Filed under: historical materialism, political economics | Tags: capitalism, class struggle, Marx, proletariat, the living, undead labor, work-force
Class struggle is not, first and foremost, the struggle between classes, social classes, already constituted as such. Struggle is the ground of such social classes, be they working and owning classes or any other. It is this struggle which, situated within the organization of human activity as a whole (and the problematicity of this formulation does not for a moment escape me), comes before and allows for the genesis of social relations in which distinct classes take shape.
This struggle is a matter of force before relation, of a force at odds with itself, principally, the force of labor or work-force (the living). Class itself names this struggle, situated within the substructural organization of forces (an organization that is always difficult to maintain, always struggling to remain organized, and indeed, struggling to remain whole, to wholly encompass, and even to maintain the humanity of the whole, as humanity itself is but an effect of the organization of the productive activity of the living).
Class is struggle itself as constitutive, before it is a particular class that struggles with another, or even with itself. Thus the great difficult we face today in even identifying classes to which we or anyone might belong in terms of ownership of living or dead labor, the relative impossibility of doing so, and the real disarticulation of the division which engenders such impossibility, are constituted effects of a struggle that too often succeeds in effacing itself.
Classically (and whether there was a purely classical time is doubtful), classes were carved from the living, insofar as the general work-force was organized against itself. A part of this force subordinated the rest, by way of claiming exclusive right over the dead, the materialized past or means of production. This classical model degraded, whether it was ever really present or not (it is unimportant now), to the point that power was ascribed to dead labor itself, rather than its masters. Death (capital), now granted dominion over the living, becomes an “animated monster”, and all the more so in that the living increasingly become indistinguishable from the dead they slavishly serve. At this point, the work-force forgets the humanity it uses to distinguish itself just as it forgets the specificity of classes (workers and owners, not rich and poor; classes are replaced by a universal debtor class distinguished only by the health of their balance-sheets). It even forgets living itself, in forgetting ‘how to live’, or in other words, forgetting to ask itself ceaselessly ‘how to live?’ Death instead has already answered for it.
Classes are constituted (or not) in struggle. This is why Marx insists that the Proletariat must be organized as a class: the Proletariat is that exposure of work-force stripped bare of its humanity, of its situation within any constituted social relation, reduced to the quivering pulsations of an anxious and starved body. To organize that exposed, bare struggle itself as a class, rather than dissimulating it in a class that can clothe itself (even with difficulty), would be the undoing of class as a social relation that dissimulates struggle, but never of struggle itself. Rather, it would raise the struggle to exist – living – to the surface, as that which society can no longer deny. Together, this struggle is what we are, before we are even ourselves.
Everything existing struggles in doing so, and often, in order to do so as well; although, it is not unheard of that, in the struggle to cease existing, one only persists all the longer. This latter struggle is that of the Proletariat.
I’ve recently had a few publications you might want to check out. The first is a brief essay in Mark Fisher’s excellent collection, The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson, called “The King of Pop’s Two Bodies”. It’s an allegorical (in Benjamin’s sense) interpretation of the Thriller album and videos as eerily chronicling Michael’s real-life downward spiral. The book also has great pieces by Mark, David Stubbs, Alex Williams, Steve Shaviro, Evan Calder Williams, Dominic Fox, Owen Hatherley, and many others. Also, if you have read it or plan on doing so, consider posting a review on the Amazon US page, which got hit early with a few rather harsh ones.
The second is a paper in the current special issue of the International Journal of Zizek Studies, Zizek in Tehran, called “Iran’s Utopian Melancholy”. It’s a bit problematic, but came out rather well I think. It also is relevant to the debate about revolution spurred by my last post. You can get the pdf here.
Filed under: eventalism, experimental strategies, politics, the real world | Tags: Harman, Mark Fisher, Marx, politics, revolution
*UPDATE* I want to clarify that I in no way intended any offense to Graham, or anyone else for that matter. I find the sort of remarks to which this post responds (and Graham is certainly not alone in making them) to be objectionable and deserving of criticism, but I certainly am not attacking anyone. This is simply a statement of my skepticism regarding the out-of-hand dismissal of political positions with revolutionary aspirations. I hope this is taken as a good faith statement of my convictions and not some kind of personal attack.
*UPDATE 2* To abate any confusion, let me clarify at the outset. My argument here is absolutely not that skeptics of revolutionary politics are McCarthyists or guilty of any sort of ‘Red Scare’-like tactics. The argument is really the opposite, that this skeptical position was originally generated as a reaction-formation to the brutality of McCarthyism, that the moderate left’s hand was forced by the latter. They had to dissociate from any sort of radicalism or risk being attacked as well. This skepticism was an unfortunate but necessary defensive tactic that by now has outstayed its welcome. However, it is, again, in no way a form of McCarthyism, and is on the contrary a defense against it.
Some brief comments on K-punk’s “Dialogue with Graham Harman”:
There are several mentions of “a Left devoted to Revolution” as Harman puts it. Perhaps I’m showing my ignorance, but I admit I wasn’t aware of anyone actually ’shouting “Revolution!” without context or explanation’, in a philosophical article or any other sort of mature discussion. Of course the caricature is commonplace, but I don’t know anyone over the age of 17 that makes such a heedless appeal to some “total and immediate eschatological transformation of society”. I’m beginning to think that the demonization of this largely imaginary position is about as detrimental as the behavior it ridicules. Who are these leftists so concerned with such a fantasmatic and unattainable ideal?
This sort of rhetorical criticism seems especially discomforting to me, in that it is likely derivative of mocking dismissals of Marxist and anarchist positions by the more mainstream Left. Of all the conversations of I’ve had with people of such persuasions (and I do count myself among the former), I’ve never encountered anyone that regarded such a quick-fix notion of revolution as anything more than a self-deprecating in-joke. I doubt there are many radical Leftists of an adult age that seriously advocate such nonsense.
It seems more likely that this condemnation is a remnant of the sort of anti-communist hysteria that unfortunately split the Left for so long, at least in the US (I’m not sure about the UK or anywhere else). Where there should be solidarity, for too long moderate Leftists were forced to distance themselves from their more radical comrades for fear of loosing any popular credibility. And resentment amongst the radical Left was an understandable side-effect.
