I cite

Leon de Mattis, "What is communisation?" -- annotated

Components of the communisation thesis (emphasis added). These are annotated as notes for a future essay. Most of my disagreement is with the insurrectionism, the romantic sense of violence and destruction in a death match wherein everyone spontaneously, that is, without mediation, destroys value, wage, state, etc and in the course of this spontaneous, global destruction, achieves unity. It's communism as organism. Not surprisingly: 'the situation decides.' 

Consider this in comparison with Schmitt on the sovereign as the one who decides the exception. It's an inversion, one of total, global determination. The effect is completely messianistic: what sort of situation could decide globally, particularly in the context of a death match? 

1.    Critique of a politics that reinforces the proletariat when the goal of communism is the abolition of the proletariat. 

During the period preceding the crisis of the 1970s and the restructuring, the proletariat’s struggle had a double meaning, no doubt contradictory but ultimately based nonetheless on the same premise. On the one hand, the struggle could pursue immediate objectives, such as an improvement of working conditions, an increase in wages, and social justice. On the other hand, the struggle also had as a result, and sometimes as an objective, the reinforcement of the class of labour relatively to the class of capital, and even, tendentially, the overturning of the bourgeoisie. These two aspects were conflictual, and the antagonisms between the proponents of ‘reform’ and the proponents of ‘revolution’ were permanent. Ultimately, however, the struggle as such could mean either of them. The struggle for immediate advantages and the struggle for future communism were articulated together around the idea that victory could only come through a reinforcement of the working class and its combativity. Needless to say, the debates cutting across the working class were as many divisions between proponents of revolution or reform, of parties, unions or workers’ councils, etc. – that is to say, between leninists, leftists, anarchists, etc. But they shared an experience of struggle where the proletarian class, without being unanimous or even united (which it never has been), was nonetheless a visible social reality in which all workers could easily recognise themselves and with which they could identify themselves.

2.    Analysis of collapse of form of subjective existence of working class in pulverization of the workers' movement.

 What about now? If the debate between ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’ has simply disappeared since thirty years, it is because the social basis that gave it meaning has been pulverised. The form which gave a subjective existence to the working class for a century and a half – i.e. the workers’ movement – has collapsed. Parties, unions and left-wing associations are now ‘citizen’ or ‘democratic’ parties, etc., with an ideology borrowed from the French Revolution, that is from the period preceding the workers’ movement. It is however obvious that neither the proletariat nor capitalism have disappeared. So what is missing?

3.    Specification of loss of "possible sense of victory" in context of partial victories secured by institutionalized unions.

At first sight we could of course say that it is the possible sense of victory which has been modified. Without at all idealising previous periods, nor under-estimating retreats, we could say that since the beginning of capitalism, the working class has staged struggles that have translated into real transformations in its relation to capital: on the one hand, through what was concretely achieved – regulation of the working day, wages, etc. – and, on the other hand, through the very organisation of the workers’ movement into parties and unions. Any struggle and any partial victory could take the form of the reinforcement of the proletariat, whereas every defeat could appear as a temporary retreat before the next offensive. It is true that this reinforcement was at the same time a weakening. Partial victories and the institutionalisation of the unions’ role were factors tending to make the communist perspective increasingly more distant. As years went by, this perspective became evermore remote and hypothetical.⁶ Yet the general framework of struggles – notwithstanding all their limits – was the reinforcement of workers against employers.

The left we are. The left we need.

I came across the following passage in a Slate piece about the failure of gun control legislation to pass the Senate. The question was whether it was Obama's fault, his failure to lead, or whether it was the fault of partisan politics. 

In fact, the type of president who could work or cajole the Senate in this political environment would probably never have been elected in the first place. 

The passage made me think about dilemmas on the left. The kind of left that we need for successful communist struggle today is the kind that can't appear. The conditions that make it necessary are the conditions that make it impossible.

If leaders emerge, they are slapped down. If they don't emerge we are stagnant. When some try to unify our struggles, they are treated with suspicion, resisted and rejected -- even as the multiplicity of singular struggles fail to make any substantial headway. The automatic reflex in the face of any appeals to unity is to criticize:  there isn't a strong working class movement, so there is no ground for unity; any unity is or will be exclusionary; any success will only result in another form of domination. 

It also seems as if people don't know how to follow.  Instead, we are enjoined to have our own opinions, be independent, be winners. Among intellectuals this is a particular hazard -- especially for academics who are paid to judge, evaluate, and grade, who function in reputation economies that value criticism, pedantry, and iconoclasm, who construe disagreement as the sine qua non of independent thinking, especially when it is accompanied by an injunction to historicize and compare. It's odd, this way of thinking that considers itself so willing take risks even as it criticizes ideas and suggestions because they risk X, Y, or whatever.

The only ideas that seem to escape unscathed are those that conform to the expectations of communicative capitalism:  do it yourself, rely on technology, go local (small is beautiful), smash and hack (as if nobody learned that the capitalist economy can eliminate trillions of dollars of wealth and still keep going).

I'm looking forward to Historical Materialism (and Left Forum) because it seems like we may be building the critical mass necessary to break free of this deadening individualism and figure out what pulling together will entail and how to go about it. I'm going to listen for organizing ideas (not because I am an organizer, I am not, but because I would like to be able to do my part in building support for them). 

After talking to a friend who spent a lot of time with the Sandanistas, I started wondering about what it would look like to organize young women, single mothers in communist struggle. What would that look like? It seems a good place for unifying with teachers and nurses (who have been highly visible in their organized struggles). It would probably make health care, nutrition, education, and housing into core issues (and so look for protest opportunities on these fronts). And it could suggest the development of a communist infrastructure of clinics, farms, schools, and anti-eviction alliances/public housing/rent controlled apartments. A cool advantage here is that recognizing that women's politics are about a lot more than sex (birth control, abortion, etc) can attract and radicalize a lot of women who are considered so narrowly in mainstream Democratic politics. 

American receptions of the Commune

(from Philip M. Katz, From Appomattox to Montmarte: Americans and the Paris Commune, Harvard UP, 1998).

