I cite

Better off dead

Yesterday's NYT picked up a story out of LA about a man left dead on his balcony for five days.

“He looked fake,” said Austin Raishbrook, 33, who lives nearby. “It looked like somebody had thrown a dummy over the back of a chair.”

and

“I ran over there with my camera equipment,” he said. “There was blood on the balcony, and he was visible from the street. But it really did not look like a real person up there.”

Also reported in the NYT (in a recap from a blog) was that suicide has been increasing:

Worldwide, deaths from suicide now outnumber deaths from war and homicide together: the World Health Organization estimates that each year around one million people — predominantly men — kill themselves

We cannot tell the living from the dead. Many of us choose death.

Popular culture is overrun by the dead--vampires, ghosts, zombies. They are more alive than the living, demonstrating the kinds of freedom and agency (or, more precisely, the fantasy of freedom in the undead circuits of drive) we can only dream about. After all, no worries about health insurance here--it can't get any worse.

Do we fear them, these dead, these zombies or vampires? Do we seek in them a kind of release from our own entombment? So are they fantasies of agency or passivity? Or is part of the fantasy the very posing of a choice or opposition?

I read The Lovely Bones. The freedom of the dead narrator, the one at the center of the horror who as that very center escapes it. The contemporary tethering to the dead has replaced American dreams of progress, manifest destiny, hope, change, a better world. The zombie banks that are Obama's obscene underside are the truth of embrace of the dead, are failure to distinguish between living and dead (there are other elements of this as well: enthusiasm for Antigone, a new book on the blurring between life and death, everything written by Agamben).

Can we come back to life (especially a life that is not biopolitical--as I posted here a number of months ago, biopolitics is best understood in terms of the death drive). Can we engage living and the living, without having to talk about valuing life, and thereby inserting it into arguments over economies? Can we hold onto living as a necessary element of the axiom of equality, without getting dragged into ridiculous arguments over fetishization of the human? What is the fear of life? A fear of responsibility, agency, accountability, of the day to dayness of its processes and requirements?

Don't bring out your dead. Our dead are already here and they are enough.

Sick and Wrong : Rolling Stone

Excerpt from a great article by Matt Taibbi:

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.

Over the course of this summer, those two failed systems have collided in a spectacular crossroads moment in American history. We have an urgent national emergency on the one hand, and on the other, a comfortable majority of ostensibly simpatico Democrats who were elected by an angry population, in large part, specifically to reform health care. When they all sat down in Washington to tackle the problem, it amounted to a referendum on whether or not we actually have a functioning government.

It's a situation that one would have thought would be sobering enough to snap Congress into real action for once. Instead, they did the exact opposite, doubling down on the same-old, same-old and laboring day and night in the halls of the Capitol to deliver us a tour de force of old thinking and legislative trickery, as if that's what we really wanted. Almost every single one of the main players — from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Blue Dog turncoat Max Baucus — found some unforeseeable, unique-to-them way to fuck this thing up. Even Ted Kennedy, for whom successful health care reform was to be the great vindicating achievement of his career, and Barack Obama, whose entire presidency will likely be judged by this bill, managed to come up small when the lights came on.

We might look back on this summer someday and think of it as the moment when our government lost us for good. It was that bad.

via www.rollingstone.com

Collective achievement

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].

Arendt's human condition (3.4): what about action?

As is well known, Arendt emphasizes a view of the political in terms of the sharing of words and deeds. The political is neither a concrete space, an intensity, nor a fundamental antagonism. Rather, it is more akin to the big Other constituted through our interactions: our actions disclose a self that is more than the situation. The gap of the subject discloses the gap in the Other, the way it is non-all. Arendt says that the political is the way reality appears to us; without the political, reality doesn't appear.

My summary of her account of action, then, will draw out the elements of her account that correspond to this Zizekian-Lacanian reading.

1.    Plurality is the condition of human speech and action. Life without speech and action is no longer human; it is dead to the world; it is no lived among men. To live in the condition of plurality is to live as a distinct being among equals (I think this is wrong; it also seems at odds with Arendt's emphasis on politics among the Greeks; later in the text she qualifies the point by saying that the equality of the public realm is an equality of unequals; it is not natural, not an aspect of sameness--indeed, sameness is an aspect of animal laborans, an aspect of life separate from speech and action and distinction--215).