Make no mistake, the red scares were long, bloody monstrosities, the closest the US has come to Stalinism thus far. They were so frightful they drew the condemnation of famed Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko. A truly shameful moment in American history. I get the feeling that the knee-jerk rejection of radical politics is a sort of inheritance from that history, looming skeptically over any vaguely revolutionary temptations.
Of course, radical Leftists, especially those of a more theoretical stripe, are generally more talk than walk, and Graham is certainly right to say they likely don’t expect a revolution to actually occur. Indeed, as Zizek has said repeatedly, the majority of Leftist academics would probably shy away from any such upheaval that deprived them of their comfortable social status (which is not to imply all academics are so comfortable, but only that such status is not easily relinquished). Yet this criticism misses the point.
One would have to be a madman to think that revolutionary transformation could occur out of nowhere, that suddenly everything would up and change. Nobody expects this to happen. Revolutionary politics has far less to do with this sort of pipe-dream, and far more with questions of what people want, why they want what they want, and how to get them to question these desires. Above all, revolutionary change is not a matter of instantaneous redemption, but of generating a critical desire in the people, a desire capable not only capable of questioning authority or the status quo (such desires are almost ubiquitous on the far Right), but of questioning itself. The people must become critical of their own desires, they must ask why they want what they want, rather than always criticizing from a position of certainty.
Revolutionary politics is concerned first and foremost with generating a revolutionary criticism amongst the people. Recently, it has not often been successful in the thinking through pragmatics of this task, certainly no more so than with greater strategic and theoretical concerns. Yet I doubt there are many people actually committed to revolutionary politics that think such considerations are unimportant. No one worth listening to advocates any sort of imposition of revolutionary change on unwilling masses. The question is one of provoking the masses to strive for such change themselves. The heart of this change is, above all, in the shift from a social order based upon certainty of its own desired ends (however broad and general these might be), to one based upon a foundational critical stance with regard to any such desire. This is not to say such criticism must remain negative and dismiss any positive content, but it cannot advocate any such content without retaining an essentially critical prerogative toward it. Again, the question of revolutionary politics has nothing to do with the miraculous solution to all social woes, and everything to do with the pragmatics of generating and maintaining an essentially self-critical social order.
Filed under: experimental strategies, neuroscience, political economics, politics, speculative realism | Tags: Brassier, capitalism, communism, Marx, misuse, nihilism, normative insecurity, proletariat
“For just as the phenomenon of death indexes an anomalous zone in the conceptual fabric of the manifest image – the point at which our everyday concepts and categories begin to break down, which is why it remains a privileged topic for philosophers exploring the outer limits of the manifest image – so, by the same token, the concept of extinction represents an aberration for the phenomenological discourse which sought to transcendentalize the infrastructure of the manifest image precisely in order to safeguard the latter from the incursions of positivism and naturalism. Yet it is precisely insofar as the concept of extinction expresses a dissonance resulting from the interference between the manifest and scientific images that it could not have been generated from within the latter; it is manufactured by deploying the manifest image’s most sophisticated conceptual resources (in conjunction with elements of scientific discourse) against that image’s own phenomenological self-understanding. At this particular historical juncture, philosophy should resist the temptation to install itself within one of the rival images, just as it should refuse the forced choice between the reactionary authoritarianism of manifest normativism, and the metaphysical conservatism of scientific naturalism. Rather, it should exploit the mobility that is one of the rare advantages of abstraction in order to shuttle back and forth between images, establishing conditions of transposition, rather than synthesis, between the speculative anomalies thrown up within the order of phenomenal manifestation, and the metaphysical quandaries generated by the sciences’ challenge to the manifest order. In this regard, the concept of extinction is necessarily equivocal precisely insofar as it crystallizes the interference between the two discourses.” Nihil Unbound p 231 (Emphasis mine)
The red-herrings so haphazardly bandied-about – “neurology death cult”, reductivism, mettrieism – are symptomatic of a lack of philosophical engagement. Brassier’s project couldn’t be clearer: far from championing the reduction of subjectivity, its denunciation as ‘unreal’, and so on, his work is devoted to thinking the trauma that accompanies subjectivity when it has thoroughly demystified itself. The concept of extinction, far from some gothic fetish or fixation, is “necessarily equivocal” in that it forces us to reflect on this trauma without being capable of resorting to some mode of resistance or avoidance. If Brassier was championing an absolute reduction of the manifest to the scientific image, this entire discussion would be absurd, as it explicitly aims to exacerbate and valorize the dissonance between these images. Brassier claims we should maintain the manifest image precisely in order to mobilize it to explore this dissonance, to confront and live with this trauma rather than avoiding it. If he were a reductivist, these claims would be nonsensical.
In a time in which subjectivity really is being reduced, deprived of its special and mysterious status (both by science, and by the evacuation of agency from politics in the form of technocratic administration), Brassier demands that we cease to recoil from reduction even while we refuse to simply submit to it (as if such a submission were possible). Rather, the manifest image will persist, and Brassier’s argument is that it should persist in the mode of resolute confrontation with this trauma. Moreover, this trauma can itself become the libidinal source of a renewed self-relation in which subjects become concerned with exploring the limits of their own subjectivity, experimenting with this unshakable condition rather than taking it for granted.
(This, uncoincidentally, strongly resembles Marx’s definition of communism, which is not another positive order which comes after capitalism, but is simply the process by which capitalism is progressively abolished, dismantled. As Nicole Pepperell has argued, the purpose of Das Kapital is to expose the massive reservoir of practico-conceptual structures that must not only be undone, but which communism will have to at the same time study, as its very being will exist solely in the experimental misuse that suspends their proper functioning. The agent of political change, the proletariat, is precisely the subject that has been totally deprived of agency (having literally sold this capacity), totally ‘reduced’ to its integration in the production process; the crux of Marx’s argument is that this position is not hopeless, and that their is still a subject that remains, witness to its own desubjectivation, and that can then instigate a break precisely by mobilizing this irreducible dissonance. Today, when technocracy has nearly universally deprived us of political subjectivity (of a say in the large-scale projects by which we organize our social existence), instead deferring to the ’scientific’ necessity of capitalism, we all become capable of joining the proletariat by becoming subject to this very desubjectivation.)
