it owed to us. The given is given in the given of the some-thing without a givenness, some-thing given as not to be given and not given.

Second: the same as... We have adressed this element above in brief. This element, as itself, does not pertain to the comparison of two things more or less the same, nor to the sameness of something with itself or with another or with itself as another or another as itself. It is here, between, that the same as... is no longer bound between subject and direct object, between terms related in sameness. When it is the same as it is, it is as it is, which is to say, it is not the same as anything, nor is anything the same as it is. It is, the same as..., not the same, it is not-itself, it is not- the-same-as -itself, and the same as not-itself is.

Third: ...as some-other. The same, as it is itself, is as some-other, which is to say, is as-not, not-itself and some-other. Not other itself, but itself other. It is not itself the same as itself, but is itself the same as itself is some-other. Have we yet thrown you off the scent, or must you still persist in chasing this voice through the thorns?

The formula is, then, that identity as the same, as, the same as, some-other, means that there is no-other that is not itself, and thus that to say "the same" seems meaningless. How can we say something is the same, without say it is the same as (some-other thing)? It amounts to the claim that identity, without itself in ipseity, is the very condition of being-not-itself. And with itself in ipseity, being can only be-with if it is beside, and along with, another one or some-other, and hence, is either with another that is not it and hence not the same as it, or it is with itself alone, and without some-other to be the same as it is.

Identity can only ever claim that which, with itself, is not-itself, or is as not-itself. This is the secret being must keep and keep quiet, that in-itself being is not-itself, as not-itself, and then, maybe, in-itself only as outside, as an outside folded upon itself, facing itself and staring back at itself, which is to say, already beyond itself and toward the limitless reaches outside itself, on the outside in-itself.

Nothing Doing

2008-08-04T20:59:00.007-05:00

In my previous post, "If All Else Fails", I gave a brief overview of the typology of violence that Slavoj Zizek develops in his new book, Violence. I did so to indicate a form of violence I believe Zizek to have omitted, or rather, to explicate the relation between revolutionary violence and the other types, a relation Zizek leaves unclear. However, I should clarify my account of his typology, which was perhaps too brief. Zizek does not simply enumerate three distinct forms of violence - subjective, systemic, and symbolic - but aims to show how violence is always caught in the knot of these three modes, which parallel the Lacanian triad of Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real.

Subjective violence is simply what we would ordinarily recognize as such: abusive, injurious actions that occur between people, inflicted by one person or group of people on another. This has the simple form of an Imaginary relation, in which the relation of ego to others and the predominance of Eros are the frame.

Such subjective violence is only visible against the background or context of normal, nonviolent relations, and is hence a disturbance of this equilibrium. Systemic violence is precisely an anonymous and impersonal collateral effect of sustaining the nonviolent background of Imaginary relations, it is that which cannot enter the contextual frame of subjective experience, but sustains this frame. If such violence does enter into the frame of our experience, we cannot help but to contextualize it, to ascribe it to a particular offender violating the normal run of things; we cannot accept that our comfortable life-world is sustained by an immense suffering. In this sense, systemic violence is the Real, that which cannot be integrated into Imaginary/Symbolic legibility, but is only a blotch or distortion, or better, the horrible thing behind the veil of non-violent normalcy.

Symbolic violence is visible as the relation between the subjective violence and its context, in the sense that the very standards by which we can recognize something as violent, and hence stand apart from it in a non-violent reflection, already is a form of violence itself. It is not simply that normalcy is sustained by a violence hidden behind its veil - the very act of veiling, of covering-up, is the very source of what it must hide, or better, what it hides is the fact that nothing is hidden. There is no reason for the massive excesses of systemic violence to not be recognized as such, they are not covered up or denied, but ignored, disavowed. "I know very well there is a genocide occuring somewhere in Africa, that hundreds of millions live in the worst poverty in urban slums, that children are starving all over the world, but nevertheless...what does that have to do with me, my non-violent lifestyle, in my innocent little town?" It is the very symbolic medium that, in enabling us to not subjectively register some things as violent, or better, to not subjectively account for the systemic violence that sustains our contextual life-world, is the most pressing form of violence.

In the aforementioned post, I elaborated the link between Symbolic violence and mythic violence, or law-founding violence, as Benjamin conceives it. Zizek also draws this link, and from there elaborates his notion of revolutionary or emancipatory violence, which he links to Benjamin's divine violence. Yet here we find a difficulty. Zizek associates this divine violence with what he calls "Bartleby politics", or passive aggression. The point here is that any intervention we make to correct the violent excesses of capitalism is inevitably incorporated into the system, making it run more smoothly. Every form of resistance is assimilated, and so all we can do is 'nothing'; that is, everything we try to do to change things ends up reinforcing the way they are, but if we do nothing, if we refuse to intervene, it would be unbearable for the system, it would not know how to react. This kind of passive aggression is the answer he offers to his own question from the final chapter of his book on Deleuze: how is revolution possible against an order that constantly revolutionizes itself?

The difficulty with this position has been registered in the philo-blogosphere, with complaints and criticism being the standard reaction. Moreover, this position seems quite inconsistent, both with the ethic of discipline and self-sacrafice (Those who have nothing have only their discipline, to paraphrase Badiou) that he elaborates in Lost Causes, and with his claim that we find examples of divine violence in the revolutionary terror of the French Revolution, the October Revolution, and so on. Can these apparent inconsistencies be reconciled?

I propose that Bartleby politics is far from simply doing nothing, from refusing to engage with struggles and socio-political problems of any kind, despite Zizek's apparent claims to the contrary. Rather, it rests with the distinction between not doing anything, simply not acting, and doing nothing in the sense of enacting a negativity or void, an act which renders visible the nothingness at the heart of the constituted order. Zizek himself gives us evidence in this direction in his exegesis of Saramago's story Seeing, in which the government of an unnamed democratic city is deeply disturbed when an overwhelming majority of their citizens, during an election, submit blank ballots. For Zizek, this mass refusal is a true Act, in the Lacanian sense. But is this a case of not doing anything, of passively sitting back and refusing to engage, or is it rather an act of making nothing happen, of foregrounding the void upon which this world stands, like the coyote hovering over the precipice, before looking down?

Bartleby himself is characterized not by simply not acting, by doing nothing at all. No, Bartleby acts, but in the paradoxical manner of enacting a refusal to act, of acting out nothing, through his familiar refrain: "I'd prefer not to". He does not say no, nor does he simply do nothing in response. He does something, he registers the void of his motivation. This is thus quite similar to other political themes Zizek has mobilized in the past: Badiou's Event as registering the void of the empty set, Ranciere's democracy as the demand of the part-of-no-part, and even Marx's proletariat as articulating their lack of place within the capitalist order. It would be fruitful to explicate the differences between Zizek's turn to Bartleby and these earlier references, but I cannot do so now. I would like to emphasize, however, that there is an undeniable political force - violence, we might say - at work in the tearing asunder of the existing order, the introduction of a void into the space of politics. The practical question is hence, what does it mean to actively do nothing, to will nothingness into existence? And where do we go from there? How do we live together, how do we found a society or reorient this society, on the basis of nothingness?

Giving Rise

2008-08-02T12:03:00.008-05:00

John McCain has recently engaged in some creative history in an attempt to cover his own tracks. As the above video recounts, he misrepresented the time-line of the War in Iraq, claiming the Anbar Awakening occurred after and because of the 'Surge' strategy, when in fact it began at least half a year prior. The next day, he claimed this was not a mistake, and that the Surge began long before it was announced as a general strategy. Rather, according to McCain, 'surge' refers to any counterinsurgency strategy whose aim is to hold and secure territory, as opposed to simply chasing enemies without regard to sustained security. In this regard, the tactical engagement that enabled the Anbar Awakening was the begining of such a strategy, which was months later announced as a general strategy, one that would oblige a great increase in troop levels.

As has been pointed out, McCain is taking great liberty with the facts here. The Surge was so-named because of the 'surge', that is, increase or rise, in troop levels, and so decribing previous tactics that were meant to be generalized as part of this strategy is misleading. Even if McCain is correct in claiming that the tactics involved in Anbar were an inspiration or model for the Surge, this would still contradict his claim that the latter caused or enabled the former. Clearly, even in McCain's revised account, the contrary is still the case.

What appears to be telling here is McCain's peculiar claim that 'surge' generally refers to 'counterinsurgency' tactics. Etymologically, 'surge' and 'insurgence' are from the same source, the Latin surgere, to rise. This is a compound of sub-, meaning 'from below', and regere, to lead straight - literally, from below to lead straight. From a position in which the only straight or right course forward is to rise or ascend, it is to lead in this way. This should resonate with my previous mediations on 'leading'. Regere itself is related to rex, 'king', and can translate the Greek arche.

'Surge' literally means to rise up, increase suddenly, swell or rush forward, and 'insurgence' modifies this, meaning to rise up against an authority or rule, to rise from below this rule and exceed it. Yet insurgency here is already complicated, in that this rising already entails being 'led straight', 'leading' here being related to 'rule'. So does this mean insurgence, in rising above a ruling power, must already have recourse to a more 'right' or 'straight' rule, one that, rather than subordinating it and keeping it below, leads it to rise and stand? More than simple academic reflections, I believe these questions bear directly on the political matter at hand.

Recalling Lacan's famous quip in response to the student rebellions of May '68, "You are looking for a master. And you will find one." Are the Iraqi insurgents also looking for a Master, in this case, a theocratic one? This is likely the case for the most part, although there is undoubtly little consensus on the nature of this new rule. The one unifying feature we can point to, however, is that it would be a rule that leads the insurgents 'from below', and hence, is a right and straight leadership. The Nietzschean tones of these sentiments implicate far more reflective potential than I can muster here, although this is ground that needs to be covered.

In any case, it seems likely that, from the purview of American (neo-)conservatives, the insurgents themselves were only acting out under the bad influence of opportunist leaders, and the 'Surge' was in fact part of the ongoing strategy to install a 'right and straight' leadership in Iraq, one that would legitimately allow the people to 'rise above' both the unjust rule of Saddam Hussein, and the chaotic injunctions of terrorist and insurgent leaders. This right leadership that would amount to a legitimate 'rising above subordination', a legitimate 'insurgency', would of course be parliamentary democracy. For the insurgents themselves, however, this would only be the worst kind of subordination.

The problematic heart of this conflict is hence the paradox of how to recognize 'legitimate', right and straight leadership, what it means to rise above, and whether the violent rejection of rule we call 'insurgency' on the one hand, and 'spreading democracy' on the other, can be or should be arrested in the constitution of another rule, a new leader. Are the two senses of leadership, one subordinating and the other liberating, truly distinct or mutually implicated? Can they, should they, be separated and opposed?

If All Else Fails

2008-07-31T17:25:00.004-05:00

In his recent book, Violence, Slavoj Zizek aims to distinguish between 'subjective' violence - violence as we ordinarily experience it, as a disturbing intrusion into the normal run of things, which only appears against a background of non-violent normality - and two forms of 'objective' violence. These latter forms are invisible, in that they sustain the very appearance of non-violence presupposed by the former.

On the one hand, there is 'symbolic violence', which is not merely that of injurious phrases or expressions, 'hate speech' or 'fighting words', slander or libel, et cetera, but rather, the violence of an imposition of a symbolic order or world of meaning. This involves the disintegration of the existing set of meanings, values, and associations, the traumatic uprooting of subjects from their contextual habituation, as well as the absorbtion of this trauma into the new symbolic order, which renders this violence invisible by depriving evaluation of any standard of measure, any value, that would allow it to register abuse, violation, or injury.

Here we should note that violence, in whatever form, refers to a force that exceeds a threshold of 'abuse', such that the victim has a normally defined range of proper 'use' or 'treatment'. Symbolic violence is invisible precisely insofar as the injury it induces is so severe that it redefines the normal limits of treatment, redistributes the thresholds of abuse, and in the extreme, erases the being that may be treated properly or improperly, replacing it with a new being.

We can see the close relation between 'symbolic violence' and the law-constituting 'mythic violence' of which Benjamin speaks. Whether the realm of meaning or the realm of law, in either case we are dealing with a violence that disposes with the previous order, and in doing so, establishes a new order in its place. This violence cannot coexist with the law thereby established, but must be ejected into an eternally past 'primitivity' or 'mythos'. Within the standards of this new order, it would necessarily appear as the greatest crime, but since this order had not yet come to be, and could only come to be on the condition of this crime, there is no standard of judgement.

Any previous standard of judgement by which we could condemn it is the very casualty of this violence, and this opens a kind of vaccuum between the two orders. Moreover, this vaccuum is not simply an anomic period between two constituted orders, but cleaves the plane of constituted order to/from the groundless, shadowy realm in which constituting power struggles to assert itself, in a time before any constituted time.

The second form of objective violence, according to Zizek, is 'systemic violence', which he defines as the enormously destructive side-effects, the 'collateral damage', of global captialism. Although this system is said to be the epitome of freedom, fairness, democracy, and so on, it nonetheless is sustained by a disavowed underside of orgiastic violence and destitution. Examples of this would be the enormous, and growing, populations living in slums, the emergence of ever-new ethnic civil wars and genocides, the massive death tolls in the Global South attributed to cured or treatable infections that nonetheless go untreated...

The point I would like to make is that there is another form of violence that is not accounted for in Zizek's typology. If the revolutionary aim would be to bring the two forms of objective violence to light, and hence undermine the reactionary form of subjective violence, then the violence of which I speak is the very supression or silencing of this revolutionary activity. This is not as obvious as it may sound. The point is not that there is a systematic effort to discredit or ignore pleas for 'recognition' of objective violence. Rather, as subjects, we are already unable to recognize objective violence; there is no 'enlightened' position one could occupy in this regard. The pained attempts to undermine the constituted order are defeated, failed, in that they must necessarily fail to take place at all.

Every order, of law and language, is born of and sustained by an unaccountable explosition of violence that breaks not only with the previous order, but with power in its 'constituted' form altogether. It is here that we can glimpse the constituting power, which is also revolutionary violence, in that it reveals itself as objective violence. Hence, the revolutionary aim is not simply to denounce such a violence, but to become this violence: both the symbolic violence that dissolves existing law, meaning, and value, and as the product of systemic violence, the collateral damage (the proletariat) of this order turned against the very order that created it. Yet, insofar as this revolutionary break of constituting power becomes a means to the establishment of another constituted order, the revolutionary violence degrades into mythic violence. (Here, we would do well to revisit Deleuze's discussion of the 'eternally New' vs. the 'eternally established' in Difference and Repetition.)

This other kind of violence of which I speak - we might call it 'catastrophic violence' - is hence that which binds constituting power to constituted power, and thereby enlists the revolutionary break in sevice of its own erasure. The radical conclusion here is that this violence is nothing other than revolutionary violence turned back upon itself, ejecting itself into an mythic eternal past. So many attempts to break with the existing order had to fail, that is, failed to happen, in that they ultimately became identical to the establishment and service of this order. The point here would be, not to see what might have happened otherwise, what could have been different, inventing ineffectual 'alternative histories', but rather, to see what had to not happen, what must have failed to occur; to see that which, though impotential, was nonetheless, paradoxically, actual, that which did fail to happen. To make the explosive break of constituting power not an exception to the rule that sustains the rule, but an example of the rule that deactivates the rule - to make visible the inclusion of constituting violence within the realm of law, and insodoing, to step outside that realm - these are imperatives yet to be deciphered.

Making History

2008-07-30T13:30:00.006-05:00

What is historicity? We can see it when there happens to be, there emerges or occurs an event that breaks with the chronological chain of presents, distinguishing itself from that which does not distinguish itself from it (Deleuze). In its own wake it becomes unaccountable, inexplicable in terms of chrono-causality, lacking an intelligible or schematizable situation in relation to the rest of history. Yet for this same reason it is, for historicist chronology, indiscernible, invisible, or unproblematic. Regarding itself it cannot explain itself in relation to chronology. Regarded by that very chronology, there is nothing to explain, it does not stand out, or does not even possess a unique and distinguished existence.

Such an event appropriates the whole of history, past and future, to itself, making history its own history. It deciphers history - which is not to say that historicism presumes history as ciphered and opaque. On the contrary, historicism can be minimally defined by the presumption that history is transparent, clear, and already intelligible, in principle if not in fact. Rather, the event of historicity bears witness to a cipher that is itself ciphered, a code itself encoded, hidden in that intellgibility. It reveals the ciphered character of history as such: not the hidden meaning or telos of the past, but only its opacity and hieroglyphic character. What is hidden, ciphered in history, is the very fact that something is hidden or ciphered. The form of the cipher is also its only content.

The event does not endow the whole past, even the most insignificant and 'unhistorical' instants, with a new or hidden significance. Rather, it reduces all of the past: it does not reduce everything to it, to its own omnipotence or determination, but leaves it to a reduction with no significance, separating everything from its significance, so that even the grandest, the seemingly most 'historical' and weighty of things, are reduced to the same stature as the most insignificant. The past is reduced to a collection of monadic punctures that cannot be reduced further, for they are infinitely shirinking or falling from any significance. They are not, for all that, irreducible, for they are nothing in themselves but their reduction, the reduction of reduction, the very insignificance of insignificance, in inessentiality or innecessity or the inessential. The past is reducted to (almost) nothing, to that bare minimum that persists in nothingness.

Historicism would nonetheless consist, or begin anew, in maintaining the very irreducibility of the event - not to chronological history, but to itself. It cannot think the event as reduction itself, the reduction of all of history to a series of bare, meaningless hieroglyphs, marks, or wounds. It makes history reducible to an event, which is in turn reciprically reducible to history, to its historical instances, which is to say, to historical instances themselves, to its own instantiation, as it is history. We should hence distinguish two senses of 'event':

1) The historical or historicist sense, which constitutes a proper history in reducing history to itself and itself to history (what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as bi-univocality), while remaining irreducible to itself, in itself. These are the events of great significance that 'make history' and define a tradition, appropriating everything that exists as past while excluding only what did not exist, what did not happen.

2) The event in its historicity, or the event of historicity, reduces all of history, seeing in all of the happenings of the past - not what did not happen, in the sense of what could have happened otherwise or what could otherwise have happened, but - what must not have happened, thereby reducing the past to the zero level of an exclusion. And it reduces itself to itself - or, as reduction implies the dissolution of what is, its dissolution in something else, we can not say it is reduced to itself, but to its being-in, in-itself and thus not itself, in that it no longer is by virtue of being-in. In itself, reduced to being-in itself, it is other than itself, in-and-not-itself. As in-itself, it differs from what it is in, and hence is not itself. It is what had to not-be in its being, what could not be so that it could be. It is a monad, the navel whose umbilical cord reaches inward, as if the thing itself were its own prosthesis or parasite.