'The Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Paris Commune each posed the question of republicanism in its starkest form: Shall "the people" be sovereign.' (89)

'But defining what "popular" (much less "republican") government proved elusive, as the bitter politics of Reconstruction showed. Reconstruction was a struggle to define what it meant to be a republic, and to decide who was fit to participate in such a polity.' (90)

Marx had followed the civil war in the US closely--his text on the Paris Commune is The Civil War in France.

(In the wake of the civil war, mistrust of popular government spread among Northerners: rejection of women's suffrage, acquiescence to Southern 'home rule,' ruins of 14th and 15th amendements, urban reforms limiting local autonomy, voting reforms limiting the franchise. The Commune became a way to 'focus and excuse the ideological shift away from popular government,' 92.)

For some, the Commune became an emblem of the failure of Reconstruction. The editor of the Nation, 'railed against the "Socialism in South Carolina" that came from allowing incompetent black men to govern and vote" (97). In his polemic againt reconstruction, the political incapacity in South Carolina was as bad as the Paris Commune. Attacks on the Communards were attacks on the political incapacity of the people. For Northerners, "neither Paris nor the South was ready for self-government" 100.

Related positions emphasized the parallel between Southern secessionists and the Commune, both rejecting centralized government. Some Southerners, not surprisingly, rejected the comparison and emphasized differences between themselves and the Commune, in particular, they (the South) were resisting revolution (the Union's attempt to control them) while the Communists were making a revolution. Other Southerners were happy to embrace the parallel, of "wholesome revolt against an oppressive centralized power" (107) -- the same position held by Northern Republican critics. Newspapers in Atlanta and Charleston expressed sympathy for the Communards. Still others associated the Parisian mob with the newly freed slaves.

(Weirdly, a former vice-president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, who became a a member of Congress from Georgia after the war, identified himself as a Communist in 1880. For Stephens, to be a Communist meant to favor home rule, the sovereignty of the local government, 108-110. Stephens, of course, explicitly rejected the idea that communism entailed the abolition of private property.)

Lenin: Two Tactics: Conclusion. Dare We Win?

Yes, the people’s revolution. Social-Democracy has fought, and is quite rightly fighting against the bourgeois-democratic abuse of the word “people.” It demands that this word shall not be used to cover up failure to understand the class antagonisms within the people. It insists categorically on the need for complete class independence for the party of the proletariat. But it divides the “people” into “classes,” not in order that the advanced class may become shut up within itself, confine itself to narrow aims and emasculate its activity for fear that the economic rulers of the world will recoil, but in order that the advanced class, which does not suffer from the halfheartedness, vacillation and indecision of the intermediate classes, may with all the greater energy and enthusiasm fight for the cause of the whole of the people, at the head of the whole of the people.

That is what the present-day new-Iskraists so often fail to understand and why they substitute for active political slogans in the democratic revolution a mere pedantic repetition of the word “class,” parsed in all genders and cases!

...

Revolutions are the festivals of the oppressed and the exploited. At no other time are the masses of the people in a position to come forward so actively as creators of a new social order as at a time of revolution. At such times the people are capable of performing miracles, if judged by the narrow, philistine scale of gradual progress. But the leaders of the revolutionary parties must also make their aims more comprehensive and bold at such a time, so that their slogans shall always be in advance of the revolutionary initiative of the masses, serve as a beacon, reveal to them our democratic and socialist ideal in all its magnitude and splendour and show them the shortest and most direct route to complete, absolute and decisive victory. Let us leave to the opportunists of the Osvobozhdeniye bourgeoisie the task of inventing roundabout, circuitous paths of compromise out of fear of the revolution and of the direct path. If we are compelled by force to drag ourselves along such paths, we shall be able to fulfil our duty in petty, everyday work also. But let ruthless struggle first decide the choice of the path. We shall be traitors to and betrayers of the revolution if we do not use this festive energy of the masses and their revolutionary ardour to wage a ruthless and self-sacrificing struggle for the direct and decisive path. Let the bourgeois opportunists contemplate the future reaction with craven fear. The workers will not be frightened either by the thought that the reaction promises to be terrible or by the thought that the bourgeoisie proposes to recoil. The workers are not looking forward to striking bargains, are not asking for sops; they are striving to crush the reactionary forces without mercy, i.e., to set up the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.

via www.marxists.org

Theory & Event 16.1

Introduction -- Jodi Dean and Davide Panagia 

We begin the sixteenth year of Theory & Event by grouping the contributions to this issue into four sections: “Articles,” “Austerities,” “Symposium – US Election 2012,” and “Reviews.” The pieces in each section endeavor to theorize an event or events, even as they remain acutely aware of the changes and continuities that disrupt presentations of old or new, similar and different, significant yet banal. At stake in each is an approach to collectivity, a thinking of political rupture and movement in terms of their enabling collectivities. 

The two pieces in the “Articles” section take up revolution and displacement. Thomas Nail connects Deleuze to the recent debate on communism. “Deleuze, Occupy, and the Actuality of Revolution” engages communist critics of the speculative leftism of Deleuze and Guattari (such as Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels, Peter Hallward, and Slavoj Žižek), using their critiques to launch a constructivist reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of revolution. Nail then puts this reading to use in an analysis of Occupy Wall Street that demonstrates the ways the movement resists and exceeds a politics of state, party, proletariat, and vanguard. The actuality of revolution, Nail argues, is better understood with categories such as “deterritorialization” (specifically, in the four variants discussed in A Thousand Plateaus ) and “consistency” (as it resolves the problem of a political collectivity or composition that is neither representational nor merely potential). Sudeep Dasgupta analyzes displacement in the work of Jacques Rancière, as an attribute of both his formulation of concepts and his style of argumentation. Through his analysis, “The Spiral of Thought in the Work of Jacques Rancière,” Dasgupta illuminates the relation between politics and aesthetics, as well as the problems in their orders and equations, in Rancière’s thought. Understood as spiraling displacement, the operation of critique repartitions the perceptible, blocking programmatism and prescription. 

The two contributions to “Austerities” focus on recent political disruptions, specifically right-wing violence in Greece and economic precarity in the United States. In “ The Comrade is Violent: Liberal Discourses of Violence in Anti-austerity Greece,” Pavlos Hatzopoulos and Korinna Patelis investigate the equating of right and left in the hegemonic liberal discourse. They note the obscene attachment to violence on which the “extreme center” of this liberal discourse depends. Rather than erasing violence under a peaceful democratic imaginary, the hegemonic discourse uses violence, real and imaginary, to position itself as a reasonable center. In “Occupy Precarity,” Sanford Schram uses Judith Butler’s account of bodies in alliance to theorize the collective political agency of a diverse population. For Schram, following Michael Shapiro, precarity provides an “action framework” wherein subjection under neoliberalism is turned back in on itself against the state. 