This is precisely what Brassier recommends: not the simply ‘reduction’ of subjectivity, but a mode of subjectivity that valorizes its own naturalization and disenchantment, that refuses to impose itself as metaphysically primary as much as it refuses the same gesture on the part of science, in favor of insisting on the primacy of the dissonance between the two. This dissonance, this process of desubjectivation with which the subject is nonetheless coincident (which Agamben calls the condition of ’shame’), is the ultimate aim of Brassier’s work, not ‘reduction’ or ‘extinction’, as any moderately careful reading will prove. He even goes so far as to claim science is only possible on the condition of this dissonance, as the norms of truth and rationality are only operative on the basis of the will to know furnished by the manifest image.
If this doesn’t prove the inanity of the aforementioned charges so regularly leveled at Brassier, nothing will. Those charges are based on nothing but reckless and cursory readings, and forgo serious engagement with the content of the text in favor of easy dismissal on the basis of decontextualization. They’re no less absurd than claiming Harman thinks everything is made out of hammers.
Filed under: historical materialism | Tags: allegory, Benjamin, constellation, ex-appropriation, exposure, historical materialism, materialism, misuse value, myth, mythic violence, nihilism, ruin, sovereignty
A constellation is an imaginary, invisible and immaterial relation drawn between real, visible, material things. It is something seen into the world, but not itself in the world; between things, amongst them, but not of them. It is not a property ascribed to them, but an improper way of treating them, not endorsed or induced by them, supported by them without permission. It is an improper use of the elements of the world, using them for a purpose they could not have anticipated and toward which they are indifferent.
The constellation is a mode of allegory, perhaps its purest mode, in that it makes use of some material such that the actual context and character of that material is totally abstracted, only retained insofar as it serves to illustrate something totally and essentially unrelated. The constellation treats the constellated material much in the way the present may regard ancient ruins: now deprived of everything that furnished them with relevance and meaning, we are free to read into these ruins whatever fabulous and romantic significance we care to, even if this takes the form of meticulous and scientific reconstruction of the original context. In the latter case, we do not struggle against the manifest effect of historical corrosion, but only resurrect the past in a form now deprived of its original aura, a new and barely recognizable form that nonetheless faithful repeats the original (just as Christ was unrecognizable to his disciples after his resurrection). Even the truth becomes allegorically transcribed when bestowed upon the ruin.
The constellation treats everything it touches as ruined, as deprived of any proper meaning or context. This is not to say that it ever had such a meaning, but only that it has none, and that this poverty is its only essence. The improper use of worldly material evinced in allegory and constellation is not a violation or transgression of proper use, but demonstrates the absence of any such propriety; in approaching its material as ruined, any use would have to be improper, even the scientific use of archaeology.
The constellation may be imaginary, imputed to things that have no need of it and remain blind to it, but this is not to say it is unreal. Yet the reality of the constellation does not take a literal form, as lines really traced in the void between stars. The reality of the constellation is manifest in their power of orientation, to give direction to travelers, especially at sea. The constellation exists not between stars, but between stars and sailors as the orienting force which is a condition of navigation. The lines of the constellation are traced in the movements of ships at sea, even if these lines bear no resemblance to those imagined in the heavens.
The relation between a constellation and its navigational manifestation is one of non-resemblance, as much as that between the constellation and the myth it supposedly transfigures. The constellation is a figure of both the myth and the journey, which is not to say it depicts or predicts them. Rather, it constitutes a graphic that, without resemblance, nonetheless traces or outlines elements as incomparable as a myth, a navigational course, or a divination. The astrological divination in particular is paradigmatic: its predictions have no ’scientific’ value, they have no necessary relation to the future, they may in no way resemble it; yet they nonetheless are fully real and amount to a tangible influence upon that future, however negligible.
The stars are indifferent to the myth they are imagined to figure, the course assist in charting, and the future they seem to reveal. As the material of a constellation, they are treated allegorically, as support wholly enveloped in an improper use, but nonetheless remaining essentially unassimilable, necessarily inappropriable and hence rendering every use improper, marked as improper. This relation, between the materiality of the ruin as indifferent support, and the misuse value manifest in allegorical ex-appropriation, is that of constellation.
This relation is what is at stake in myth; not myth in the sense of fabulous pseudo-histories, but myth as the effacement of the inappropriable support of every use (this is precisely the sense of mythic violence described by Benjamin). It is no coincidence that our constellations are carved up according to mythology. The mythic assimilation of origin to that which originates with it, of condition to that which it conditions, of creation to the created, is precisely what is opposed by materialism, which is the attestation of the essential inappropriability of the material support of myth, or any self-validating use. Myth, in claiming propriety over its material support, in claiming the authoritative account of its own origin (or more abstractly, that there is such an account, as in the case of Lacanian fantasy), attempts to erase every trace of impropriety. Benjamin’s historical materialism begins precisely from the revelation of this impropriety as the very materiality of history itself, and on the basis of which every sovereignty (mythic effacement of impropriety and inclusion of origin) establishes itself, while also being essentially doomed to ruin.
Filed under: experimental strategies, hauntology, para-ontology, utopian science | Tags: abandon, Badiou, being-no-one, communism, exposure, music, Nietzsche, nihilism, nudity
The way one feels could be likened to an opening
or a slamming
or a breathing hard
all of them,
all of them
have seen inside my mouth
have grown and flown southone day I’ll be my own Leadbelly
and I will grow a baby
oh he will move so swiftly
to hold me completelyall of them
all of them have pushed into the air
all of them
all of them will bathe with me
when we are safe
in the salty caves.
A triumph of song, of poetry. A triumph, in the precise sense of the Greek thriambos from which it derives: a hymn to Dionysus. Dionysus was of course the God of drunkenness, madness, and revelry. Nietzsche insisted that this Dionysian spirit is nowhere better exemplified than in music, in the revelry of the chorus that begs us to sing, to lend our voice, to participate, and of course, to dance. It begs us to expose ourselves, but not alone, rather to expose ourselves together, and insodoing, to stand naked together.
