Schizoanalysis 2.5: Notes on Organization

I just want to add a few brief points to clarify the conclusion of this post. So to sum up, I see schizoanalysis as a method of developing new organizational structures within existing social groups, on the basis of a new social bond. This bond is based on what I call the ancestral, what Marx calls the proletariat, what Benjamin calls the oppressed of history.

I concluded that post by discussing Wolff's proposal for a new kind of socialism, based not in state control of the economy, but in collective appropriation of businesses by the working class. His model is one in which the employees of a company would become its 'collective board of directors', on a similar model as Silicon Valley upstarts during the 80s and 90s. I have two problems here:

1) There is a reason 'classical' socialists emphasized the necessity of seizing state power, namely, that one will not get very far in attempting to develop new economic organizations if the state is not on your side. While the argument is flawed, there is a truth to that neoclassical evolutionist dogma that claims that, if collective enterprises were really preferable over corporations, then they would have a far greater market share, they would have displaced corporate business and become the dominant model. In other words, the market would have 'selected' them. The truth here is that, while the former may in fact be the better model (or genre of models), it can not gain much ground, it cannot assert itself, because the market is already configured in favor of corporate business.

Every market, however 'free', presupposes a certain level of politico-legal support and foundation, and our foundation slants the market dramatically in favor of capitalist enterprise, making collective enterprise inefficient, not preferable. Therefore, of course, the former is clearly the superior model. So we cannot absent the question of state power: if we want to develop radical economic organizations that break with capitalism, we must intervene in the politico-legal foundations of economy, and this can only be done by means of the state. It is not enough to say, as Wolff does, that economic democracy must be the foundation for political democracy: political organization is already the foundation of economic organization. I do not have any direct answers or approaches to the question of state power at the moment, but I think we can here learn a lot from Zizek's recent work on the matter, particularly in his In Defense of Lost Causes.

[But doesn't this contradict a fundamental principle of Marxism, that of the determining role of the economy over political 'superstructures'? In fact, as Zizek describes in his The Parallax View, the point is not that politics determines the economy rather than vice versa; politics names - over and above constitutional-state superstructures, juridical/oppressive apparatuses - the antagonism at the heart of economy, class struggle.]

2) It is an easy gesture to say that the workers should be their own collective board of directors, but it is also an empty one, in that it begs the basic organizational question: how? How does a group of workers direct themselves? Now there are many models, in practice or not, of such self-direction, and so there is plenty to draw on. But this can only take us so far, for two reasons. First of all, many existing collective businesses, for the most part, are quite small and localized. So there is very little from which to learn concerning large-scale - regional, national, international - collectivization. And we may confront this problem on three fronts: converting large corporations to collective structures, breaking up large corporations into smaller collective bodies, and integrating small collective operations into some kind of larger federate body. Overall, we can put it quite simply: with many businesses, you'd never be able to get the entire workforce into a boardroom, much less conduct an orderly meeting to decide upon direction.

Second, you can do all the research in the world, but it still begs the practical question: how do I do it here, now? The problem further multiplies. For the most part, collective businesses are founded as such, so we have little to go on when we are talking about converting existing corporate business to a collective structure. Moreover, besides the issue of size, the entire range of characteristics of the business in question present problems for its collectivization: location, regional values and customs, industry, peculiarities of the workforce, competition, history, et cetera. There is no general model that can be unproblematically applied; in every instance, collectivization must not only deal with these specificities, but use them to develop an organization unique to the constitution of the group, that uses these traits as assets rather than impediments.

Schizoanalysis, as a kind of institutional self-analysis and transformation, can offer an approach to these problems of organization, using the unique characteristics of the group in question as support and material for the creation of new arrangements and programs. This is an approach that both avoids the urge to propose a general model, and that bypasses the impasses of democracy, as outlined in the aforementioned post. Analysis is not simply a reflective, theoretical exercise, but an exercise in organization and self-direction of collective social arrangements.

