I cite

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.

Whatever being

... the citizens of the coming community emerge from the sheer success of capitalism, growing like poisonous mushrooms within the cracks of Empire.

The line is from Dominic Pettman, Love and Other Technologies. In the book, Pettman works over Agamben's notion of whatever being as a way of conceptualizing the 'emerging postsovereign subject' (already I have questions: was the subject ever sovereign? isn't it rather the case that the critiques of Kant as well as Lacan's rethinking of the cogito as a gap, not to mention numerous feminist and postcolonialist engagements with the notion of the subject, demonstrate that it was never what some claimed it to be? and if it was never all that rational, singular, and autonomous to begin with, what exactly does 'post' mean?).

Pettman reminds us that whatever being is the mode of 'coming community' and the coming community is based on an 'inessential commonality.' His elaboration of the point is valuable:

this entails a fundamental revision of what it means to be a person: to declare that uncoded existence precedes the modern circumscriptions of citizenship, family, religion, ethnicity, and other blood-soaked calls to an essential identity.

Whatever beings don't consist in anything in particular, anything essential. Their associations don't presuppose bases in anything typically associated with essential human being. The coming community, then, is not an association of citizens. Nor is it a tribe or religion. I would guess that common history is also out as a basis, insofar as the problem is with the need to establish a basis for commonality. So, what then, is whatever being? Can we glimpse it? Will we know it when we see it? Or, if we use the notion as a way of thinking about forms of being and becoming in the present, might it help us imagine the present and possible futures differently?

As I mentioned in a previous post, Pettman considers the 'inherent interchangeability' at the heart of the lover's discourse: one can say (and generally does say) 'you are the only for me' to more than one person. At the same time, the emphasis on the singularity and irreplaceability of the other is not false. It is also a component of love, the love of this one in particularity. It could be anyone, but it's you. For Pettman, the tension between interchangeability and irreplaceability provides a glimpse into whatever being. Our beloved may be one of a series, and may resonate for us with others we have loved; these others may even be why we love the new one, the one who takes their place and in so doing, in the capacity to do so, is irreplaceable. (To this extent, I wonder if objet a, a purely formal concept with no content, could be helpful for thinking about whatever being--and, I think Pettman is wrong to say that in the Lacanian system love is only the product of a socio-semiotic machine wherein the trivial differences don't matter; these trivial differences are but another name for objet a, those elements that in being only themselves become something else entirely).

Love gives us insight into whatever being insofar as the others are beloved is one of enable our beloved to be the one: we see him in a crowd, he speaks at a party, his book is on our shelf. (Pettman uses the example of backup dancers making the 'star' shine all the brighter.)

Pettman also considers the dark side of whatever being, whatever being

in its most bare and abject form, completely tangled up in the sticky webs of the spectacular market injunction.

People's characteristics are interchangeable; no one recognizes another. Interactions are contingent. And here is a crucial point: is it the interchangeability that leads to violence, to solipsism and a lack of care or regard for any other? Or is it the sense that some are worth regard, the installation of a gaze, essence, abstraction that separates people and lets us hate some, that lets some become victims of violence? Pettman takes the latter view.

Pettman suggests that whatever being is prior to interpellation (following this line, as interpellative structures break down, whatever being would emerge more clearly). Perhaps whatever beings are those incapable of work (Hardt and Negri). They would seem incapable of desire in that they lack nothing (what do you want for dinner? I don't care. Whatever) and perhaps incapable of anything at all, for what drives them?

I wondered if we glimpsed whatever being in America's Next Top Model. At first, the girls seemed indistinguishable. The show worked to individuate them via ethnicity, family, locational background. It also worked to individuate them visually with makeovers that made their faces stand out more specifically. In a way, the show is a disciplinary machine, trying to take whatever beings and make them into specific identities with personalities, feelings, looks, types (Tyra and the other judges were the big Others). And even as the winner would be the one who seemed best able to do the job, to be professional (work when sick, take direction, negotiate foreign cities) and element of whatever being remained: the winner stood out as one among others; it could have been anyone, but it was her. And, will we recognize her again when we see her in magazines or on commercials or on the runway? Or will she blend back in to any model whatsoever?

My point here is the relation between whatever being and discipline. Pettman writes as if (if I've understood him) whatever being is fundamentally different from the disciplined identities of modernity which were primarily individuating disciplines, disciplines that produced the sense of autonomous identities based on essential characteristics. But, disciplines were also normalizing and aggregating, producing indistinguishable types, producing plurals--workers, students, families--producing any person whatsoever. We might think here of photographs of spectators and crowds, millions at a rally or march, Times Square on New Years eve. We might also think of blocks of people in Chinese pageants, armies marching through Red Square, streets of identical suburban houses.