In the event of historicity, all of history is rendered insignificant - both the significance of the significant and the insignificance of the insignificant. Rendered insignificant or meaningless, not in the sense of a meaningless statement, but as a cipher: the cipher does not depend on the significance of what it encodes, but only on its own opacity, impenetrability, the insignificance of the signifier in itself. It is irreducible to the meaning it encodes, but reduces itself to its own insignificance regarding what it encodes, to the necessarily excluded potential to mean anything.

The sense in which the event of historicity appropriates all of history is very different from the corresponding operation on the part of the historical event. The latter institutes a proper history, endowing the past with significance and propriety. The former, itself already reduction and expropriation in itself, is the appropriation or owning over of history to expropriation. History is disowned and abandoned in the sense that it radically identifies with what it had to abandon in constituting itself. Historicity is hence the paradoxical propriety of the improper or expropriated, in which history gives itself over to its own loss, its irreparable abandonment.

Whereas historicism resorts to a concept of history as given, its intelligibility as such thereby presupposed and not accounted for in its genesis, historicity raises the question or is already the question of the conditions under which the historical is constituted. History, what is history, is not taken as self-evident, but must be investigated. History in this sense does not simply refer to a discipline or field, a science or mode of writing, but primarily to the object toward which the are directed, the matter at hand. It is therefore not a question of historiography, of methods employed by the academic discipline of History. It is an ontological question concerning the very being of history, and hence, of time.

For Example

2008-07-29T10:59:00.011-05:00

Para-ontology. This is the methodological/epistemological basis of Giorgio Agamben's research, which weaves through fields as diverse as juridical theory, poetics, philosophy, and theology. More than that, it is the orientation of thought regarding itself, the thought of thought or the thought of the power of thought, thought to the second power, it is the meta-thought that thereby, paradoxically, seizes upon the being without thought, outside of thought and without relation to its being-in thought or being-thought. The recent trend in ontology of 'speculative realism' (see the excellent post by Nick of The Accursed Share, "On Contemporary Materialism", and his new collaborative blog devoted to the topic, Speculative Heresy) primarily concerns itself with this paradox - how can thought think that which has no relation to thought, that which cannot be thought, that which must remain outside of thought? I would like to hear how Agamben's para-ontological approach to the problem relates to that of the speculative realism.

To expose this approach, we need only refer to Agamben's definition of paradigm, or example. The lecture "What is a Paradigm?" is available in video on Youtube here, and transcribed by the EGS here. Anyone familiar with Agamben's lauded work on the juridical and politico-theological concept of exception will recognize it as an 'inclusive exclusion', an operation by which the outside of law, that which is excluded from the domain of law - bare life, without political qualification - is nonetheless included in law through this very operation, in which the sovereign declares the very point where the law is suspended, that is, the state of exception. The outside of law becomes part of the law's functioning, the source of its consistency, as it is able to rule over not only its own domain, but also over the operation defining its domain against its outside.

The example or paradigm functions in an opposite way, and hence has the contrary function of 'deactivating' law within itself. "If we define the exception as an inclusive exclusion, in which something is included by means of its exclusion, the example functions as an exclusive inclusion. Something is excluded by means of its very inclusion." What does this mean? An example is a part of a set, one particular member of a general category, or instance of a universal concept. And yet, as an example, it does not obey the law defining its set, it does not function according to this law, but rather, it indicates or exemplifies this law, and in doing so, stands outside of the normal set.

To demonstrate this, Agamben cites the example of performativity. A performative statement, such as "I swear...", is one which does not refer to given state of affairs, but creates a new state of affairs in its very utterance. This statement creates a 'promise' that did not exist before its declaration. Yet it is evident that in this case, as an example, the utterance "I swear..." did not actually perform this function, Agamben did not actually swear or promise anything. Hence, the rule does not apply to this statement as an example, as it would to a normal case of swearing. Yet the utterance must still be included in the category of performatives, it is still a member of the set. As an example, it stands beside the set, steps outside of it, but must still be a member in order to properly function as an example. Quoting Agamben:

What an example shows is its belonging to a class, but for this very reason, it steps out of this class at the very moment in which it exhibits and defines it. Showing its belonging to a class, it steps out from it and is excluded. So, does the rule apply to the example? It’s very difficult to answer. The answer is not easy since the rule applies to the example only as a normal case and not as an example. The example is excluded from the normal case not because it does not belong to it but because it exhibits its own belonging to it.

What the example shows is not the rule or normal function of the rule, but rather, its shows, exhibits, exposes, its very membership in its class, its submission or subjection to a rule, the force of the rule's application without actually applying the rule. It is the force-of-law subtracted from the actual law. And in so exposing this force, it deactivates the law, subtracting itself from law. It would be a fruitful course of research to compare the split between law and its force in the two modalities of exception and example, and how this bears on the debate between Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin, a debate that so often surfaces in Agamben's work.

In any case, as Agamben so often reminds us, his research is not simply confined to the given field of juridical theory, political philosophy, theology, or whatever, but is genuinely ontological, using these cases to expose the being of law, the being of politics, and so on. So let us return to the question of thought and its relation to being, to a being outside of thought. This is the very problem that Kant insists upon as the new ground of a critical philosophy. For a para-ontology, which is concerned with the exemplary being, the being that, in-itself, steps outside itself and deactivates itself, the problem is reoriented. It is no longer, 'how do we think a being which cannot be thought, which is not in-thought, but in-itself?' Rather, the thought of this being must become the example of this being, it must become the stepping-outside-itself of being in-itself. Thought must become no more than the outside of thought, and that most intimate outside, that alterity of a being that, in-itself, is no longer its own, deactivating itself. Thought of a being-outside-of-thought, thought as being-outside-of..., is that of a being in-and-not-itself, exclusively included in itself, that most intimate outside.

(Notes for research: Derrida's intimate Other, Lacan's ex-timacy, spectulative realism, Deleuze and Guattari's 'thinking the unthought' in What is Philosophy?...)

Diminishing Returns

2008-07-28T13:07:00.008-05:00

Reduction is a familiar problem in contemporary analytic philosophy, which often concerns itself with the reducibility or irreducibility of mind, thought, consciousness, among other things, to matter, and specifically the material processes of the brain. The philosophical heritage of the concept is in fact quite old, and extends beyond the problems of 'mind', finding its origin in the most fundamental metaphysical concern. We know that at least since Aristotle, the ultimate form of ontological question, "What is?", is subjected to a formula in which Being is already thematized in terms of being-in. We can only approach the question, "What is?", in terms of what is in-itself, or otherwise, what is in-another. The concern is then that of reduction, of reducing everything that is to what it is in, to what holds, contains, or admits it. This concern persists at least until Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel.

The term reduction derives from the Latin dcere, to bring or lead, modified by the prefix re-, thereby, to lead back, bring back, return. Returning has the double sense of returning to a place one has been, and returning something to its proper owner or place. Reduction, then, has the sense of leading beings back, bringing them back, returning them to their proper place, source, origin. It gives the sense in which the reducible has gone astray, is out of place, dislocated, and definitively cut off from its ground or propriety. Yet we must also say that in returning the being to its proper place, we must reveal its being-in, in-another, and hence return it to what it is in, lead it back to where it is. This amounts to showing a being as displaced in its very place.

We should not be so quick to assume that the reducibility of beings in-another is inverted in the irreducibility of being in-itself, as if this being cannot be lead back but is eternally in place, its proper place, that is, itself as identical with its place. There is nothing evident about this, and it is just as easy to say that being in-itself is reducible, as the function of being-in has been shown to be the returning of being to where it is, of revealing the dislocation of being in that it is otherwise than its place. Being in-itself is reducible, just as beings in-another are reducible to that other. This means that Being in-itself is reducible to itself, in that it can be returned to itself, or that it returns itself. Here we can only note the problems of ipseity that are beginning to propigate and restlessly cry out. I will begin to address these problems in a following post on historicity.

We can at least say that, insofar as the being returns to itself, finds itself in-itself, that it is not itself, it is itself what is in-itself but not-itself. Having returned to itself, it is therefore not necessary for itself, but can be lead back to itself, finding itself as having been without - outside of itself and itself without the being that is in-itself. The Being in-itself is at once in-and-not-itself: it is not in-another, but it is what is other in-itself.

Deduction proceeds from the universal concept to the particular case, showing the case to be contained analytically in the concept, the propriety of the particular with respect to the universal. It brings out the particular from the universal. de-dcere: to lead out, lead away from, bring down or carry down, to carry out. As with Moses, who carries the universal Law, the Decalogue, down to the people. Induction proceeds from the particular case, showing the concept to be justifiable and intelligible on behalf of the relations between cases, and hence, the propriety of the universal with respect to the particular. It leads to the universal from the particular. in-dcere: to lead toward, lead into, bring to or bring about.

Reduction proceeds, we can say, from the particular to the particular, as the returning the particular to its place qua particular, yet without reference to the specificity of the universal concept. This is the logic of the example that Aristotle demonstrates in the Analytica Prioria, as Agamben reads it. Yet Aristotle only hints at such a logic, in a brief exposition that last only a few lines. Elsewhere in his work, such a logic is assimilated to traditional deduction, in which the particular properly belongs to the universal. To quote Agamben, "Yet Aristotle’s treatment of the paradigm is in a way inadequate, though he had these beautiful ideas of the paradigm as going from the particular to the particular, he does not seem to develop this point and like Kant still sticks to the idea that the individuals concerned in the example belong to the same genus." If we refuse to subordinate this logic to the former two logics, as is typical in the philosophical tradition, and instead give it priority, it will mean drastic consequences for ontology, as well as politics, as the recurrent theme of 'leading' should forshadow.

Like Father Like Son

2008-07-27T12:52:00.009-05:00

Some notes following Giorgio Agamben's lecture, "The Power and the Glory".

Economy properly becomes a concern when the activity or actuality of a praxis, which is to say, an effectivity or efficacy, cannot be reconciled with the being to which it 'belongs'. We should be precise: it is not only the fact of an actuality or action, a 'having happened', an effect, but the facticity of efficacy or the ability to be effective, the power or potential to produce a desired or intended effect. Perhaps it is too much to say 'intended'. It is the facticity of efficacy in the effect, of the potential manifest in an actual effect to produce itself as the right one, the desired one, the appropriate, if not intended effect. In other words, we can say that the propriety of an effect does not belong to being to which it is ascribed, to its 'proper' cause, the cause of which it is a property. It rather holds within itself its own propriety as an immanent power.

Economy is already a form of leading or guiding, which is to say, arche. This is also beginning, in the sense of that which comes before us and goes before us, that which must precede us, in time as well as in space, standing before us to lead the way. We only ever follow after a beginning, we do not begin of ourselves but are preceded. Economy is the form in which the arche of the oikos - the pater - relates to his action of leading, in which the leader relates to the action of leading, through the son and the family, and then the possessions and property of the family, as that which follows from him. In the pater the abstract order of leading must relate to the specific instances of following, or rather, the being which leads must relate to its action of leading as itself manifest. The father intends not to keep the son within his propriety and rule, but to lead him to his own propriety, to the self-directed appropriation that he manifests.

In this sense, the son, as the enacting of leading in following, or of being in an actuality, cannot simply be reduced to the ground of the father's arche. The son must become groundless, self-sufficient, independent of his own beginning, he must exceed the boundary of paternal order and go beyond... The leadership of the father is ultimately aimed at leading the son beyond being led, beyond the being that leads, that stands before and is 'in beginning', 'in the beginning', 'at first'.

This of course is intended to reproduce the structure again, with the son assuming the position of the father, the self-grounded effect returning to the place of a cause, the act assuming the being to which it once belonged. This is not our problem. Our problem is within the structure of economy, not in the concrete reproduction of this structure. The problem is thus: the father, as the beginning from which the son comes, which comes before the son, must lead the son to become without beginning, an-arche, groundless and improper, or again, self-grounded and appropriate to itself and not another, beginning only from itself. Yet the father, not within the chain of concrete reproductions, but the very structural function of the father as beginning, leader, archon, must itself be without beginning, not lead by another or preceded by another, and thereby following after.

In the concrete occasion we may say that either the father has become without leadership after maturing, through being his father's son, or - and this is not necessarily incompatible with the former point - by creating the illusion, in the prerogative of the son, that there is nothing before him, that he is lead by no one, by blocking the way and all sight of what lies ahead. This would be a symbolic fiction, an effective illusion, with a certain pedagogical function. Yet this is not what concerns us at the moment. When such concern does arise, however, it would do us well to revisit, in this light, Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of familialism in Anti-Oedipus, which has for too long been cast as a polemical condemnation of psychoanalytic theory, rather than the precise engagement of a structure within that theory that it really is.

What is it, then, to say that the father qua beginning, archon, is without beginning, an-arche? In the structural sense, it amounts to saying that the beginning is without beginning, or without itself, outside of itself and lacking itself, missing itself in itself. This is not the same as saying that the beginning 'comes from nowhere', ex nihilo, but rather that the beginning does not have itself, does not possess itself, is improper to itself. To return to the terms with which we began, the principle of propriety by which an effect, as manifest, has the power to produce itself as proper or desired, that is to say, in its actuality to become what it was to-be; this principle is also present in the beginning, the being or ground of an effect, or it is reflected into this being once economy structures its relation to its actuality. Yet it is present there in an inverted form by which the beginning becomes improper to itself, in actuality becoming what it was not to-be.

This raises a question as relevant from the structural perspective as it is from the concrete perspective: what was before the father, before the beginning, if this beginning cannot have itself as itself, as its own beginning? What was the beginning before it became the beginning? Who was the father before he became a father, and what has now become of him, if he has apparently vanished?

Economy: Inside-Out

2008-07-26T15:41:00.009-05:00

Some notes on a paradox, a paradox central to both the modern economic/administrative paradigm we know as bio-politics, and to its relation with the juridical paradigm of sovereignty. First of all, we find power originally abiding in a nexus between two forms of 'rule' or 'lead', two forms or loci. Even 'rule' may yet admit too much. To lead - it is to guide, direct, to show the way by already going along that way before, both chronologically before an other, and standing before another, already in the way. In the way, standing in the way, at once blocking the way and opening it, preventing another from going farther, and allowing that other to go forth after, in following. The archon is not merely setting an example, but constituting what can be exemplified at all.

The two forms of lead, or rather, two loci of leading, are then to lead the way, opening the way, and to stand in the way, blocking the way, or making any other in the way already following, deficient and imitating. These are, respectively, the oikos and the polis. The leader of the oikos will lead forth where the leader of the polis will stand in the way. Or better - the former will block in order to lead forth, the latter, lead forth in order to block. The former, prevent in order to allow, the latter, allow in order to prevent. This, as should be evident, is a drastically sketchy and oversimplified account, but it will do for the moment, as a prop.

Before venturing further, we should dwell for a moment on the sense of 'paradox'. For a term so indispensable for philosophical reflection, it is itself left, all to often, unreflected and taken for granted, dogmatically or doxically held as self-evident. Para-doxa is literally that which is beside, alongside, or bordering on doxa, which is opinion, common sense, shared assumptions or assertions held dogmatically in self-evidence. It lies on the same level, the same ground as the doxa, but cannot be assimilated to it and stands outside it as much as beside. Or we can say that it is not something outside, but the evidence of an outside that is nonetheless coextensive with the inside, it is the intrinsic, necessary possibility of an externality or exclusion that is immanently included in the constitution of the category.

Paradox is what the doxa must admit, must allow for, but which cannot be contained or admissible, it is the violation whose possibility the prohibition necessitates and sustains, the excess of allowance that is already given in the structure of allowance, as the spectre inhabiting the allowed and allowable. Outside, but along-with; beside, or bordering on, but in doing so constituting the border, the definition or limit that is always necessary for the bordered-upon to be at all. In this way, paradox is of the same being, it shares its being with the being of doxa, they are univocally aligned alongside one another and on the same ground, of the same 'kind' or nature. And yet it is that which cannot be held as doxa, cannot be the opinion of anyone, unassimilable to that which it is, is of and is by.

Paradox runs counter to doxa, but it is not one doxa against another - it is counter to doxa itself, turning it against itself, forcing it to admit its own outside or inability to close upon itself: disclosure. Paradox holds the characteristics of doxa, in its common assertability and iterability, and yet the self-evidence of a paradox is that of the impotence of doxa, disclosed as such, in that cannot rely only on itself, but folds in on itself at the point where it must admit its reliance on an opinion that cannot be held by anyone. Not because this opinion is too radical or intense, not because it is too inconsistent with the majority of opinions, but rather, because it is already inconsistent with itself, it is the inconsistency of opinion with itself exemplified.

What we have with the oikos is an inside that is sufficient with itself closed upon itself in maintaining and dealing with the subsistence and reproduction of what already is there, inside the borders of the household. The border, as pointing to an outside, is not primary, and just because economy necessitates commerce and intercourse with an outside does not entail this is primary. The primacy rests with what is thereby bordered, and its perseverance in regards to itself, not in relation to its outside. By contrast, the polis begins with having taken-leave of the household, having passed a border and gone outside of... We already enter the polis as a point of arrival and destination, which entails a primacy not of the location, destination no less than point of departure, but of the crossing of a border, and the relation of a location to its outside, to the dislocation assumed by location. This is evident not only in that we must begin by entering the polis and crossing the border of the oikos, but also in the political relation to its own outside, to other cities and peoples and the threats they may pose.

And yet, if the oikos only establishes limits and borders as a means of relating the located to itself, to its perseverance regarding itself, as in the way and continuing in the way (of life), does this mean that it has within itself its every resource, immanently containing its entire being, including the outside in the instrumentalization of recognizing it as such? Or does not the possibility of an outside already inhabit the immanence of the oikos? We can say, in a similar vein as Levinas, that economy already entails a primary taking-leave-of that undermines the consistency of the location, or being-located. In this sense, the economic being - life itself in relation to itself, persevering in relation to itself - is already caught in a relation to its outside, to a political task of living a Good Life that exceeds life as its own standard, that cleaves life against itself and with itself, into life and the good life.

