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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economic Alien(ation)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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