Issue 16.1 also features a symposium on the 2012 election in the US. Edited by Steven Johnston, the symposium eschews the celebratory rhetoric of democracy to consider the way the democratic process subverts democracy as well as the unpredictability of democracy in unlikely places and moments. Contributing to the symposium are Romand Coles, Paisley Currah, Michaele Ferguson, David S. Gutterman, Robyn Marasco, Lori J. Marso, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and George Shulman. The symposium introduction can be viewed here:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v016/16.1.johnston.html 

Issue 16.1 concludes with six book reviews: Thomas Dumm reviews William Connolly’s A World of Becoming ; Brian Duff reviews Kennan Ferguson’s All in the Family ; Melissa Ptacek reviews Eyal Weizman’s The Least of All Possible Evils ; Alexander Otruba reviews Delia Popescu’s Political Action in Vaclav Havel’s Thought ; Robert Lehman reviews Martin Hägglund’s Dying for Time ; and, Keally McBride reviews Kathy Ferguson’s Emma Goldman and David Graeber’s Debt . 

"Philosophy's sole aim is to become worthy of the event." Gilles Deleuze 

Theory & Event: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tae/ 

Deleuzian Politics? (excerpts from a discussion published in New Formation in 2010)

With Éric Alliez, Claire Colebrook, Peter Hallward, Nicholas Thoburn, Jeremy Gilbert (chair)

citation: DELEUZIAN POLITICS? A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION. By: Gilbert, Jeremy, New Formations, 09502378, Fall2009, Vol. 68

Excerpts below (full disclosure: the excerpts reflect my interests and concerns; they don't attempt to provide a representative segment of the debate).

Peter: Just going back a bit to what you said, Eric. It's absolutely true that Marx and Engels are fascinated by the deterritorialising thrust of capitalism: 'all that is solid melts into air', etc. There is a real point of similarity there. The thing is, though, that having made that assessment, what distinguishes the communist movement in the nineteenth century from, say, the anarchist movement, which would agree on that point, is precisely the strategic conclusion that they draw. The communist conclusion is that we need, in response to this situation, an institution, an organisation, direction, and so on: precisely so that the proletariat can indeed dissolve itself as a class (within the historical constraints of a class-bound situation) but not as social existence, not as 'emancipated labour'. What is required, from this perspective, is the construction of a disciplined working-class political organisation that would be capable oí winning the class struggle that takes shape around this time. Later, people will make roughly the same sort of argument in defence of the mobilisation of national liberation movements, for example. Both sorts of organisation emphasise things like discipline, unity, strategic purpose: certainly at the risk of problematic consequences, but the risk is unavoidable. This is the political legacy of Marxism, if you ask me. It's the combination of these two things: an assessment of historical tendencies and economic logics, articulated together with the formulation of political strategy.

What is original and distinctive about Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, is that they substitute for something like the mobilisation of the working class, or national liberation movements, things like schizo and nomad. They do privilege the movement of 'absolute deterritorialisation', however much they might seem to qualify it by adding that all deterritorialisation is accompanied by forms of reterritorialisation. Their political alternative, if that's the right word, is precisely something that unfolds in what they call infinite speed. It is something like a politics of the nomad which they identify with the deterritorialised par excellence, a deterritorialised movement which only reterritorialises on the movement of deterritorialisation itself. That, it seems to me, is what is distinctive and strong in their position. It's not presented as one of several strategic options to choose from, as if here we should do one thing, there we should do another. There is a strong teological moment in their thought. They say: this is the movement of becomings, for example. They say that the thrust of deterritorialisation goes in a particular direction and that we should follow it, basically. And that I think is politically and strategically problematic.

Éric: Ok - trying to get to the core of the question - I do think that what Peter has just described as the political organisation of the working class corresponds, for me at least, and to a certain extent, to what Foucault calls 'the disciplinary society', wherein one is necessarily caught up in this particular figure of the classic-modern conflict, struggle and war. In this context, historically, forms of political organisation have to follow the social form of organisation of society as such in the most dialectical figure of the class struggle. Now, in brief, if Anti-Oedipus tried to answer to the necessity for a new conception of politics which was called for, on the one hand, by 68's worldevent, and on the other, already, by the immediate post-68 counter-revolution (which is not at all a 'Restoration'), it is A Thousand Plateaus which confronts itself with the emergence of what Deleuze would later call the 'control society' (we can find Foucauldian equivalents from his Collège de France lectures on Neoliberalism). And this is the real explanation for its caution with regard to deterritorialisation - with the way capitalism reterritorialises itself on the most deterritorialised ... Conclusion: Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.

In the control society, power no longer operates through enclosure, as in the disciplinary society, but through processes of what Deleuze calls 'modulation' that give an entirely new dynamic to exploitation. So to position oneself as 'Deleuzian' (but I avoid doing this for myself, preferring to think with and from ...) is always to remember, without becoming historicist, the importance of this kind of historical frame and framework for a political ontology of the present. From this perspective, we can't just carry on with the same old forms of political institution, the same modes of working class social organisation, because they no longer correspond to the actual and contemporary form of capitalism and the rising subjectivities diat accompany and/or contest it. That's where I come back to the importance of the systematic enquiry into die mutations of capitalism, which is, fundamentally, through the 'machinic' dystopia which they enact, Deleuze and Guattari's central project. For sure, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that we should 'schizophrenise' Marx; but, my gosh, Marx was writing mid-nineteenth century and look at what is going on since then, and above all since 1968!

Claire: If you think about contemporary politics: all we have to do is move from talking about national liberation movements and workers' movements to looking at some of the most tortured and vexed political situations, such as the relationship between indigenous Australian communities and European settled communities, and we can see that as long as we have a notion of collectivity that's founded on the traditional notion of labour and its organisation, then we will always be necessarily disenfranchising and robbing those people of a potential form of individuation.

