Object-ions: Cutting the Cord

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

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.

On Zizek and Consequences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes for the Debate: Alien vs. Specter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economic Alien(ation)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

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.