I'll briefly return to the question of state power. If an intervention in the politico-legal foundation of the economy is to effect a significant change, it cannot simply change the value of what we strive to realize by way of law, 'the good life'; it must moreover base itself on a change in the way we relate to that for which we strive. The good life can no longer be the end or telos of life, it must become the presupposition of life, we must already be the achievement of this end, we must be the realization of this good life. Here I am referring to what I call the ancestral dimension: the sense in which our very capacity to exist is the result of the self-exclusion of those who gave everything for us, those who could never live to see the day that we would inherit the world they built. This shift from seeing ourselves as bare life absolutely separated from the good life (utopia), to seeing ourselves as the executors of the good life as the inheritance of a 'bare life' which is foreclosed upon, must become the ground of our relation to law, politico-juridical operations, et cetera.

I know this remains very theoretical, so let me offer two attempts at concrete proposals. First, substantively, the analytic relation as a new social bond would, on the one hand, seek to deprive group belonging of any groundedness in consistency, the quilting operation of the name of the father, and instead would seek to install non-signifiers (slogans, names, memes, values, projects...) that enact a continuous, consistent destabilization of such of group identification. On the other hand, if schizoanalysis shirks the traditional analyst-analysand dyad in favor of a collective relation mediated by an impersonal analytic machine or function, then how does the role of money in the analytic exchange figure? Some payment or investment must be made on the part of those undergoing analysis, but rather than this sum going to another individual or institution, it is invested in the name of the group that is instituted through analysis - the collective analytic machine of a pregiven group. (This could be read as a renewed concept of 'union dues'.)

This pool of liquid, unspent credit capital can then serve as a body without organs, in the same manner that finance capital becomes the BwO of the socius in Anti-Oedipus. This is not the same as the latter, however, because capital entails the extraction of surplus-value by exploitation, whereas this common credit pool would be separated from the group without any relation to an agency of separation - it is already separated, insofar as the group exists. Capital does not appropriate it from the workers, nor do they still possess it - neither group possess this power, they are adjacent to it. It is then question of the collective management of a fund that, while the result of a collective investment, does not furnish the group with any return other than the investment itself. This management could, for instance, take the form of a real estate investment that thereby could not only lead to a growing pool of liquid capital, but moreover, a service open to the group itself - affordable, secure, collectively managed housing. Or it could become a credit union providing its members with safe banking and cheap loans.

The second proposal concerns not a task, but a methodological point: how would the collective board of directors, or managers of the common BwO of capital, organize and effectively make decisions? If democracy is not the answer, then what? Now I'd never rule out a priori techniques like voting, parliamentary representation, consensus building, et cetera. But these cannot serve as the basis of the decision-making process, as the bond uniting the group that thereby decides. These should only be tactics.

My short answer is that the decision-making process would be determined by the formation of an analytic collective, a group whose relation is one of a continual and univocal auto-analysis, and hence that includes precise procedures for determining when something will follow or does follow from the analytic intervention. The group would exist, not on the basis of the interests, demands, or goals of the members, but rather, on the basis of an ongoing interrogation of what holds the group together, what constitutes the members as members, what led them to be claimed by this group (the analytic collective as sub-multiple of a given institution, be it a workplace, school, union, neighborhood, political party, et cetera). This would of course be an arbitrary sign, the non-signifier, enacting the collective solidarity in the face of the absolute loss of any necessary belonging or purpose, so that we might become the purpose whose contingent appearance will be the redemption of that loss (a loss of that which we never had). [Meta-note: this last sentence, a bizarre convolution of Badiou, Meillassoux, and Lacan should betray not only my current confusion, but the complex task of reconciliation that would be its resolution.]

The decision-making process would then be a complex operation of connection in Badiou's sense, determining the belonging or non-belonging of a given multiple to an event, that also determines the belonging of a given decision or legislation on the part of a group to the consequence of analytic intervention. How this operation would work I cannot say: because its formulation would always be determined by the local conditions of a given institutional multiple or group, as well as the evental traces within that multiple (name-of-the-father as sign of the count, the operation of the count as the exclusion of every event, name-of-the-father as symptom of evental inexistence); and because the operation can only be formulated in a terminology, a symbolic system or arrangement, specific to its event, coded by the circulation of the name of the event as non-signifier, and therefore indecipherable and meaningless to those not participating therein. Maybe some general remarks on this operation can be made eventually, I cannot say right now.

