I cite

Zizek on democracy (now)

That’s ideology today. We don’t believe in democracy—nobody. You make fun of it and so on, but somehow we act as if it works. It’s a very strange situation, because there are—some of us old enough still remember them, old days when the public face of power was dignity, belief. And privately you mocked it, you made fun, and so on, no? Now we are, I think, approaching a very strange state, where the public face of power is becoming more and more openly indecent, obscene. Look at Sarkozy in France. Look at Berlusconi in Italy, who is systematically undermining, for over five years now, the minimum of dignity of the state power. I mean, you are again and again surprised how is this possible. You know, after those sex scandals, two weeks ago, his lawyer, Berlusconi’s lawyer, made a public official statement, where he said that the claims that Berlusconi is impotent are lies and that Mr. Berlusconi is ready to prove this in court. Now, how? How—what did he mean? You know, there is a level of obscenity, but this shouldn’t deceive us. We really live in cynical times, not just in this cheap sense they don’t take themselves seriously, but in the sense that—how should I put it?—the ironic self-undermining, making fun of yourself, is in a strange way part of the game. It’s as if the system can function even if it makes fun of itself.

Criticism, oh yes, please, more, more

An installment trying too hard, but not hard enough (cites omitted):

Agamben affiliates whatever being with the capitalist commodification of the human body and the technologization of its image in the spectacle. The photographic images proliferating out of advertising and pornography are “neither generic nor individual, neither an image of the divinity nor an animal form.” In them, the body “now became something truly whatever.” The “whatever” Agamben invokes here suggests a new approach to Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle, one that takes back from the spectacle the positive properties of being in language and being in common that it expropriates.  For Agamben, whatever being thus suggests a mode of being in the coming community. A remnant produced in capitalist spectacle, whatever being is harbinger of a better future, one wherein the division held together in the unity of the spectacle is ultimately overcome. Because he wants to wrest transformations of human nature from their entrapment in the spectacle, Agamben suggest the “geometrical splendor” of the legs of a long line of dancing girls.

Another way to think about the idea of “neither generic nor individual” is to link it to the normalizing, aggregating aspect of disciplinary power. Modern disciplinary institutions, be they home, school, factory, or state, produced individuals as types, as occupants of social roles or positions. Recall photographs of Levittown, of soldiers in training, of graduates in their caps and gowns. The self-governing, reflective subject idealized as the outcome of the disciplines may have understood himself to be an individual, but more than that, he was an instance of a form.

Agamben associates the planetary petty bourgeoisie a frustration with and impropriety toward identities rooted in physical particularities or differences in language, tradition, or culture. He concedes that fascism and Nazism had already recognized seen in the petty bourgeoisie the “decline of the old social subject.” So he jumps quickly over their nationalism as a false popular identity to assert the new planetary refusal of identity. With this jump, however, he misses the mass as a modern collective force that is also neither generic nor individual. In Baudrillard’s formulation, “The mass is without attribute, predicate, quality, or reference.” Agamben’s whatever beings thus appear as the components of the mass or as the mass now rendered in terms of the singularities that compromise it. Routing around the mass enables Agamben to evade the way that what he presents as being in the coming community inverts the political imaginary of radicals from the sixties and seventies: they feared erasure, that is, being commodities, being indistinguishable, being one among many. They rejected the terms of mass society and mass media, the forced collectivizing of their self-perception into the envelope of “us.” Agamben accepts the mass without its collective form, taking the joy of dissolution into a whole as the singularity of belonging.

Displacing or standing in for the mass, the petty bourgeoisie present a new opportunity, an opportunity for a form of belonging unhindered by the division and specificity of “belonging to.” Agamben writes:

Because if instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, human were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and an individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity—if humans could, that is, not be-thus in this or that particular biography,  but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication with the incommunicable.

We have been produced as subjects unlikely to coalesce, subjects resistant to solidarity and suspicious of collectivity. Central to this production has been the cultivation and feeding of a sense of unique and special individuality. Every sperm is a sacred: so began the story of our unique cellular lives. Or, every potential genetic combination carries with it the remarkable potentiality we locate in our individuated selves. Each voice must be heard (but they don't combine into a chorus). Each vote must be counted (but they add up to less than a movement).
Each person must be visible (but then we don't see a group). Personalized “participatory” media is a problem not only because of its personalization of participation.  More than that is its injunction that we participate ever more in personalization: make your own avatar, video, profile, blog, mobster, video, app. Participation becomes indistinguishable from personalization, the continued cultivation of one's person. Leave your mark.