In his analysis of the figure of dance in Nietzsche, Badiou insists upon the essential nudity of the dancer: “Of [the dancing] body, one will necessarily say…that it is naked. Obviously, it matters little if it is empirically so. The body of dance is essentially naked…Dance, as a metaphor for thought, presents thought to us as devoid of relation to anything other than itself, in the nudity of its emergence. Dance is a thinking without relation, the thinking that relates nothing, that puts nothing in relation.” [Handbook of Inaesthetics, p 66] One might assume that such a figure that stands naked, without relation to anything but itself, is therefore incapable of holding anything in common, or constituting any sort of togetherness. And yet we all know that no one can dance alone. Even when dancing alone, one cannot be alone, because there is no one there: the dancing body does not strictly relate even to itself, the self of the dancer, but only to the nudity of the dance, to the pure, meaningless, contentless exposition of the dance itself.
In the dance, the dancing body only relates to itself insofar as it is itself nothing, a pure nothing embodied in the ephemeral flailing and contorting of the flesh, no matter how disciplined these movements. The monstrosity, and monstrous beauty of dance rests in the possibility of a rigorously disciplined and coordinated, choreographed, movement that itself signifies nothing, that is not disciplined in the name of some higher authority, but precisely for no reason, taking the exposition of its own exuberant and restless extraneity as its essence and purpose. An essential inessentiality, and purposive impurposiveness.
No one can dance alone, because no one can dance: dance can only begin when there is no longer anyone to resist the somatic seizure of dancing, to oppose some meaningful posture to the imposture (the deceptive, the placeless, the positionless; impostor, without posturing) of movements resolutely bereft of meaning. In dancing together, with others, we share in this nudity, this exposure of the nothing we are, and we stand naked together in the face of the Nothing, Nihil, abandon and extinction. Yet even without anyone to share in this exposure, we nonetheless cannot dance alone, because in dancing what is exposed, what stands naked, is no-one, the no one that can never be anyone (das Man) and can never belong to anyone, can never properly be anyone. In dancing together, we share in this being-no-one, we are no-one-together.
It is the same with song: in song, the voice no longer says anything, it is only the exposure of the nudity of the voice, a voice that says nothing and can say nothing, because it is a voice that speaks for no one, the voice of no one. It is a voice that gives no meaning, no content, and says nothing, not in the negative sense of not speaking or saying nothing of value, but in the positive sense of saying nothing itself, putting nothing itself into words (even if this forces words themselves to come apart at the seams). In song, even the most explicitly narrative song, the act of singing itself amounts to the exposure of the nudity of the voice, such that the meaning of the words and the story they tell is only a vehicle for the exuberant voicing of meaninglessness, the utterly inessentiality of the voicing itself, which might as well not happen. Even if we pretend there is some necessity to saying these words, there can be no necessity in singing them, other than to revel in the madness that they might be voiced at all.
In song, the voice is no longer an instrument of the one who speaks, and thereby imparts some meaningful discursive content. The singing voice is that of no one, it is the voice and voicing of no one, it is the always potentially humiliating exposure of the no-one and nothing that I am. In singing and dancing, I always risk humiliating myself, because I must confront and very well may recoil from the meaningless and inessential nothing that is my identity, even as I refuse and cover it. And in singing and dancing together, we refuse to allow one another to stand so humiliated alone, without also encouraging cowardly recoil into prideful posturing. Here we find and rejoin the chorus, the revelry of the chorus, the spirit of Dionysus.
It is fitting that Mountain Man voice their hymn in such a choral style, with the bare and naked voices of the singers unaccompanied, unsupported, calling out and echoing in the dark night of silence. One can easily imagine, beginning from this song, the utter silence that is so barely abated by the flickering candle of the choral voice. The silence is so starkly present it seems to threaten extinguishing the song at every moment.
The choral theme is only affirmed in the lyrical content which insists on the refrain: all of them. All of them, who? “Have seen inside my mouth”; “will bathe with me” – first, all of those who have seen me so exposed, in the voice as issuing from “inside my mouth”, from the raw pink flesh which recedes into ever darker depths, depths which have no bottom, in which one will never find an original and reassuring source. Inside my mouth, one does not find the source of the voice in the sense of the one who speaks, but only the pure no-one of the nude flesh whose articulate groaning has been so disciplined into song. And yet they, “all of them”, are not obscene voyeurs in whose gaze I stand humiliated, laid bare in the quivering nudity of my insides. They “will bathe with me”, they will share in my nudity, “when we are safe/in the salty caves”, together in the darkness of being-no-one, of being our very nudity.
The difficult first lines must be read in this light: “The way one feels could be likened to an opening/or a slamming/or a breathing hard”. An opening, or a slamming: an exposure, or a desperate covering up, closing off, blocking out. A singing, an opening and exposing of oneself in song, that could just as easily be extinguished in silence, the silence of shutting up, slamming one’s mouth shut out of embarrassment. “Or a breathing hard”, the difficult breath, the pained exhalation that could as easily become song as despondent sigh. “The way one feels” – who is this one, this impersonal one from which we begin and begin to slide into something more personal, more intimate and desperate? It could be anyone, perhaps. This could mean “the way one is feeling, the way one happens to feel”, but also, with a bit more interpretative risk, perhaps “the way in which one feels, can feel, is capable of feeling anything, that by which feeling is possible”. It is this very precariousness of exposure that is the very condition of possibility for feeling anything, and in whose dialectic the composition of emotion is constantly drawn and redrawn.
It is from this condition that the personal voice of the singer then begins to confront “all of them”, and exposure before them. Yet this confrontation is not limited to the precarious shift between being exposed to others and sharing in this exposure with them. “All of them…have grown and flown south”; “all of them have pushed into the air”. The first mention of departure follows the anticipated humiliation of exposure, as perhaps a flight from the frightful spectacle of the denuded singer. Yet in the final verse, the theme is repeated just before exposure becomes shared. The bridge between these two repetitions is the second verse: “one day I’ll be my own Leadbelly/and I will grow a baby/oh he will move so swiftly/to hold me completely”. Leadbelly was of course the infamous outlaw folk singer whose inspiration is palpable even without explicit citation. If Leadbelly does serves as an inspiration, and as an example of inspiration more generally, then the music of Mountain Man is marked by a certain inheritance, a certain familiarity. Leadbelly stands in for a tradition from which Mountain Man’s music is born, a new offspring. Yet the narrative voice here wants to become this figure of inspiration, and wants to give birth to a child of its own.