The Double Maverick

From the LA Times:

It was almost nine years ago that John McCain's quest for the White House began in the basement of Peterborough's town hall. McCain had held a few scattered town hall meetings in New Hampshire before then, but his candidacy in the 2000 Republican presidential primary generated such little interest that fewer than 20 people showed for the Peterborough event, even though his campaign distributed 1,000 fliers advertising free ice cream. And, as the Arizona senator recalled Sunday, his campaign "ate ice cream for the next two weeks."

McCain's anecdote appropriately summarizes his whole campaign thus far - in desperately trying to woo a reluctant and unenthusiastic populous to give him a chance, he pulled out all the stops, offering free ice cream to anyone who would just show up and listen; the result is a pathetic image of McCain sitting alone, surrounded by the unopened gallons of melting dessert. Ever since Obama became the presumptive Democratic candidate, McCain has offered every possible incentive for voters - from base Republican conservatives to moderate undecideds - to give him a chance, to question his opponent's appeal and hear him out. And now, at the end of the race, McCain is alone, surrounded by months of empty campaigning as his legacy.

Perhaps this is what makes McCain's appearance on Saturday Night Live last week so uncannily appropriate. It's not simply that he is being a 'good sport', showing off his sense of humor in the face of ridicule and nearly inevitable defeat. The uncanny comedic air comes from the kind of pathetic resignation that has been a latent destiny for his campaign, ever since he relinquished his famed high moral standards, his respect for opponents, his dignity. How can one help but get the sense that, standing next to Tina Fey's Sarah Palin, McCain was receiving the message of his presidential bid back in its inverted (true) form - Palin was always a caricature, and so was the whole campaign.



We shouldn't praise McCain for being 'in on the joke', as opposed to Palin, who, in her appearance on SNL a few weeks prior, seemed oblivious. The fact is that McCain can only maintain such a sense of humor because he is disconnected from his campaign on a level of principle, he fundamentally can't identify with his candidate persona. Palin, on the other hand, may not understand (or even if she does get the joke, she certainly doesn't seem to find the humor in it), but she did as she was told, she went along with it anyway. McCain's disingenuous alienation and Palin's naive humorlessness have gone hand in hand from the beginning, making the ticket intriguingly imbalanced.

The uncanniness, which builds to the point of an uncomfortable brush with the truth (to say the least), culminates in McCain's segment on Weekend Update, in which he self-mockingly enumerates some 'radical last minute strategies':



Before the series spirals off into absurdities, he lists two 'strategies' that reveal nothing less than the not-so-secret logic of his campaign. First, there is the 'reverse maverick', where he would do whatever anyone tells him. "I don't ask questions, I just go with the flow." Yet isn't this what he has been doing all along? Following the directions of his campaign organizers and the GOP, giving up on positions that had once defined his alleged 'maverick' status, doing what he is told...

Next, there is the 'double maverick': "That's where I go totally berzerker and just freak everybody out." Yet with the intense negativity that has characterized the late campaign, namely the allegations of Obama's affiliation with terrorists and secret socialist agenda, McCain has indeed freaked a lot of people out. On top of that, his own supporters, in the insane fervor these allegations provoked, became increasingly out of control at rallies, to the point of concerning cries of 'Terrorist!', 'Kill him!', and the like, being raised at the very mention of his opponent. McCain struggled to keep these sentiments under control, as he became the 'regular maverick' who was spooked by the 'double maverick' he had unleashed in his supporters.