This is what this is all about. The key question is how you can take part in some form of collective action without necessarily being identified as or appealing to 'classes' in the old sense. So the 'molecularisation' of politics which Deleuze and Guattari propose is about how to get beyond a situation in which, within a given context of communication, there are things that can't be heard. The question is: how can you have some maximum degree of inclusion with a minimal degree of identification? This is a crucial question if you want a global politics which can allow for notions of contamination, and which can get beyond the limitations of models of politics modelled on opposed pairs of identities: workers vs. capitalists, national liberation struggles vs globalist struggles. You can't have that anymore: you can only have these extremely molecular, local, individuating political gestures.

How is it that the subject becomes an individual?

I've been perplexed lately, wondering about the strange link between the individual and the subject. I use a couple of slogans to designate the problem. One is an inversion of Althusser: the subject is interpellated as an individual. The other comes from reading Federici (although she doesn't put it exactly this way): the individual is a form of enclosure.

It's clear enough that psychoanalysis is the study of failure, the specific failure of the individual form. The object of its discourse is nothing but this failure. Hence, the scandal of Lacan is to place nothing at all at the heart of the subject, to recognize that 'subject' names nothing but a gap or lack. Every component of the psychic apparatus, evey arrangement of the economies of desire and drive, every discourse that constitutes a social link works around, over, and through this emptiness, investing it with a charge or intensity such that it always seems more than itself.

And, why not, Marx and Nietzsche also give rise to the two other primary studies of failure inextricable from the waning of European modernity: the failure of capitalism and the failure of morality (Corey Robin is pursuing an exciting project that makes the operative term here "value," as he notes the convergence between the ungrounding of value in Hayek and in Nietzsche). In this vein, what becomes postmodernity or late-modernity is resignation, complacency, acquiescence, compromise, and melancholia. No grand narratives, no utopia, no ideals. Even that political form said to be the best, democracy, is acknowledged as unworkable, not so good, only viable because everything else is worse. Political maturity, political realism, is accepting this sorry state with good humor and irony.

The happy story left behind was one of modernity as a kind of triumph, the liberation of reason from dogma, of the individual from the collective, of creativity from stultification and determination within a realm of traditional culture that confined individuals within pregiven roles. And even as our discourses of failure have taught us, rightly, to critique and reject the happy story, how is it that its terms and suppositions persist? More specifically, how is it that some kind of individual free from the collective is so frequently turned to and invoked, the limit of any political project as if struggle were only and ever liberal? 

How is it that the subject remains reduced to the individual, as if there were an individual who is subjected rather than a collective, exercising the power of its own self-determination, that becomes fragmented and desubjectified, pacified as it is divided up into ever smaller portions? 

If we can think of such a prior collective subject, and Freud's discussion of the unconscious as a crowd suggests that we can, then the gap Lacan notes suggests the form that remains once it is emptied of the crowd, once everyone leaves, like an arena that one can never fill alone. Perhaps a better metaphor would be a field where the grass is left broken and flat after everyone is gone. Or perhaps an empty street or public square, the strewn paper and broken glass traces of the many who had been. Subject is gap in the structure not in the sense that subject designates a site of individual freedom, decision, or choice, and not in the sense of unconscious fantasies that fill in and direct the never complete structure, and not even in the sense of the twist or torsion of the real, but rather in the sense that structure becomes subject as collective. The collective body is the subject form of the structure, the gap that makes it not fully itself, or the gap between the ways it is active and the way it is passive.

How is it that subject and individual seem blurred and even equated in contemporary thought? I wonder if we might blame critiques of the transcendental subject that tried to give it a body in order to critique this body for its exclusions? I wonder as well about the effects of forty years of neoliberalism where the emphasis on the unique and creative individual is so incessant, so unavoidable, that we fall into it, unaware. And then I wonder, well, maybe it's just me, maybe it's just my mistake, my misunderstanding. Does this actually enact the very problem I'm trying to address? I personalize and individualize it, eliminating what is common before it can appear?

The Psychic Life of Power opens clearly enough: the paradox of subjection Butler investigates via Freud, Foucault, and Althusser is a formal problem, the problem of the subject form.  She writes:

"The subject" is sometimes bandied about as if it were interchangeable with "the person" or "the individual." The geneaology of the subject as a critical category, however, suggests that the subject, rather than be identified strictly with the individual, ought to be designated as a linguistic category, a placeholder, a structure in formation. Individuals come to occupy the site of the subject (the subject simultaneously emerges as a 'site'), and to enjoy intelligibility only to the extent that they are, as it were, first established in language. The subject is the linguistic occasion for the individual to achieve and reproduce intelligibility, the linguistic condition of its existence and agency. No individual becomes a subject without first becoming subjected or undergoing subjectivation . . . It makes little sense to treat 'the individual' as an intelligible term if individuals are said to acquire their intelligibility by becoming subjects. Paradoxically, no intelligible reference to individuals or their becoming can take place without a prior reference to their status as subjects. The story by which subjection is told is, inevitably, circular, presupposing the very subject for which it seeks to give an account. On the one hand, the subject can refer to its own genesis only by taking a third-person perspective on itself, that is by dispossessing its own perspective in the act of narrating its genesis. On the other hand, the narration of how the subject is constituted presupposes that the constitution has already taken place, and thus arrives after the fact. 10-11

Can more than one individual occupy the place of the subject at the same time? If the function of the category subject is to hold a place, then it would seem absolutely necessary that more than one individual occupies the place. Individual is a specific occupation of the subject. And, that would mean that as a subject, the individual can't be individuated. It's just an occupant among other occupants. Subject designates what they are in common, their commonality. For Butler this occupation is subjection, a kind of repression and discipline that involves a relation to law, an attachment to law. As the individual is subjectified, it sacrificies something of itself. To be a subject is to be, in a way, bereft.

But in what way? It seems at times that Butler thinks that the subject is bereft of freedom, where freedom is a kind of authenticity, a freedom to love and desire as she chooses or as she could choose were she not beholden to a norm to which she is subjected. But I wonder if we might understand this differently. When the individual occupies the place of the subject, the individual is bereft of others, of the crowd, of the collective. The individual tries to do and be alone what she can only do and be with others. The place of the subject is a place for us, not for me. It's a crowded place.