Perhaps it is to hasty to say ‘a child of its own’, for the next lines betray an inverted relation: it is not the child that belongs with and to the family or tradition from which it is born, but rather, it is the child that ‘holds completely’ that which bears it forth. This holding, embracing, ‘enowning’ of the inspiration is accomplished in a “move so swiftly”, which might be the means by which the holding is accomplished (he will move swiftly, and in this movement, I will be held), or simply a haste in taking hold (he will be swift in taking hold of me). Either way, we have here a clear sense in which this embrace is tied to swiftness, which undoubtedly resonates with the lyrics about taking flight. Specifically, it becomes clear how, in having pushed into the air, they thereby become capable of embracing me in my exposure. Taking flight can only signify a radical departure and abandonment in which that ground from which one originated cannot be carried along, lest swiftness be encumbered by the burden of tradition.
There is far more in these dense lines then can be unpacked here. Yet we should be attentive to the sense in which, within this song, the singers aim to reconfigure their relation to tradition, the tradition of folk music which has plainly borne them. They want to embrace this tradition, and to embrace the nudity and exposure that is at its heart, specifically at the heart of singing, voicing, and especially voicing anonymously, words that are ‘traditional’ belonging to no one, even the moment they are first conceived intended only to be sung by innumerable voices and to become lost amongst them, to become completely embraced by the voices they inspire to sing, to expose themselves in song. The tradition of folk music is one of a shared anonymity, it is a tradition of anonymity, of being-no-one in song, together in song, in sharing song. And it is a tradition of giving oneself over entirely to the embrace of an inheritor that can never know you, but will nonetheless embrace you in this totally nullified and denuded being.
Dionysus is the god who comes, the god who is coming and is to come. A hymn to Dionysus is a song for those who are coming, those to whom you will be lost, to whom you will be no-one, in hopes that they might not forget this exposure, that they perhaps will embrace this nudity in which, together, we are no-one.
Filed under: historical materialism, politics, speculative realism, utopian science | Tags: abandon, Agamben, contingency, facticity, Heidegger, in-and-not-itself, Meillassoux, nihilism, ontology, politics, resoluteness, speculative realism, utopiation
I’ll be back to regular posting soon, including the Marx posts I’ve promised, but I’ve been very busy lately. In the mean time…
Nina Power posts some thoughts on the privileging of ontology in philosophy to the detriment of the thereby devalued ontic sphere, specifically that of politics. She questions, in a Badiouian vein, whether philosophy even has adequate resources to pursue ontology, to speak about ‘what is’, especially when compared with those of mathematics, and presumedly mathematicized natural sciences as well. What, then, is philosophy to do if it soberly renounces the delirious proliferation of ontologies, whose apparent yield amounts to little more than the denigration of being in its ‘impure’ local modalities?
Confronting ‘what is’ has to mean accepting a certain break between the natural and the artificial, even if this break is itself artificial. [...] What happens, or what does not happen, should be what concerns us
Far from explaining what basically ‘is’, philosophy amounts to an essential confrontation with what is (our confrontation), with the fact that it is, and a concern with the consequences of this ongoing confrontation. Far from any sort of correlationism, weak or strong, the key proposition here is not ‘to be is to be the correlate of thinking’, but rather, that ‘to think is to think under the condition of facticity’. (This is moreover quite amenable, if not identical, to Meillassoux’s escape act.)
This is the real value of Heidegger, for whom ontology is nothing but the hermeneutics of facticity, of the fact of being here in the world, in our very essence inseparable from our confrontation with mere ontic things, mere beings. There is no sense in which we can talk about ‘being’ itself apart from this confrontation, and the manner in which being is fundamentally concealed in that which is disclosed. For Heidegger, ontology speaks of nothing but the insurmountable immersion in the ontic – and in this regard his work has far more political and ethical value, be it implicit, than either he or his followers would care to admit. Agamben is exemplary in indicating this value.
In the above quotation, Nina uses a strange phrase – a break between natural and artificial that is itself artificial. This break is, of course, the fundamental problem for Marx, as manifest in the break between ‘natural’ use-value and ‘artificial’ exchange value, a break itself artificially imposed by the form of value. Yet Marx is not so naive as to think that simply recognizing this artificiality is sufficient for disregarding it. As Nina says, we must, as philosophers, accept this break. It’s an impotent gesture to reject admission of the ‘artifices’ of being (political being, for instance) into philosophy, instead allowing passage only to the ‘nature’ of being itself, deprived of such divisive determinations. If the difference between nature and artifice is itself artifice, then it seems in vain to probe into uncontaminated nature, which itself exists in its distinction only on behalf of artifice, and as itself artifice. Does this lead us inevitably toward some sort of social constructivism?
No, because the nature/artifice distinction does not coincide with that of nature/culture, despite appearances. Nature does not mean ‘that which occurs without dependence on humanity’, nor does artifice mean the ‘that which is dependent on humanity for its occurrence’. (I’m taking some liberty with Nina’s statement, possibly extending it beyond her intentions.) Nature, rather, means necessary or of necessity, whereas artificial means unnecessary or contingent. The ‘nature of being’ speaks of what is necessary or essential in being, whereas ontical artifices could either be or not, without affecting being itself. Nina’s comment, and its Marxian echoes, suggests on the contrary that the ‘natural’ in this regard is itself the result of a process of naturalization, of a ‘treating as natural’, and hence is artificial. The implication is that we cannot say anything about the nature of being, anything that holds necessarily about being, anything that is fundamentally prescribed by being itself. The ground of any such prescription is itself artificially supposed.
The problem for a position willing to admit the artificiality of the difference between nature and artifice is its inability to prescribe itself. It cannot ground this claim in the nature of being, nor can it accept the prescriptive valence of any such claim proceeding from nature in this way. In beginning from the artificiality or contingency of every alleged necessity, it seemingly deprives itself of any justification of this very claim as itself necessary. Here we should turn to Meillassoux, who provides a way out of this deadlock. Beforehand, however, a point of clarification regarding the natural/artificial distinction: I said above that artificiality is equivalent to contingency. Now artifice is typically taken to refer to the man-made, the product of human labor and imagination. More generally, it is semantically quite close, if not etymologically related to facticius, the Latin root from which ‘facticity’ is derived. (I suspect a relation, on the basis of the Latin root fictus; the precise relation to factus is still obscure for me, but I know the latter has the sense of made, molded, etc, whereas the former has the sense of forged, counterfeited, etc; their proximity is clear, and not so easily reduced to the difference between fact and fiction.)