The problem here is, which is originary and pure? Life in itself, bare and unconditioned, or the Good Life as qualified and adorned, but in its 'proper' fashion? There are too many consequences of this problem to even begin here. But we should note the fashion in which this paradox presents itself: the economic being cannot be cleanly distinguished from the political being, having already been contaminated by a taking-leave and relation to the outside. Is there a life that can be its own and only measure, standard, and principle? Or does the political cleavage originally inhabit life? At least we can say that economic life cannot simply and cleanly instrumentalize its outside to its own ends, to life in its way, persevering in its way, as this outside is already and necessarily admitted as a possibility, if not an actual end. The point is that life, in its own way or on the way to another, is already leaving behind what life was to-be before it became what it is - alive, living, the living.

The Heir To Be(ing)

2008-07-05T02:35:00.010-05:00

Inheriting -- being. The inheriting being, the heir whom receives or responds to the call of a gift, also is the inheritor of this being: the inheritance is being. To give - a giving that sends forth and relinquishes, cedes and abandons, but also abandons over to..., to an abandon that is also no more than the named, the called upon and responsible and surely unwitting heir. To give, to bequeath, in this way is to give everything, to leave everything, to let go of everything one is, to one's own being. Proper being: and this is even not enough, because a cleavage holds being in relief, before itself unfamiliar to its own reflection (and it is not accidental to read that, rather than a reflection or mirror-image that is not recognized by its original, the model or source, the represented and real reflected visibility; it is rather a reflection, a mirror-image or representation that does not recognize what is represented, that mistakes its own origin for a poor semblance or even a stranger, and altogether-other and unrelated opacity, an unrecognizable stain. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.)

Held in relief, being before itself - in representation. It cannot be said, if it is the representative representing the represented, or if the representation itself constitutes a presence as represented, thereby representing that which cannot be represented as such. In representation, the being as immediate presence, accessible and sensible, given and accepted, givable and acceptable - is this even proper? Is this not already given up, acceded, sent away and dissented over? Acceded over to a sovereign arbitration - to the indifferent and impartial rendering of a decision, which is also an arbitrary decision, and also a rendering arbitrary of that which is decided upon - in that the arbitrator is impartial, that is, uninvolved, indifferent, and without the capacity to decide. The sovereign decision, as inside and outside of law at once, must be the ignorance of the law regarding that which it rules upon, that is, an indifference to a real content, an undecidability in reference to a real situation. The sovereign is the life of a moment at which the criteria and capacity for decision become totally abstracted from their content, the matter of decision, rendering a decision on that which cannot be decided upon, while also rendering the undecidable as such - opaque to the judging eye. Law can only come into its own in disowning that which it can no longer speak to, or find in itself: that which, in itself, is not itself, is manifest in a becoming-otherwise of what (it) is, leaving it in the dust, abandoned by its own identity. If the law is purely an effect of concrete social relation, and not a being unto itself, a real force in the world but only an alienated force left over, a remainder or unincorporable by-product of being-in-the-world, a 'reification' as they say...it moreover and nonetheless reduces and leaves the original immediate force to a by-product of its own by-product, an instrument of its own task (man as the reproductive organ of machines; the puppeteer as manipulated by its own puppet;...).

The immediacy of presence to the being-present, of the self to itself, of the inheritance to the heir or the given to the subject: this is already suspect when its representation claims to posit it in presupposing it, or when the law ruling upon it and over it claims to rule it in, to order it to be so, to be the case... When the being becomes identical to its being-thus, this way, its being-given in this way, its being present to this account or inherited by this heir. A this-ness, such-ness, an haecceity, takes the place of the what-ness of the thing-in-question, the thing called upon, made responsible (before the law); it takes the place of, and is the place of the replaced, the mere structural or symbolic place thereby positing itself as holding itself, of holding itself in relief in holding forth the thing into space and spacing, into an allotting and allowing for, a sharing of the thing and of space with and for the thing. In other words - the thing is relieved of itself in other words, words that do not belong to the thing but that it nevertheless shares, imparts, gives up, and that give up the thing, both giving it over and giving up upon it, handing it over in cowardly dissociation and washing ones hands of it. In other words - the thing is given in words and gives words that are not its own, but that rather are only given when the thing is given up and disowned.

Proper being: does this expropriation and impropriety characteristic of presence as represented, as the actor is characterized by a performance (which is also the performance of a character, the acting and giving in acting of a character that causes - in the sense of 'giving a cause to' and being the cause to which one is devoted - the actor, that which acts and enacts) - does this leave a certain potential propriety to the heir, to the executor of the will and character of the actor, to the 'manner' of its being? Or is it already the case - and we have already seen it was the case - that the the word taken for the thing, that our 'taking its word for it', our counting on and investing in the word of the thing; the word taken to be so, to be the case - that the word already was the case, in that the thing is in other words, that is, given in words that are not properly its own, as if there are words that are its own, that could be its own and to which it owns up and is owned over? The principle is that the thing already belongs to words that will not accept it, that the heir does not cannot recognize what it inherits, and also that any heir cannot properly be such, as the gift is given by one (the departed) not present to give to a recipient. And yet this also can (and will, but let's not get ahead of ourselves) mean that the one who gives, in giving, has given over and given up on his own being, let go of being, and thereby has constituted the recipient as to-be, but never present there for it, that is, for being.

The inheriting being - the heir - inherits itself, its being, its being as such, as conditioned by what it receives and accepts; and - and this does not amount to the same thing - the heir is its inheritance, it is the very way of accepting its being, or the way of being its way-of-being, its being its own being-such. And its own: this is proper to it, and yet the property is not the received being as it is immediately received, nor is it the being as accepted and given by the place given to it, amounting to no more than its valence and potency in being there, in its place, that is, in the place of that which is given and disclosed, or placed or emplaced. It is not the thing owned, nor is it the ownership of thing as the proper form of a thing cleaved to its content and cleaving its content - we can abbreviate: the form as cleavage, as cleavage of the thing from itself and to itself.

The proper inheritance is the disappearance, and at once also the persistence, the perseverance of, the progenitor or forebear, which is not to say father - it is rather the father as already dead to himself, in that, to become father, he must already be an ancestor, and thus not yet a father, but a fore-father, an antecedent and thus completely dependent upon its own offspring. Proletariat: those whose only wealth is their offspring, whose only property is their own expropriation into an eternally past precedence or antecedence. If the commodity-form is a ghost (and es spuk is not only a haunting or spooking, but we should say, or hear Derrida say: a ghosting or apparitioning, an action of the ghost that is the only existence of the ghost, and yet this act which posits its own actor is not only a fallacy of grammar, but also a temporal backflip, positing that which it produces as having always been there, invisible or departed, and waiting to reappear, to return. The ghost always comes in returning, it is a revenant, and its is always a coming-back, not of a once living, now dead being, but of itself, its own indefinite inhabitance, haunting, or possession), it is not merely a false and misleading distortion of the living truth, a disturbance of the normal and proper running of things: the ghost is not merely the impropriety of the representative form of exchange-value, its inappropriateness to the immediate density of use-value; no more than it is the impropriety of a purely-posited use-value, which has no material density of its own, but is merely the presupposition of a subjective utility function which already represents the world to the subject, in a quantitative weighing that precedes market value, but which is nonetheless the evidence of an exchangeability and replaceablity. No. The ghost is the very form of relation of (exchange)-value to itself as use-value, which is to say, the form of representability as the proper being of given, or, we should say, the exchanged.

This amounts to the paradoxical affirmation that the very expropriation of the immediate being of the thing is its proper being - not that the word which expropriates the thing is its proper being, but that the thing is only its expropriation. Not a communication, representation, or signification of the thing, but its communicability, giveability. It is bequeathed, it is given up, abandoned, and thereby given over to an offspring, to abandonment as its offspring, to an offspring that comes to-be with it, with which it comes to-be. Rather than 'inheriting being' or 'the inheritance is being', we should say that the inheritance is to-be, it is to-be, in order to be, it is in order to be not being, it is being in order to be not being. Or rather, we can say that Marxism calls for more than a substantiated and 'justified' messianism of the revolutionary proletariat, at once redeemer and redeemed, on the one (Eastern) hand, and a dry, desert-like messianism without content, of an altogether other and unforeseeable redemption to-come that will shirk any figure of a redeemer, and of an already lost and unidentifiable ghost, the ghost of all fallen figure that cannot be recognized. The redeemer, the messiah, is thereby not an inappropriate ontologization of an insistent and unimpeachable spectrality, nor are those in need of redemption reduced to the expropriated victims of a founding crime, to law as the founding crime that must exclude or ex-cept that which is nothing to it. Rather, the two figures are drawn together and cleave in the form of the proletariat - not a positive sociontological category, but a form of social (though non-intersubjective) being, a manner or structure of being-there - which is anyone who is exploited, in the sense of giving over to market exchange that to which, as given or bequeathed, they are already dead, departed and no longer, lost and irreparable. It is the form in which one is oneself only in having already surrendered oneself, abandoned oneself, bequeathed oneself - in which one is only worth one's offspring, and is nothing in himself, but only the condition of an offspring which must already be without its own conditioning generation.

Bourgeois

2008-03-08T21:49:00.002-05:00

Today, while working on his philosophy thesis in a coffee shop in a very affluent part of New England, a friend and co-student of the same expensive, exclusive, private liberal arts college I attend, was walking back to his table, which held among other things a copy of Karl Marx's collected writings, when a woman, presumably unaware of the Marx volume in his possession, approached him to ask, "Excuse me, do you know how to spell 'bourgeois'?"

Saving Spinoza

2008-02-05T16:22:00.001-05:00

We all know the cliché according to which Spinoza remains a pre-critical philosopher insofar as, in his assertion of the identity of God and nature, he naively asserts a kind of reductionist materialism. Spinoza's nature is a 'closed mechanism', a blind chain of necessity, and freedom, far from some mystical exemption from this chain, is no more than the assumption of this necessity, et cetera. Thus Žižek claims that for Spinoza, ethics (deontology) is simply reduced to ontology, to this blind necessity free of any obscurantist language of teleological aims, a 'Good' which should be imposed on the way things simply 'are'. Such 'oughts' are no more than fictions that falsely impute to God a will or aim, when God in truth is ignorant of any aim and refers to the blind mechanism of natural causality.

So Spinoza ultimately leads us to a naive scienticism in which we need only learn the way things 'really work', devoid of any ideological mystifications. This 'post-ideological' reign of a pure science, in which we should simply administer the means of a satisfactory life free of any overriding prescriptions or projects, is the paradigm of submission to capitalism; Spinozism thus becomes the perfect capitalist ideology. There is no place for the Cartesian subject, subtracted from the closure of this natural necessity, lacking a proper place and lost, necessitating some perhaps 'fictional' narrative of a moral telos in order to act. Indeed, in this model there is properly no 'subject', but only the free play of natural impulses which, upon assuming their modest place within the natural causal order, can live free of such delusions and the harm they cause.

This reading of Spinoza is exemplified in his discussion of Adam's fall: God does not arbitrarily prohibit Adam from eating from the Tree of Knowledge in a simple exercise of authority, with death as the punishment; God is simply warning Adam of the 'scientific fact' that this fruit would be poisonous to him, that eating it would simply 'cause' him to die... Yet as A. Kiarina Kordela puts it in her remarkable book, $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan, it matters not whether this is an arbitrary prohibition or a mere natural fact, because either way, the notion that Adam should prefer life to death would already entail an aim, that he should live, which imposes on the mere 'facts' a fictional telos. [7-8] The point, then, is that any bare scientific analysis of facts, if it is to have any relevance for us, must already be warped by some fictional (ethical) aim imposed upon them; in short, Adam would've already had to have chosen to live.

Kordela's point, in reading Spinoza 'against himself', is that there is no neutral ontology which can simply see God/nature free of any imputed aims; that we are subjects insofar as we necessitate such a fictional imposition. This is the basic Lacanian point, that any chain of knowledge is incoherent, irrelevant without the stabilizing power of the Master-Signifier, the quilting point which fastens this knowledge to some determinate course of action. This quilting point is a fiction, but a necessary one, without which the world and a 'neutral' ontological analysis thereof would have no consistency for us. Yet can we account for this necessity within Spinoza's thought, or must we resort to 'turning him against himself' so as to draw out the inconsistency of his explicit statements? While I like to think I do not succumb to what she identifies as the 'Neo-Spinozist' tendency to take his words at face value, effacing confrontation with the deadlock intrinsic in his work, I nonetheless think his explicit doctrine is more nuanced than she gives it credit for. To be fair, I have only just begun reading this truly fantastic work, and do not know exactly where she will take her reading; yet, at this early stage, I already find it quite useful in explicating my own reading of Spinoza (to what degree this reading conforms to her's I cannot yet say).

I would contend that, far from the naive position that we can be done with the illusion of ethical aims and modestly resort to a neutral scientific analysis of nature, which must be supplemented with the 'critical' assertion of the necessity of these illusions for us, we can take Spinoza a bit further. The point would then be that, if we were to attempt a truly neutral, 'aimless' dwelling within nature, we would find ourselves unable to act, to do anything. Yet far from a mark of our imperfection, our inability to recognize and fully identify with our proper place in the perfect causal order, and the resulting necessity of supplementing this imperfection with a fiction, what if we radically assert that there is nothing to recognize, that there is no 'natural necessity' to which we would conform if freed from fictive aims?

In other words, insofar as God/nature is the complete chain of causes, a 'closed mechanism', that is, insofar as God is not the constitutive exception to the totality of the world but identified directly with the totality without exception, this totality in its 'infinite perfection' is thereby incomplete, inconsistent. Without the exceptional external view which could explicate 'the next link', that is, the 'natural aim' or 'God's will', there is no way to determine the necessary course of things, inclusive of 'what I should do free of any fictive moral aims'. In other words, the only conclusion of a purely neutral knowledge of nature is that necessity coincides with impossibility, with the impossibility of determining necessity without 'taking a chance', acting without any guarantee... We can thus see how Spinoza is the paradigmatic feminine philosopher in the Lacanian sense: God/nature is 'non-All', that is, there is nothing exempted from it, there is no exempted point of God's will (or, for that matter, a 'free subject' in the vulgar sense), but for that very reason this totality cannot attain closure, it remains incomplete and 'open'. Perfection paradoxically coincides with incompleteness just as the completeness of a fictional aim which gives meaning to arbitrary natural necessity is image of imperfection.

So the 'imperfection' of man is not simply his inability to recognize his place within the perfect order of God/nature; rather, this imperfection is transposed into God/nature itself, such that the shift from imperfection to perfection is no more than a change of perspective on one and the same thing. Whereas we, even in accepting that our aims are ultimately fictional, 'relative', may still continue to posit the divine chain of natural causes as simply epistemologically inaccessible to us, though complete in-itself, Spinoza radically asserts, with his 'third kind of knowledge' (intuition), that we can in fact directly know this perfection; my hermeneutical claim is that this 'intuition' involves no more than transposing this inaccessibility of a complete knowledge of perfection into the very incompleteness of perfection itself. We are thus this incompleteness of the Divine as 'for-itself'. (Furthermore, I would propose against Kordela that Deleuze's reading of Spinoza is not filtered through some vulgar Bergsonian vitalism; rather, if we take his understanding of intuition in Bergson as determined by the Spinozan concept as I read it, we can see that, rather than a 'Bergsonized Spinoza', Deleuze already 'Spinozizes Bergson'; I think his reading of élan vital as not some vulgar Universal Life, but rather a principle of self-difference, is evidence in this direction.)

So, to be precise, if we take Spinoza's God/nature along the same lines as the Lacanian assertion that 'God is unconscious', this does not mean that without the fictions constitutive of consciousness we would find a 'true' necessity, a 'proper place' within nature; rather, God/nature is ultimately no more than the impossibility of discovering such a necessity, the limit internal to every aim that prevents it from coinciding with itself, the very incompleteness of perfection as such. Indeed, Kordela hints at such a reading when she insists that Spinoza's assertion that God has no will, that nature is ultimately 'aimless', is to be read in the same way as Lacan's 'the big Other does not exist':

Lacan...maintains that the Other is inconsistent, that "there is no Other of the Other," that the Other in itself has no will or aim... [H]e adopts the Spinozian conception of history as aimless, and supplements it, according to the Spinozian conception of truth, with a willful and intentional gaze (and, hence, aim), which, however, is "a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other". [17]

And precisely as subjects, who depend on fictional impositions of aims in order to make sense of the world, we are no more than this gaze already inscribed in God: not God's will, but God's opaqueness to itself, the fact that even God does not know his own will, that precisely as perfect, God cannot explain why necessity itself is necessary. Think, for example, of God's speech at the end of the Book of Job, in which he enumerates his own creations as if he himself is amazed at them, as if they are inexplicable even to their creator.

Thus, if freedom is affirmed necessity, it is precisely the assumption of the 'miraculous', inexplicable character of this necessity, the fact that not even God can explain why this was necessary. Spinoza never really elaborates a theory of the subject because the subject is no more than this splitting internal to the divine perfection of nature, this incompleteness/openness that is perfection, necessity. To return to the example of Adam, it is not simply that Adam, in order to make a decision regarding the fruit, must choose some aim (to live or to die), out of ignorance of what God really wants from him; the point is that God himself does not know what he wants of Adam, and hence must leave the decision up to Adam's ignorant, impulsive hubris. The gaze desperately seeking meaning from God is already inscribed in God himself, and is, far from a mark of imperfection, is precisely his perfection as such.

Of course this is only the preamble to such a reading of Spinoza, and I am here setting myself a task I probably won't even begin until my thesis is finished. And I still have a long ways to go in Kordela's book, among others. In any case, I highly recommend $urplus, which presents in my opinion the most original and exciting reading of Spinoza since Deleuze. Whether or not it supports my position, that Spinoza is already a 'critical' philosopher in the strict sense, has yet to be seen, but I am resolute that this is in fact the case. What this means is that, far from reducing deontology to ontology, fictive 'oughts' to the scientific 'is', any more than maintaining the gap between them, Spinoza more radically transposes the gap into the 'is' itself, so that Ethics is the name of the impossible coincidence of God/nature, of the One, with itself. The ethical subject then must assume this gap as his very being, he must identify with this gap/incompleteness that defines the perfection of God/nature.

