I cite

Theory & Event 11.2 now available

The new issue of Theory & Event is now online and available to subscribers through Project Muse. As you will see below, the issue explores themes of terror and political violence.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_&_event/

Below you'll find the table of contents for the issue as well as the editors' introduction.

Table of Contents:

"We are all torturers now": Accountability After Abu Ghraib
Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn

Necessary Interruption: Traces of the Political in Levinas
Erica Weitzman

Lethal Freedom: Divine Violence and the Machiavellian Moment
Michael Dillon

Event or Exception?: Disentangling Badiou from Schmitt, or, Towards a Politics of the Void
Colin Wright

Imagining Extraordinary Renditions: Terror, Torture and the Possibility of an Excessive Ethics in Literature
Nathan Gorelick

Reviews
Critique of Abysmal Reasoning
Brian Goldstone

Imperialism and the Intimate Self
Robert Lee Nichols

Escaping the Cult, Recuperating Victims
Judy Rohrer

Reason and Revolution Redux: Antonio Negri's Political Descartes
Robert T. Tally

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).

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.

Not about binaries

Last night on the radio, I heard a woman, an academic and/or activist, someone giving a lecture, someone who had written a book, say that the worst problem in America was dehumanization. She explained all contemporary problems as repercussions of an ethics that excludes some from the human community. Her examples were the words "terrorists" and "illegal aliens." These terms, she claimed, make us fail to see how underneath "it all" we are really the same, part of one human family.

This broadcast echoed some themes in one of the essays I recently read in a collection on so-called third way feminism--the big problem was binaries, us and them. And, I've just today read a blog post that not only criticizes bloggers for using binaries (us/them) but that classifies bloggers insofar as they use binaries. This leads to an oddly recursive argument insofar as it relies on a binary opposition between those who use binaries and those who do not.

I don't find any of these views convincing. First, dehumanization is not the problem--inequality rooted in neoliberal capitalism is. Second, the Bush administration gets off on torturing and killing people. That's part of its power. It claims the right, the executive privilege, to decide which people to watch, arrest, imprison, torture, and kill. Doing all this to non-humans wouldn't provide quite the kick, nor would it hold those inside the Beltway in awe, inspiring them to give in. The terms "terrorists" and "illegal aliens" designate who can be killed.

The "feminist" argument strikes me as ill-informed--a great deal of feminist academic work in the nineties criticizes binaries, engaged in deconstruction, examined the workings of oppositional terms and the exclusions necessary for oppositions to function at all. Echoing the charge today fails to acknowledge the change of context: the proliferation of identity categories (in part because of consumerism), the multiplicity of sexualized and racialized positions, and the ways that the impulse to pluralize supports contemporary power arrangements. Even as the division between the classes is all the clearer and stronger in the US (the income of one's parents is the strongest indicator of future income; class mobility is lower in the US than in most European countries), the emphasis on multiplicity and plurality functions ideologically to prevent the clear expression of antagonism.

The point made by the blogger is clearly the weakest one, particularly insofar as blame is placed on television as the base determining the impulse to think in terms of oppositions. If that is the case, then would not the one who groups bloggers into those who use binaries and those who do not be the ultimate consumer of television? And why is the presence of heroes and villains blamed on television rather than attributed to all sorts of different genres? And, why is it wrong? Can't there be instances where exploring a relationship between a hero and a villain or between a perpetrator and a victim or a detective and a suspect becomes interesting, opening into all sorts of other questions (some of which are cliched--the criminal within, everyone is a victim, the prostitute with the heart of gold) that resist binary terms?

The structures, terms, and concepts that enable thought, prevent it. To think in one direction is not to think in another. To organize one's thoughts with a binary (on the one hand, on the other), with an image (the figure of), with a matrix, paradox, dialectic, set, analogy, or repetition necessarily excludes elements of a context, aspects of a question. Often, it seems to me, those who charge others with binary thinking (or with being trapped in the dialectic or captured under the One) have to repeat the thinking that structures their charge. To show binary thinking in their object, they have to become subjects who think in terms of binaries (and this applies to the other examples as well; we can imagine the figure of the figural thinker).

And maybe this isn't so bad--it can demonstrate that sometimes binaries (and other modes of structuring thought) can be useful, despite (and actually because of!) the inadequacies of the critic's substantive claims.

Dissolving

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post Time, Entropy, and the Dissolution of the World. And, I said:

So we persist, but the distinctions are fading, and with it, the people we have been, the lives we have led.

Now I wonder about a couple of things (and perhaps the lack of specificity in my terms, the blurring and generalizing and manifestation of diminution in my vocabulary should be read symptomatically).