What would happen if we just stopped? Agamben’s evocation of singularity and belonging detached from a compulsion to cultivate an individual identity or identity with a specific group opens up the potential for another practice or form of belonging, one unlimited by the divisions and restrictions of presuppositions of being this or that. He suggests, moreover, that the beings who would so belong are not subjects in the sense that European philosophy or psychoanalysis might theorize. If some sort of identity served as a locus of ethical personality, and the search for this identity has been configured as an important ethical task (perhaps, as some philosophers would have it, the task of each human life), then whatever beings would emerge as those who are not subject to such tasks. Unburdened by the obligations of being this or that, of being bound by choices or words or expectations of meaning, whatever beings could flow into and through community without presuppositions.

Agamben asks what the politics of whatever singularity could be, what sort of politics could accompany “a being whose community is mediated not by any condition of belonging (being red, being Italian, being Communist) . . .but by belonging itself.” Because the course of his exposition of whatever being takes him through Saint Thomas Aquinas and limbo as the habitat of the souls of unbaptized children, the political question seems particularly vexing.  Those in limbo lack God, but they don’t suffer from this lack; they know nothing of it:  “Neither blessed like the elected, nor hopeless like the damned, they are infused with a joy with no outlet.” With  limbo long synonymous with a certain stuckness, an in between condition of persistence that is neither here nor there, with an inability to go forward or back, it is difficult to register a politics that we might admire or seek. Souls in limbo belong in neither heaven nor hell; this condition of belonging to neither is limbo. It is also Agamben’s model for a politics of absolute enmity toward the State.

Agamben writes that “a being radically devoid of any representable identity would be absolutely irrelevant to the State.” And so the State or, better, states, would continue, unbothered and unlimited by the demands of people. They could attack and imprison, exploit and ignore—the future unfolding in and through militarized predatory robot drones. For Agamben, however, rather than easing the way for unchecked state power, whatever being is the “principal enemy of the State.” The State, he tells us, “cannot tolerate in any way . . . that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging.” Yet the State has from time to time tolerated and used the mass, a form of co-belonging without representable condition. The mass can threaten or support it, subvert or sustain it. In Baudrillard’s terms, the mass is neither a group-subject nor an object. It does not become a conscious revolutionary force but neither does it submit to attempts to make it speak. Surveys and statics may simulate it, but the mass remains ungraspable, particularly as these very surveys are implicated in the reflexive constitution of the mass they survey. The absence of the mass, Baudrillard says, “is nevertheless intolerable.” Thus, it drives the repetitive processes of polling and testing. The implications of the mass, then, are not only that the state can and has tolerated forms of co-belonging that do not affirm an identity, but that the absence of an identity can itself generate processes of surveillance and incitement-to-speech useful for producing and maintaining power.  

Baudrillard claims that the masses “accept everything and redirect everything en bloc into the spectacular, without requiring any other code, without requiring any meaning, ultimately without resistance, but making everything slide into an indeterminate sphere which is not even that of non-sense, but that of overall manipulation/fascination.” This view of unification without meaning aligns with Debord’s account of the spectacle as an unreal unity masking class division. Agamben’s account of the coming community as the end of the era of the spectacle, while explicitly engaging Debord, can also be read as an implicit engagement with Baudrillard.  He takes from each critique of the spectacle “a positive possibility that can be used against it.” Agamben conceives the spectacle as language or communicativity. It is a form for the expropriation of linguistic being, a form that alienates people from language. Yet, this very expropriation and alienation opens up a new experience of language and linguistic being: “not this or that content of language, but language itself, not this or that true proposition, but the very fact that one speaks.” Baudrillard’s view of the spectacular as without code and meaning becomes the positive experience of language as such. The division between sense and non-sense is overcome within the real commonality of the taking place of language.

Debord writes, “Whatever lays claim to permanence in the spectacle is founded on change, and must change as the foundation changes.” Agamben’s whatever beings are the foundation of the spectacle. They shift and mutate, are reformatted and reconfigured. They are the thus of change, the thrust of change, change as the capillary, plastic movement of drive.