It sometimes seems to me as if Butler presumes a link between individual and subject, as if individual preexisted subject and were separate from it, even if its separate pre-existence is inchoate, even abject. When she refers to subject as the condition for the individual's agency, it seems to me that she says this sadly or critically. For her, it's a problem that the individual has to be subjected to have agency. 

But if subject is collective, then we recognize that agency can only be collective; it is always and only the agency of a group (and theorists like Jane Bennett encourage, even enjoin, us to note the multiple objects that must be part of this group). There is no agency by an individual, so it's no wonder that the subject is a condition for agency. This is simply another way of pointing to the fact of collectivity. It would make more sense, then, to say that no individual can become subject, which, it seems to me, is the insight of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, as well as Lacan.

And of the problem of narration? If subject refers to a collective (mass, class, party), then any telling of its story will be partial. It's story will always be open and in process. But this is not because of a dispossession (which Butler considers because she presumes the link between individual and subject) but because of plurality. The subject's story of itself doesn't present a paradox because there isn't a whole or complete story to tell.

The Freudian Subject: crowd

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen reads the primary issues of 'Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego' as arising out of the problematic of the relation between self and other. On the one hand, this problematic is a trick: it presupposes the subject as a self, that is, as already constituted and separate from the other such that relation (in the strict Freudian sense) cannot arise; on the other, this very questioning preserves and protects the subject insofar as it posits it, is premised on it. Shouldn't we think, rather, of a primary sociality that precedes the ego as well as the other--"a mass-ego, a primordial crowd" (133)?

Freud has already implied as much when he observes, in the close of "On Narcissism," that the ego ideal has a social side: "the common ideal of a family, a class, or a nation." Yet we know that insofar as he continued to presuppose an ego, even one that could form itself, he displaced the problem of the group elsewhere (even as it continued to distort his analysis). He returns openly to it in "Group Psychology." Since Freud is heavily indebted to LeBon--quoting pages and pages of his The Crowd, B-J begins with LeBon.

B-J describes LeBon in terms that make clear the proximity between LeBon and Freud. First, both read symptoms as pathological returns to a previous state (so, origins are revealed in symptoms). Second, the crowd is the buried truth (symptom of the social/political): "beind 'people' there lurks the crowd and 'primitive communism' (135). Third, the crowd reveals the 'unconscious substratam' that all its members have in common (something like a racial unconscious, although I think this is better understood simply as belonging: the crowd displays our fundamental nature as belonging. This common basis enables Freud to appropriate LeBon (blurring their respective terminologies);

the crowd is impervious to contradiction, to logical argumentation; credulous, it knows neither doubt nor degrees of conviction; it cannot be restrained, for it tolerates no lapse between desire and its realization, to the point of being careless about its own preservation; the only reality it recognizes is psychic reality (image, illusion, the 'magic word) . . . It seems, then, that at the end of the enumeration the matter is settled: crowd psychology is nothing but the psychology of the unconscious ... The unconscious, in other words, is the archaic group, sociality or collectivity. (And the only question left is in what sense the unconscious is [the] collective. 137

So, it is collective in the sense of common to individuals (and so still within an individual psychology) or is communal or trans, exceding the boundaries of 'individual', or is it prior to this very boundness? And, if we are talking here about prior collectivity than in what sense can we say it: this only repeats for us the problem of the subject or ego; we presuppose a unity.

The crowd, though, is not a unity; it has no identity of its own. B-J notes that LeBon insists that a crowd 'is based not on a common ground but on the absence of any 'subjectal' ground.' Crowds are accumulations from different causes (even if this accumulation is underneath or prior to his odious 'racial soul'). They have, then, a set of new characteristics: sentiment of invincible power, mental contagion, suggestibility. We should note that these are strange characteristics, clearly of disanalogous types--a feeling, a process, an attribute. Also, B-J observes that the latter two disrupt any thing of the crowd as some kind of closed entity in that contagion could designate a process that flows through the crowd, that produces a crowd, or that comes into the crowd from without. Suggestibility is similar: it could designate internal as well as extrnal processes (suggestions from another source).

The crowd does not have an unconscious (an inherited, archaic unconscious), simply because it is not a subject or an aggregate of subjects. At the very most, the crowd may be said to be the unconscious "itself," the crowd-unconscious or the mass unconsious: neither substratumr nor substructure, but rather a soft, malleable, plastic, infinitely receptive material without will or desire or any specific instinct of its own. A matrical mass: the group as a womb. 139

I am going to look for ways to avoid this maternalization of the crowd, particularly as it evokes the idiocy of aborption in jouissance, an imaginary unity, etc. For even if LeBon (or even Freud) may admit of such a reading, later work on crowds (Rude, specifically) provide strong evidence of the rational will of crowds. Even LeBon and Freud, though, reject 'infinite receptivity,' in that they note that the crowd can resist, object, and insist. The crowd acts more like a subject that B-J wants to acknowledge. But, this is likely because his interest is less in the crowd than in the Freudian subject.

B-J's basic point regarding LeBon, then, is that LeBon's crowd is indistinguishable from the unconscious because the unconscious is for me "indissolubly nonsubjectal and 'social," members of the crowd are just "mediums" controlled by suggestion. The model here is hypnosis (totally trendy at the time). The primordial crowd lies at the origin of society and the individual. Every specific crowd is a reappearance. There's a problem in LeBon's account, though, because the crowd doesn't seem capable of giving rise to or originating anything. They depend on suggestibility, on something coming from outside them, which means, again, that they can't be an origin.

The reactionary LeBon takes another path, the way of the Leader. B-J quotes LeBon: "Men gathered in a crowd lose all force of will, and turn instinctively to the person who possesses the quality they lack."  They have no will. What makes a leader the leader is the fact that he does (the feminity of the crowd and masculinity of the leader, the phallic logic at work here, is pretty crude). The leader gives form to the inchoate mass. B-J suggests that the form the leader provides it the political form as the Subject-form --and vice versa, establishing the complicity between the political form and the Subject-form: "There would be no body politic if there were not individual at the outset; and if this is so, it is because the body-politic is defined as a supra-indvidual" (145). The leader provides the crowd with its will.

What is Freud's response? He fully accepts the leader but rejects LeBon's account of suggestion. B-J summarizes Freud's critique of hypnosis: it is too violent and intrustive, too directive. Rather than allowing the unconscious to express itself by freeing it of its internal obstacles (as occurs in free association) hypnosis imprints it from without. But there's a problem: suggestibility didn't vanish from psychoanalysis. It's present under a different name: transference.