Heidegger’s concept of facticity draws upon Augustine’s use of facticius, which designates the status of man as ‘made’ by God, and which is opposed to nativus. Agamben on this distinction:
In Latin, facticius is opposed to nativus; it means qui non sponte fit, what is not natural, what did not come into Being by itself (“what is made by hand and not by nature,” as one finds in the dictionaries). [from "The Passion of Facticity"]
Nature is that which has its source and reason in itself, whereas in the facticius source and reason – or ground – is outside. Now I’d have to go back to Augustine to know for sure how this disjunction complicates God’s relation to Nature, but holding off on this point, we can see how the man-made does not have its reason in itself, or does not arise spontaneously. This much is obvious. Yet the important point is that, having its reason in man, the man-made or artifice did not arise of necessity, as its origin was dependent on the contingent whim of man (and the same could be said of man vis-a-vis God). Man did not necessarily have to make this thing, or make it in this way. The important point here, far from dependency on man for origination, is the sense in which there is no intrinsic reason in the thing itself why it should be, or be this way. Artificiality is equivalent to contingency, then, in the sense in which things are void of reason for being what they are, lacking necessity in themselves, being grounded on something else. A natural being, on the contrary, is necessarily what it is insofar that it is, in that its very being is its reason for being what it is – it is its own ground.
Yet aren’t we drawing dangerously close to correlationism? If the distinction between nature and artifice is itself artificial, doesn’t this mean that everything is grounded upon man? This confusion, however, misses the point: contingency is not a matter of dependence upon something else, such as man, but rather, of a lack of intrinsic reason. Man-made things may depend upon man for their ground, but man is no more self-grounding, he is himself contingent and groundless in himself. Meillassoux’s innovation in this regard rests in transforming the epistemological problem of discovering the (external, natural) ground of a factual thing, into the ontological maneuver of treating contingency itself as the only ground. Hence, the lack of reason intrinsic in any thing is converted into unreason itself as ground. The purely contingent and ungroundable fact that something is – the facticity of the thing – is not only an unsurpassable epistemological obstacle, but the ultimate ontological condition, the in-itself itself. To avoid confusion, it’s important to realize that facticity is a matter of reasons, not causes. The argument is not that things are uncaused or arise spontaneously without any possibility of explanation. It is not a question of how the thing came to be, but why it should be, rather than not, or rather than otherwise. Thus, Meillassoux does not simply collapse nature into artifice or vice versa; he does not simply say that everything is by nature contingent, constructed, etc, thereby leveling the distinction between ground and grounded in the name of a univocal plane. The distinction between ground and grounded, nature and artifice, is preserved, with the simple adjustment of emptying the former of any content – the ground is not some metaphysical thing (God, Nature, World, etc), but rather only groundlessness or facticity itself.
This last point might seem like splitting hairs, until we take account of the political consequences. The univocal leveling operation, in which contingency is naturalized, will thereby imbue every contingent thing with intrinsic self-grounded reason, thereby cutting off every actual instance as in-itself eternal and necessary (Latour is paradigmatic here). The artificial gap between nature and artifice is refused, and as a consequence, there is no justification for claiming things should not be thus – on the contrary, for Latour, things must be thus, insofar as they are. Rather than devaluing the ontic in the name of the ontological, this gesture assimilates the ontic into the ontological, and thereby imbues everything with the intrinsic self-grounding reason of being itself. (I think Harman’s corrective reading of Latour is important in this regard, in his insistence that the ground is not reducible to what it grounds.) Meillassoux, on the contrary, maintains the gap, accepts it as such, if only to empty nature itself of any reason. The ontological, far from being the ‘deeper reason’ of ontic things, is their very reasonlessness as such, taken as a positive condition for being. Whereas the Latourian move suggests things are always already what they should be (at least in their very instantaneous actuality, given that temporal endurance has no sense for him); and the ‘traditional’ ontological move condemned by Nina suggests the way things are is at best a matter of indifference, in that their being is irreducible to their manner of being, or at worst to be evaluated on the basis of the intrinsic tendency of being itself, and hence their conformity with their ground (this is where one ‘reads politics off of ontology’, in the most vulgar sense); Meillassoux’s gesture allows us to claim there is no reason things should be the way they are, without permitting either indifference or ‘natural’ standards of evaluation.
In this regard, Meillassoux’s formal evacuation of ontology, reducing it to the pure form of factical confrontation, opens the space for genuine political contestation. The critique of Meillassoux’s project as politically ambivalent, or at least underdetermined, is therefore desperately wrongheaded. Only a position like Meillassoux’s (and in different ways, this is also true of Heidegger, Badiou, and Brassier, amongst others), in which being simply is our confrontation with ungrounded facticity, gives politics a space between indifference devaluation and technocratic dogmatism, a space in which no decision or commitment is guaranteed, but in which we nonetheless must decide. On this ontological basis alone can we achieve, in Nina’s words, “a historical materialism…that is able to conceive of politics from the standpoint of catastrophe but carries on anyway“. This is precisely how we should understand Heidegger’s concept of resoluteness.
Here I have to disagree with Nick, who claims that “The positive political outcome of speculative realism, then, is to refuse the move of deriving politics from philosophy – and to restore politics to its own relative autonomy.” While I don’t think we should simply derive our political commitments from some alleged tendency inherent to being itself, I think the total separation of the two is mistaken, especially given the conviction that (philosophical) ontology is nothing apart from the pure meaningless confrontation with facticity. It is only on the basis of accepting the groundlessness or reasonlessness of facticity itself that we can derive a politics that does not ‘depoliticize’ itself, or that respects the political proper – not in the Schmittian sense of the friend/enemy distinction, but in the more fundamental sense of the vertiginous situation of undecidability, in which we must act without any guarantee, and hence must commit ourselves to something resolutely, without reason. It is only on the basis of such a groundless decision (which in Schmitt is relegated to the sovereign exception) that something like a friend/enemy distinction can even be intelligible. To respect this groundless condition of action, which is the political tout court, one would require a politics that refuses to naturalize itself, that refuses to resort to the fantasmatic necessity of its own decision. This is the fundamental difference between Left and Right, as Zizek often affirms. The fundamental character of political conviction, if not the content of the positions it endorses, is very definitely derived from one’s ontological prerogative – grounding or ungrounding. Ontology is therefore very directly political, although not in the trivial sense of ‘committed to this or that party or group or cause’…Here is where I think the sort of ‘political critique of philosophy’, advocated by Benjamin Noys, becomes absolutely essential.