Drive and biopolitics

Download Drive and biopolitics Here is the first draft of my efforts to think about drive and biopolitics. The paper synthesizes a number of the posts from the last several months. An excerpt:

Zizek notes that much has been written about the subject of desire and that now there needs to be attention to the mysterious subjectivity brought about by the circular movement of drive. Viewed in terms of changes in governmental reason since the late eighteenth century, changes wherein the economy arises as a site of truth external to and ungovernable by sovereign power, the political subject of drive appears as a passive subject, not one who can rule and be ruled in turn but one who is governed and managed and who through his very economic activity makes himself governable. The subject of drive is stuck in drive’s circuits and repetitions.

 

As an inhabitant of civil society, he is part of a governed population. To this extent, we can say that population is the space of overlap between government and economy, the site produced as state power confronts the limit of economic truth. As part of the population, the subject is neither the rational homo economicus nor the juridical subject. Agamben refers to such a subject as bare life and understood as the impossible/Real part of the population, the term bare life becomes useful.  

 

Agamben says that “the people necessarily contains the fundamental biopolitical fracture within itself”. He’s right, but he misidentifies the fracture. Agamben describes the division as between the people as a whole and the people as the excluded other, the poor and the exploited. The fracture is better understood as between the people as subjects of desire and the people as subjects of drive, that is, between the people and the population. Rather than locating the political problem in exclusion, the focus on drive explains the fundamental political problem as the limiting of the people’s power through the establishment of a domain of truth they cannot navigate, they cannot affect, they cannot steer as the corresponding endeavor to governmentalize them as parts of the population. Agamben writes:

 

It is as if what we call ‘people’ were in reality not a unitary subject but a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the set of the People as a whole political body, and, on the other, the subset of the people as a fragmentary multiplicity of needed and excluded bodies . . .

 

The oscillation he describes is better understood as the circuit of drive, the circuit in which the people get stuck in a repetitive loop which they occupy as the population. No active subject, juridical or economic, persists as a part of the population. This is a set of the governmentalized.

 

But one should be wary of the risks involved in taking on Agamben’s argument in its entirety, risks that block from view the historicity of biopolitics. Foucault’s account makes clear the way biopolitics is the byproduct of a constellation of strategies and tactics circulating around a hole in political reason.  Blocked from knowledge of the economy, sovereign power swerves in another direction, extending into a variety of other more domains and turning the people, who were in the process of becoming sovereign throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, into the population.  

 

Agamben: the biopolitical terrain

This post is in connection with an undergraduate course on politics. The course is related to some work I'm trying to do in preparation for a conference on biopolitics. As I've mention before, I hadn't thought much about biopolitics prior to the conference invitation. So I'm having to reread a lot of material with that theme in mind. Returning to Homo Sacer I am yet again flummoxed by how difficult the text is, something I seem to forget admidst the current multiplicity of gestures of bare life and the inclusion of the exclusion. Nonetheless, in this post I will soldier on, attempting to set out a general outline and some questions.

1.    In the introduction, Agamben positions his inquiry in relation to Foucault and Arendt. So although he begins with Aristotle's distinction between zoe and bios, he reminds us that Foucault references Aristotle in the last chapter of The History of Sexuality: "modern man is an animal whose politics calls his exitence as a living being into question." He notes that Foucault's account of the emergence of the biological life of the population as problem for sovereign power was preceded by Arendt's discussion in The Human Condition where she looks at the way 'biological life as such' comes to occupy the center of the political scene of modernity.'  What Agamben will do is try reckon with the entry of life (zoe, species life) into politics that Foucault and Arendt flag but fail to develop:

the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis--the politicization of bare life as such--constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought.

The problem of contemporary politics, then, stems from our failure to come to grips with biopolitics. More specifically, we fail to deal with the legacy of Nazism so long as don't grapple with biopolitics--such problems:

will be solved only on the terrain--biopolitics--on which they were formed. Only within a biopolitical horizon will it be possible to decise whether the categories whose opposition founded modern politics (right/left, private/public, absolutism/democracy) will have to be abandoned.