Contrary to Žižek, Spinoza does not reduce deontology to ontology, but rather raises ontology to deontology. Thus we at the same time denounce fictive 'oughts', ideological aims imposed on the world, and a pure necessary order of 'is' accessible to science: the is, the Being of God/nature, is said only of the must, the vertiginous decision of the subject absent of any justification through aims (the Lacanian act): it is this tautological assertion of an act without any grounding in symbolic coordinates that would 'make sense of it' which selects what must be, which remakes 'what is' by dissolving the symbolic framework that previously defined it, retaining only that which can endure a new evaluation (ultimately, no more than the New itself in History, in the guise of the failed attempts to break out of the given symbolic order which were rendered meaningless by that very order; the act is thus one of Benjaminian Redemption). The is, the Lacanian Real, is ultimately nothing but this immanent limit of symbolization, this necessary inconsistency of every symbolic order, and hence the potential for the New to escape its confines.

Amor Fati and the Eternal Return

2007-11-13T02:07:00.001-05:00

This is my final paper for the course on Heidegger, Bergson, and Deleuze I took last spring. The focus of the paper is Deleuze's articulation of the Eternal Return in Nietzsche. It's a little rough, but overall I'm quite happy with it. Since writing it, I have been reading a lot of Zizek, Badiou, Hegel, Lacan, et cetera, a regimen which has significantly altered my reading of Deleuze. Yet, returning to the paper, I was surprised at how much it prefigured this shift. More on that later.

~

Yet to Come
Amor Fati and the Eternal Return in Nietzsche and Deleuze

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
- William Blake, “Eternity”

~

Amor fati: love of fate, fatal love –

We are faced with a volitional intuition and a transmutation. 'To my inclination for death,' said Bousquet, 'which was a failure of the will, I will substitute a longing for death which would be the apotheosis of the will.' From this inclination to this longing there is, in a certain respect, no change except a change of the will, a sort of leaping in place (saut sur place) of the whole body which exchanges its organic will for a spiritual will. It wills now not exactly what occurs, but something in that which occurs, something yet to come which would be consistent with what occurs, in accordance with the laws of an obscure, humorous conformity...It is in this sense that the Amor fati is one with the struggle of free men.¹

Who is this man who wants to die? Who wills death, longs for death? Who is capable of affirming his death? He who has becom strong enough to affirm even that most terrible burden, to discover in that most terrible realization a joy more profound than any mere enjoyment or pleasure, a joy that cannot be bound to oneself, but that flies from the self and from every captivity, that mercilessly destroys anything that would try to capture it. He who can kiss that joy as it flies, who can love death for discovering in death the joyous escape from that which dies.

Bousquet distinguished two moments. First, a resignation: I cannot will death, I cannot affirm it; that burden is too heavy, too big for me, I would collapse beneath that weight, and so I can only wait for death to take me. I have an inclination for death, I bend toward it, I submit to it and accept its inevitability. On my knees, hunched over, I yield to its merciless judgment, I await its cruelty in pathetic surrender. I have only my little pleasures which allow me to endure this wretched life, those little joys I was able to capture and bind, and I can forgive myself of them because they will not return once my time has come.

When Blake says this man “does the winged life destroy”, we must read it in the fullest sense: he destroys, diminishes, disgraces that purest joy in capturing it, he possess it on the condition that it will soon be gone, and this is already its death; this little joy is only a corpse, an idol, a fool's joy, for it can no longer take flight and attain its highest power, it is already paralyzed, doomed. Yet we can also repeat this quite differently: it is no longer he who destroys the winged life, but the winged life does destroy him.

He who cannot affirm the highest power of joy, who can affirm his joy “once, only once”, will suffer the wrath of his prisoner when, as a phoenix, it rises out of the ashes of its miserable double in a furious incandescence, casting its captor to the flames. These men content to wait for death, to endure life, to take pleasure in the littlest of joys, will receive the most pitiful fate: “they will have, and be aware of, only an ephemeral life!”^²

In the second moment, resignation is overcome, the resignation has transformed into exaltation, apotheosis. The man content to wait for death, unable to affirm it, to will it, to carry this burden, is forsaken in favor of a new strength, a new capability: a longing, a passion for death expresses a will transformed, no longer a failed will, a “nothingness of the will” as Nietzsche says. It is now the most profound expression of a “will to nothingness”, no longer stifled by those petty pleasures that distract one from the immensity of its cruel fulfillment.

The man who wants to die, who wills that everything of himself that cannot affirm and cannot be affirmed, everything petty, weak, cowardly, that all of this should die with him – and this is the highest power of joy, this is the winged life attained. When everything base, everything that weighs heavy on one's back, has been annihilated, only lightness and joy remain. He has become capable of casting off everything of himself that has failed and of retaining only that highest power of affirmation. Even negation remains only as a power of affirmation: to will death, but to will the death of that which, incapable of affirming even itself, is resigned to die – to affirm this resignation as such. This is the exaltation of the will: the will to nothingness undergoes a transmutation, becoming a will to affirmation; the abyss swallows everything heavy, so that only an arrow swift and sturdy, sent with the whole force of one's being, can escape its gravity; and so that even the abyss itself is swallowed up by the line of flight the arrow draws.

The man who wants to die succeeds in surpassing the man who cannot affirm his death, who waits patiently for the abyss to open and take him. The man who wants to die becomes capable of shouldering this terrible burden, but only so that he can liberate in himself that which is utterly weightless, the winged life. “What makes one heroic?— Going out to meet at the same time one's highest suffering and one's highest hope.”^³ This weight may lead him all the more quickly into the abyss, but it is precisely everything of himself that is a burden for him that is so annihilated, so that the quickness, exuberance, affirmation and joy are set free.

Does this not imply a third moment, a moment when, after death is affirmed and all that cannot affirm death is annihilated, a will to affirmation flies free into its winged life? We have seen the last man, the man resigned to die, and his nothingness of the will; we have seen the man who wants to die, who, in realizing the completion of the will to nothingness, surpassed the last man and his ephemeral life by liberating from his very being a life that would escape that which dies. Are we not then waiting for this winged life to appear, this life that finally overcomes every burden, every death? Are we not awaiting the Overman?

~

Amor fati –

Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought: hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year—what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of all my life henceforth! I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things:—then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation! And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer!^⁴

How does Nietzsche realize this love? How could anyone accomplish such a task? The problem is at once an ethical problem, the problem of how to live, how to make beauty of this life and in this life, to have done with negation and accusation, to make life into pure affirmation. It is through the power of affirmation that beauty and strength and importance is discovered in even the smallest of things, even in cruelty, in pain, in illness, in limitation. To make of one's life an affirmation would mean that the value of everything must be evaluated; of every person, every act, every relationship, every moment. Everything is evaluated so that beauty and worth can be discovered in every thing, so that every thing can be remade on this basis. The will to affirmation would realize and rescue the beauty in everything, in spite of the values imposed on the world that obscure, denigrate, or deny that beauty. Affirmation is the only way in which ethics, as the examination and reinvention of one's very mode of living, one's ethos, can be rescued from the accusation, judgment, and denial of morality.

The problem is also, at the same time, an ontological problem, the problem of “what is necessary in things”. It is not only a matter of “what is”, “what exists”, but rather, of what must exist, of what, in things, necessarily exists. An ontological affirmation cannot affirm everything that is without succumbing to a paralyzing inadequacy. However, it must affirm that which, in every thing, necessarily exists, that which must be made to exist. We seek not a total ontology that would affirm as existing everything, even the most base, most vile, most deserving of inexistence, but a selective ontology that engenders in existence that which must exist, and expels all the rest. Whereas the former would 'let be', the latter will 'make be'. A selective ontology would not simply describe reality, but would engender it as such, as that which must necessarily be; it would select in existence that which purely exists in and for affirmation, and thereby would create a pure ontology. Thus we can see that when ontology becomes pure, it merges with or implicates ethics, it is an ethics, ontological ethics. There is no longer any trace of the classical distinction between what is and what ought to be, a boundary dividing ontology from ethics; there is only what must be, as the traversing of the gap, an arrow crossing the void, a love of fate.

Yet here we must proceed with the utmost caution. For what is the source of this imperative? Doesn't it imply an authority that would reintroduce morality? In what sense can we speak of a pure being, a necessary being, and doesn't this reintroduce a value higher than what is, which opposes existence, which existence merely resembles, against which existence is judged? These concerns will plague us until we consider Nietzsche's solution to the two-fold problem of Amor fati. The will must undergo a test, a torturous crucible, if it is to affirm and love its fate, to make fate itself the object of the will, a will taken to the very limit of its power, to the n^th power. The last man, despite his resignation to death, does not know of this love, for his will is reduced to its minimum of power, and so he cannot will his fate. It is only the man who wants to die that can pass the test, that has a will strong enough to affirm death and all the miseries of fate. In becoming capable of this affirmation, becoming-equal to the task, he aspires to overcome himself, his mortality, all of his weaknesses and limitations He prepares the way for the Overman: “At the stage of the 'during,' or the becoming-equal, the 'overman' becomes an ideal we seek to imitate.”^⁵ Nietzsche's test will eliminate these weaknesses and liberate a winged life from that which dies; the Overman will no longer be an ideal for man, but will have already overcome him. With the force of an arrow escaping the gravity of the abyss, it affirms the must that flashes between ontology and ethics as a bolt of lightning. Nietzsche's test is the eternal return.

~

Eternal Return –

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!'— Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine!' If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you; the question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more, and innumerable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? —^⁶

Nietzsche's test is first presented here as a hypothetical, a mere thought: could you affirm the eternal recurrence of the same events, of every moment of your life, from the most wonderful to the most terrible? Could you affirm it all again to the n^th power? Could you will your life, all of your life, without the intrusion of anything new? Yet Nietzsche also says this thought will change you if it does not crush you. What is this change? If one is able to affirm this life once and only once, content with the little pleasures, then one will always confront the intrusion of the new into one's life as miraculous, the mark of a higher power than one's own. One cannot change things or oneself; one can only dwell in those little routines and habits that make one comfortable. The new must come from without, with a strength and a violence greater than one's own. This man would be crushed by the thought of the eternal return, as his only consolation for his miserable life is that it will be over soon enough, and the new will intrude at his death when he is spirited off into the afterlife.

Yet the man who can affirm this terrible weight has discovered the greatest secret. He is able to affirm the eternal recurrence of the same events because he can liberate the new from every past event of his life, drawing out of those same things something different by making difference a power of his acting. It is no longer a divine guarantee, but a immanent imperative. This man lives such that he can affirm all of his past, and the new within everything past, in his every act. It is by making the new, the different, in one's act that one frees from those same events the power of the new, as if the whole of his past is the same, but at the same time, everything has changed. It is as if those same events now mean something completely different, because we now see them as having been necessary for the new to emerge in that very act. One can now affirm all of one's past indefinitely, in every new act that subsequently reacts back on and reveals the new in the same series of events. One can affirm the eternal return of the same events, because this has become the condition for producing the new.

Hence we can draw from this hypothesis an ethical imperative. “The eternal return says: whatever you will, will it in such a manner that you also will its eternal return.”^⁷ Only will that in which you can eternally discover the new, that which can serve as the condition for something different. This imperative gives rise to a genuine change in one's actions; not a simple modification of habits, but a reorientation of every action towards change itself; to will all of one's life, such that the action of this will changes everything. The same events can be affirmed eternally only if they are said of an internal difference, an eternal differing from themselves; they are affirmed only as opening onto the new. They are the 'same events', but they can be affirmed as such only on the condition that in this affirmative act, every one of them is changed; the 'same' is said only of difference when we can affirm our power to eternally make the difference. One is impelled to think of one's actions in such a way that they can be affirmed eternally as the conditions for something new to emerge, as having been necessary for the new. The thought of the eternal return must discover in every past event the potential for something new, and in fact, the necessity of something new.

Yet insofar as this is only a thought, only hypothetical, it has no real imperative power without the support of an authority. How might we think this test as not hypothetically but really imperative? And if this thought is an ethical imperative, what is the reason for this emphasis on the new and different? What is the ethical value of these, and can they really serve as the highest values, such that our imperative need consider none other? The problem is we have yet to discover the relationship between ethics and ontology, and so we must consider the eternal return not only as an ethical test, but an ontological principle. Nietzsche himself takes up the concept of eternal return from the ancients, but not without making it serve as the condition for something new, a new concept.

The ancient concept was an ontological or cosmological principle that conceived reality in terms of the 'cyclical hypothesis': given an infinite amount of time, every possible finite event will be realized, and after which time every event will be realized again to infinity. In this way, the same events will return identically for all eternity. This hypothesis, in Nietzsche's own time, became a scientific claim, the claim of either a mechanistic universe or a final thermodynamic equilibrium: “The two conceptions agree on one hypothesis, that of a final or terminal state, a terminal state of becoming.”^⁸ In this way, all change in the universe will terminate in a final equilibrium identical to the beginning state of the universe, after which everything will happen again in the same way, thus subordinating all change to an ultimate identity.

Nietzsche rejects the cyclical hypothesis in both its ancient and scientific formulations. “Nietzsche says that if the universe had an equilibrium position, if becoming had an end or final state, it would already have been attained. But the present moment, as the passing moment, proves that it is not attained and therefore that an equilibrium of forces is not possible.”^⁹ He defends this claim by denying the necessity of positing a beginning point from which all change is born, as there is an absurdity in this notion: if there was an equilibrium position before change began, it would have had no reason or power to change, it would have remained as it was. Because there was no beginning to becoming, but rather an “infinity of past time”, a final equilibrium would have already been attained if it were at all possible. And if it had ever attained this state, it would again have no reason or power to leave it.^¹⁰ Thus the eternal return as ontological principle cannot base itself on the idea that there is an ultimate series of events bound between a beginning and an end which are identical, and which will repeat identically whenever the end is reached, a “mechanical process [that] passes through the same set of differences again.”^¹¹

How then does the eternal return become an ontological principle? “According to Nietzsche the eternal return is in no sense a thought of the identical but rather a thought of synthesis, a thought of the absolutely different which calls for a new principle outside science. This principle is that of the reproduction of diversity as such, of the repetition of difference...”^¹² We must then think this principle of synthesis, this synthesis of difference as such. What returns of the same events is precisely their capacity to be synthesized differently; they must necessarily return, but they only return eternally when, in every act, a new synthesis is carried out, a new combination of those same events is produced, such that everything that returns does so only insofar as it is now made different. The new combination succeeds in discovering in the same events something new, some new possible combination. The same events only return as the condition for something new that subsequently discovers in them a new sense; it is this new sense, created in new combinations, that returns, and the 'same' is said only of this new sense that flees from any necessary identity.

This internal difference, internal to every 'same event', of which the same is said, is what Nietzsche calls will to power. “If...the will to power is a good principle, if it reconciles empiricism with principles, if it constitutes a superior empiricism, this is because it is an essentially plastic principle that is no wider than what it conditions, that changes itself with the conditioned and determines itself in each case along with what it determines.”^¹³ The same events only return by virtue of this internal principle that makes them serve as the condition of the new, and that determines those events as new at the same time that it determines the new itself. The same events are synthesized as different in the determination of a new combination, and this determination is the destiny of those events. In this way, the affirmation and love of fate must discover in what occurs the destiny of the new. “Destiny never consists in step-by-step deterministic relations between presents which succeed one another according to the order of a represented time. Rather, it implies between successive presents non-localisable connections, actions at a distance, systems of replay, resonance and echoes, objective chances, signs, signals and roles which transcend spatial locations and temporal successions.”^¹⁴

Destiny is affirmed as the destiny of past presents to enter into new combinations, to produce the new that simultaneously determines them anew, giving them a new sense. This plastic, internal principle of difference is thus the ontological principle of the eternal return. Everything returns, but only insofar as it enters into new combinations: “In the eternal return, identities do not return; combinations return, which differ in their atomistic nature. [It] actually unmasks these illusions by making this moment distinct from all others...The present moment assembles a unique combination, distinct from adjacent ones...When we become aware of different combinations, we become aware of novelty, which, rather than emerging from us, erupts from the random play of combinations within time itself.”^¹⁵ Everything exists only as a combination, in which the things combined no longer exist except as pure differences, pure elements of an absolutely different combination. They are no longer identical to what they had been, but differ from themselves in being implicated in a novel combination that determines them anew. The affirmation of fate, of destiny, is thus the affirmation of the necessity of chance; what is necessary in things is their ability to enter into a 'random play of combinations', chance encounters that give rise to a new sense in them. Chance, affirmed as necessary, is the internal principle of that which returns in the eternal return, it is will to power. “Chance is the bringing of forces into relation, the will to power is the determining principle of this relation. The will to power is a necessary addition to force but can only be added to forces brought into relation by chance.”^¹⁶

If everything exists only in combinations of differences, as combinations of differences, then nothing can be identical to itself, there can be no inner essence or model of things. Here we can think of Plato, who distinguished between the ultimate Forms or Ideas which were identical in themselves, and the things we encounter in the world which are only approximations or copies of those models. Yet there is a third category, the simulacrum: that which resembles or appears to be the copy of some model but does not depend on that model, which only imitates that model as a mask or disguise, hiding a different internal principle. In Plato, simulacra do participate in some other model despite imitating another; for example, the sophist resembles the philosopher, whose Idea is truth, but actually participates in the Idea of prestige or wealth. Yet before the simulacrum is determined as the copy of another model, it is known only as possessing an internal principle different than what was thought. The internal principle of the simulacrum qua simulacrum is difference, only difference.

The ontological principle of the eternal return is precisely that there can be no model, no essence, no identity, of that which returns, and that everything exists only in combinations whose internal principle is difference. The 'same' things exist as such only in returning, in being repeated with a different sense, determined anew in a novel combination that arises out of chance. The 'same' things are said to exist only as an affirmation of chance, of the chance that they might take on a different sense, and this affirmation is the internal principle of that which returns. In this way, things only return as simulacra: “[T]aken in its strict sense, eternal return means that each thing exists only in returning, copy of an infinity of copies which allows neither original nor origin to subsist...it qualifies as simulacrum that which it causes to be (and to return). When eternal return is the power of (formless) Being, the simulacrum is the true character or form – the 'being' – of that which is.”^¹⁷ It is in this sense that the eternal return is a selective ontology: it selects, in what exists, that which is capable of differing from itself, of entering into new combinations and attaining a new sense. Only that which can affirm the chance of differing, and has this affirmation as an internal principle, will return. Affirming chance as necessary and as the only necessity is Amor fati.