When McCain characterizes these strategies as bad, its hard not to hear a note of implicit self-criticism. This is only confirmed by the next 'bad strategy' he offers, one his campaign explicitly resorted to the week before: the 'sad grandpa', in which McCain would plead with voters that Obama, being young, would have plenty of chances to be president, and that they should give him his last chance. Isn't this the not-so-subtle message of the recent McCain ad that claimed Obama 'isn't ready to be president...yet'? Or again: at the same rally in Peterborough, New Hampshire, that McCain told the ice cream anecdote, he said, “I come to the people of New Hampshire … and ask again to let me go on one more mission." [reported by Reuters here] It seems plain that he is criticizing the very 'bad strategies' to which he has nonetheless resorted.

Here we should prefer Obama's blatant pandering to undecided voters, exemplified in his infomercial, over McCain's cynical reliance on fear and distrust. While Obama's message of hope and change may be more talk than walk, hiding a more or less standard liberal-centrist program, he is at the very least offering people some kind of overarching moral framework, some standard to live up to, some goal to achieve. US Presidential elections, at least since Reagan, have basically been contested over which candidate's platform will make us better off - no ideological obfuscation, let's look at the facts: who will give me lower taxes, more security, et cetera (recall Reagan's famous quip, "Ask yourselves, are you better off now than you were four years ago?"). Obama's significant departure is to break with this logic (not always, but enough to matter), renewing the approach to politics in which what is at stake in an election is not simply a set of factual circumstances, wherein we are 'better or worse off', but the very standards by which we identify what is 'good' or 'bad', what constitutes 'better' or 'worse'.

Of course, this cynical politics of the facts has always relied on its own implicit moral standard, one in which it is immoral to decide what is good or bad for anyone but yourself, and in which you must focus solely on your own benefit. This is why the 'culture wars' elements of political platforms, issues like abortion and gay marriage, feel tacked on, and don't amount to a consistent moral framework; they are only concessions, opportunistic compromises. Yet perhaps it is the insufficiency of these compromises that has, in part, given such a broad appeal to the Obama campaign.

We can recognize, in the series of attacks McCain supporters have leveled against Obama, evidence of a telling ideological shift on this level: from 'secret Muslim', to radical black militant, to domestic terrorist/anarchist, and finally to socialist or even Marxist. First he represents the particularist program of a theocratic proto-fascism; then, a separatist rejection of society in the name of, again, group-specific interests; then a complete rejection of society in the name of a global, even universal rejection of authority; finally, a universal and positive program for a new society, this time proto-communist. This chain of equivocations is striking, but understandable from the prerogative of conservative-liberal politics: they all share in common the imposition of an over-arching moral framework that breaks with rational self-interest. Yet from the communist perspective, this Obama-effigy has made a progression from the worst to the best of anti-liberal political positions.

What must truly frighten the McCain-loyal is not the prospect of an unprepared president, but rather, the stunning enthusiasm exhibited on behalf of a moral framework with the potential of breaking with that of the unholy neoliberal-social conservative alliance. This framework is based on notions of participation, faith in the people, service and sacrifice. And not sacrifice 'for the greater good', but more importantly, sacrifice so that there might be a 'good' at all, a good that is not the shallow copy thereof that is rational self-interest. What Obama is calling on people to do is to work, to participate, to join the Peace Corps or Americorps, to get involved with the new 'green economy', to organize, so that we can change the very meaning of what 'good' is. We must enact this good, and cannot wait for it to be handed to us in a press release. The republican criticism that Obama talks a lot about change, but doesn't tell us what exactly this change is, is thus poorly aimed: it is by virtue of leaving the goal of this change open, by entrusting us with its realization, that Obama's message is truly effective.


Ultimately, if Obama is elected, he will not live up to the hype, he will disappoint the enthusiastic to some extent at least. Yet a politician's platform should not be measured by its effectiveness first and popularity second, but the reverse. If the cliche that electoral politics is theater teaches us anything, it is this. The effectiveness of a given political platform is only a secondary effect of its capacity to mobilize people, to really move its audience. If the slogan of 'change' is to mean anything, it won't receive this meaning from policies, but from the people. As Obama said, in his speech at the DNC, "change doesn't come from Washington, change comes to Washington." And moreover, "This campaign was never about me. It was about you."