Modern politics has been governed by a 'secret link' between bare life and politics. Agamben endeavors to reveal what has been concealed and in so doing 'bring the political out of its concealment.'

What can we notice here?

a. Agamben misrepresents Arendt's account: she is not concerned with the politicization of life but with the loss or effacement of politics.

b.  Agamben's misrepresentation of Arendt is repeated in his account of the oppositional categories of modernity: he omits the rise of society, the third term (private/social/public or family/civil society state) already introduced into 19th century thought. Foucault's lectures in the Birth of Biopolitics focus on the rise of civil society understood in terms of little entrepeneurs concerned with their human capital. Agamben, though, rejects the Foucauldian emphasis on the rise of the population as an operative locus of power, asserting insted that the change that matters is 'the process whereby the exception everywhere becomes the rule and there is an irreducible indistinction between inclusion and exclusion. So instead of a third sphere, he finds something closer to chaos (or closer to Arendt's engulfing blob of the social as process run amok).

c.    The omission of society may well lead Agamben to miss the terrain of biopolitics altogether insofar as it arises not within the juridical field but alongside it. Eliminating society as the terrain of biopolitics, Agamben is forced to adopt the language of arcana and mystery. He searches for the purity of an originary relation, ignoring the multiplicity of tactics, processes, and relations right before his eyes (he thereby produces himself as the unveiler of mysteries, the holder of the secret truth to power).

d.    The link, then, between bare life and politics may thus turn out to be not so secret after all. It's right in front of us, before our very eyes, in the relations and engagements, the movements of lives and objects, that constitute society as a third domain (a system of wants and needs part of the ethical life of the state but not reducible to sovereign law).

2.     To be sure, Agamben is well aware of Foucault's endeavor to move away from juridical models of power, to turn away from an approach to power strictly in terms of sovereignty and the state. Yet he thinks that Foucault fails adequately to connect the 'techniques of individualization and totalizing procedures,' that he doesn't explain the convergence between subjective technologies and political techniques. As I read it, this is a version of a criticism Lacanians have long had of Foucault, namely, his failure to account for the subjectification of relations of power as well as for his failure to account for how the different techniques of power are elements in or aspects of a set of discourses of power that can be understood as a set (one of Zizek's most important contributions is his theory of ideology as a solution to this problem).

One would expect, then, some version of a theory of subjectivity. But this is not the path Agamben takes. Instead, he inquires into:

this hidden point of intersection between the jurdico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power.

Thus, he rejects Foucault's separation between the system of alliance and the deployment of sexuality, between the right of death and the power over life. Rather, he proposes

that the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original--if concealed--nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of the biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. ...the modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life.

So not only is the only distinction between the modern and the ancient state one of amplitude, of intensification that finally enables one (or One, the mystic master Agamben) to grasp the secret of power, but there is but one State, one form of power and of politics. (We should ask what were the conditions of reception that enabled a generation of academics trained in the critique of essentialism to latch onto Agamben as the remedy to theory's problems).

3.     What, then, is the secret of Western politics: the structure of the exception. Western politics relies on a mechanism of including by means of excluding. More specifically, the political is constituted via the exclusion of bare life. Bare life is the founding exclusion. Emphasizing Aristotle's account of man as a living animal with the capacity for political existence, Agamben suggests a view of politics as if it were

the place in which life had to transform itself into good life and in which what had to be politicized were always already bare life. 

I use the word 'suggests' deliberately: Agamben offers this view of politics subjunctively, 'almost as if.'  Why? what is involved in this hesitation?

It's particularly odd in that the paragraphs that follow are much bolder:

politics therefore appears as the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshhold on which the relation between the living being the logos is realized.

and

The fundamental categorial pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zoe/bios, exclusion/inclusion. There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion.

4.    Agamben uses the archaic Roman figure of homo sacer (one who can be killed but not sacrificed and who is thus included by means of an exclusion--can be killed) as the figure for bare life. Homo sacer is the key to illuminating the condition whereby the exception everywhere becomes the rule.