What returns in the eternal return is every thing, but only the extreme form of every thing; every thing returns only insofar as it is capable of being transformed, insofar as it goes to its limits rather than resting within them. Those forms or senses of things in which they have stable identities, immutable essences, natures already determined, are abolished in the instant of chance, of determination as such, in which everything is determined anew. “Only the extreme forms return – those which, large or small, are deployed within the limit and extend to the limit of their power, transforming themselves and changing one into another.”^¹⁸ The values of all things are not already determined, but in every moment must be determined anew; in this way, eternal return becomes the ethical test of evaluation, in which everything is evaluated in terms of what it can do, what it can become, in the new combination that thereby determines itself by affirming the chance of this becoming-other. This is the point at which the ontological principle becomes an ethical imperative; not simply a hypothetical imperative, a selective thought, but a real and realized imperative, a selective being. “It is no longer a question of the simple thought of the eternal return eliminating from willing everything that falls outside this thought but rather, of the eternal return making something come into being which cannot do so without changing nature. It is no longer a question of selective thought but of selective being; for the eternal return is being and being is selection.”^¹⁹

Whatever you will, will it such that you also will its eternal return. This means that every act of the will must select in everything that determines it a different sense, a different way of being. The being selected in the eternal return is always a different way of being, a being said of becoming, an identity said of the absolutely different. The value of everything will give way to an evaluation that selects in everything new values, new powers. This is what extreme form means: that which only exists in its capacity to become other than what it is, by entering into a novel combination. The extreme form abolishes everything weak, limiting, stable, already-determined. “Eternal return alone effects the true selection, because it eliminates the average forms and uncovers 'the superior form of everything that is'...the superior form is...the eternal formlessness of the eternal return itself, throughout its metamorphoses and transformations. Eternal return 'makes' the difference because it creates the superior form.”^²⁰ Masked by every formed identity is a formlessness, a chance to become different, and this is what is selected and affirmed. The superior form is what must exist, what must be made to exist, and this is where ethics and ontology coincide – thought and being become indistinguishable in the will, the affirmation of the will to power.

The superior form of everything is realized when form itself becomes a mask for an internal principle of formlessness, when identity becomes a mask for difference. The 'same events' return only when they are capable of differing from what they were. This is the ethical imperative: in everything that has value, discover the power of an evaluation that gives sense to values, and that can endow everything with a new sense, a new value. “In what do you believe?— In this: that the weights of all things must be determined anew.”^²¹ This revaluation of all values becomes the task of an ontological ethics that would select the superior forms, that would make exist that which must exist of necessity, and affirm this necessity in a love of fate. But necessity is only the necessity of difference, and fate is only that of what is yet-to-come: not a result whose identity is determined beforehand, but the affirmation in everything that occurs of what is only as yet-to-come, and this affirmation is determination as such. “The extreme formality is there only for an excessive formlessness...In this manner, the ground is superseded by a groundlessness, a universal ungrounding which turns upon itself and causes only the yet-to-come to return.”^²² The eternal return affirms in what exists that which exists only as yet-to-come: internal difference, the potential to differ, to become.

In the act that affirms the eternal return and selects the superior form that must exist, the actor affirms all of the past as the necessary condition for action. Yet insofar as all of the past is implicated in this new combination arising from the chance of the act, it is implicated only in its capacity to differ from what it was prior, in its capacity as the condition of something new. The past is affirmed, but only that which, in the past, is eternally yet-to-come. Every sense of things past that would demand identity, stability, limitation, fidelity to the essence, all of these are eliminated. In the same way, the actor's own identity, his self, is abolished, he is dissolved in the act as the pure power to differ from what he was, he becomes unrecognizable. All of the weaknesses, limitations, and failings that characterize him are abolished, and he becomes otherwise.

The last man, resigned to die, unable to will his fate as the advent of the new, remains fixated on the necessity imposed upon him by his conditions, and repeats these conditions incessantly out of his inability to affirm and to act out of necessity. He can only repeat and retain his weaknesses, limitations, and failings. Because he cannot become otherwise, cannot make something new from his conditions, he cannot pass the test of the eternal return. The man who wants to die, on the other hand, becomes capable of affirming his fate, he actively abolishes his weaknesses in discovering in his condition something yet-to-come, the Overman. Yet while he may pass the test, he will be annihilated as such in the process. Everything in him that constituted his identity, his self – weaknesses, limitations, failings – is eliminated, and so this identity, this self, falls into the abyss. In the third moment, the eternal return liberates from this man the pure will to affirmation, the affirmation of the yet-to-come, and the Overman is born as a child. “The 'small man' and 'last man' repeat since they lack the ability to take action (the repetition of the before). The great heroic and active man, or the 'one who wants to perish,' repeats in order to become-equal to the action (the repetition of the during). And yet both of these must perish in the third moment. This agrees with Nietzsche's sentiment that man is something to be overcome: 'he is a bridge and not an end.'”^²³

In the eternal return it is not the past that conditions us, nor ourselves as capable of acting and exceeding these conditions, that returns; they are both led to death, swallowed by the abyss, dissolved in the act. Yet man dies, he is overcome, only in liberating, in his conditions and in himself, that which is yet-to-come. It is not the life of man itself that must die, but man as that which limits his life, which cannot affirm all of chance and find a joy and a love in necessity. Man must be overcome, and what overcomes him is the secret and obscure coherence of the act – the coherence or consistency of every possible outcome, everything in the act that is yet-to-come, affirmed as such. Man will only be overcome when all of chance is affirmed in the act, with a love of fate, whatever fate that may be. When ethics and ontology coincide, there is no longer a distinction between man and his condition, as both are dissolved in the act that retains of them only the power to differ, to become, to make the difference. The act must become the pure affirmation of all of chance, of every possible outcome, and must wager everything on that single throw of the dice. When man and his conditions are transformed in the act, overcome by the act, the will realizes the superior form of everything that is, and it is this form that will return eternally in the secret coherence of the yet-to-come, the winged life of the Overman in eternity's sunrise. The abyss of death is swept up in its line of flight, in a new life that escapes the spirit of gravity.

~

Eternal Return –

In the horizon of the infinite.— We have left the land and have embarked! We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone further and destroyed the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom—and there is no longer any 'land'!^²⁴

References:

Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science.

Gilles Deleuze:

D&R – Difference and Repetition. New York: Continuum, 2004.

LoS – The Logic of Sense. New York: Continuum, 2004.

N&P – Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

DTST – Keith Faulkner. Deleuze and the Three Syntheses of Time. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006.

Notes:

1LoS p 170
2D&R p 67
3The Gay Science §268
4The Gay Science §276
5DTST p 123
6The Gay Science §341
7D&R p 8
8N&P p 46
9Ibid. p 47
10Ibid. p 47-9
11Ibid. p 49
12Ibid. p 46
13Ibid. p 50
14D&R p 105
15DTST p 14
16N&P p 53
17D&R p 80
18Ibid. p 51
19N&P p 71
20D&R p 66
21The Gay Science §269
22D&R 114
23DTST p 124
24The Gay Science §124

Materialism of the Problem

2007-10-25T15:43:00.000-05:00

If Deleuze is a materialist, it is because he brings materiality to its limit: the familiar materiality of bodies and their physical relations of force, matter as substantial and formed, at its limit, passes over into the bodiless, insubstantial realm of an unformed and non-formal matter-function. We have the physico-empirical plane of material bodies, of visibilities or sensibilities, which relate in the passage of forces from body to body in causal chains. A cue strikes the cue ball, which strikes another ball, et cetera, constituting a series of passages of force. The complication here is that the passage of force becomes autonomous, inscribed on a different plane than that of the bodies which act and react.

It is this autonomy of passage which Deleuze and Guattari name rhythm. Rhythm must be understood in terms of an alternation, a passage from one thing to the other; they say that rhythm is what happens between milieus, it is a transcoding, a "coordination of heterogeneous space-times." (ATP 313) Coding refers to what Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, calls 'habit': a regular pattern, a series of relations that endures coherently, that repeats. A milieu or habitus is ultimately no more than a consistent set of habits/codings which endures. Rhythm, however, is not simply a habit, a regular pattern or 'meter', but refers to that which interrupts habits/codes, undermines them, and forces them to reorient.

Rhythm, as alternation, involves a passage from one coded milieu into another; yet this does not simply mean that two foreign milieus relate to each other, that one relates to the other as different from itself, composed of different codes. Rather, they together relate to the outside, to an alterity irreducible to some determinate other. It is this outside upon which the passage is inscribed, in which rhythms reverberate. Rhythms are basically the relation between disparate codes, series, or patterns, such that two different codes relate to the Disparate, to their divergence as such. It is across this disparity that a novel conjunction of the coded elements occurs, that a 'transcoding' is born.

Rhythm is that reorientation of codes or patterns that results when two milieus encounter, between each other, that paradoxical element which undermines their consistent conjunction; ultimately, this element is nothing but a pure distance - not the distance between them, but the distance of each from its threshold, the point after which coding breaks down and the consistency of the milieu is compromised, resulting in a change in nature. Every coding envelops this distance, this threshold of decoding, which is not simply the distance of one set of habits from another, but more like the distance of each coding from itself, its inability to extend itself infinitely, to perfectly coincide with itself. At this point, the being of the thing (milieu) becomes indistinguishable from its problematic status - the consistency of the milieu depends upon the problem of its relation to the limit beyond which it will decompose.

Rhythm as alternation is ultimately the incessant oscillation between the consistent encodings of a milieu, including the transcoding that preserves this consistency when foreign milieus must relate across their difference, and the decoding or loss of consistency which characterizes a passage to the limit. This is the passage which becomes autonomous, drawing a plane apart from that of the milieus and their codes. Passage to the limit is the way an arrangement composes itself as such: beyond the incidental conglomeration of the milieu, an arrangement organizes itself on the basis of a limit it must posit as such by extending its power that far, by occupying the whole distance between its borders, and thereby realizing the threshold beyond which its influence ceases. As Deleuze and Guattari say, the territory is a place of passage, or even the place of passage, the taking-place of passage. The territory is constituted precisely when the threshold of a milieu (or the vertiginous conjunction of several thresholds, converging on the paradoxical element of an encounter) becomes the vector of deterritorialization, thus retroactively positing the consistency drawn between milieus as their 'territorialization', as the becoming-expressive of the habitual functions, and the emergence of partial surfaces, membranes, which give body to limits.

This incorporeal transformation of milieu into territory occurs only when the threshold qua problematic point is treated not as some external threat to the consistency of the milieu, but rather as intrinsic and constitutive of that consistency, a 'positive principle of non-consistency'. If the milieu is defined by a warding off of problems - a denial of the consistency of the milieu itself as problematic and unstable, endlessly caught in a coming-to-itself (positing of its constitutive limit) coterminous with a leaving-itself or becoming-other (passage to the limit/confrontation with the threshold of consistency) - the territory is born of a simple 'change of emphasis': the problem is posited as constitutive/productive, the entire habitual field is reoriented in relation to this problematic status.

Insofar as the entirety of the encoding is mobilized in a passage to the limit, the passage itself, in the mode of a fleeing or escape, a passage across the threshold indistinguishable from the threshold itself posited as such, is endlessly displaced within the field, potentially appearing anywhere, amongst any conjunction of elements/functions. The problematization of the field thus involves a displacement of the paradoxical element (line of flight, aleatory point) within the field such that the elements and functions are subject to a continuous variation or redistribution. A materialism of the problem, therefore, should acknowledge the ontological status of the problem as the line of flight, the drawing of limits which territorializes or individuates the pure multiplicity of milieus by virtue of an incorporeal surface, a body without organs, tearing asunder coded elements and functions which are then arranged in relation to the problematic points (thresholds) which, by chance, present themselves in the passage to the limit.

~

The point here is that the vulgar, physical materialism in which all that exists is empirical (perceptible) phenomena enchained by causal determination does not go far enough. In this view, reality appears to us as incomplete, plagued by misunderstandings, errors, illusions, et cetera, only insofar as we possess finite, imperfect epistemological relations to it. So reality is an ontologically complete and consistent 'mechanism', everything can be explained immanently within the material world without reference to any divine or supernatural beyond; unfortunately, this view nonetheless presupposes a perfect, untainted intellect, unbound by finite epistemological limitations, which has total access to the complete chain of causes.

Even if we have no conceivable way of occupying such a position, or we deny that there is any (divine) observer occupying it, this vulgar materialism still presupposes that such a position exists in principle. In this sense, the incompletenesses of reality as we experience it, the problems which intervene and disturb the consistency of our world(s), are only epistemological, symptoms of our finitude and embeddedness, which can be progressively overcome through scientific rigor, increasingly approximating the 'ideal', untainted prerogative. Existence is posited as complete, consistent, only insofar as we rely on a constitutive exception by reference to which we can explain apparent inconsistencies (problems) as illusions resulting from a false identification with the exceptional point.

Deleuze's point, if we may put it in these terms, is precisely that this incompleteness is not epistemological, that there is no exceptional point of clarity from which all problems will be recognized as illusory. He is far more radical, asserting that materiality must be extended to the problems themselves, that the inconsistencies we confront must be included in materiality. This means that for Deleuze, the ontological itself is incomplete, inconsistent, problematic. There is no exceptional point unencumbered by the limitations of finitude. In this way, we do not reduce all problems to the central problem of the inadequacy of our knowledge; rather, problems attain a primary ontological status. This status is precisely that of the threshold posited in the passage to the limit constitutive of the consistency of any arrangement; it is the force of deterritorialization which retroactively territorializes the milieu from which it departs; it is the incorporeal transformation of the ordinary into the singular, of delimited coagulations of flows into the unlimited becoming of virtualities.

Division III Contract, First Draft

2007-10-17T10:24:00.000-05:00

This is the first draft of my project proposal as it appears on my contract.

Changing the Subject: Elements for an Ontology of Economy

Ontology of economy: what does this mean? Economics as a science is the investigation of an empirical field, into the phenomena we observe within this field and the way these phenomena operate. If 'empirical' designates what appears to our senses, then by ontology we mean what 'really is', apart from the way it appears to us. This is the famous Kantian distinction between the thing for us and the thing-in-itself. Yet, as Kant makes clear, we by definition cannot know the thing-in-itself, what 'really is there', as our knowledge is always knowledge in and of the empirical realm. Thus, he designates the a priori forms and categories structuring this field, which is to say, our experience of it, and hence what we can know.

We are not strictly Kantian on this matter, but we nonetheless find in him an insight: the ontology of any scientific field, in this case, the economy, would designate precisely the limits, the horizon, of that field in terms of the concepts and categories that delimit and define our experience of it. So in the first instance, we are investigating these concepts as they structure this field. Yet we must go further: why do we have these conceptual orientations at all? Why are there several orientations of this type, as evidenced in the split between different schools of economics? Is direct access to the empirical economy even possible, or is it constitutively mediated by these categories?

Thus, while ontology in the first sense refers to the modes in which the empirical field is disclosed, 'what really is' then referring to how the appearance appears, how we experience it and know it, in the second sense it must seek out that mysterious thing that causes diverse modes of disclosure to come about, that necessitates this mediation in disclosure, and yet is not disclosed itself. This thing is nothing empirical, it does not appear, and yet it is that 'real' that all appearance presupposes. This 'real', though a priori unknowable, is nevertheless not to be foreclosed or ignored. We propose that the real precisely has no existence apart from the problem it poses, that it is the very being of the problem. Different modes of disclosure, conceptual orientations, 'world views', result from different ways of posing this problem and subsequently different solutions, however inadequate.

Science in general, in this way, deals with the cases of solution, and not with posing the problem which delimits its horizon, structuring its field of inquiry. In contrast, philosophy has the two-fold task of analyzing the ontological consistency of the empirical field, of what 'merely is', and of positing the ethical imperative of our relation to it as actors, and so what 'ought to be'. Philosophy has historically been characterized by this mysterious gap between ontology and ethics, neither of which appear as evident empirically.

This brings us back to economy. Economics occupies a unique position among the sciences insofar as it claims to discover within its empirical field, and hence its ontological horizon, an immanent ethics. From the classical political economists to the neoclassicals of today, all that is necessary for a 'good' society to come about, and for us as actors to act ethically, is that every individual maximizes his rational self-interest. The distribution that would result, through exchange between actors, would thus tend toward the best possible outcome, and would spur production to grow, causing society to progress and develop. Hence, we need not look to a 'beyond' to find some divine ethical imperative: insofar as we are rational, we already act ethically, by virtue of our very composition.

Economics is thus a sight of philosophical interest, as it seems that ethics, far from standing apart from 'what is', instead is already immanent in it. Yet this brings us back to our opening considerations: did we not say that 'what really is', abstracted from all particular experience, exists only as a problem or set of problems which refract the disclosure of the empirical into different conceptual (com)positions? My thesis is that, far from either abandoning or foreclosing truth, i.e. 'what really is', or from claiming to have solved this problem whose solution is by definition unknowable, economics has historically taken a far more subtle and subversive position with regard to the famous immanent ethical mechanism, the market, and the implicit relation between ontology and ethics.

So I propose to analyze the considerations above in greater detail, and in doing so, to set the stage for a historical investigation into the conceptual.

~

I realize this is only a teaser, and will publish a somewhat more substantial explanation of the project soon.

"God is dead"

2007-09-08T13:22:00.000-05:00

I haven't posted in a few months, primarily because my computer died at the beginning of summer, leaving me with only unreliable internet access. When I did have the opportunity to post, I froze. I did write a lot in notebooks, in preparation for my Division III thesis, but it was for the most part nothing I was ready to share. My computer is back, and I'm back at school. After those months of privacy, I think I'm ready to write publicly again. I'm going to be posting regularly with thoughts for my thesis and other projects, hopefully returning to those summer writings with more rigor and clarity.

For now, I'll begin with something very embryonic and probably obscure, sparked by the introduction to Badiou's Briefings on Existence, and fueled by a summer of reading several books by Žižek.

It may well be that God has been agonizing for a very long time. What is surely less doubtful is how, for centuries, we have been busy with successive ways of embalming Him...
I take the formula "God is dead" literally. It has happened. Or, as Rimbaud said, it has passed. God is finished. [Badiou, Briefings p24-5]

Taking seriously the death of God does not result in the vulgar atheism committed to the claim that God "does not exist", that it is a fiction, a social construction or symbolic function. Nor do we fall into agnostic limbo, unable to decide. God is not explained away as an abstract concept with no real and/or confirmable existence. As Badiou says,

If "God is dead" is asserted, it is because the God spoken of was alive and belonged to the dimension of life. When you consider a concept, a symbol, a signifying function, you can say that they have become obsolete, contradicted, and inefficient. They cannot be said to have died. [ibid p24]

When we say "God is dead", we unrepentantly affirm that God was, God existed, lived, and has now passed. God is a reality, a real existence or mode of existence, that has decomposed. What was this mode, this real thing that God had been?