So when we are disappointed, when the dream does collapse into the sobering morning after, the question is precisely in which direction the dominos will fall. Will the people be awoken to the cynical realization that great plans for change inevitably fail under their own weight, and that we should stick to modest, pragmatic reforms? Will the ideal die in favor of a cynical Realpolitik? Or will we see this disappointment as the failure of reality to live up to our ideal? In other words, will the slogan of change outlive the failure of Obama's concrete platform? Will we accept the loss of the factual battle, so that we might win the war over morality? It is preserving and encouraging this latter sentiment, and drawing it out from the former wherever it arises, that will become our task after election day.

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.

Bartleby on Main Street (Schizoanalysis 2)

How does this economic crisis, and crises more generally, relate to emancipatory change? There is a small contention concerning whether crisis can lead to a 'lack of faith' in capitalism, up to the point of breeding antipathy and discontent great enough to motivate opposition to it. The argument is that, following Marx, crisis is a structural function of capitalism, and in no way undermines it, rather constituting a crucial moment of its reproduction. Moreover, because crisis plunges the masses into despair and fear, they are less likely to question established values than to seek protection and stability from those in power. Following from this, we would be more likely to see oppositional sentiments grow in times of abundance and growth than times of crisis. Mark at k-punk summarizes this contention nicely here.

I think both positions are right, but for the wrong reasons. Periods of affluence certainly do breed oppositional sentiments - with the catch being that these sentiments are ultimately nothing more than that, impotent gestures of rejection without a concrete program. Even where we do see real, positive action taken on their behalf, and I refer here to the countless activist groups and movements that have been booming since, well, at least the mid-90's or so, culminating in events like Seattle or the anti-war protests that lead up to the invasion of Iraq, this action does not lead to a significant disruption of the operations of capital or the state. No governments fell (except, of course, Iraq), no significant restrictions or regulations were placed on capital, no new liberated territories were formed. What you get is Bush looking at the protesters and saying 'Someday, because of our invasion, the Iraqi people will be able to protest like that also!'

And as for the other position, periods of crisis do announce a significant threat to capital, but this threat is not the external one of a revolution or rejection of capitalism. The threat is the one capital itself poses to its own economic structure. This is not to say that the crisis itself threatens capitalism, but that it reveals the manner in which capital threatens itself. We can ask a very simple, empirical question: if the state did not intervene in this crisis, what would have happened? The total implosion of financial capital, and with it, a shockwave undermining capital invested in production and service as well. So if we did demand a pure capitalism, one in which the market was allowed to work out these problems itself, it would amount to a near-total devastation of existing capital, with defaults on debt leading to a massive implosion of existing wealth. But we cannot imagine a capitalism that did not require a minimal level of state intervention in the economy - property law, corporate law, bankruptcy law, state-backed currency... If we did demand a market with pure conditions, lacking any interference from the state, capital would collapse on itself (and so would the state, lacking some alternative economic program).

In these situations, when we are posed the alternative of 'le pere or le pire', the father or worse, the state or an uncontainable meltdown, we should chose the latter. The conditions in which capital can exist run counter to 'pure' capitalism, and hence the existence of capital is the ultimate limit to capitalism, as the famous formula goes. What the real 'anti-capitalist' should do is not demand some alternative socialist system, or create a space outside of capital, or otherwise reject capitalism outright: she should demand pure capitalism to be implemented directly, as this would deprive it of the existence of capital, and hence lead it to undermine itself, to pull the carpet from under its own feet, in a strange inversion of Baron Munchausen.

I want to distinguish this position from that of the Chinese government's version of Marxism, which claims that the complete development of the capitalist mode of production must precede any utopian dreams of post-capitalist reality. This position takes Menshevik gradualism to an absurd extreme, claiming that in order to be a Marxist, we must advocate for capitalism's development. First of all, Chinese capitalism relies on an extreme level of state intervention, whereas I am claiming we should argue for total deregulation, a total lack of intervention, that we should deprive capital of every state support. Moreover, whereas the Chinese government says we need to gradually develop the capitalist mode of production, I am making the 'Leninist' demand that we must have pure capitalism now, whether the conditions are ripe or not. We must implement pure, 'abstract' capitalism regardless of the 'stage of development' at which we are.