Plurality is characterized by equality and distinction: without equality, humans couldn't understand each other, or those in the past or future (Ranciere makes the same link between understanding and equality; I think it is unconvincing; in fact, it seems to me that one cannot accept the idea that there is such a thing as the Master's discourse and accept the idea of equality rooted in understanding).

To act is to begin, but in a very specific way: to insert oneself into the human world. To act is to be born again, born in the word. Action corresponds to natality as speech corresponds to distinctiveness

An act is a miracle, something unexpected and improbable.

2.    The link between action and speech is disclosure, revelation. Through speech and action we show who we are; we reveal unique personal identities (these unique identities have nothing to do with one's position in the world or with one's activities as a consumer, that is, the activities by which one tries to construct a unique identity; action is not achievement). In fact, we do not know ourselves prior to acting; we cannot calculate what we reveal.

Disclosure requires a public realm; it is opposed to a notion of friend/enemy where there are only sides, where words are but means to an end, that is, when they are assessed according to a means/ends rationality.

So is disclosure fundamentally a self-disclosure, a revelation of a true inner core? Or is it perhaps better understood as the disclosure of a lack, of the gap that is subject. Differently put, if action is unique and unexpected, a miracle, then the identity that is disclosed is not determined by its context, history, or attributes. It is instead something new. Arendt uses the expression 'agent-revealing"--but it seems that the agent that is revealed has no substance, that it is instead only the gap in the string of worldly tangibles. So, yes, this gap will be narrated into a new life story (it requires a story-teller; Agamben would call it a witness; Zizek makes the same point with his emphasis on retroactive determination); but more significant is the instance of an opening that cannot be accounted for by the existing web of relationships.

An act takes courage. It is a risk.

Arendt acknowledges that her notion of action is individualistic; she presents it as an agonal spirit, a passionate drive to show oneself.

3.    Action is boundless. It has unpredictable effects; it has a tendency to 'force open all limitations and cut across all boundaries' (190). Unpredictable, irreversible, anonymous (220) Because of this, there is a temptation to try to eliminate the dangers of actions, to try to contain them. To this extent, political philosophy ala Plato is reactive, an attempt to substitute making for acting.

It can be judged only by greatness because it is extraordinary, because it breaks through the everyday, because it is there where the everyday no longer applies. (It cannot be assessed in terms of intention or consequence, means or ends.)

4.    The polis was a form for enabling action; it was supposed to make more frequent the disclosure of one's distinctiveness, one's uniqueness. It was also supposed to provide a way to remember great deeds. Its role, in other words, was temporal in two senses--a multiplying of the rare event, a making of the rare more frequent and an extending into the future of what was in the past; repetition and memory; synchronic and diachronic.

As organized remembrance, the polis:

assures the mortal actor that his passing existence and fleeting greatness will never lack the reality that comes from being seen, being heard, and generally, appearing before an audience of fellow men...

5.    The space of appearance is momentary; it doesn't survive its being brought into being. It is thus only actual through power, power understood as potential. Organization is a way to compensate for this fleeting character of the public.

Yet, a space of appearance is necessary for the reality of the world and of one's self. This reality, then, stems from trust. Trust produces reality; we have to 'actualize the sheer passive givenness' of our being (208).

Alienation, then, is the atrophy of the space of appearance; what Zizek will call the decline of symbolic efficiency.

6.    Labor, collected, does not establish reality; rather, it relies on the loss of awareness of individuality and identity (213)--I think, here, that Arendt shrinks from her insight into action, that she anchors it too much in distinct, determined personhood and not enough in a gap or lack. Thus, her critique becomes the conventional one from the 1950s: the critique of conformity.

The labor movement was more than economic and more than an aspect of modernity's acceleration of productivity. There were rare moments of politics that enabled the workers to appear in public. Despite the fact that they were excluded from society, they were able to appear in public as men (219). For a brief time, they could represent the people as a whole. Now, however, they are not outside of society.