Here we can take some direction from Deleuze's remarkable book on Foucault [sidenote: a book which, for me, is of the utmost importance in reading Deleuze's works as a whole, from D&R and LoS to the latter writings with Guattari; more on that later]. Deleuze there describes this existence as that of a certain formalized combination of forces; specifically, of those forces of which human beings are capable. God, or the "God-form", is a real thing, just as much as you or I: for Deleuze, everything, every mode of existence, is an arrangement of intensive forces whose consistency ('thing-ness', to be crude) is maintained insofar as these forces do not surpass certain limits, remaining within "non-decomposable variable distances" in relation to each other. Every combination or arrangement (agencement, assemblage) of forces is metastable within its limits. Yet if these distances do decompose, if the relations between forces reach the critical point at which a limit loses efficacy and a threshold is crossed, we then pass into a new arrangement, a new distribution and metastability with new limits.

Any arrangement or mode can thereby be understood by its immanent limits and the tendency of its constituent forces to respect these limits. If we accept that every individual mode is unique, different from every other, singular (and the reasons for doing so are by no means self-evident), then the mode itself is defined as a singularity. A singularity is not merely a unique thing; it is precisely that which is expressed in the tendency of forces to 'posit' and respect limits immanent to their given unique arrangement. Singularity is not simply the uniqueness of terms within a diversity, but the tendency by which "the given is given as diverse" to paraphrase D&R.

The singularity of a mode is thus the unique configuration of forces and their limitations that compose a thing as consistent and metastable, but moreover it is the tendency immanent in the forces so combined toward that metastability. The mode qua arrangement is a multiplicity of singular points toward which the forces arranged tend; as DeLanda describes it in his Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, it is a topological diagram or vector field within which are inscribed various attractors defining the long-term tendencies of the individuated trajectories/forces. When a force exceeds the 'basin of attraction', the diagram bifurcates, and a new distribution of singular points results, along with a new set of limits and tendencies immanent to the resulting re-arrangement.

The God-form is, on the one hand, such a mode, defined by an immanent diagram of potential permutations of constituent forces. The forces involved are all the individual and collective forces of human beings. Yet what makes the God-form distinct from other possible arrangements of these forces, other possible ways we might exist? The God-form names precisely the formalization of a particular mode such that there is a strict division between two generic forces: the general forces of the human life-world, and the divine forces of 'raising to the infinite' or of realizing perfection. In this way, the former forces become the brute matter whose formation corresponds to the latter, which becomes a formalized function expressed by this formation. Man is born as the Content, submitted to a finite form, only functioning through the Expression of God as the infinity of formalization.

To bring things down to earth: God exists when the immanent limits of human beings become autonomous, external, as a formalized system to which they are submitted, a transcendent imposition of function. It is not simply that people 'reify' their social relations onto some imaginary being; as with Marx's notion of the commodity form, God is an 'objectively necessary appearance' - we may be the 'real' causes of our various functions, but God is a quasi-cause that appropriates all of these functions, formalizing them and reducing our 'non-reified' causality to a subjective illusion. With formations like the God-form, the Man-form, the State-form, the Organism, etc, the organization of forces is no longer immanent to the arranged forces, but becomes autonomous of and reacts back on what it organizes. (Strangely enough, this definition corresponds to that of 'institutions'; this problem is very important for my Div III research, and I'm not really prepared to address it appropriately, but I will say I believe the crucial thing about focusing on institutions in economics is to rediscover in them the forces they formalize, to reintroduce strategy at the heart of stratification.)

As Deleuze never fails to remind us, we should not be too quick to rejoice in affirming the death of God, as a new formalization was already waiting to replace him: the Man-form (for more on this, see the appendix to Deleuze's Foucault). Yet, following Foucault, we should realize the futility of now plotting the assassination of Man, as if our Fall from Grace requires a redemptive sacrifice. In a Hegelian way, Foucault understood that the death of God, far from signaling the new reign of Man, was already the death of Man from the very beginning. As soon as Man seized the empty throne of divinity, his fate was sealed. Fidelity to Man does not do justice to God's death, to what God died for: if God has died, it was not to clear the way for Man's reign, but to warn us that this place that Man will fill is a place of death, that Man, too, will die, and that we must already see in Man that which will overcome him, destroying not only God and Man, but the very place they both occupied (the surface qua plan of organization or plane of transcendence).

When Christ dies on the cross, it is at once the death of God and of the Man who takes his place. This is perhaps what is crucially missing in Paul. If we affirm that God is dead, we should do justice to this death; we should be faithful not to the corpse or the ghost, but to the event of death itself. God died not to set Man free, but to free that which was lost to them both, that which may overcome them: the unlimited (af)finity of the singular in its becoming.

Enowning Heidegger

2007-05-24T12:47:00.000-05:00

This is a paper I wrote for my metaphysics course, on Heidegger's concepts of 'ownness' and 'Enowning' [Ereignis]. It still needs a lot of work, Section 5 in particular, but I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. I know its written in a very Heideggerian voice, which was my professor's main criticism, but having already written several papers in which I tried to go beyond Heidegger without really finding myself in Heidegger, papers that turned out well but left me feeling overly ambitious, I wanted to dwell in his voice and follow his meandering articulation. Many of the refrains of this paper will show up again, in a different arrangement, in my next post, which will be my final paper for this course on the Eternal Return in Nietzsche and Deleuze.

...

One's Own Life

1.

Whatever direction seizes upon this question,
there will follow one's ownmost pursuit.

If one raises the question
in a call,
a cry,
out into the darkness, only
one's own voice
will return.

What of this return?
What returns is the resolve,
the courage to face the darkness,
to send the question
on its ownmost way.

Nothing more can speak in response.

It gives only the open,
the opening-ground,
the bursting cleavage of Be-ing,
from which may spring
a different life,
one's own life,
for the very first time.

2.

Thinking may follow the concerning question, and yet will wander lost if it cannot seize upon its ownmost way. One may think the question of the meaning of Being; one may be led to the unfolding openness of truth. One may study philosophy, after time become a philosopher, and someday, perhaps, abandon philosophy altogether. Yet thinking will be lost, it will fall prey, and it will find only illusions if it does not take hold of its own way forth. There is no way forward but through darkness, and so one should take heed: when you are lost, you won't know it; you will imagine you have found the right way, perhaps the only way; and yet you will wander on endlessly, unable to find your way, your own way. There is no way forward, but through darkness, and so one must discover, one must bring to light, one's ownmost way of Being. Otherwise, the question, concerning the truth of Being, will lead only into the abyss.

3.

What can this mean, to speak of thinking's own way, the way due to thinking by right? A primary, if not the paramount, impetus behind Martin Heidegger's works is to discover a way of thinking (and to thinking) that can leave metaphysics to itself.^¹ Metaphysics, and the whole of philosophy that has bowed before it, can only produce answer upon answer to whatever question thinking poses; and yet it cannot deliver to thinking that way of answering that would be thinking's own. Metaphysics can only pose thinking's essential question in an abstract, thematic way. It can only speak the question in a voice that is not one's own, in a public voice.^² These public words have, throughout the epochs, accumulated so many tangled and knotted senses that we can no longer hear that softness, that lightness, with which thinking gives them voice.

We must deliver thinking over to belonging, to the realm of its belonging: the realm in which thinking belongs, and which belongs to thinking. What could this belonging, this enowning^³, mean or represent? Perhaps the question is poorly posed. Casting light on this belonging, and owning over to thinking its ownmost, was a life's work for Heidegger, and we should not expect to answer it hastily without falling prey to misunderstanding. And we might come to find that what we speak of as belonging has no affinity to representation, is not and cannot be represented. Its meaning is not something representable, but rather is only a question whose unfolding-opening reveals the luminous advent of the destiny of truth.

We must enable thinking to claim this question in its ownmost voice, and to enown the way to truth this claim opens.

We must enact thinking by owning over our words, those words we are already following, to the claim of Ereignis.

We must deliver thinking over to the giving, so that thinking will arrive at belonging.

4.

When we speak of owning and belonging, this first and foremost does not mean the ownership of a property or possession.^⁴ It is not the ownership of an ontic thing, a being. If we follow the question of Being and avoid getting lost in the tangles of metaphysics, we will find that the truth of Being, and thus thinking's ownmost way to truth, cannot lie in beings. “Whenever a being is, be-ing [Seyn] must sway...From where else does thinking decide here if not according to the truth of be-ing? Thus be-ing can no longer be thought of in the perspective of beings; it must be enthought from within be-ing itself.”^⁵ This is imperative. The belonging of thinking with Being in the advent of truth's destiny does not entail a belonging in the way a thing belongs to a person or people, be it private or public property. If we cannot think of owning and belonging otherwise than beings, ontic things as present-at-hand, then we will lose the way of thinking and of Being, and the sense of thinking, Being, man, time, and history will fall prey to metaphysics once more. “The attempt to think Being without beings becomes necessary because otherwise, it seems to me, there is no longer any possibility of explicitly bringing into view the Being of what is today all over the earth, let alone of adequately determining the relation of man to what has been called 'Being' up to now.”^⁶

If we follow Heidegger's own way after the question, we find this sense of owning as early as the first approach of Being and Time. The Analysis of Dasein begins: “We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed. The Being of any such entity is in each case mine. These entities, in their Being, comport themselves towards their Being. As entities with such Being, they are delivered over to their own Being.”^⁷ Moreover, this Being that is Dasein's own, is as such at issue for it. That is, Dasein's own Being is the matter of its essential questioning. Dasein poses the question concerning the meaning of Being, of its ownmost Being, and this questioning is Dasein's constitutive way of Being.^⁸ “That Being which is an issue for this entity in its very Being, is in each case mine.”^⁹ Heidegger says that this mineness leads us to ontically designate Dasein with the personal pronoun, 'I myself...', but that this should not mislead us. We may answer the 'who' of Dasein by responding 'I, myself, am Dasein', and yet this ontical answer only indicates the way to an ontological response, as long as we do not go beyond the mere formal, reflective sense of the 'I' as a conscious subject. We must grasp this ontical, reflective, 'subject' self as only an indication of a more primordial ontological Self, as 'only' a way of Being of Dasein. The ontological Self that 'owns', that has as its own, Dasein, is not physical substance, nor is it pure consciousness, but is rather existence itself.^¹⁰

The danger confronting Dasein, in its constitutive questioning of its ownmost Being, is seen ontologically as its inability to distinguish what is its own, to answer the 'who' of Dasein: 'my own Self'; rather than 'one self ['they-self'] amongst Others'. Heidegger calls this danger 'inauthenticity', literally 'not-ownness' or 'un-ownness'.^¹¹ It arises whenever Dasein fails to distinguish itself from the 'Others', who are not definite, ontical others, but are in an existential sense those to whom Dasein's average, everyday actions are connected via equipment.^¹² Dasein loses its ownmost Self amongst the Others, and the 'who' is no longer answered with 'my own Self', but rather as 'one' [das Man], 'anyone', 'nobody in particular'. Dasein becomes unable to claim what is its own, its ownmost Being, and its question is thereby led off course. It will no longer strive to discover the meaning of its ownmost Being, but will be content with the meaning that would satisfy anyone, actually satisfying nobody in particular. One can only think of one's self as 'anyone' amongst the Others. “When Dasein is absorbed in the world of its concern – that is, at the same time, in its Being-with towards Others – it is not itself.” “Every kind of priority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known.”^¹³

5.

The question now becomes: how can Dasein seize what is its ownmost?

Insofar as Dasein is constituted by its questioning, it has understanding as its characteristic way of Being. It understands itself in its Being, in that it understands the possibility of meaning for that Being, and the possibility of questioning into that meaning for its way of Being.^¹⁴ Dasein's absorbsion and dispersion in the 'they-self' leads it to lose hold on its ownmost possibilities, finding only those possibilities of 'anyone', 'nobody in particular'. Dasein cannot seize what is its ownmost: its way of Being as the projecting possibilities, its questioning into the meaning of its own Being, its ownmost Self. It becomes alienated from everything that is its own. “This alienation closes off from Dasein its authenticity ['ownness'] and possibility...”^¹⁵ Understanding has the existential structure of 'projection', that is, Dasein can hold before itself its ownmost possibilities. This projection of possibilities makes up Dasein's ownmost way of Being, which is potentiality-for-Being. “Dasein is in every case what it can be, and in the way in which it is its possibility.”^¹⁶

The effect of alienation is that Dasein flees in the face of its ownmost possibilities. Dasein experiences anxiety in the face of its authentic potentiality-for-Being, which, as alienated, it finds as completely indefinite.^¹⁷ Dasein confronts in anxiety its ownmost possibilities as indefinite, and thus has the chance to seize its authentic Self and escape from das Man, from understanding itself as 'nobody in particular'. “Anxiety makes manifest in Dasein its Being towards its ownmost potentiality-for-Being – that is, its Being-free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself.”^¹⁸ Yet there is as great a chance that Dasein, when confronted with anxiety, will retreat into the Others, failing to seize its ownmost. The outcome hinges on Dasein's attitude toward its own mortality, toward death.

“No one can take the Other's dying away from him.”^¹⁹ That is, one's death cannot be given up in dispersion amongst the Others, as each Other always has his own death as his own. “Death is a possibility-for-Being which Dasein itself has to take over in every case. With death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being.”^²⁰ In anxiety, in which one's potentiality-for-Being is completely indefinite, Dasein may recognize in this indefinition its own death, as the possibility of no longer projecting any possibilities, the possibility of being unable to define one's possibilities any further. Death is, in this way, the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all: not my own, and not anyone's.^²¹ When Dasein finds itself anxious in the face of death, it can either seize its death as its ownmost possibility, that which cannot be outstripped, or it can evade owning up to this possibility, and attempt to pass it off on 'anyone'. This marks the crucial difference between authentic and inauthentic projection. If Dasein is to have its way of Being as its own, it must own up to the possibility that it may no longer exist at all. This is the recognition that anxiety in the face of death is not fear in the face of an ontic event that could 'happen to anyone', but is rather Dasein's defining ontological structure, enabling the possibility of its ownmost definition. No one else can die this death, my death, because only I have this existence, my existence, as my own, and so only I can confront its utter, singular, impossibility.^²²

In confronting its ownmost death, Dasein becomes resolved to have its possibilities as its own, refusing to yield them to conformity with those of 'anyone'. This is authenticity. In this way, Dasein holds itself open to the light, the truth, of its Being, rather than passively accepting whatever passes for anyone's truth. It “brings one without Illusions into the resoluteness of 'taking action.'”^²³ In the face of the anxiety that arises from fleeing from one's own self into the Others, and among them confronting one's own as absolutely indefinite, one recovers the joy of having one's own possibilities as absolutely singular and unstrippable. “Along with the sober anxiety which brings us face to face with our individualized potentiality-for-Being, there goes an unshakable joy in this possibility.”^²⁴

6.

Yet we still must attempt to think of the ownmost belonging free of any being, even Dasein. We must allow Being to claim its ownmost truth as we unfold our questioning, and this obliges us to follow the giving of Being itself, free of the gift of Dasein's there. This giving is not only that by which Being is given, but that in which Being will claim what is its own, that is, its truth. Heidegger speaks of this giving in terms of the 'It gives...', Es gibt. “As the gift of this It gives, Being belongs to giving. As a gift, Being is not expelled from giving.”^²⁵ Being is a gift, insofar as it lets beings presence; it is the gift of their presence. But it is also a part of the giving insofar as it is the presencing itself, which is not a property of beings, given along with them, but rather belongs to giving. “Being, presencing is transmuted.”^²⁶ Heidegger says later that the giving of presence, which is presencing, does not belong to the gift that reaches us, but that the giving is the reaching concealed in the gift. “Does this giving lie in this, that it reaches us, or does it reach us because it is in itself a reaching? The latter.”^²⁷ The giving holds itself back, conceals itself, in the gift it gives and unconceals. Thus, metaphysics thinks Being in terms of beings that are given, but misses the sense in which 'It gives Being', in which Being is only in and of the concealed giving itself.^²⁸

Heidegger tells us that Being's belonging, be it with time,^²⁹ or with man and thought,^³⁰ is determined by this concealed giving, which he calls Ereignis, 'en-owning'. “What determines both, time and Being, in their own, that is, in their belonging together, we shall call: Ereignis...”^³¹ Yet we must not misunderstand the sense of 'belonging together'. This does not mean that time is a property of Being, is thus determined by Being, any more than the reverse. That man and Being belong together does not mean that one determines the other. These would take on the sense of a belonging together, in which the belonging of the elements is determined by the unified order they form. We must instead look to the sense of belonging together, meaning that the 'together' is determined by the 'belonging'.^³² The specificity of this will become clear in a moment.

Man belongs to Being, man is Being's own, in that man as Dasein is always questioning after the meaning of Being, and responds to the question as long as its Being is its own, authentically. “[M]an's distinctive feature lies in this, that he, as the being who thinks, is open to Being, face to face with Being; thus man remains referred to Being and so answers to it...A belonging to Being prevails within man, a belonging which listens to Being because it is appropriated [owned over] to Being.”^³³ Yet at the same time, Being belongs to man, is man's own, in that man is open to Being's presencing and can receive the gift of presence. “Being is present and abides only as it concerns man through the claim it makes on him. For it is man, open toward Being, who alone lets Being arrive as presence. Such becoming present needs the openness of a clearing, and by this need remains appropriated [owned over] to human being.”^³⁴

In order to think the sense of this mutual belonging that determines the togetherness, the constellation, of man and Being, of time and Being, of thought and Being...we must leave behind the given and well known sense of these. We must 'spring' away from the rigid, metaphysically well-worn possibilities of these terms, out into the darkness.^³⁵ Yet if we must leave behind not only time as a linear passage of ‘nows’, and man as a rational animal, but also Being as the ground of beings, where will we arrive but the abyss of darkness? If we have this spring, this projection, as our ownmost possibility as thinkers, then we will be enowned by, we will find our belonging in, the concealed giving itself: Ereignis, enowning, giving-belonging. If we call resolutely into the darkness, we will be claimed by the giving-belonging of Ereignis. We will arrive at the belonging of Being and man, Being and time, as the active essence [Wesen] of thought,^³⁶ which finds their identity in giving. Being as the self-identity of present beings, time as the succession of self-identical 'nows', man as the identity of his self, can be thought as such,^³⁷ and authentically thought otherwise, only in and of the giving-belonging that gathers them and holds them together in unconcealing-sending:

Ereignis.