Finally, I want to again discuss what a 'Bartleby politics' might look like, as regards this case of crisis. 'Doing nothing' here cannot mean simply not responding to the crisis, acting as if nothing was happening. Rather, for the state to do nothing, it must abandon every form of support and regulation, it must refuse to intervene to any extent, and this includes ceasing to provide any structural support to the capitalist economy: property law, bankruptcy protection, subsidies and tax-breaks, everything must go. Now, this is clearly a dream, there are basically no conditions under which the State would adopt such a program, not only because of the influence of capital on policy, but moreover because this would like lead to a catastrophe for the population in the form of unemployment, homelessness, poverty, and so on. But we can draw an insight from this self-destructive character of capitalism, and the preventative role played by the state. Ultimately, Marx was not naive to claim that the force capable of overcoming capitalism would develop directly out of capitalism: this force is capitalism itself, which seems to strive for the liquidation of its own support, that is, accumulated capital.

Okay, but this is a dream. What would Bartleby politics look like for us, here on the ground level of the economy? Nicole at Rough Theory weighs in on the debate concerning crisis and change, and her response is quite instructive for our problem. She reminds us that the crisis and contradictions generated by capitalism are, for Marx, not necessarily elements of its collapse or overcoming, but rather, only part of the reproduction of capital. The question of emancipatory change, which for her is bound to the standpoint of critique, the genesis of a position capable of really breaking with the logic of capital, cannot be posed abstractly; it is not a question of 'is this the right time?' or 'what kind of conditions does it require?'. It is a practical question of bringing about such positions through the reconfiguration of the 'materials' of social being - the 'social but non-intersubjective element' that she has previously discussed, which I would not hesitate to identify with the Symbolic order itself, or rather, the way subjects are bound up in it through organizations of jouissance. By intervening directly in the organization of collective praxis, which is to say, arrangements of enunciation and production, we can engender such a critical standpoint.

Or maybe I can put this another way. It is not that we must figure out some more radical form of organization, so as to bring about a break with capitalism. The question is how to organize collectively in line with a break that is already structurally presupposed in capitalism (the proletariat position), but that is at the same time rejected from assumption or possession, that is dis-inherited or foreclosed. It is not a question of bringing about a critical standpoint, but of enacting the necessary exclusion of its possibility, through the circulation of praxicals (indices of collective praxes, constellations of discursive and productive arrangements) that do not point toward capital as a pure possession of productivity, as the fullness of the yield of production. This latter notion is probably quite enigmatic at the moment, but it is what I am attempting to develop in my thesis (which is complete and will be posted here soon), and in my preliminary formulations of a practical model of schizoanalysis, which is, for me, a collective reorganization of the social/non-intersubjective materials of symbolic structures and relations of production. I will begin laying out a basic methodological elaboration of this model in following posts.

A top-down version of Bartleby politics, in which the state would abandon capital to capitalism, is clearly not only dramatically unlikely, but also probably not preferable for most workers. Even if such a politics did lead to a massive investment in the reorganization of economic life, it is expecting too much of the state. We will likely end up with some version of neo-Keynesianism, aimed at developing a set of regulations adequate to the contemporary excesses of financial capital. Yet as I said, we can learn something from such a thought experiment. What kind of investment would be required of the state to reorganize economic life in such a manner that avoided the reemergence or perseverance of capital? It would have to take the form of a radically different organization of production, productive relations and forces, that, in the absence of accumulated capital, would have to rely on the collective organization of workers themselves. It is this kind 'radical reorganization of production', such that the surplus is reinvested in and by a new social bond amongst (non-)workers, that would be necessary.