For Agamben, the change in the status of the exception corresponds to modern democracy: man as a living being is subject and object of political power; bare life, then, is a locus for the organization of State power as well as emancipation from it (it functions, in other words, as a constitutive exclusion; one way to look at the argumentation that follows in the first section is that Agamben is basically reinventing the Lacanian formulae of sexuation, a shift from the logic of the constitutive exception to the logic of the non-All). At any rate, one of the benefits of thinking through the figure of homo sacer is that it can enable us to grasp the fundamental aporia of democracy: its devotion to life that ends up exterminating it (and Foucault would think that Agamben's blurring of Nazism and democracy is indicative of state phobia).

5.    The end result will be a plea for a new politics, one that can escape the form of the exception [actually, this should be a question: is Agamben's claim that we need a politics not based on the inclusion of bare life via its exclusion or is he arguing for a politics not based in the form of exception more generally; I think his claim is the latter, broader one]. What makes this conceivable is that the we are now in conditions of emergency where the exception has become the rule, where it is breaking down completely such that the 'threshold of the political order itself' is being called into question [yet, noticeably, not by the economy, which is nowhere to be found, which itself seems to be included only as a kind of constitutive exclusion, the constitutive exclusion of the material basis for the reproduction of bare life].

Schmitt and the concept of the political (1): Foucault on the Nazi State

In a discussion of Arendt's notion of natality, Miguel Vatter links the notion with her attempt to envision a politics counter to totalitarianism. For Arendt, he argues, totalitarianism involves the subordination of the individual to the species. In contrast, Arendt's politics is a politics of life. Both, then, are part of the discursive matrix of biopolitics. He argues:

Arendt's answer to the phenomenon of the systematic production of 'bare life' in totalitarian regimes consists in basing a politics on the phenomenon of natality. Natality is biopolitical concept that counters the 'thanatopolitical' concept of bare life, a response to the politics of death implicit in modern biopolitics and realized, for the first time but certainly not for the last, in the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.

I am going to leave to the side Vatter's reduction of Foucauldian biopolitics to 'totalitarianism' (as opposed to liberalism), his reduction of totalitarianism to Nazism, both of which enable him unproblematically to assert a kind of theoretical consistency between Foucault and Agamben for the purpose of attributing to Arendt a positive account of bare life. Instead, I want to use the turn to Nazism and the camps as an opportunity to consider whether biopolitics is implicit in Schmitt's concept of the political or whether his account is opposed or antagonistic to biopolitics. In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault presents German ordoliberalism emerging in opposition to Nazism. For them, Nazism proved that the defects previously attributed to the market were in fact defects of the state. So, they sought to subject the state to the supervision of the market. This is the birthplace of biopolitics, neoliberalism and the crises of liberalism, not Nazi eugenics. Differently put, the best exemplar of biopolitics is not the camps but neoliberal governmentality with its homo economicus dwelling in civil society.

1.    Before moving to Schmitt, though, I should attend to Foucault's last lecture in "Society Must Be Defended" (March 17, 1976). He discusses here biopolitics as a new technology of power emerging in the second half of the eighteenth century. Unlike the individualizing disciplines, these processes take as their object the population; they apply to 'man as living being' or 'man as species.' This technology of power has at least three primary domains.

a.    Birth and death, reproduction and longevity. Rather than epidemics as the primary problem, a more complex and permanent matter of concern became the illnesses endemic in a population.

b.    Public hygiene, safety, and insurance; biopolitics intervenes in a field of accidents that can never be completely eradicated.

c.    Environment and its effects on its human inhabitants.

In all these areas, biopolitics emerges as a continuous, scientific power to make live. It attempts to 'make live' via a kind of regularization (not discipline, not related to individuals), an effort toward achieving equilibrium.

2.    So biopolitics is a power that takes possession of life (or taken life under its care or taken control of life, Foucault uses all three expressions). And this power thus create a set of political problems or problems of sovereignty.

a.   Atomic power: the power to make and use the atomic bomb is a deployment of the sovereign power to kill; but, if the sovereign uses this power, it ends up destroying or suppressing itself as a biopower to guarantee life; or, there is no sovereign right in excess of biopower but biopower itself exceeds sovereignty (biopower can create uncontrollable monsters and is thus beyond human sovereignty).

b.   racism: insofar as sovereignty understood biopolitically ends up in a paradox of death--how can a power based on making life kill or demand death--racism becomes inscribed in the modern state as break in the domain of life under power's control. Racism creates holes or gaps in the population or biological continuum. It  "makes the relationship of war . . . function in a way that is completely new and that is quite compatible with the exercise of biopower." The death of the inferior race creates healthier, purer conditions. A biological relationship replaces a military or political relationship. Foucault writes:

And the reason this mechanism can come into play is that the enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries in the political sense of the term; they are threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the population. In the biopower system, in other words, killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race.