Arendt's Human Condition (4) world alienation as disalienation

Arendt traces two reversals in the vita activa, two reversals that help account for the present condition of world alienation, the attempt to escape the earth and enter the heavens and the attempt to move from the world into the self.

1.    Homo faber trumps the contemplative life. We don't need to know or understand nature, we just need to make things. Such an emphasis on making and process is a problem for political theory: the unexpected does happen. This is the realm of the event--"the event constitutes the very texture of reality within the realm of human affairs" (300). Reality is indeterminate, open, non-all; the very supposition that it can be made regular and predictable is thus itself a kind of unreality, an irrational failure of realism.

But homo faber is superceded by the animals laborans. Homo faber and his instrumentalization of the world (his principle of utility), his attachment to processes, to viewing nature and history as processes to such an extent that there are no stable or ultimate values, no primary values upon which to anchor or through which to assess these processes (the point here is like Weber's in "Science as a Vocation" or Nietzsche in "The Genealogy of Morals") lead into a kind of fundamental doubt: a distrust in human reason and in humanity itself. The reflexivity of utility--making tools that make tools that make tools--is replaced by happiness: how does making, producing and consuming, make you feel?

2.    Underneath the felicific calculus of pleasure and pain, though, is something more potent: life itself (311):

What pain and pleasure, fear and desire, are actually supposed to achieve in all these systems is not happiness at all but the promotion of individual life or a guaranty of the survival of mankind. . . In the last resort, it is always life itself which is the supreme standard to which everything else is referred, and the interests of the individual as well as the interests of mankind are always equated with individual life or the life of the species as though it were a matter of course that life is the highest good.

Life can reconnect man to reality, to the world: the animal laborans trumps homo faber.

3.    Arendt provides a religious explanation for the assertion of life as the ultimate reference point: Christianity's emphasis on the sacredness of individual life, a life that begins on earth but will endure eternally. Life itself is superior to any of its occupations.

4.    The real triumph of the animal laborans, though, relies on secularization and Cartesian doubt. Faced with doubt in immortality, man doubts the world as well; he doubts his ability to know the world, to know his own thoughts. What's left? Appetites and desires--the impulses of the drives that Arendt refers to as senseless urges that are the only thing as potentially immortal as the body politic or individual soul. Life itself, the species process, becomes the locus of immortality.

This assertion of the life process is present as the rise of society; action is displaced by 'the force of life process itself' (321). It's only aim 'if it had an aim at all' was survival of the species. Given the remarkable similarity between Arendt's discussion of life and the Lacanian account of drive, it should not be the least bit surprising that she locates a loss 'involved in this development.' (Zizek points out that in drive loss itself is the object; drive is not stimulated by a specific lost object or by a fundamental lack; instead, its very movement, its circuit or course, is loss; we might add here that drives are how we enjoy loss. My suggestion, then, is that biopolitics is a politics of the drives, that the shift Foucault describes is a shift from a politics of law and desire to a politics of the drives and that this means that approaches that see a politics of the Real as the direction for a solution are mistaken).  For Arendt, this loss is a loss of human experience, a loss wherein thought becomes but a function of brain. Making is an aspect of laboring, what happens to people, an aspect of the life process. Making is but a kind of automatism, sheer automatic function--the problem of behavioralism is it's becoming true.

Productivity, modern activity, becomes the 'most sterile passivity history as ever known' (322). And this activity also appears this way; in other words, Arendt invokes the gaze (the Archimedean point) before which our activities are but processes.

But why, then, world alienation as disalienation? Because the turn to life is a form of capture seemingly immune to reflection; the scientists, she concludes, are the few who know how to act and act in concert. It's an odd claim, particularly insofar as any claim to their action would have to deny their very situation within the processes she describes--and this seeming paradox or dilemma is the discourse of the university.

Desire is to law as drive is to ? (2 )

I think that one answer Zizek gives to this question is act. Desire is law as drive is to the act. As real, the act is the founding moment of the symbolic, the vanishing mediator between what is not yet and what is already.

