Redeploying the Count

This is an excerpt from the draft of a paper that is a version of a chapter in The Communist Horizon.  I'm attaching the draft here. Download Communist desire Critical remarks are appreciated, but please do not cite the piece. It is provisional, an experiment, and I might change how I formulate it. 

One of the slogans to emerge with particular power out of the September 17, 2011 movement to Occupy Wall Street was “We are the 99%.”  Instead of naming an identity, the number highlights a division and a gap, the gap between the wealth of the top 1% and the rest of us. As it mobilizes the gap between those who have 99% of the wealth and those who comprise 99% of the population, the slogan asserts a collective, a common. It does not unify this common under a substantial identity—race, ethnicity, nationality. Rather it asserts it as a “we” of a divided people, the people divided between expropriators and expropriated. In the setting of an occupied Wall Street, this “we” is a class, one of two opposed and hostile classes, those who have and control wealth, and those who do not. Differently put, the announcement that “We are the 99%” names an appropriation, a wrong. In so doing, it voices as well a collective desire for equity and justice, for a change in the conditions through which one percent seize the bulk of collective wealth for themselves, leaving 99% with the remainder. Additionally, “We are the 99%” erases the multiplicity of individuated, partial, and divided interests that fragment and weaken the people. The count dis-individualizes interest and desire, reformatting both within a common. Against capital’s constant attempts to pulverize and decompose the collective people, the claim of the 99% responds with the force of a belonging that not only cannot be erased but that capital’s own methods of accounting produce: Oh, demographers and statisticians! What have you unleashed?As capital demolishes all previous social ties, the counting on which it depends provides a new figure of belonging! Capital has to measure itself, count its profits, its rate of profit, its share of profit, its capacity to leverage its profit, its confidence or anxiety in its capacity for future profit. Capital counts and analyzes who has what, representing to itself the measures of its success. These very numbers can be, and in the slogan “We are the 99%” they are, put to use. They aren’t resignified—they are claimed as the subjectification of the gap separating the top one percent from the rest of us. With this claim, the gap becomes a vehicle for the expression of communist desire, that is, for a politics that asserts the people as divisive force in the interest of over-turning present society and making a new one anchored in collectivity and the common.

 

Comments

[Alain]

I look forward to reading your essay but I have to ask: clearly the declaration of "We are the 99%" is an opening but what necessarily leads it to a new society "anchored in collectivity and the common." Perhaps you aren't saying that it necessarily follows, but simply that it asserts an opportunity. Thank you for sharing.

[JudyButlerSpeak]

I was left wondering with many of Žižek's analyses, just where one could go next with this highlighting of drive as opposed to desire. What I like about your piece is that it takes a step back and instead of following Žižek and talking about drive as some Schellingian pre-ontological abyss, and then left wondering where a progressive politics can take this, you give us an example of a desire that escapes the logic of consumerism, that is, you return desire as a concept that can be used for progressive theorizing. No longer must we abandon this term 'desire' to advertising codes and unfulfilled consermer want ...
I sense that you are also with this concept of communist desire, moving away from individualist notion of the Act, as an instance of political subjectivization. Do you find Žižek's notion of the Act falls prey to the critique you make of Badiou, in terms of isolating the individual subject as opposed to a more collective transformation?

Is communist subjectivization a collective process? You also say that every marking of the people, a collective 'we,' is an elusive notion, you state:

"The people are elusive. They exceed their symbolic instantiation as well as the images and fantasies that try to fill the gaps. Communist desire, a collective desire to desire communist, occupies and mobilizes this gap, recognizing its openness (that is, the impossibility of the people) and treating it as the movement of communism itself"

Your earlier work on Z's politics, in a chapter outlining a love beyond the law, you cite as an example Rousseau's General Will. I'm just afraid that your notion of a communist "we" that consolidates around a collective desire, may fall prey to the same types of criticisms and questions with regards to how this collective or universal communist "we" negotiates the particular. In other words, I see your work moving straight towards the complex web of issues with regards to the very problematic that somebody like the left-liberal William Connolly works within.

Could you elaborate more on the analyst discourse and its articulation with regards to the "subjetivization of communist desire". A couple of theorists with a background in Lacanian theory, (Ed Pluth and Molly Anne Rothenberg) jump off from the analyst discourse to think a progressive politics, the former follows a very Badiouian line that you would no doubt criticize as individualist, the latter takes off from Žižek's Bartleby but instead emphasizes the subjectivity not of Bartleby, but the lawyer who continually finds himself 'undone' by the (non) action of Bartleby, but never reacts in vengence or violence. However again Rothenberg's take on the analyst discourse for progressive political theory remains too individualist compared to the strong emphasis you place on the collective we. But I'm interested to know how you move from the discourse of analyst to the genesis of the communist collective subject.

Zizek work on the dialectical relation between particular and the universal requires of the subject the part of no-part, but in other of his works he also mentions the necessity for subjective destitution. You mention this also. Do you support the analalogy with Antigone? A communist subject, is reduced to substance-less subjectivity in what sense? Your example is somewhat abstract, but I feel that this is an important component of you entire emphasis on a communist subjectivity. Žižek mentions the Muselmann in the death camps, the sans-papiers etc. You state "The deprivation of substance—common, social, substance—leaves collectivity as its shell, as the form that remains for communist desire." Zizek substanceless subject is based on the Cartesian cogito, but that again is the individual doubting his surroundings and ultimately herself. But how does this move to communist subtanceless subjectivity occur on a collective basis?
Again Jodi, you're goin places that need to be gone to, but few possess your unblinking theoretically astute eye or the deft insight, or the courage to just say it. Thanks for posting this draft paper.

[Jodi Dean]

thanks so much for your comment--I've been out of town and now have to catch up; you've given me some good suggestions and a lot to think about; I hope to have some kind of response in a couple days. again, thanks for your questions and remarks, very much appreciated.