Racism is bound up with technologies that let biopower work, with a State that uses race to justify its sovereign power of making life and letting live in that death and killing can make the race stronger; it's not just the 'bad' race that is eliminated; the 'good' one gets stronger.

It's not a surprise, then, that Foucault says that the most murderous States (the capitalization is in the text) are the most racist. And here he turns to the Nazism where ''murderous power and sovereign power were unleashed throughout the entire social body." Only the exposure of the entire population to death would achieve the proper regeneration of the race. Nazi society was thus a society of generalized biopower.

At the same time, it was a society where the sovereign right to kill is also generalized. The Nazi state involves the coincidence of two mechanisms: the classic sovereign right of life and death and the new mechanism of biopower. Foucault writes:

The Nazi State makes the field of the life it manages, protects, guarantees, and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people but also its own people. There was, in Nazism, a coincidence between a generalized biopower and a dictatorship that was at once absolute and retransmitted throughout the entire social body by this fantastic extension of the right to kill and of exposure to death.

At this point, Foucault suggests that the mechanisms of biopower in combination with the sovereign right to kill our present in the workings of all States. He then qualifies it with, well, maybe not all capitalist States and proceeds to a set of general criticisms of socialist states as themselves racist.

3.   It's important to note where Foucault's later (1979) lectures diverge from the account here.

a.    His critique of "state-phobia" rejects the impulse to see all states as essentially the same as well as the impulse to attribute to the state a 'becoming fascist;'

b.   His discussion of biopolitics does not develop along the lines of racism, ethnocentricism, or nation figured in terms of blood. On the contrary and it stark contrast, it focuses on political economy and liberalism.

c.   The problem of biopolitics is not a matter primarily of the defects of the State but of a governmentality that comes in to limit the state (in the context of crises of liberalism).

d.   The Nazi State, then, appears exceptional insofar as it is a coincidence of biopolitics and an earlier model of sovereignty. It's not itself the exemplar of biopolitics per se. Taking control of and managing life is key to a neoliberal approach to governance.

Hooked on a feeling

Although I remain confused and mystified by The Community Community and Means without Ends, one of my favorite ideas from these books is the spectacle's return to us of our linguistic nature in an inverted fashion.

The spectacle contains and captures the possibility of a common good. We could even say its production of a common is its good or that the power of spectacle is its production of the common as a feeling, necessarily shared. Its form is inseparable from its affect. A spectacle is affective form and this is its common good.

Yet this common good is so fungible, so commodifiable, that we feel its force most often as lost. Zizek would emphasize stolen. We might also call this feeling of lost common good a sense of corruption or distorted. The common, the we, appears or is manifest only through distortions, inversions, and corruptions, via theft, commodification, and capture. We feel the common, our commonality or a commonness, by feeling also and at the same time its corruption or capture. Conceptually it's possible to separate the common good from the spectacle that inverts and returns it to us, but only conceptually, not actually.

Actually we encounter our hope for change channeled and manipulated into mainstream political parties and candidates, into commodities and ads and packaged experiences that promise to be different, this time, to be spectacular. We encounter or experience our own feeling pushed and distorted into too simple packages of for and against, optimist and pessimist. Where one argues that the pessimists are cynics demeaning one's authentic political longing, another views the optimists as kool-aid drinking compromisers. In either case, the common good as intensity of being and belonging together impresses itself upon us with and as the intensity of our sense that another is trying to take or distort, capture or coopt it.