Pettman refers to Agamben's chapter "Dim Stockings" to think about these questions. His point is that, yes, there has been a commodification of the human body, but there is more to it: first, interchangeability extends beyond specific massifications (disciplines?) and the individual cannot be reduced to the mass. There is still the person as such. Pettman thinks about this via Deleuze's discussion of essence--which I will consider in a subsequent post.

Muselmann

In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben writes:

The witness usually testifies in the name of justice and truth and as such his or her speech draws consistency and fullness. Yet here the value of testimony lies essentially in what it lacks; at its center it contains something that cannot be borne witness to and that discharge the survivors of authority. The 'true' witnesses, the 'complete witnesses,' are those who did not bear witness and could not bear witness. They are those who 'touched bottom': the Muslims, the drowned. The survivors speak in their stead, by proxy, as pseudo-witnesses; they bear witness to a missing testimony.

The power of testimony is more than the content of the experience that constitutes its content. Indeed, the experience requires a separate name. It has to be spoken in the name of something else. The reference to a name might be understood as a reference to the symbolic as the order of names. In testimony, experience is spoken in the name of something else. It stands for something beyond itself and is understood as something more than itself, as truth and justice. Truth and justice, universals beyond the content of experience render the non-all of experience as something ordered. They involve drawing lines (making sets, determining exceptions and exclusion)--there is injustice; there is falsity.

The horror of Auschwitz is the obscenity that comes to replace/displace/render impossible such claims to truth and justice. Agamben discusses this in terms of dignity. Witnesses to the conditions in the camps cannot speak with authority. That they can speak makes them, to themselves, guilty and ashamed--why did they survive? In speaking from their experience, they cannot account for the horror of their experience because that experience renders one speechless--the Muselmann. Those who fully experienced the horror are those who cannot speak at all, who cannot bear witness to the horror. Any testimony to experience remains insufficient, partial. And in this instance the insufficiency points to the depth/extent of violence.

For Agamben, the problem of testimony is not unique to the Muselmann. It inheres in language as such, in "the immemorial relation between the unsayable and the sayable, between the outside and inside of language." There is a constitutive gap in testimony, in what we can say, in what we can to others and to ourselves about our experience. Any and every claim to experience remains partial and in need of supplement.

And, that supplement cannot be purely additive, a quantifiable addition of numbers of testimony. There is a split or lack in language that is Real, and that may and will stimulate addition, expression, perhaps even testimony.

Why Agamben?

Last weekend, another political theorist asked me why I thought Agamben had become popular. Someone asked Paul a similar question a couple of days ago. It's interesting that people ask this question. I've not heard it asked about, say, Zizek or Badiou. So why do people ask it? And, what's the answer?

A prelude--I don't think the answer rests on why Agamben might be interesting to philosophers. The reason is that Agamben's popularity is now interdisciplinary. His ideas have spread around the humanities and social sciences. More people cite him in passing without exactly engaging his thought (for example, Henry Giroux and Zygmunt Bauman). And, the cited text is nearly always Homo Sacer.

Why do people ask the question? Because Agamben goes against the dominant tenets of post- structuralism even as he is cited by posties. He offers essentialism in the guise of genealogy--one essence of sovereignty that stays the same over millennia and produces/relies on the production of the same excess, homo sacer. Whereas other thinkers have emphasized specificity, differential productions and relations, Agamben does not. Differences in sex, sexuality, ethnicity, language group, kinship, class don't appear in his work; they aren't key conceptual components of his thought. Also odd is the working of power--the only kind that interests Agamben is sovereign power, another counter to Foucauldian emphases on discursive power, combinations of power-knowledge, disciplinary power, colonizing power.

So, why Agamben? A good answer might start with Michael Hardt's book on radical political thought as well as reviews of Agamben's pre-Homo Sacer work. And even though I think that this would be necessary for a good answer, I actually suspect that it won't tell us much because the interdisciplinary popularity, the viral spread, occurs with Homo Sacer. The real question, then, might be why Homo Sacer.

I think that the concept of bare life attracts people looking for something to hold onto after identity politics. Identity politics resulted in a complete fragmentation such that rooting any political claim in an identity became impossible. The category 'woman,' for example, fragmented into myriad identities of ever greater specificity. Bare life conceptualizes a remainder, product, and irreducibly political embodiment. It's ontological claim rests not on a fundamental identity but on its relationship to sovereign power. In one broad stroke, all the incompatible differences--and their differential relations to power, culture, experience, society--are swept away and one can talk critically about state power in relation to a mode of human being.
Agamben's attack on sovereignty resonates with left and postie rejection of the state. It continues the left front of attacks on the state (one strand of which goes to Hardt and Negri) and on law as viable tools of politics, forms of political collectivity. And, it resonates with postie emphasis on micropolitics and multiple sites of politics insofar as it makes sovereignty the opponent to be defeated (as opposed to the market).