In an organicist explanation, Freud considers the nature of the tie holding members of the crowd together as Eros rendered as a combining or clustering tendency: society as a multicellular organism (Eros will ultimately be rendered as the love of each member for the leader). But doesn't this clash with the impulse underlying his critique of hypnosis? For B-J, the answer is yes. And this very tension indicates that we are dealing with the logic of the Subject.

For when Freud rises up against the tyrrany of suggestion, he is of course militating in favor of the autonomy of the individual subject. But when, like LeBon and many others, he conceives of society as an organism, he is likewise militating in favor of a collective subject or Subject-State . . . That body which is society requires a head; the organism requires a center of organization. And the group cannot set itself up as Subject except by setting  up, and setting itself up as, the figure of an independent, autonomous subject taking its authority from iutself alone--hence of an authoritarian leader . . .The politics outlined here is a narcissistic politics. 157

B-J, tracing Freud's "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego," doesn't turn directly to the problem of this Subject, this narcissistic politics. Instead he deconstructs the opposition between binding and unbinding. Ties among group members--narcissists all--are libidinal and nonlibidinal, possible and impossible, detached and attached all at once.

He also returns to identification, pulling out tensions in Freud's discussion of identification in the text. A first issue concerns the anteriority of identification to the ego--but how is identification without a model possible (part of the problem in the essay on narcissism). "The difficulty involving the formation of the ego or the birth of the subject" is  "impossible to resolve within the conceptual framework of psychoanalysis." It's impossible to say which comes first--identification or object bond.

A way out: a prehistory in which the two are not yet separate, where hate-identification and object love are one and the same, "devouring identification as process of ego-formation:" "but we are not win a prehistory of the ego, in a sociality or a collectivity that precedes all individual history" 180. B-J traces this out to argue for a kind of maternal-womb, identificatory devouring. He then introduces two other kinds of identification in the text. The purpose is to show a range of options open to Freud, who himself always chooses the "Oedipal" option, which means he bypasses certain problems (particularly of origination) and undertakes various conflations and elisions. To what end? According to B-J, to preserve the Subject and Politics, 191.

The preemptory installation of Oedipus complex at the origin of the history of the individual subject is a way of short-circuiting the investigation of the subject's genesis in a pre-individual identification with the other. In this sense, it is no exaggeration to say that the Oedipal hypothesis intervenes to protect the autarchy of the subject--or, in what amounts to the same thing, the propriety of its desire (its 'feelings,' its affects, and so on)--in order to protect it against the possibility of an altration (which particularly does not mean an alienation) constitutive of its identity, its most proper 'being.' 192

The result: the subject's exemption from the question of its being (like) the other, of its being-social. As B-J points out, the wild and unexpected move in the chapter on identification is the way that social psychology appears at the heart of individual psychology. "The group is thus at the origin (without origin) of the individual." Freud, though, conceals this in the Oedipus complex. B-J's argument is thus that the Oedipus complex is a political myth of an individual subject not permeated by violence 'of a relation without relation to the other,' but instead lovingly closed in on itself.

To be sure, the Oedipal complex itself denotes a crisis "and a violent one at that." Again, B-J notes the opposition and oscillation between identification and object choice: when violence is eliminated on one side, it shifts to the other. How can hate give way to love? How does love become hate? How does rivalrous identification become sympathetic identification? 

Freud takes this up in chapter 9 of "Group Psychology." The chapter rejects the herd instinct proposed by Trotter. Sociality is not natural--hostility and jealousy are. Identification, in the sense of sympathy, is necessary to put an end to rivalry. Here again, the problem: before, identification was the source of jealousy, "feeling like the other, in the place of the other, from the place of the other" 200. Now it turns into its opposite, giving rise to love, justice, a social conscience, a sense of duty. "Identification is thus both the locus of the problem and the site of its resolution" 202.

At this point, B-J turns to the leader, the relationship to which constitutes the founding bond of society. It won't be surprising to learn that Freud's account stumbles because the leader can't be understood via identification or libidinal ties (even though Freud tries to employ the Oedipal frame). Hence, Freud reintroduces narcissism to try to account for followers love for themselves in the leader. B-J asks whether, if the founding bond of the social is narcissistic, it makes sense to distinguish between narcissistic mental acts and social mental acts (as Freud does in the essay on narcissism. This suggests to me the instability of the individual, its blurring into the social. Rather than narcissism at the root of the social, the social is at the root of narcissism. Narcissism is a desperate failure at an impossible individuation.

If the leader is loved (and Freud discusses being in love in this context) this means that the ego is impoverished to the benefit of the object, which absorbs it. If the leader is identified with, this means that the object is introjected into the ego, which absorbs it. So, which is it? Freud's attempt to distinguish them in effect undermine the difference between them. One of the reasons this matters is that there has to be a difference between the bond between members and the bond between a member and the leader (without a difference, the leader is not a leader). 

Freud defines the group as "a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego" 212. For B-J, the problem is that Freud doesn't explain the sort of bond with object put in place. Thus, B-J constructs the following possibility. "Putting the object in the place of the ego ideal means putting it in that identificatory place where the ego would like to be, but where it cannot or must not be itself". The kind of identification at work is one that is incomplete in that the other remains other; the other is inassimilable ("inimitable and uneatable"); imitation of the inimitable. The example here is the Church, where the faithful are to be like Christ (the ideal) even as they are really to put themselves in Christ's place (which would be crazy).