In a state-centered version of this story, we could quite easily imagine state funds, on the level of the recent bailout plan, being directed toward agricultural-, production-, and service-sector corporations that would inevitably crumble under the weight of a failed financial sector. This could either aim to rebuild and stabilize failing corporations, which would likely be next to impossible, or could invest in the appropriation of the business by employees now abandoned by investment and credit, with an eye toward a new kind of collective organization. Once such collective appropriations of businesses became profitable, they could buyout the state investment and begin from there. Although this version is only a dream, we can nonetheless imagine such a collective model emerging from the bottom up (and indeed, there are a great number of collective business models, in theory and practice, throughout the economy). Richard Wolff, with whom I had the pleasure of taking a course last year, presents a variation on such a model of reorganization on the basis of collective ownership by workers.



[I'm focusing here on the last ten minutes or so of Wolff's lecture.] Now I take issue with Wolff's proposal on many accounts, but here I want to focus on his claim that collectivization of enterprises amounts to their 'democratization', and that economic democracy must serve as the real substrate of any legitimate political democracy. The simplest way to explain this problem is that democracy, as a social bond, essentially maintains the very elements that make workers susceptible to exploitation. Here is a provisional list of such elements:

1) The gap between articulated positions and actualized policies, which always maintains the primacy of a majority or consensus over deviations, oppressed or dissenting positions. This gap is moreover a symptom of the necessary distance between all actually articulated positions, actual or potential, and the necessarily rejected or foreclosed position that is 'undemocratic' and hence incompatible, namely, the position of those who do not exist (yet, or anymore, or even those who do actually exist, but that are not accounted for, that do not 'belong' to the set).

2) The basic formal function of democracy is to reduce all members to abstract equivalents, 'votes'. This is true of everything from parliamentary democracy to 'authentic' direct democracy - we must be seen as equal in the eyes of the group (demos). Now besides the obvious technical problems with every form of voting, and the question of merit or weight of particular votes, both of which can to some degree be addressed, this nonetheless misses the crucial dimension of subjectivity, what I've been calling the ancestral dimension: the subject is not (only) a unified element that can be counted and equivocated in a set, but is moreover the symptomal expression of that which can not, and must not, be counted, registered, or legitimated in a set or group, in other words, that which had to not be so that the group could constitute itself.

3) Democracy, even in its most radical form (Laclau and Mouffe), relies upon the hegemonic articulation of a Master-signifier that stands for the inadequacy or incompletion of the existing bond, whether this consists in a fantasmatic assumption of some lost or possible fullness or completeness of the socius, or post-fantasmatic cyncism. It cannot break with the Master-signifier, with the masculine logic of exception, and it cannot reach the level of drive, in which the signifier that acts as social bond would directly enact the loss of such a completion, indeed, in which the social bond would directly be the loss of such a completion.

I could go on, I could clarify these points in less obscure terms, go into greater specificity, et cetera, but this account should be sufficient at the moment. What I am proposing is that the possibility of a new collective praxis, a new organization of productive and enuniciative relations, cannot rely on the existing symbolic configurations, the existing economy of asubjective-social materials. It must generate a new social bond through a reorgnization of this economy, or rather, of the relation between collective jouissance and its symbolic support/impediment.

This is more than a matter of figuring out a new way of socializing - it is a matter of rescuing from obscurity that necessarily missed potential of a different bond with others, and making this foreclosure itself the realization of the foreclosed. I understand this to be the objective of schizoanalysis. So such a practice should endeavor to develop a new collective organization of praxis, discursive and material production, that enacts this break that is simultaneously a bond, a pact or promise. Schizoanalysis is a method and science of reorganizing society, abandoned by capital (but aren't the workers always already abandoned by capital?), on the basis of a radical collective praxis, a collectivized production of existence.

So Bartleby politics, in 'doing nothing', forcing into the symbolic texture the intolerable void of the situation, cannot rely on the social bond of democracy. It must make this void, this nothingness, into the social bond itself, and this is precisely what schizoanalysis does, as I conceive it. It is not a matter of inaction, but of acting in a manner that capital cannot register, a manner that enacts a dimension foreclosed to capital from the outset. Any collective organization that seeks to overcome capital, in the wake of this startling crisis, must begin by thinking carefully about the nature of its social bond. To 'do nothing' for capital, we must become nothing to capital.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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