7.

The giving-belonging of Ereignis does not pertain to something owned, something that can be given or appropriated, some property or possession. It speaks only of the possibility of giving and of belonging that wells up in and exceeds every being that is given and belongs in the order of a unifying 'together'. It speaks not of appropriation of property, but of the possibility of Being appropriate, well-suited, fitting. It speaks of 'owning' not in the sense of something I own that I can exchange or dispossess, but in the sense of that which is my ownmost, that which I can not give up, that which cannot be given because it is purely giving as such. It speaks of that which I cannot leave, for my disappearance in death is at once its disappearance as well: a life that is my own. We give one another, we belong to one another; I am no more its keeper than it is my keeper, but we are in keeping with one another. We, together – man and Being, man and Being and time, man and Being and time and thought – are only a giving, a belonging, with no owner or owned.

Enowning, Ereignis.

Notes:

1TB 24

2On 'publicness', see: EBW 235

3Where I have chosen to translate Ereignis, I do so as 'enowning', following the translators of the Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). See CP xix-xxii. I will, for the most part, leave it untranslated.

4CP xx

5CP 5. on the translation of Seyn as 'be-ing', see xxii-xxiii

6OTB 2

7EBW 219-20 (emphasis: bold is mine, italics is Heidegger's. This scheme will continue throughout, unless otherwise noted.)

8EBW 213-4

9EBW 220

10EBW 231-2

11EBW 234-5. “The Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic Self...”

12EBW 232

13EBW 233, 235

14EBW 213-4

15EBW 239

16EBW 242

17EBW 243-5

18EBW 245

19EBW 247

20Ibid.

21EBW 250

22EBW 249-51

23EBW 254

24Ibid.

25OTB 6

26Ibid.

27OTB 13

28OTB 8

29OTB 19

30ID 30

31OTB 19

32ID 29

33ID 31

34Ibid.

35ID 32

36ID 39

37ID 32

References:

All works by Martin Heidegger

EBW – Selections from Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson, in Existentialism: Basic Writings. Guignon and Pereboom, eds. Second Edition. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001.

OTB – On Time and Being. trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

CP – Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). trans. Emad and Maly. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999.

ID – Identity and Difference. trans. Joan Stambaugh. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

Lacan, Proust, Woolf

2007-05-15T15:46:00.000-05:00

This is my final paper for the course I took on Lacan, Proust, and Woolf. It's my first time writing on Lacan and I by no means have a strong grasp of this thought, so if there are any mistakes or confusions or anything, let me know.

...

A Different Subject, A Subject of Difference

We are subjects. As such, we are subjected to the world. Our experience, our knowledge, our very thought is inseparable from this subjection. Must we then resign ourselves to despair, for being hopelessly imprisoned within subjectivity, only ever capable of glimpsing the Real with the forlorn eyes of a prisoner glimpsing the light of day through the barred window of a cell?

~

We are subjects, but first and foremost, we are.

We are subjects, and as such, our way of being is subjectivity. The Real, for us, is constituted through this way of being; it is constituted as subjective. By speaking in this way, we shift the problem: it is no longer the case that we are limited by subjectivity, trapped within it as its denigrated essence. We no longer think of ourselves, our very being, as in principle capable of attaining the Real in itself, though denied this perfection by the immobilizing chains of our subjectivity.

Rather, we must begin to think otherwise. What could it mean when we say that the Real is constituted, composed, created for us in this way? The Real can no longer be thought to preexist, as transcendent and apart from our existence – adrift in a world of change, of production and dissolution, life and death. The Real is no longer a world apart from our own, apart from the cruelty, the violence, the precariousness of our situation; untouched, pristine, divine. We should no longer dwell on an impossible desire to escape this precarious existence into the eternal, into a direct relation with the Real.

Subjectivity is our very way of being, it is in this way that we exist, that we are something that exists. Our existence maintains a certain minimum of consistency and stability, a ground or condition. Condition here does not mean an extrinsic form imposed upon some inert docility, securing dependence and limitation, like shackles and chains. Condition must obtain the sense of a mode of being or of life, a way of being and living. It relates immediately to the process of genesis of existence, which is the ground which any form whatsoever presupposes, as the foundations of a structure presuppose the earth upon which they are lain.

Subjectivity is the very constitution of our existence, be it a fragile constitution. This 'something', this ground or support, this composition or 'makeup', must itself be thought in terms of the process of its genesis, and no longer as some extrinsic and preexistent form of possibility such that any direct experience of the Real is excluded as impossible. We said above that the Real is constituted for us, and this remark will only make sense if we understand ourselves, 'we', in terms of this constitution: the minimum support necessary for the process through which the Real is constituted, which is ultimately inseparable from the process itself.

In this sense, we are able to think ourselves and our relation to the Real such that we are the modes, the conditions, the ways in which the Real is constituted as such. The constitution of my existence is rendered by virtue of the process through which my relation to the Real is constituted, and I am ultimately nothing more than this processual relation. As the Real is constituted for us, we are this constitution and nothing else.

~

If one thinks of the concrete constitution of one's existence, this implies many things. We think of the body, itself nothing more than a multiplicity of organs, tissues, cells, fluids, systems, signals, etc., arranged in a certain way. One thinks of one's social situation, inseparable from a multiplicity of other people, family members and friends, acquaintances and strangers, enemies and lovers; inseparable as well from a multiplicity of physical elements, geographic, ecological, and man-made structures; and of course, sociality is inseparable from concrete discourse, which depends upon the enormous multiplicity of differential elements of articulation and designation that make up language. One thinks of one's so-called 'inner experience', which is inseparable from a multiplicity of sensations, memories, thoughts, passions, prerogatives, shifting relations with the 'outside'.

All of this points to one thing: there is no 'one thing' that is one's self; rather, oneself is itself generated in and of a multiplicity of things belonging to various registers, brought together and agglomerated, composed, constituted in a certain fashion, such that a minimum of stability and consistency endures. 'Oneself' is only ever said of several things. This coherence or consistency is then what we will call subjectivity; even prior to consciousness, conscious experience, the subject is said of the unconscious as that which grounds any experience, but which is irreducible to that which, in us, is inert and incapable of experience, the bare materiality of our makeup, the objective dimension of our existence. In fact, the unconscious, as this minimum consistency, is the condition, the ground, of the 'objective' or 'material' dimension no less than of consciousness and the faculties of cognition.

The unconscious is not simply that which is 'not conscious' within us. Rather, it is that element of the subject, of subjectivity, which grounds the subject's conscious experience, and subjectivity thereby takes on a more profound sense than simple consciousness. Consciousness must be unified in space and through time, depending on the identical self-relation of the one who is conscious, such that I know I am the one who has different experiences, and I know it is the same 'I' that endures throughout the flux of experience. Yet the unconscious is inseparable from a multiplicity that has no preestablished unity, and so rests on an original division, a split or scission, a 'relation of non-relation' as Kierkegaard says.

~

Lacan is a thinker of the utmost profundity if only because he was able to think of this scission as such, as the ground of any experience, without relating it back to some preestablished unity. For Lacan, the subject is always split, divided against itself, and the minimal consistency that relates different registers across a schism – for him, primarily the register of the body with the register of language – is precisely that of the unconscious. By drawing on Freud and Saussure, he develops an account of the process of genesis of this consistency, of the unconscious, which is inseparable from the consistution of the Real as such. In this way, we essentially relate to the Real through the structuration of the unconscious which constitutes the Symbolic register of language, and through the mediation of Imaginary doubles. The Real has no sense apart from these registers, and we are only in the sense that we are constituted in and through these registers, maintaining thereby a primordial relation to the Real. Though it may be inaccessible to conscious experience, apart from the brief glimpses we receive when there appear cracks in the facade, subjectivity in a more profound sense is the way in which, for us, the Real is constituted as such through the Imaginary and Symbolic registers. This way of existing, this way in which we are capable of existing at all, this genetic mode of constitution, is the unconscious.

For Lacan, the unconscious is itself inseparable from language, that is, from the signifiers or sound-images that make up language. This 'make-up' composed of signifiers is itself entirely differential, that is, signifiers are only related through their difference from one another, they exist only insofar as they are articulated.^¹ In this way, concrete discourse is always made up of a multiplicity of signifiers, strung together in statements as 'signifying chains', that are meaningful only by virtue of the differential relations between them. The meaning of any given statement or series of statements is thereby intrinsic to the differential structure of the signifying chains that compose them; meaning insists in the chain as the differentiation that defines it. “Whence we can say that it is in the chain of the signifier that meaning insists, but that none of the chain's elements consists in the signification it can provide at that very moment.”^² The consistency of the chain, the very linking that holds these differences together and in which meaning insists, does not derive from a correspondence with the concepts signified; we must look elsewhere.

What is the source of the consistency of the differential elements of language, if not the fundamental consistency of the natural world of which we speak? What allows meaning to insist in signifying chains, if not a logical consistency that derives from reference to the empirical world, already itself wholly consistent? The problem with these questions is they fail to recognize that, for us, the 'natural' world signified in concrete discourse is inseparable from its signification: the signified is produced as such through the action of signifying chains that enter it and structure it, endowing it with an intelligibility by introducing a differentiation or disjunction. “[I]t is Freud's discovery that gives the signifier/signified opposition its full scope: for the signifier plays an active role in determining the effects by which the signifiable appears to succumb to its mark, becoming, through that passion, the signified.”^³

Lacan demonstrates this differentiation of the signifier that shapes the signified with the example of restroom doors, being on all accounts identical until a signifier, 'gentlemen' or 'ladies', enters into its material constitution to make it what it is. “The point is not merely to silence the nominalist debate with a low blow, but to show how the signifier in fact enters the signified – namely, in a form which, since it is not immaterial, raise the question of its place in reality.”^⁴ If the signifier shapes the signified by introducing disjunction, it is through this function that it grants meaning to the experience of the situation signified. The meaning that insists in the signifying chain itself is thereby attributed or ascribed to the signified it shapes, but not without first being inscribed in the signified. This inscription constitutes the signified as such by enabling a disjunction, in other words, by making material reality 'differ from itself', so to speak, and it is this function that produces meaning (sens) in the structure of signification. The disjunction produced by this inscription is precisely what endows signifying chains with their consistency, and more profoundly, what endows the structure of signification itself (signifier/signified) with the consistency of meaning (sens).

This disjunction is precisely what we have already called the unconscious. “Starting with Freud, the unconscious becomes a chain of signifiers that repeats and insists somewhere (on another stage or in a different scene, as he wrote), interfering in the cuts offered it by actual discourse and the cogitation it informs.”^⁵ Wherever there appear 'cuts' or inconsistencies in signification, the unconscious presents itself, it insists as the disjunction that itself produces meaning. Yet these sights of disjunction do not simply involve a signifier (in the above example, 'restroom door') whose signified remains indeterminate (as regards gender) without reference to another signifier (either 'gentlemen' or 'ladies'). Prior to the actual disjunction between, say, the differently gendered restrooms, there is a purely formal or 'virtual' disjunction that is not between two terms or things, but which is presupposed by such actual cases of disjunction. This formal or formative disjunction is that from which the actual things in disjunction are differentiated as such, that which thereby shapes and structures the signified, granting it the attribution of meaning, and which gives consistency to the signifying chains in which that meaning insists. Thus, the formal or formative disjunction is primarily that between the signifier and the signified as such, determining their relation as the consistency of meaning that produces them both.

Hence, the 'cuts' in the signifying chain that correspond to a differentiation in the signified, and that realize the formative disjunction of signifier and signified, are the source of the consistency of meaning or sense (sens), in that it is here that the unconscious asserts itself. This is thus where we find the unconscious subjectivity of which we spoke at the outset. “The cut made by the signifying chain is the only cut that verifies the structure of the subject as a discontinuity in the real. If linguistics enables us to see the signifier as the determinant of the signified, analysis reveals the truth of this relationship by making holes in meaning the determinants of its discourse.”^⁶ Subjectivity is thus a 'discontinuity in the real', an original and formative disjunction, from which the consistency of sense and the continuity of signifying chains in concrete discourse derive.

How then do we account for the genesis of this subjectivity? Lacan does so by reconceiving Freud's own account in terms of linguistics. He locates this disjunctive relation between signifier and signified as the effect of a 'bar', a signifier without a signified that separates all signifiers as such from any direct relationship with the signified, and this function is precisely that of the Freudian 'phallus'. “For the phallus is a signifier...the signifier that is destined to designate meaning effects as a whole, insofar as the signifier conditions them by its presence as signifier.”^⁷ This function is conceived in terms of the child's introduction into language. The child, confronted by the speech of the Other, usually exemplified in the mother, knows this other as the source of satisfaction of its every need, and hence is driven to articulate its need to the Other. “'Other' [designates] the very locus evoked by recourse to speech in any relation in which such recourse plays a part.”^⁸ Yet the signifiers the Other provides do not yet have any significance; they are without signified. So the child can only articulate its demand through the signifiers it imagines that the Other desires to hear. Language does not serve originally to signify a specific need, but rather to articulate the primordial need for the love of the Other, that is, to be the complete object of the Other's desire, and thereby to have every need satisfied. “Demand already constitutes the Other as having the 'privilege' of satisfying needs, that is, the power to deprive them of what alone can satisfy them. The Other's privilege here thus outlines the radical form of the gift of what the Other does not have – namely, what is known as its love.”^⁹

This formulation of the demand alienates the child from its needs. In the signifiers it articulates as the demand, it is not any need that takes precedence, but rather the alienated form of need itself as the need for the Other to satisfy every need, the need to be the object of the Other's desire. “In this way, demand annuls (aufhebt) the particularity of everything that can be granted, by transmuting it into a proof of love, and the very satisfactions demand obtains for need are debased (sich erniedrigt) to the point of being no more than the crushing brought on by the demand for love...”^¹⁰ Yet there is no demand the child can make that will fulfill this primal need for love, and so it takes on the repressed form of desire. Just as the child is unable to articulate itself such that it would become the object of the Other's desire, hence rendering this desirable unarticulable, the primal need the subject is unable to formulate as demand becomes its own desire. “What is thus alienated in needs constitutes [a primal repression], as it cannot, hypothetically, be articulated in demand; it nevertheless appears in an offshoot that presents itself in man as desire.”^¹¹ The phallus is thus that signifier without a signified, that impossible articulation of desire; both the impossible articulation that is the object of the Other's desire, and the impossible demand that would articulate the subject's own desire.

The articulation of specific needs is possible only after this essentially insatiable demand, this signifier that 'designates meaning effects as a whole'. This structure, which divorces all signifiers, all articulations, from that which they articulate, separating them through the unsurpassable gap of desire for love, makes any signification, and thereby language itself, possible. “For the unconditionality of demand, desire substitutes the 'absolute' condition: this condition in fact dissolves the element in the proof of love that rebels against the satisfaction of need. This is why desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the very phenomenon of their splitting (Spaltung).”^¹² Desire as this difference, this remainder, is what constitutes the subject as such. It splits the signifier from the signified, as that unavoidable gap, that original discontinuity or disjunction that constitutes them and holds them together in their very difference, inscribing the signifier in the signified itself. Because the child has learned that it cannot possess the phallus, it cannot eliminate this remainder of desire, it is able to constitute itself as the source of the disjunctive tension of language. This desire forms the unconscious, which asserts itself in the cuts, gaps, breaks, inconsistencies in signifying chains, paradoxically holding them together and assuring their consistency in disjunction.

It is thus the desire constitutive of the subject that is the source of the disjunctive consistency of its multiplicitous components, both the material elements signified and the signifiers that differentiate them and structure them as such. The multiplicity of signifiers, always gathered in signifying chains, have two modes through which they become consistent and thereby constitute the signified.

What is at issue is to refind – in the laws that govern this other scene (ein anderer Schauplatz), which Freud, on the subject of dreams, designates as the scene of the unconscious – the effects that are discovered at the level of the chain of materially unstable elements that constitutes language: effects that are determined by the double play of combination and substitution in the signifier, according to the two axes for generating the signified, metonymy and metaphor; effects that are determinant in instituting the subject.^¹³

Metonymy and metaphor are the two dimensions of the multiplicity of signifiers arranged in signifying chains, the dimension of combination or conjunction of signifiers and the dimension of substitution or disjunction, respectively. Metonymy is literally the contiguous connections of several associated signifiers that thereby constitute the fleshed out identity of the signified. Lacan uses the example of signifying an unknown number of ships by referring to them as 'thirty sails'. The signifier of a part ('sail') is intelligible only in terms of its conjunction with the signifier of the whole ('ship'), and it is this conjunction that makes the signifying chain consistent. “This shows that the connection between ship and sail is nowhere other than in the signifier, and that metonymy is based on the word-to-word nature of this connection.”^¹⁴ Metonymy thus functions by relating a signifier to other signifiers with which it is associated, thereby involving an implicit combination of signifiers.

Metaphor, on the contrary, involves a substitution of one signifier for another where said signifiers do not bear any direct association. “Metaphor's creative spark does not spring forth from the juxtaposition of two images, that is, of two equally actualized signifiers. It flashes between two signifiers, one of which has replaced the other by taking the other's place in the signifying chain, the occulted signifier remaining present by virtue of its (metonymic) connection to the rest of the chain.”^¹⁵ When a signifier is thus replaced by another unassociated, dissimilar signifier, they enter a relation of disjunction such that the replaced or occulted signifier persists as an empty place in the metonymic chain of connection, while the substituted signifier 'stuffs' the signified, constituting it purely through the differences it introduces. The displaced signifier thereby leads to the revelation that the signified itself was only ever blank, a void, an empty space, given form exclusively by signifying chains connected to its signifier. The substituted signifier can thus 'cross the bar' between signifier and signified, entering the void to disguise it with a difference. This void is the sight of the pure disjunction of the subject's desire, a pure difference that is not yet the difference between terms. The difference is only bound, realized, when a metaphor effectively disguises the void with an unassociated signifier, thus constituting the subject as the difference between itself and this signifier. “Thus it is between a man's proper name qua signifier and the signifier that metaphorically abolishes it that the poetic spark is produced... We see that metaphor is situated at the precise point at which meaning is produced in nonmeaning...and at which it becomes palpable that, in deriding the signifier, man defies his very destiny.”^¹⁶

Metonymy functions through the conjunction of associated signifiers, whereas metaphor functions by revealing the originary disjunction of the subject as the source of all signification. The former explains the consistency of necessarily finite signifying chains, whereas the latter exposes the source of consistency for any chain whatsoever. We can see these function demonstrated in some examples from literature. Take, for instance, Marcel's encounter with a sleeping Albertine in The Prisoner. When she is awake, Marcel is mercilessly consumed by jealousy, paranoia, and distrust, obsessed with discovering the 'real' Albertine, the one she hides from him, the one involved in worlds, relations, loves, that he will never access. Yet when he finds her in his room, already sleeping on his bed, his disposition changes entirely.