If optimism is felt as a threat, then, this is not primarily a fear of feeling or an inability to risk hoping again after being disappointed. Yes, it is felt as a threat when one feels pressured to like-feeling, to identifying with the group spirit or identifying group spirit as the common good: having grown up Southern Baptist, I know this feeling well, this pressure to feel the Holy Spirit, to feel Jesus in the room. Did others feel It, Him? Or is what they felt the pressure to feel? And did they name this pressure God, the big Other? (My son says his friends are incredulous that he is an atheist, "Dude, but God is like awesome!"). In this example, it isn't the specificity of optimism that's the problem. It's the compulsion to feel like everyone else, on their time. If there is a sense of threat, and there may not be, this sense comes first and it itself part of the inverted return of common good. This sense is the carrier, the impulse we invest with our hopes and fears, our optimism and pessimism, our faith in the future or defense of lost causes.

Rather than optimism as what is at risk, hope as a desire too fragile to sustain, optimism and pessimism are two aspects of the same distorted common feeling, what the inverted spectacle returns to us. The spectacle may be political (it always has political effects), commercial, religious, sexual, even natural (understood as unavoidably mediated). Spectacle is a form for imagining, projecting, experiencing, believing in the movement of others, we are moved because they are. 

An object that speaks

In one of the last chapters of Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Zizek takes up the four discourses. He writes:

the analyst stands for the paradox of the desubjectivized subject, of the subject who fully assumes what Lacan calls 'subjective destitution,' that is, who breaks out of the vicious cycle of the intersubjective dialectic of desire, and turns into an acephalous being of pure drive.

For Zizek, correlative to the discourse of the analyst is radical-revolutionary emancipatory politics. What occupies the position of agent, a, is the part of no part of the situation.

But what about a different reading of the formula of the analyst's discourse? What if we think of the social link of the discourse of the analyst as set within a declining symbolic order, an order which is barely ordered, where meaning slips and slides, getting momentarily stuck on nuggets of enjoyment?

If the setting is the decline of symbolic efficiency, then at least two things follow. First, the subject is desubjectivized or destitute; that is, it is not structured in terms of symbolic identification. Second, we have entered the domain of drive, rather than desire (a point Zizek makes at the end of The Ticklish Subject when he asks about the possibility of hystericizing the subject).

In this setting, the formula might be read as a formula for whatever being. The object addresses a subject. It sends a message, it attempts to connect. Knowledge is in the position of truth (S2 under the bar). But this knowledge is anything whatever, any sort of content or knowledge can support the agent/speaking object. The master is below the bar, under the subject, in the position of production or remainder. Authority is remaindered, present but inoperative, unable to establish meaning.

In the setting of the decline of symbolic efficiency, the part of no part is not radical; it doesn't establish a break with the situation because there is not a situation that can be set or established as such. There is also no space for fantasy (the formula for fantasy does not appear). Whatever being doesn't allow for fantasy, is premised on its foreclosure (which follows as well from the movement from desire to drive).

Whatever Blogging

In Love and Other Technologies Dominic Pettman rejects cultural studies' tendencies to focus on the self, particularly self-reflexivity. He writes:

Rather, we should begin with reflexivity, itself creating (and constantly reinventing) the self from external zones of indeterminacy.

I think he is right. He's made me rethink the blogging project I'm working on with GL. I had over-emphasized the self-reflexivity in blogging. But this is nonsense. There is exteriorization of affect, image, opinion, intensity, point of view, but not identity per se. That presumes not only an account of the typist but it a narrow notion of what is being typed. Cooking blogs, gadget blogs, cat blogs, etc--why presume they are all vehicles for the expression of an identity, of a self, rather than simply platforms for expression. The content, then, is not what's crucial--and this is how it should be given that there are over 70 million blogs.

Pettman quotes Agamben:

whatever being is not an essence that determines its existence but finds its essence in its own being thus.

There is not an inner identity or longing for identity (on the part of the blogger) that determines blogging content or practice. It's rather the being thus. Connecting for its own sake, throwing something out there and seeing if it sticks--on anyone.

Wow

In today's NYT book review, Katie Roiphe reviews David Rieff's memoir of his mother's death. His mother was Susan Sontag.  Here is a passage from the review:

The reaction of this strong, singular woman to her illness, as Rieff reports them, are oddly generic. In a car returning from receiving the terrible diagnosis, he writes, she looks out the window and "'Wow' she said, 'Wow.'" It tells us something important, surely, that one of the most articulate women of the last century should say, in the face of her cancer, "Wow."