But I am troubled and confused by the equation of drive and act. It doesn't make sense to me. The idea seems to be that "the Real is not a hard external kernel which resists symbolization, but the product of a deadlock in the process of symbolization" (110). The drives are another way of designating this deadlock. And so is objet a. And so is subject of lack. And so is the act constitutive of the subject, the object in it more than itself.

The failure and the space of symbolization are the same; hence drives are both failure and opportunity, something old and new. Being stuck is a modality of beginning again. Where God closes a door He opens a window. Getting fired is a chance to realize one's dreams.

Every crisis is an opportunity. Just look at it differently.

No wonder I'm depressed.

Desire is to law as drive is to ? (1)

For a while now, the theme of escaping the dialectic of law and desire has appeared in psychoanalytic approach to political and legal theory. Foucault's History of Sexuality provides one version of this theme. There are others. The Slovenian school, I have Zizek in mind, can be read as attempting to provide a response to the critique of Lacan's account of the constitutive relation between law and desire: desire is not all there is; one also needs to consider drive.

So desire is to law as drive is to what? Law's founding gesture? The beyond of law? The Real permanently shaping and eluding law? And if any of these answers are correct, what do they mean for politics? That desire is to law and drive is to revolution? This seems unsatisfying, I think, because it becomes just another version of constituted and constituting power or even of the police and politics of the order of things and the enthusiasm of the revolutionary moment.

But what if a better answer is desire is to law and drive is to biopolitics?

In The Indivisible Remainder, Zizek asks:

is the alternative of desire and drive, of lack and positivity--the alternative between, on the one hand, remaining within the constraints of the negative ontology of lack, of man's constitutive 'out-of-jointedness,' and so on, and, on the other, yielding to the pure positivity of drive qua the eternal return of the will which wills its object for ever--truly the ultimate unavoidable alternative of our lives?

No one will be surprised to learn that the answer is no. There is a third position. This third position involves the gesture of vanishing mediation, an idea that Zizek develops through his Lacanian rereading of German idealism. Before looking at the third position, here is the political version of the problem at hand:

it is easy to suspend the big Other by means of an act qua real, to experience the 'nonexistence of the big Other' in a momentary flash--however, what do we do after we have traversed the fantasy? Is it not necessary to resort again to some kind of big Other? How are we to avoid the painful conclusion that the experience of the nonexistence of the big Other, of the act qua real, is merely a fleeting 'vanishing mediator' between the two Orders, an enthusiastic intermediate moment necessarily followed by a sobering relapse into the reign of the big Other? What corresponds in the domain of politics to the resigned conservative notion of revolution as a transitory moment of liberation, the suspension of social authority, which unavoidably gives rise to the backlash of an even more oppressive power.

Zizek then asks:

What are the modalities of the big Other which emerges after the experience of its nonexistence?

Cynicism is the answer he introduces and rejects--there is more to the morning after than saying "thanks for a great time, I'll call you later." What, then, is the answer?

a gesture of precipitate identification, of an act not covered by the big Other's guarantee.

With such a gesture I "recognize myself in my symbolic identity-mandate." Such a gesture isn't provided by the big Other. It constitutes the big Other. It seems rather like adhering to an identity one gives oneself.

But this isn't terribly convincing. It seems to combine both the fact that 'the big Other doesn't exist' with its collapse, the fact that the big Other is the order of the lie, of law and its transgression, with the big Other's collapse. I'm not claiming that Zizek confuses these. Rather, I'm claiming that it seems that his argument moves between these different modalities.

But it doesn't seem to me that these are 'two sides of the same coin" or a change in one's attitude toward the non-existence of the big Other. Why? because one can know full well that the big Other doesn't exist but believe that others believe it exists. The decline of symbolic efficiency designates the collapse of this belief. Differently put, the non-existence of the big Other becomes "for-itself."  To then suggest that the next step is having this non-existence turn in and for itself doesn't work. Why? Because it conceals the prior elimination of the conditions of communicability. Without the communication of the notion (hey, none of us believe) the collapse cannot become in and for itself. Or, put another way, there is no big Other to register the fact that no one believes it exists.