Additionally, bare life is not a notion of subjectivity. It shifts questions away from the subject, which seemed to have reached an impasse, and toward a key operation of sovereign power--its reliance on the exception as a way to include what is excluded.

Finally, in case notions of bare life and sovereignty seem too blunt, there is the intermediating 'zone of indistinction.' Sometimes clarification isn't possible, so we enter into the muddy zone, the confusing zone. This concept works for contemporary thinkers grappling with the complexity of the world, with indeterminacy and undecideability.

The key notions in Homo Sacer, then, seem appropriate to our time. They change the terrain of thinking, enabling thinkers to side step some tricky impasses. But, they don't change it too much; they work with some already existing pressures against the state or state forms (even as they fail to give us much insight into varying state processes and the workings of law, the interconnections between state and economy, the goals toward whicht taking state power might aspire).

The case of the missing economy

If one posits a Western metaphysics that persists in a set of core concepts and conceptual relations, what happens to materialism? At the very least, one could not be a vulgar marxist: the flow or flight of ideas takes place according to its own inner logic, seemingly free from or immune to our good old determinations from the base. Regardless of the economic formation--slavery and family farming, feudalism, mercantilism, industrial capitalism, finance capitalism, communicative capitalism--the essential categorical elements have a certain autonomy.

I'm tempted to call this the autonomy of the biopolitical, a senseless, paradoxical notion that might highlight an oddness in Agamben's employment of Foucault's category of biopolitics. If sovereignty relies necessarily on its production of bare life, if bare life does not precede sovereignty but is its product (which I take to be Agamben's argument in Homo Sacer), then there is a politically incorporated biological substratum. Sovereign power requires this substratum as its medium, anchor, and point of inscription.

Theorists of political representation, participations, and resistance have fallen into a trap, treating this substratum as a location of agency and opposition, failing to see how every emphasis on it or thinking in terms of it ultimately strengthens sovereign power. And, this point is much more than one of state dependency on resistance (which enables it to justify its policing and coercive deployments of power). Instead, emphasis on the substratum is necessarily an intensification of a relationship: the more the substratum is a suffering human person, the more its abandonment by the state is both a capture and a letting go to alternative forms of violence.

But, isn't the substratum more than bare life? Isn't biopolitical life necessarily productive life, creating life? And don't all accounts of revolution and resistance remind us of this life in it more than itself?

If we take something like the US to be exemplary of Agamben's sovereign state, then we recognize from the outset that the state is in relation to more than bare life: it depends on productive life. It's laws and justification privilege production, property, growth (as theorists like Locke and Marx, from their different perspectives make abundantly clear). This very privileging of property and production was featured in the US constitution in the form of slavery and the inclusion of some as less than full persons, as partial beings included in a strange kind of count. This was not simply a count of bare life--because slaves weren't fully human--but a count of productive living.

Withdrawal

The more I consider Homo Sacer, the less I understand it. Perhaps it is because I am thinking about it separately from the other work, perhaps not. I have great affection for The Time That Remains. Homo Sacer, though, remains a puzzle. Perhaps because it is a middle work, a transitional and transitioning work, a speculative work. Perhaps not. At any rate, there will be a roundtable discussion of the book on Thursday and I don't know what to say. Ideally, I would make comments that wouldn't require knowledge of another theoretical system. Unfortunately, I easily give in to the temptation to try to reformulate some of the ideas in a vaguely psychoanalytic direction.

What to make of 'the secret tie uniting power and bare life'? Why, I wonder, is it a secret? Who is keeping it and from home? Plato's examples of shepherds and physicans aren't secret. From a different direction, his emphasis on luxury and against necessity as he builds the city in speech suggest a more to the formation of the republic than bare life, a more that matters, that makes the city what it is.

More troubling: the withdrawal of the state as a means of capture via the ban. Here, there is nothing outside or external to the state. How can such a notion be useful (much less plausible) in an international arena where there are multiple externals and internals and exclusions and inclusions? To be sure, the challenge of refugees and immigrants point to a condition of the withdrawal of the state and resulting vulnerability to be violence. But is the ban the best way to understand this condition? Does it make sense to think of this condition as a kind of capture? And, how is that here, with this example, was is affirmed, strengthened, and solidified is state sovereignty? What about the excesses of people that, erm, exceed the capacities of the state? That expose its limits, inadequacies, and pretensions?

Is, then, a prior sense of universalization victimization--we are all homni sacri--accurate and necessary for conceptualizing a politics adequate to the present? Must we accept the obscenity that all is Auschwitz? Must we jettison every capacity for differentiation?

Just say no. Or even, prefer not to.