B-J says that the same logic is at work "The Ego and the Id" (written three years after Group Psych). The point at stake involves identification in the Oedipal complex: if the boy child identifies with his father, that would maintain his rivalry with him. How, then, can the boy child have a love bond with his father that ends the rivalry? How can the child be like but not be like his father? There is, B-J, says "an antimimetic interdiction" that forms the heart of morality:

not to identify with the other (more precisely, not to identify the other with oneself) is the only way of respecting the other as other, without doing him violence. The Law is the of the Other. It is thus, by the same token, a Law of the Subject. "Do not be like me": this is understood, positively, prescriptively, as "Be yourself," "Be original," "Be a subject." The origin of morality is simultaneously the origin of the subject, in the sense that there is no subject (identifying itself as ego through difference from the other) except a moral subject, morally instituted. The Law assigns the subject, assigns it to being. Thus would emerge from the Oedipal chaos, where all is in all and the ego in the other, a subject finally identified, identifiable, capable of entering into normal, normed, regulated relations with others/ That, at least, is what could be said if this very "subject" did not have to identify itself in order to be a subject. 217

The law can't take the form of an interdiction because there isn't yet a subject. "The law, the double law that assigns the subject, is thus stated as follows: 'Identify without identifying.' Or, more simply still: 'Identify yourself as a subject.' (I am reminded b0th of Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals and Hegel in the Philosophy of Right: be a person and respect others as persons. Why would there need to be an injunction to be a person?)

For B-J the issue is that of the insane core of Oedipal law, the double bind instituting the subject at the site where it submits to a law by transgressing it (and this is why the subject is always guilty). The Oedipal law "binds twice over: it bonds and unbonds the subject" 218. 

B-J's writing at this point is wondrously, deliriously over-the-top, fullying enjoying the paradox of guilt, destruction, guilt, punishment, birth, and identification. Identifying in order not to identify, a veritable Escher-esque Oedipal complex where the exit is no different from the entrance. And yet I wonder if his enjoyment here may also be a kind of relief from the problem of Group Psychology --after all, he is discussing "The Ego and the Id." So the ego has a kind of separate obviousness that it lacks in Group Psychology. When he returns to Group Psychology, he does so rather flatly and simply, saying that the Father-Leader represents the ideal of crowd members, a point so obvious in the text that all the paradoxical delirium seems unnecessary, a distraction.

At this point, the chapter is almost over. Yet it feels strange and unsatisfying, moving quickly to hypnosis and then back to LeBon. The strangeness, to me, results from the disconnect between the Oedipal discussion and the return to 'the collective prehistory of humanity.' What's at stake here is the collective unconscious or the 'unconscious-as-collective' (235). "The first psychology of humanity (ours, even now) was collective" and "this 'psychology,' this thought, belonged to no subject. Being common to all (communing them), it belonged to no one."

And then: the story of the primal horde and Father-leader, killed by the sons yet narrated by the poet/genius who puts himself in the role of the Father-subject-creative genius. Who to be unique must imitate. For B-J, this is the story of Freud's egoistic dream, and ours as well. For me, it's a story of psychoanalysis as the failure of individuation, the impossibility of the individual. 

Why does he not ask whether the crowd, group, collective is Subject? Here Subject would be multiple, heterogeneous, conflictual, and incomplete even as active, creative, and willful. Hypnotist-Leader-Father would be contingent, tempting, and dangerous. Guilt is falling for the lure, pretending to the image of a separateness that is not separate. Do not identify, do not be like me means do not separate, do not put the image (ego) where we are and have  been. 

Central planning: maybe better than you think

The theoretical and the empirical arguments against central planning are weak. 

Download Murrell economics and socialism

A summary from Seth Ackerman:

Around the time of the Soviet collapse, the economist Peter Murrell published an article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives reviewing empirical studies of efficiency in the socialist planned economies. These studies consistently failed to support the neoclassical analysis: virtually all of them found that by standard neoclassical measures of efficiency, the planned economies performed as well or better than market economies.

First he reviewed eighteen studies of technical efficiency: the degree to which a firm produces at its own maximum technological level. Matching studies of centrally planned firms with studies that examined capitalist firms using the same methodologies, he compared the results. One paper, for example, found a 90% level of technical efficiency in capitalist firms; another using the same method found a 93% level in Soviet firms. The results continued in the same way: 84% versus 86%, 87% versus 95%, and so on.

Then Murrell examined studies of allocative efficiency: the degree to which inputs are allocated among firms in a way that maximizes total output. One paper found that a fully optimal reallocation of inputs would increase total Soviet output by only 3%-4%. Another found that raising Soviet efficiency to U.S. standards would increase its GNP by all of 2%. A third produced a range of estimates as low as 1.5%. The highest number found in any of the Soviet studies was 10%. As Murrell notes, these were hardly amounts “likely to encourage the overthrow of a whole socio-economic system.” (Murell wasn’t the only economist to notice this anomaly: an article titled “Why Is the Soviet Economy Allocatively Efficient?” appeared in Soviet Studies around the same time.)

Actually, the title is "Why does the Soviet Economy Appear to be Allocatively Efficient."  Download Why does the soviet economy appear

The Freudian Subject: ego

A key line of argumentation in The Freudian Subject attempts to de-sexualize psychoanalytic theory. I appropriate the idea as follows: Freud treats the unconscious as the unconscious of a subject. This leads him to individualize it, to contain it within the individual, as we might say, an ego unconscious. But much of what he discovers can't be contained within the individual. It points to an unconscious that cannot be trapped in a scene or point, an unconscious that moves and shifts. Why is the unconscious this way? I want to argue that it's because the unconscious is a crowd; it's plural, multiple (and so the question remains: is it a still the unconscious of a subject, now understood as a collective subject? or, is it collective but not a subject?) . Freud tries various ways to repress his knowledge of this crowd. One way is with his emphasis on sexuality, which also immediately ties the subject back to others, although in a more singular way, that is, a way delimited by Oedipus. Sex is too limiting (or, in the famous line from Sid and Nancy: sex is boring). 

How does Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen develop his argument? In the second section, he reads Freud's discussion of narcissism together with Freud's correspondence (Jung, Fleiss). A key issue: Freud's emphasis on sexuality, particularly in the eliding of the autoerotic body with narcissism that occurs in the correspondence with Jung. This elision is a problem. The autoerotic body is anarchic, ruptured, conflicting (70); this body doesn't merge easily into a narcissism that associates a whole, unified body with an individual, which makes the body into my own body. There is uneasiness and confusion here.

B-J argues that Freud insists on sexuality as a way to give body to narcissism. And, also, as a way to differentiate his view from Jung's even as it had blended and overlapped in a "communism of thought-sharing" in their correspondence. The emphasis on sexuality was, according to B-J, also a (re)institutionalization of "intellectual private property." The explanation of narcissism was a product of a narcissism caught up in mimetic rivalry.