Back to Zizek's argument:  Zizek emphasizes the Lacanian point that there is no Other of the Other, no metaguarantee for the symbolic. And he says this is not a deficiency but a positive feature--it's the knowledge we share that cannot be grounded in something external to that shared knowledge, something which would distance us from our connection. What concerns me is the status of this sharing. The decline of symbolic efficiency refers to the loss of the supposition that there is something, let's call it meaning, that is shared. So, not only is there no external referent (the regular condition of the big Other's effective non-existence) but there is no sharing.

How does Zizek explain Lacan's position:

Lacan asserts that it is this very impossibility which links an individual to his spiritual substance: the collective substance emerges because individuals can never fully co-ordinate their intentions become transparent to each.

and, somewhat later:

far from depending on a kind of minimal co-ordination individuals were able to reach in spite of the opacity of their true intentions, the spiritual Substance emerges as the way to avoid the impasse of this opacity by presupposing the co-ordination of intentions as already given in the purely virtual Third Order of impersonal rules...

We never fully know what others intend. They are opaque to us. The social substance images as a supplement to the impossibility of knowing the other. So, manners tell us what to do when we meet strangers, come into contact with others, etc. But, the problem is that Zizek's point here doesn't address the decline of symbolic efficiency. It is still part of an account of how it is that the symbolic order is possible in the first place.

He continues:

if individuals were able to coordinate their intentions via shared knowledge, there would be no need for the big Other, for the spiritual Substance as a spectral entity experienced by every individual as an external In-itself.

This seems to me to hint at the conditions of possibility for the decline of symbolic efficiency: we don't need a big Other anymore. Shared knowledge coordinates our activities, not as the result of our conscious communicative efforts but as materialized in networked communications, bureaucratic protocol, the discourse of the university, and biopolitics.

Arendt's Human Condition (3): Labor

Reading again The Human Condition, I find myself wondering why it is that the last chapter of the first volume of The History of Sexuality seemed so remarkable. Nearly 20 years before Foucault, Arendt theorizes modernity in terms of the battles it fights in the name of life (110). What Foucault terms biopolitics, she analyzes as society. Just as Foucault addresses in the Birth of Biopolitics lectures, so does Arendt consider the reduction of all activities in modernity to aspects of "making a living." She writes: "whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of making a living" (126-127).

(To be sure, my wonder here can be explained: my first reading of Arendt occurred when I was a Habermasian; the key issues, then, were the conceptualization of the public and of communication. Later, as the Arendt craze crested, political theorists were emphasizing story-telling--a concept I continue to as useless to political theory as quilting is to feminist theory; that practices are meaningful to a group does not give them theoretical purchase although they might provide opportunites for theory).

At any rate. the most striking aspect of Arendt's discussion of labor (the third section of the book) is its account of a labor as a relentless process of life, a constant pressure or pulsion, a drive at the level of the species that proceeds unhindered by individual mortality at the expense of a common world. There is the Real of drive and the diminution of the Symbolic or public. There is drive, the situation of being driven in which we are confined. But there is not world. What whithers away, we might say, is not the state but the public. There is population. There is society. But this society is one of individual labors trapped in their privation. As a totality, society doesn't exist.

Labor is an aspect of the human condition of natural, embodied life. It is part of the necessary cycle or process of life. It is immortal as a species-life or as the continuation of the life of the population. In modernity, it becomes intensified. This intensification is, far from a mechanized and robotic world of technocracy, a massive amplification of life as consumption, a condition of fertility and abundance, the display of private concerns, and the recurrence of cycles of appearance and disappearance (today we call them fads and trends as well look for the next new thing).

Capitalism doesn't create a world. This is Arendt's idea before it is Badiou's, Badiou's frequent criticisms of Arendt notwithstanding.

Although it makes sense to view Arendt's discussion biopolitically, there are differences between Foucault's and Arendt's account. Whereas Foucault identifies a governmentality of surveillance, incentives, tactics, enhancements, and alterations, a set of rules and expectations that constitute a feedback loop between society and government set within the economy as habitat, Arendt sees a 'devouring' biological life, an 'enormously intensified life process' that sucks human productivity into it (one should, I think, resist the urge to reduce this account to a parody of the psychoanalytic mother),