So while I understand where Nick is coming from, I think his conflation of the content of political positions with politics as such leads to a fatal misrepresentation of the political itself, which is a matter of the groundlessness or groundedness of prescription, and consequently, either resoluteness or disavowal in the face of facticity. Here, John Effay’s response to Nick is exemplary: “It is impossible to refuse such a move [of deriving politics from philosophy] because philosophy is founded upon the break between the natural and artificial which is politics. The one presupposes the other”. The break between nature and artifice is the very space of the political, insofar as the search for any ground of (artificial) prescription terminates in either the bleak confrontation with groundlessness, or the deluded certainty of a fantasized ground which thereby closes the gap. Philosophy is the very confrontation with this break, as manifest in the absence of apparent reason in things themselves. Either we attempt to circumvent this absence by positing some ground beneath it, from which political prescriptions can be cleanly deduced, or we transform that absence into the only positive condition, through resoluteness. Only the latter option does justice to the unshakable primacy of the gap itself. Again, to quote John’s post:
Politics, in the broadest possible sense, is this break. It is via our practices and thought as social beings that we situate ourselves with regard to everything else. This is why Deleuze and Guattari say that ‘politics precedes being’. Inasmuch as we think and do things, we are unavoidably political. This is not some sort of claim that politics constitutes the real; rather that our access to the real is mediated via politics.
To repeat the claim from above, this access does not reduce the real to a correlate, but rather situates thinking under the aegis of facticity as its ultimate condition. Resoluteness in the face of factical contingency, conviction without guarantee – this is what it means to be a Leftist.
Filed under: historical materialism, neuroscience, political theology, politics, speculative realism, utopian science | Tags: Brassier, capitalism, Churchland, eliminativism, exception, Latour, Marx, mythic violence, nihilism, object-oriented philosophy, ontology, sovereignty, speculative realism, suspense
I’d intended to participate in an online reading group, proposed by Nate, centered on Chapter 25 of Marx’s Capital Vol. I, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”, and had been preparing some preparatory posts on my reading of Marx, when I suddenly had to uproot and move to Scotland. To make a long story short, I was relatively unsure I would be able to attend graduate school this Fall, until a last minute unexpected change in circumstances made it possible. Now that I’ve settled in here, I should be posting somewhat regularly again, although my busy schedule will make it difficult to be as productive as I was over the summer.
Now before I go into my reading of Marx, I should emphasize how I approach his work. My reading is centered around developing what Mark Fisher has called ‘eliminative Marxism’. Before I go into detail on the nature of this conjunction, I want to first discuss what exactly is meant here by ‘eliminativism’. Now this position is most commonly associated with the naturalistic doctrine, promoted primarily by Paul Churchland, that the ‘folk psychological’ understanding of being human must be supplanted by a more rigorous and scientifically sound image. It has been, moreover, carried over into Speculative Realism by Ray Brassier, who attempts to leverage this doctrine against the ‘folk metaphysical’ understanding of being as essentially correlated to thought. In this way, Brassier seeks to level the ontological distinction between man and world which has for so long inhibited philosophy.
Yet we must be careful in carrying out such a leveling, which should not resemble the object-oriented operation of ontological flattening (I know that Graham likes to preserve a residual hierarchy of object-types, but he nonetheless is clear that man and other objects must ’stand on the same level’). I admit, I think these operations generally tend to strip away hard won capacities that, while not ontologically essential, are nonetheless thoroughly real and important. I am thinking here of epistemic normativity, and intelligence in particular. OOO’s leveling (the violence of which is most evident in Latour) crudely dissolves the structures of cognition which our ancestors have spent millennia perfecting, and apparently for little more than an unsustainable ontologized sophistry. Unsustainable, because as a theory, it cannot give good reason for its own application, it cannot normatively secure itself, appealing entirely to ‘personal preferences’ and ‘intuitive draw’.
This lack of normative security is a similar problem for Churchland-style eliminative materialism, as Brassier expertly diagnoses. To be brief: because all theories are equivocally structures of neuronal vector activation, Churchland must provide some reason why the theory that ‘all theories are equivocally structures of neuronal vector activation’ is preferable to others. He has to jettison familiar appeals to ‘truth’, which are bogged down in the folk-epistemology he seeks to undermine, and hence attempts to rely on a sort of pragmatism. Yet this entails either resorting to an illegitimate claim of the essentially advantageous yield of this theory in the measure of reproductive fitness (which, even if correct, would nonetheless assume an essentially preferable status of survival…); or otherwise sneaking the ’super-empirical’ virtues of science into a transcendental position through the backdoor. In other words, even if Churchland’s model of cognition (or one similar to it) is objectively correct, this cannot offer the necessary justification for the elimination of ontologically equal though epistemically bankrupt theories to the contrary.
Brassier’s transcendentalization of elimination itself, his insistence of the indifferent meaninglessness of the Real, is designed precisely to bypass this difficulty. After all, Churchland’s position is not that ‘I’m right, and all theories that disagree with me must be disregarded’. Rather, it is simply that all theories must be exposed to the absolutely inexhaustible contingency of the Real, in the sense that no theory, no matter how reliable or or predictively successful, should be safeguarded against undermining evidence. Moreover, this obliges a ruthless experimental ethic that refuses to ever allow a theory to rest comfortably, continuously probing the world for the unaccountable or inexplicable. The ultimate wager is, finally, a Hegelian one: that the limitation of our capacities to understand the world is in fact a positive ontological condition, it is the very incompleteness of the world itself. This thesis is really speculation at its purest, and is one that deserves far more than indulgent assumption…but such attention cannot be afforded now.