When I started this post, I didn't have in mind that my mother died of cancer 13 years ago today, although I did think about that earlier this morning. Nor did I have in mind something like the unspeakability of death or illness or cancer because none of these are unspeakable, much is written and said about them all. Roiphe seems to take the "wow" as a sign of death as a leveler, greeting great and common alike. In death, Sontag has to confront her own ordinariness. But "wow" need not be an indicator of the ordinary. Ordinary responses could include tears, silence, prayer, denial, clinical dispassion, poetry, and planning. None surprises in the face of cancer. The cancer, then, doesn't strike me as what is "surely" important here. Rather, it is the link between "wow" and articulate. In the present, the most articulate say "wow."

Me, me, me

Read Love and Other Technologies. My ignorance of Deleuze limits my ability to speak or write well about the argument. I keep translating it into Zizekian, which surely is a disservice. As I've mentioned, Pettman's engagement with Agamben's whatever being is fascinating, and well worth engaging.

Whatever being is complex. It seems to be characterized by conflicting properties. On one hand, it refers to "an uncoded existence" that "precedes the modern circumscriptions of citizenship, family, religion, ethnicity" (I am unsure about 'precedes' here--is the idea one of historical time?). On the other, it is also the result of the encoding of existence (discipline, production). Whatever being thus seems to be prior to interpellation and a result or effect of interpellation (what exceeds it). These descriptions make me think of whatever being as like objet a now raised to the point of a subject. Instead of a subject of lack, there is a subject of something or other, whatever. It's like everyone else (all other subjects), but also different, because the everyone else that it is like are each singularly repetitions of difference; everyone else is substitutable and unique.

I think of numbered 'collectibles' or webkinz toys that have codes on them that kids use to play games in the webkinz environment. It could also be a url or some kind of other designator. Singular, but interchangeable. Unique and substitutable. Pettman writes:

As islands within the data stream, we feel our sense of individuality threatened by the global warming of 'hot media', such as the internet and other, less tangible networks, But this is no bad thing, as it leads to a recognition of whateverbeing ...

Zizek describes the fragility of egos encountered the decline of symbolic efficiency. The very individuality celebrated today (an academic quoted in the NYT recently said that people today "believe the only thing they have in common is that they are all so unique they have nothing in common"), precisely because it is so celebrated, so necessary, so enjoined, is easily threatened. But is it threatened by the internet or does the internet actually offer sites for living out fantasies of individuality?

Pettman says that whatever being ermerges out of the generic spaces of diluted global capitalism:

Just as people are born in America every day with no apparent purpose than to buy and wear Gap clothing, the citizens of the coming community emerge from the sheer success of capitalism, growing like poisonous mushrooms within the cracks of Empire.

I don't know what it make of the first clause, people born no apparent purpose than to buy and wear Gap clothing. I wonder if the contrast is between those born in American and those born elsewhere who might be the ones making Gap clothing. But if this is the case, then we have left the terrain of whatever being to consider modern circumscriptions of citizenship.

As soon we think about buying and wearing, we also have to think of making, producing, and here I think not of the 'sheer success' of capitalism but of its immense and unbearable failures, of failures that can never be redressed. It could be that success and failure here are two sides of the same coin, but I worry that they are not because an emphasis on success does not lead to an emphasis on destroying and overthrowing, or even on blocking and subverting. It suggests instead continuing, pushing through, extending, expanding, multiplying, amplifying, intensifying--which capitalism unlimited, unfettered, does in its own destructive fashion.

People born without apparent purpose: all of us, generally. But, in some cases, not all--there are some born into aristocracies, some born to carry on a family name, some born to carry the family's wood and water. These apparent purposes repeat the circumscriptions of alliances of kinship and blood that persisted in and some might say despite modernity. Or could it be that there was a purpose and it was apparent, but under modernity there have been changes in what could appear? and that in the coming community, these purposes won't be able to appear at all? And if that is the case, then do we let capitalism keep going on, doing its thing as we are distracted by the internet and its offers of sites for individuality? Do we proceed without purposes? Or might there be times for purposes? Places where we struggle around and through them, fighting to retain the knowledge that they are also sites of fantastic investment and enjoyment?

Can we do this with whatever beings? Capitalism may well produce these whatever beings. But politics can't continue with them. And I expect that those who work to retain power, to protect their fortunes, to enhance their power know this.