Is the fading of distinctions caused by the sharpening of conflict, something like the movement of the world into two great hostile camps? Is it an indication, in other words, of an antagonism coming to presence? And if so is this antagonism well understood as class conflict, or even as a conflict between rich and poor, haves and have nots, privileged and disadvantaged?

Or, is it something else, something that might be a repetition in another space of the horrors of the war on terror, on pervasive cruelty, of a greed and self-centeredness and worship of self most visible in the civil war that broke out during the peloponnessian war? And here we would think of the way that greed and self-regard appropriates languages of disadvantage and discrimination, corrupting them as it takes them to places they don't below, applies them to the privileged because they don't quite benefit enough.

These are but other ways of thinking about the decline of symbolic efficiency, a decline ever more vivid when we see discussions of whether water-boarding is torture. To focus on venality and bad faith of such discussions misses the point, the more profound point that changes the world irrevocably--words lose their customary meanings. Some people might concede just to get things moving--"ok, not torture, but still really bad and definitely illegal." This concession has future effects, as well as retroactive effects on the past, adding to the slow disintegration of a world. If waterboarding is not torture, then we are not the people we have been.

If single white men (let's call them full professors with endowed chairs) are somehow disadvantaged because of policies that try to help faculty with families, then the idea of disadvantage has lost whatever meaning it once had and those who aid in its application in any setting hasten the loss of who we were in the past.

The lives we have led are as open and variable as the ones we will lead, perhaps more so now that the world has ended and we persist in its decaying memory. Crudeness and simplicity, the black and white of a gray, burned up and out world, a world that has given up and that wastes with abandon because there is no future, replace the complexities of histories.

There is every reason

While I was reading yesterday, I came across the phrase "there is every reason" to believe or think something or other. It has been irritating me ever since. How can there be "every reason" to believe in something? Or to hold a certain view? It's the equivalent of "there is no reason not to" believe or think X or Y. Or, it's like "there is no reason that is not a reason" to believe or think X or Y. So, all possible reasons for anything at all support or justify the specific belief in or claim for X or Y.

Nice? No, thanks!

The interesting comments on the hugs and kisses thread have stimulated my thinking about niceness. They explore the ways niceness functions as a mode of control (with gendered dimensions) in the current political conjuncture, disabling dissent, channeling conflict onto the subject as the fragile individual with precarious self-esteem, and operating as an illusory locus of agency--we might not be able to change the world, but we can still be nice!

Given the politics of nice in its oppressive and gendered dimensions, is there nonetheless a terrain where we should be nice and if so how far does it extend? Like, maybe we should be really nice to young children and the very old? But, if that's the case, wouldn't it be because we don't think they can handle the truth? That they aren't quite tough enough? And, how would toughening kids up occur anyway?

These seem to me to be vexed questions because of the ways that niceness, politeness, and consensus blend together. Some forces in contemporary US society seem to want to make every forum child and family friendly (well, nearly everywhere: there positions involve necessarily excluded spaces of violence, otherness, and difference, spaces for the uncivilized, spaces that need to be contained or controlled). Others point out (correctly in many cases) the ways that hostile and demeaning speech has exclusionary effects. I have been uncertain on this point, myself. For example, in Precarious Life, Judith Butler describes how accusations of anti-semitism silence criticisms of Israel (or at least make the costs of that criticism very, very high). In the past, I haven't been very sympathetic to this view, in part because I think that one should be able to counter those positions pretty easily and in part because I think politics requires a kind of will and toughness.

But, I wonder now if I have been wrong. Perhaps the risk or the costs are more internal, happening in advance of the speech that one wants to make. That is, charges of anti-semitism, or fear of those charges, occurs in advance of one's speaking. They inflect our thoughts and our willingness to think and speak so that our thinking and speaking is shaped in advance. Fear, then, has a configuring force and once fear has been installed it runs on its own, under the surface, like an excess program Microsoft stuck into our operating system while we weren't paying attention.

But, if this is the case, then all thinking and speaking is already shaped by forces outside and beyond us. And, if that's true, then how can we tell the difference between a meanness, hostility, or diminution that is somehow wrong, beyond the acceptable, and that which is already part of the conditions within which we speak? Additionally, it could be that politics is in part about changing those conditions. This would apply to both right and left proponents of nice--they want a different terrain. They want a specific set of rules, rules that limit opposition.

So, back to my initial question: are there some terrains where niceness is a good idea and is education one of those? Or, does failure to challenge the politics of education concede a crucial terrain in advance?