B-J makes a similar argument as he reads Freud's "Psycho-Analytic Notes" together with the Freud-Jung correspondence on the topic of paranoia and homosexuality. For B-J, the issues at stake are much more those of rivalry than sexuality; Freud, however, emphasizes sexuality in the context of his own rivalrous identification with Jung. B-J's argumentation considers the "archesociality" of homosexuality in Freud's account, as well as the tension this causes for Freud's discussion of homosexuality as a threat to sociality. The discussion is intricate. For now, I want to jump to one of the conclusions:

So let us not dream, with Freud, of an ego whose existence would recede sociality (or--and it is the same thing--a sociality that would relate already-constituted subjects to each other. This would be to theorize with delusion, to speculate in line with desire. For narcissism is precisely that: the violent affirmation of the ego, the violent desire to annul that primitive alteration that makes me desire (myself) as the mimetic double . . .desire is mimetic and by the same token narcissistic, and that means that it launches headlong into  a systematic, unreflective forgetfulness of what institutes it.

It follow that desire is love of oneself, as Freud writes: self-love, love of the proper. It follows too that it is organized as a vehement rejection of all resemblances, all mimesis. To recognize that I resemble the other, that I resemble myself in him even in my own desire, would be tantamount to admitting the inadmissible: that I am not myself and that my most proper being is over there, in that double who enrages me.

It follows, finally, that narcissicism is violence, and that the ego ...is a gloomy tyrant . . . Narcissism is in profound collusion with power--by which we mean tyrannical power, or put another way, political madness--by virtue of its mimetic, rivalrous, (a)social origin . . . 93-94

Affirmation of the ego is violent because it is a wrenching of the ego out of the crowd, the collective, the group of which it is a part. Or, the ego is nothing else but this wrenching, this assertion of self. And it's an assertion doomed to frustration because it depends on the very others it needs to annihilate. The horror of the ego: I am not myself. 

B-J says that the violence of the ego is also present at the collective level: "the totalitarianism and imperialism of the 'we' are never anything but the supreme phase of the absolution of the ego, the "I," and they are implied in even the most solitary, most pacific meditations on the ego cogtito."

This does not mean that any collective is totalitarian, only that it risks totalitarianism insofar as they are 'the supreme phase' of the absolution of the ego. But, even in this somewhat watered down version, I wonder if B-J jumps to quickly to make the 'we' nothing but the ego bigger. That, I think, is too fast, particularly given his focus already on the dilemmas of sociality.

I've been reading this in order to get at the primacy of collectivity and a sense of collective desire. At this point, I am afraid that one of the costs of this direction is that the desire at work is violent. The violence, though, I think is the violence of the assertion of the ego. It's a product of mimesis, the operation that let's desire be as the desire of a subject even as it undermines the subject itself; or, desire insofar as creates and threatens an ego. 

 Fortunately, I think, the chapter ends in a way I need it to: primary narcissism is a myth, present only as already crossed out (101). Or, in my language, it's a symptom of the problems Freud is having enclosing the unconscious or accounting for the emergence of a subject as an ego.

That the subject emerges in and through a primordial fiction is what Freud has been saying from the outset, from the moment he declared ... that 'something' has to form the ego. This has to mean that the ego is nothing--not even amorphous matter, not even a 'fragmented body'--prior to such a formation, prior to such a 'creation.' Thus we have no business speculating about the nature of the ego, the subject, the Narcissus complex, any more than we may presuppose any sort of property or subjective identity. Such identity will always be apocryphal and fictious (but its falseness can no longer be truthfully expressed), inasmuch as there can be no subject except one that is initially modeled on or modeled by (here we have no way of distinguishing activity from passivity, spontaneity from receptivity) something that 'precedes' it. 116

In the beginning were others. We weren't among the others; I wasn't one among them. I emerge from and out of them and the I that emerges will always be to an extent false, fictious, imaginary (B-J, though rejects Lacan's account of the imaginary because 'in the beginning there is no one to see anything at all;' this doesn't seem to me to be necessary because I think they are talking about different stages).

And can we apply this to thinking about a political subject? Perhaps when we note the blurring of active and passive, spontaneous and receptive.

Back to B-J: his point is that Freud's early arguments presuppose the ego and the arguments in the narcissism essay attempt to solve this problem but fail (resulting in an essay that is unreadable). His very language breaks down.

if the ego is not 'present from the outset,' if it is nothing prior to accepting in (and as) 'itself' a form that comes 'from without,' it follows not only that the relation to the object (to the other, to the 'non-ego') is primary, but also and especially that this first relation cannot have been a specular relation, nor even, ultimately, a relation at all.  

The ego can't emerge by looking because that assumes that there is something that is looking; it can't emerge via an object relation, because that assumes a separate ego that can be in this relation.

Where the ego forms itself in the image of the other, where it mimes the other, one can no longer speak either of 'form' or 'image,' either of 'self' or 'other.' Where the id was (neither himself nor myself), the 'I" arrives. And the id can no longer be expressed in the language of the visible, of perception, of phenomenality, nor, by the same token, in any sort of theory of models and images. The other stage becomes a beyond-stage, a fore-stage of the primary mimesis. 118

Freud's attempts to explain the ego ideal and ideal ego, whether via introjection and internalization or projection flounder on the same problem: positing an ego before the one the origins of which he is trying to describe. Freud only 'solves' the problem by shifting it to another level.

How are we to explain that an ego (fragment) assimilates (itself) (to) the other and thereby forms itself? That it begins by incarnating (itself) (as) voice, law, ideal? That it emerges by incorporating (itself) (as) voice, law, ideal? That t emerges by incorporating (itself) (as) the other, the object? These are inevitable, and inevitably hopeless, questions, as long as continue to posit a preformed, ready-made ego. For it is not clear why such an ego would need to identify itself, even "partially," with an ideal imposed from without, or why it would desire to submit to the law that imposed imitation. If the subject is "at the beginning," why would it subject itself? 124

As B-J explains, this the problematic of the second topography Freud introduces in the 1920s:

How can we conceive of that strange figure of an ego that forms its ideal in its own image and forms itself in the image of its ideal, that projects itself in the ideal and introjects the ideal, that identifies the ideal with itself and itself with the ideal? 125

I think the answer has to turn on the crowd. And, the final chapter of the book thus focuses on the primal band.