Lying at full length on my bed, in a pose so natural that it could never have been adopted deliberately, she seemed to me like a long, flowering stem that had been laid there; and that was what she was: normally I could dream only when she was not there, but at these times the power of dreaming returned as I lay next to her, as if in her sleep she had turned into a plant. In that way her sleep realized, to a certain degree, the promise of love; when I was alone, I could think about her, but she was not there, she was not mine. When she was there, I could speak to her, but was too removed from myself to be able to think. When she was asleep, I did not have to speak any more, I knew that she could not see me, I did not have to live on the surface of myself. By closing her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had put off, one by one, the various marks of humanity which had so disappointed me in her, from the day that we first met. She was animated only by the unconscious life of plants, of trees, a life more different than my own, stranger, and yet which I possessed more securely.^¹⁷

Marcel is incessantly disturbed by Albertine when she is awake, unable to 'possess' her completely; she is never his, she is always removed from him. Yet when she is asleep, Marcel is able to 'possess her' securely, not because he has finally gained access to her whole and complete self, but rather because he can understand her 'real self' as empty, as no more than a void or incompleteness. Thus he is able to compose her anew, as a plant, a flowering stem, disguising this empty space with an unassociated chain of signifiers that thereby shape her substantial being. Through this becoming-plant, this metaphorical substitution, Marcel realizes that Albertine has no 'real self' apart from the disguise itself; she is no more than this empty place that is revealed in when the signifier 'plant' replaces the signifier 'Albertine'. Only through the function of metaphor does he truly obtain her, the Real of Albertine; “Her life was subject to me...”^¹⁸

Of course, Albertine's (empty) place is still construed in relation to the metonymic conjunction of associated signifiers, such as the parts of her body, and even her body itself. This empty place, this pure disjunction that is the subject, subsists in the constellation of multiple material elements signified: her breath, her hair, her face, her eyelids, her lips, her hand;^¹⁹ but she isn't any of these elements, which bear only a metonymic connection to her subjectivity. Her unconscious subjectivity is revealed to Marcel, and he is able, if only fleetingly, to possess the Real Albertine, only through the metaphoric disjunction. This disjunction that precedes the alternating terms and that endows their dissociative connection with a consistence sense, revealed in metaphor, is precisely the unconscious subjectivity that we have been pursuing. Marcel is able to possess her not simply because he has unbarred access to her body, but rather because he is able to grasp that she is no more her body and its multiplicitous worldly associations than she is a plant, a watch, an animal, or a musical instrument:

I could take her head, tip it back, place it against my lips, put my arms round her neck, she went on sleeping like a watch that never stops, like an animal that goes on living whatever position you put it in, like a climbing plant, a convolvulus that goes on throwing out branches whatever kind of support you give it. Only her breathing was affected by each of my touches, as if she had been an instrument I was playing and from which I drew new chords by producing from one and then another of its strings a variety of notes. My jealousy was being calmed, for I felt that Albertine had become a creature of respiration and nothing more, as was shown by her regular breathing, the expression of this purely physiological function, which in its fluidity lacks the consistency of either speech or silence; lacking all knowledge of evil, this sound, which seemed to be drawn from a hollow reed rather than a human being, was truly heavenly for me who at those moments felt Albertine removed from everything, not just materially but morally; it was the pure song of the Angels. And still in this breathing, I would suddenly say to myself, human names, the residue of memory, must be suspended.^²⁰

When asleep before him, she is 'removed from everything'; her materiality, her name, memories of her, all must be suspended; she becomes no more than that empty place disguised by a body, a name, or traits of a plant, a watch, an animal, a song; the Real Albertine shines through as only the disjunction between the various disguises, with nothing beneath these masks but a pure difference, “a life more different” than Marcel's own.

Virginia Woolf's The Waves provides another exemplary case. Not only is every character composed solely through his or her articulations in signifying chains, but nearly every paragraph reveals the constitution of the subject through the play of metaphor and metonymy. Take the character of Susan. She is made consistent throughout the book through the repetition of multiple themes that make up metonymic connections with her environment and situation: the earth, burial, hardness, juxtaposed against light, birds, flight. “I looked between the leaves and saw her. She danced in flecked with diamonds light as dust. And I am squat, Bernard, I am short. I have eyes that look close to the ground and see insects in the grass. The yellow warmth in my side turned to stone when I saw Jinny kiss Louis. I shall eat grass and die in a ditch in the brown water where dead have rotted.”^²¹ Jinny is metaphorically disguised as light and dancing, against which Susan distinguishes herself, metaphorically “turned to stone”.

Later, she expresses her frustration at time in school through her destruction of the pages of a calendar: “I have torn them off and screwed them up so that they no longer exist, save as a weight in my side. They have been crippled days, like moths with shriveled wings unable to fly.”^²² It is not simply the days themselves, but their existence as instances of her subjectivity, that is disguised as “moths with shriveled wings”, unable to attain their imperative of flying toward the light. Susan never ceases to draw herself through metaphors with ever greater complexity. As she grows older and develops a strong distaste for the city life she had in school, she begins to find herself in the countryside and life without that rigid segmentation and regimentation: “At this hour, this still early hour, I think I am the field, I am the barn, I am the trees...I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November, the mud, the mist, the dawn. I cannot be tossed about, or float gently, or mix with other people. Yet now leaning here, till the gate prints my arm, I feel the weight that has formed itself in my side. Something has formed, at school, in Switzerland, some hard thing.”^²³ Susan literally has no existence in the novel apart from the play of metaphors, the disguises she takes up, be they of the cold, damp, hard earth, the passing seasons and the countryside, the crippled moth, or the hardening source of light in her side. It is the disjunction of her unconscious subjectivity, and the repetitions of its metaphoric disguises, that maintains the consistency of her character throughout the story.

Proust and Woolf provide exemplary instances of the play of metonymy and metaphor, and are among the finest examples of 'the poet' as Lacan conceives this figure. “[I]f you are a poet you will make it into a game and produce a continuous stream, nay, a dazzling weave of metaphors.”^²⁴ More importantly, they demonstrate the way in which subjectivity in the most profound sense is nothing more than such a “dazzling weave of metaphors”, the consistency of which is the effect of unconscious desire as an originary and formative disjunction or discontinuity, a pure difference which endows the most diverse and dissociated terms with a minimum stability or ground. It is on the ground of discontinuity that signifying chains become consistent and sense can thereby insist in them. Sense is the pure effect of the 'empty place' of the subject, the genetic disjunction that conditions every metonymic conjunction. It is precisely this empty place, this 'desire as lack', that is the Real. When we said that the real is constituted through subjectivity, that the Real as such is subjective, this should not be taken to mean that everything exists only in our conscious experiences and contingent conceptions. Rather, it means that the unconscious core that grounds every conscious experience, the primordial lack or loss that is desire, the 'empty place of the subject', is the Real as such, and there is no sense of the Real other than this. The Real is thus 'meaningless', nonsense, but that nonsense in which all sense, all meaning, is produced as the subjectivity of a life.

~

Notes:
1E 144

2E 145

3E 274

4E 143

5E 286

6E 288

7E 275

8Ibid.

9E 276

10Ibid.

11E 275

12E 276

13E 274-5

14E 148

15Ibid.

16E 149-50

17P 59-60

18P 60

19P 61

20P 100

21W 15

22W 53

23W 97-8

24E 148-9

References:
E - Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits, A Selection.
P - Proust, Marcel. The Prisoner.
W - Woolf, Virginia. The Waves.

The Ethical Question(ing) of Individuality

2007-04-19T10:13:00.000-05:00

The ethical question I want to pose - or as I want to pose it, if we can think of the ethical question - is concerned with the way in which we are ourselves composed, with what makes us up, our composition or constitution. When I say 'ourselves', I mean our individuality, but this notion must immediately be rescued from the liberal-humanist interpretation which would understand us as essentially persons, and our mode of individuation as only individual persons. So we must, in posing the question of composition, implicate not only our own individuality but also individuality itself; that is, we must ask not only how is this individual here composed, but how any individuality might be composed.

Yet this does not mean we are seeking the conditions of possible individuation, as if there was an ultimate form to which any individual whatsoever must conform. In this way, we would already have delimited the modes of composition open to individuals, losing sight of the primacy of the question: how are individuals composed, and how might they be composed? When we ask after 'the individual' in the abstract, it is not in order to discover the general form or essence, but rather to destroy any possibility of generality or universality, and insodoing to make of 'the individual' nothing more than a diagram (work in progress!) of the various processes involved in composition of concrete individuals as such. There is no totalization of all possible individuals, because the diagram is always caught in the process of being drawn, never content with a given formulation.

So we must think the question in terms of reality, and conditions in terms of singularity: what are the limits and thresholds immanent in a given real individual? And following that, what thresholds can be crossed while maintaining this individual's consistency, and what limits are absolute, that is, constitutive of the 'extreme' form of this individual, drawn by the abstract lines of flight that make up the cutting edge of Absolute Deterritorialization? That is, what limits cannot be surpassed without dissolving the individual entirely? Hence, the question is always pragmatic; it always concerns the selection of the components within a given composition, and on the basis of criteria immanent in that composition.

When I spoke of 'ourselves', 'we', I meant explicitly to regard a collective, a collectivity; and again, we must avoid thinking this in liberal-humanist terms of persons who collectively make up a social body of some sort. Of course social bodies are important, as are individual bodies, but thinking exclusively in those terms is detrimentally limiting, excluding bodies of mechanical, semiotic, ecological, and aesthetic types, to name only a few. The notion of individuals as processual individuations (compositions, arrangements) is transversal to this typology, involving composites of components from multiple registers and never confining itself to one or another.

So the collectivity I was addressing would not only be the social amalgam of people reading, but the multiplicity of components amalgamated, reterritorializing on the most deterritorialized flow, which in this case would probably be the circuit of social-discursive-technical components that make up this blog and its audience. In this way, individuals are always composed out of a multiplicitous milieu, which itself might belong to one or several 'higher level' individuals, or might be caught between them, straddling their borders or evading their capture. The point is that individuals are always composed as such through their lines of flight, their most deterritorialized components or connections, which constitute the minimum of consistency ensuring a relatively stable complex entity or 'machine'.

It is through the selective action of the lines of flight, on the basis of the immanent criteria for that minimum consistency and stability, that 'something happens' - in a living creature, life thereby happens. By seizing on one's own lines of flight, and thus the thresholds of one's own transformative potentials, one constructs one's ethos, and then ethics can begin. Again, I must emphasize that the 'one' in question is not necessarily an individual person, and could in fact include several people as well as non-personological elements, such as the economic, political, ecological, religious, aesthetic, mechanical, or libidinal components or connections that make up the milieu in which these persons are immersed and individuated in whatever way.

The criteria for the composition of such individuals must be constructed in the very process of their existence as such, and are never preexistent, presupposed, or given. An ethos, and hence ethics, must always be made, produced, constructed, within a heterogeneous composition that questions itself, 'discovers' (which is to say, engenders) its own singularities - critical points, thresholds, attractors and bifurcators - and seizes on them, whether to extend to its limits and attain Absolute Deterritorialization, thereby selecting those components that will return, or to surpass them and cross the threshold of bifurcation, abolishing the weaknesses and burdens and opening onto new arrangements, connections, and evaluations, following the lines of flight.

The Possibility of Politics

2007-04-17T16:56:00.000-05:00

A convergence of several different lines of thought has led me to contemplate a question: what makes politics possible at all?

One line was drawn from my international trade class, in which we've been working on a fictive declaration for a non-oppressive and non-detrimental approach to trade and international relations in general. The first thing we discussed, and this ended up taking so much time that we had to cut it short and move on, was the unit of analysis in economics. The major dichotomy in economic theory and political science on this issue is between individual persons and nation-states. As you might expect, no one in our group found either of these alternatives adequate, but that begs the question: where does analysis begin, and following from that, what becomes of the person and the state?

We talked about possible candidates for a proposed new unit, ranging from communities and affinity groups to institutions in general. Eventually, it came up that perhaps this issue, while not unimportant, was excessively academic for a document whose intended audience would be average everyday people, be they in 'North' or 'South' countries. We ended up including some brief comment on focusing on institutions, but dropped the question for the most part. Yet I couldn't help but wonder whether this approach was presumptuous, perhaps even condescending.

To be fair, this was just a class exercise with a limited scope and length of time, and it was probably for the best that we moved on. Yet if we had been working on some real project, say, for an activist group of some kind, I suspect a similar tendency would take over. "We're talking to real people, we should talk about concrete issues, not intellectual squabbles." Why is there this dominant assumption that discussing theoretical issues, such as the unit of analysis, will alienate the majority of 'average' people? We all agreed that the issue was important, but there seemed to be an unspoken sentiment that it was best kept confined to academic circles. I find this to be an extremely condescending position: don't worry about that, don't think to hard, we'll take care of these things, you just go about your everyday life.

Perhaps it is the case that average people don't care, can't be bothered, or wouldn't understand such 'high and mighty' discourse, but I don't think it is. In fact, this notion of the 'average person' itself already assumes a standard unit of analysis, doesn't it? For that matter, so does democracy; insofar as democracy depends upon a demos, that is, a population taken together as an entity, it thereby depends upon a standard unit it can apply to the group, and thereby 'count' the population. This strips the individual of all singularity, all possibility of producing a difference that would exceed or escape the collective entity (the political system), substituting a regularity, a normality, an identity. The problem isn't that existing democracies are corrupt or have been co-opted by illegitimate power; on the contrary, as Zizek so often says in his political articles, what we have now is democracy tried and true. We shouldn't be looking for a more original or authentic form of democracy, but thinking otherwise, toward another possible politics.

What does all this mean? To return to my original question, I've been suspecting that looking at possibility and the conditions for possibility is the wrong approach. In a sense, any possible politics depends upon a difference, a specifically political difference, but this is not enough, it begs the question of this difference and leaves our real orientation with a vague formal shell. Instead, if we are to take hold of the rich potentialities open to this orientation, we must ask what are the conditions of the reality of politics. It is not enough to recognize political difference as an empty form of possibility - political difference must be made, it must be realized, and this can only be achieved through an experimental engagement with the real. Every orientation, every politic, every political actor or unit, is unstrippably unique, and its conditions must likewise be approached as such. There is no general politics, no general subject of politics, no 'average person', and hence every politic and every subject is singular, composed of singular points and passions.

Approaching 'depoliticized' orientations, groups, actors, would thereby necessitate an experimental approach to constructing a politics; not the imposition of values the group is presumed to understand, and to take or leave, but the creation of immanent evaluations between them, and that means between the group and the 'activists' who engage them in the first place. This entails a constant problematization of encounters and engagements, a constant openness to new connections, prerogatives, and catalysts, and a constant negotiation and navigation of complex arrangements or territories. This whole approach that criticizes 'liberal' or 'leftist' or 'radical' groupthink misses the point entirely: we shouldn't be trying to 'think for ourselves' any more than we should 'think for the cause'; we should rather be focused on making thought think in the first place, producing a unique way of thinking within every arrangement or orientation. It is the navigation of the space between these complex arrangements that becomes the objective of politics, a navigation that necessitates a cautious and creative engagement with unstrippably singular problems.

This points to an approach to the question of the unit of analysis: analysis should begin with the singular arrangements constellated by the problem or problems being analyzed - processual arrangements that underlie every concrete individual, be they persons, states, institutions, ecosystems, markets, communities, or even particular transactions, interactions, or conversations. This is the renewed sense of methodological individualism DeLanda proposes in A New Philosophy of Society: 'individual' must be taken in the sense of individuation, a process of individuation bound up in a concrete machinic arrangement, a self-consistent and autopoietic agglomeration.

Deleuze and Guattari Quotes

2007-04-12T09:39:00.000-05:00

Just a few forceful, affecting quotes from Chaosmosis and Difference and Repetition (by the way, I'm using the Continuum version of D&R, which has different page numbers than the standard, Columbia version):

"Production for the sake of production - the obsession with the rate of growth, whether in the capitalist market or in planned economies - leads to monstrous absurdities. The only acceptable finality of human activity is the production of a subjectivity that is auto-enriching its relation to the world in a continuous fashion." Chs 21

"There is an ethical choice in favor of the richness of the possible, an ethics and politics of the virtual that decorporealises and deterritorializes contingency, linear causality and the pressure of circumstances and significations which besiege us. It is a choice for processuality, irreversibility and resingularisation." Chs 29

"There are singular incorporeal constellations which belong to natural and human history and at the same time escape them by a thousand lines of flight." Chs 27

"So we are proposing to decentre the question of the subject onto the question of subjectivity. Traditionally, the subject was conceived as the ultimate essence of individuation, as a pure, empty, prereflexive apprehension of the world, a nucleus of sensibility, of expressivity - the unifier of states of consciousness. With subjectivity we place the emphasis instead on the founding instance of intentionality. This involves taking the relation between subject and object by the middle and foregrounding the expressive instance..." Chs 22

"...when we say that univocal being is related immediately and essentially to individuating factors, we certainly do not mean by the latter individuals constituted in experience, but that which acts in them as a transcendental principle: as a plastic, anarchic and nomadic principle, contemporaneous with the process of individuation, no less capable of dissolving and destroying individuals than of constituting them temporarily; intrinsic modalities of being, passing from one 'individual' to another, circulating and communicating underneath matters and forms. The individuating is not the simple individual." D&R 47-8

"Only the extreme forms return - those which, large or small, are deployed within the limit and extend to the limit of their power, transforming themselves and changing one into another." D&R 51