At this point we need to step back from the attempted full immersion in the scientific image demanded haphazardly by Churchland. It is foolhardy to assume that the manifest image (prescribed by folk psycho-ontology) will eventually pass away from popular use as science progresses, and that eliminativism ought to therefore focus only on purging it from scientific practice. But it is even more foolhardy to think the active pursuit of such a total renovation of public consciousness is preferable, even if possible. After all, the scientific image today nowhere exists without a complex interdependence with the manifest image, radicalizing the corrosive implications of the folk-concept of ‘truth’ as normative standard, insofar as truth ultimately equals the undermining of every value and meaning as ontologically grounded. Brassier’s entire project in Nihil Unbound culminates in the isolation of the occult umbilical cord which not only ties the scientific image to the manifest image from which it was born, but with which the child is now slowly disemboweling its mother. The monstrosity of this metaphor only tames the unimaginable transcendental horror of that movement which it dissimulates.
The ultimate question which arises, and one left open at the conclusion of Brassier’s book, is how this transcendental horror can be ‘valorized’ as such without the hitherto obligatory domestication and neutering it found at the hands of the manifest image. Yet any good Marxist should begin to recognize an unsettling parallel: isn’t this transcendental horror perfectly embodied in the mechanisms of Capital, by way of which all values and meanings are suspended in the name of expanding the power to suspend all meanings and values in the name of expanding… This sort of cancer, however, is far from the transcendentalized force of nihilation effected by Brassier’s postulated organon of extinction, in that it only suspends significance while simultaneously preserving and absolutizing the force(-of-law) it formerly gentrified. Whereas sovereignty in its traditional form sought to instrumentalize mythic violence to secure itself (this is a crude oversimplification, but should suffice for our purposes here), capital instrumentalizes sovereignty (as transcendental anchor of existential significance, not only in law but in thought as well) in the name of a generalized violence, a generalized state of exception. Brassier’s transcendental eliminativism, on the other hand, points toward a politics in which not only is the concrete meaning secured by sovereignty universally suspended, but in which the very structure of sovereignty or ‘correlation’ (inclusive exclusion of the Real by thought, or mythic violence by law) is dissolved. Next time, I’ll begin to discuss how Marx can help us understand the political form of Brassier’s eliminativism, by way of negotiating the problematic intersection between the two.
Filed under: experimental strategies, neuroscience, politics, utopian science | Tags: Buckminster Fuller, Churchland, eliminativism, ideology, politics, science
The words ‘down’ and ‘up’, according to Fuller, are awkward in that they refer to a planar concept of direction inconsistent with human experience. The words ‘in’ and ‘out’ should be used instead, he argued, because they better describe an object’s relation to a gravitational center, the Earth. “I suggest to audiences that they say, “I’m going ‘outstairs’ and ‘instairs.’” At first that sounds strange to them; They all laugh about it. But if they try saying in and out for a few days in fun, they find themselves beginning to realize that they are indeed going inward and outward in respect to the center of Earth, which is our Spaceship Earth. And for the first time they begin to feel real ‘reality.’”
‘World-around’ is a term coined by Fuller to replace ‘worldwide’. The general belief in a flat Earth died out in Classical antiquity, so using ‘wide’ is an anachronism when referring to the surface of the Earth — a spheroidal surface has area and encloses a volume, but has no width. Fuller held that unthinking use of obsolete scientific ideas detracts from and misleads intuition. Other neologisms collectively invented by the Fuller family, according to Allegra Fuller Snyder, are the terms sunsight and sunclipse, replacing sunrise and sunset to overturn the geocentric bias of most pre-Copernican celestial mechanics. (via Wikipedia)
Before Paul Churchland began calling for the obsoletion of folk psychological concepts like ‘mind’ and ‘belief’, Fuller was engaged in a campaign to rid the world of the dead ideas that so dominated the common conceptual repertoire. Science had long practiced the elimination of obsolete theories, but public use of such theories often carried on for decades, even centuries afterward. Sometimes, the public circulation of newly minted metaphors backed by scientific theories would only begin after that theory was dead to scientific consideration, as when a star’s light reaches the earth millenia after it has gone dark.
Popular consciousness is so littered with dead concepts that it is practically made of them alone. This has far from negligible effects, as is sufficiently demonstrated by the remarkable poverty of understanding on both sides of the political debates surrounding topics like evolutionary theory, climate change, abortion, and so on. The use of scientific concepts in popular discourse has definite and undeniable political and economic consequences.
Churchland believes that it suffices to eliminate dead ideas from scientific discourse, and that their public obsolescence will inevitably follow. Unfortunately, even a cursory survey of the evidence reveals that this is dramatically incorrect. Fuller admirably campaigned for significant renovations to even the most basic, unreflected metaphors structuring not only our langauge, but our very perception of the world and ourselves.
Yet a politicized eliminativism cannot simply seek to replace dead ideas with their contemporary stand-ins. It must cut to the heart of popular discourse itself, which is centered around the desire to know ‘once and for all’ how things are. This is the most fundamental attitude to be eliminated, the most malignant unscientific parasite we host. Science cannot proceed without leaving every last idea totally vulnerable, exposed to the possibility of obsolescence in the face of new evidence. A politics based around this sort of ideational fragility is what is most desperately needed today.
Hong Hao, My Things No. 2, 2001
My friend Abe Adams, my girlfriend Madeline Carlock, and I have started a new weblog that readers might be interested in: Bricoblog. It’s a collection of strange and curious fragments found around the web and the world at large, sometimes with brief reflections. It’s updated several times a day, and there is already a pretty substantial archive considering the brief duration we’ve been doing it.
Here is information from the About page:
Bricoblog is an archive of curiosities, collected for the future reference of its authors and, hopefully, its readers as well. We collect fragments of the web, text, images, and videos – anything that interests us.
The only commonality shared by the items we aggregate is their orientation toward a speculated future use. “The inexistent object of speculation here has a new significance – I become the material out of which something new makes itself, I open myself up to all sorts of strange appropriations and uses. To reduce oneself to the vanishing coherence of an inexplicable constellation of artifacts…”
We generally follow the weblog-philosophy outlined by Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG:
“Most importantly, follow your lines of interest. […] write about things…that excite [you], that make [you] want to keep writing, keep thinking, to go out right away and talk to friends. After all, why not remind [your]self – and others – of all the interesting things that actually exist in the world. Even if those things don’t exist; even if they’re just speculations and plans. Why not concentrate only on them?”
and the philosophy of the collector developed by Walter Benjamin, in his “Unpacking My Library”:
“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?”
