Notes for the Debate: Alien vs. Specter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Not Not Philosophy

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?