An installment trying too hard, but not hard enough (cites omitted):
Agamben affiliates
whatever being with the capitalist commodification of the human body and the
technologization of its image in the spectacle. The photographic images proliferating out of
advertising and pornography are “neither generic nor individual, neither an
image of the divinity nor an animal form.” In them, the body “now became
something truly whatever.” The
“whatever” Agamben invokes here suggests a new approach to Guy Debord’s society
of the spectacle, one that takes back from the spectacle the positive
properties of being in language and being in common that it expropriates. For Agamben, whatever being thus suggests a
mode of being in the coming community. A remnant produced in capitalist
spectacle, whatever being is harbinger of a better future, one wherein the
division held together in the unity of the spectacle is ultimately overcome. Because
he wants to wrest transformations of human nature from their entrapment in the
spectacle, Agamben suggest the “geometrical splendor” of the legs of a long
line of dancing girls.
Another way to think
about the idea of “neither generic nor individual” is to link it to the
normalizing, aggregating aspect of disciplinary power. Modern disciplinary institutions,
be they home, school, factory, or state, produced individuals as types, as
occupants of social roles or positions. Recall photographs of Levittown, of
soldiers in training, of graduates in their caps and gowns. The self-governing,
reflective subject idealized as the outcome of the disciplines may have
understood himself to be an individual, but more than that, he was an instance
of a form.
Agamben associates the
planetary petty bourgeoisie a frustration with and impropriety toward
identities rooted in physical particularities or differences in language,
tradition, or culture. He concedes that fascism and Nazism had already recognized
seen in the petty bourgeoisie the “decline of the old social subject.”
So he jumps quickly over their nationalism as a false popular identity to
assert the new planetary refusal of identity. With this jump, however, he
misses the mass as a modern collective force that is also neither generic nor
individual. In Baudrillard’s formulation, “The mass is without attribute,
predicate, quality, or reference.”
Agamben’s whatever beings thus appear as the components of the mass or as the
mass now rendered in terms of the singularities that compromise it. Routing
around the mass enables Agamben to evade the way that what he presents as being
in the coming community inverts the political imaginary of radicals from the
sixties and seventies: they feared erasure, that is, being commodities, being indistinguishable,
being one among many. They rejected the terms of mass society and mass media,
the forced collectivizing of their self-perception into the envelope of “us.” Agamben
accepts the mass without its collective form, taking the joy of dissolution
into a whole as the singularity of belonging.
Displacing or standing
in for the mass, the petty bourgeoisie present a new opportunity, an
opportunity for a form of belonging unhindered by the division and specificity
of “belonging to.” Agamben writes:
Because if
instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper
and senseless form of individuality, human were to succeed in belonging to this
impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and an
individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely
exposed singularity—if humans could, that is, not be-thus in this or that
particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and
their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without
presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication with the
incommunicable.
We have been produced
as subjects unlikely to coalesce, subjects resistant to solidarity and
suspicious of collectivity. Central to this production has been the cultivation
and feeding of a sense of unique and special individuality. Every sperm is a
sacred: so began the story of our unique cellular lives. Or, every potential
genetic combination carries with it the remarkable potentiality we locate in
our individuated selves. Each voice must be heard (but they don't combine into
a chorus). Each vote must be counted (but they add up to less than a movement).
Each person must be visible (but then we don't see a group). Personalized “participatory”
media is a problem not only because of its personalization of participation. More than that is its injunction that we participate
ever more in personalization: make your own avatar, video, profile, blog,
mobster, video, app. Participation becomes indistinguishable from personalization,
the continued cultivation of one's person. Leave your mark.
What would happen if
we just stopped? Agamben’s evocation of singularity and belonging detached from
a compulsion to cultivate an individual identity or identity with a specific
group opens up the potential for another practice or form of belonging, one
unlimited by the divisions and restrictions of presuppositions of being this or
that. He suggests, moreover, that the beings who would so belong are not subjects
in the sense that European philosophy or psychoanalysis might theorize. If some
sort of identity served as a locus of ethical personality, and the search for
this identity has been configured as an important ethical task (perhaps, as
some philosophers would have it, the task of each human life), then whatever
beings would emerge as those who are not subject to such tasks. Unburdened by
the obligations of being this or that, of being bound by choices or words or
expectations of meaning, whatever beings could flow into and through community
without presuppositions.
Agamben asks what the
politics of whatever singularity could be, what sort of politics could
accompany “a being whose community is mediated not by any condition of
belonging (being red, being Italian, being Communist) . . .but by belonging
itself.”
Because the course of his exposition of whatever being takes him through Saint
Thomas Aquinas and limbo as the habitat of the souls of unbaptized children,
the political question seems particularly vexing. Those in limbo lack God, but they don’t
suffer from this lack; they know nothing of it: “Neither blessed like the elected, nor
hopeless like the damned, they are infused with a joy with no outlet.”
With limbo long synonymous with a
certain stuckness, an in between condition of persistence that is neither here
nor there, with an inability to go forward or back, it is difficult to register
a politics that we might admire or seek. Souls in limbo belong in neither
heaven nor hell; this condition of belonging to neither is limbo. It is also
Agamben’s model for a politics of absolute enmity toward the State.
Agamben writes that “a
being radically devoid of any representable identity would be absolutely
irrelevant to the State.” And
so the State or, better, states, would continue, unbothered and unlimited by
the demands of people. They could attack and imprison, exploit and ignore—the future
unfolding in and through militarized predatory robot drones. For Agamben, however,
rather than easing the way for unchecked state power, whatever being is the “principal
enemy of the State.” The State, he tells us, “cannot tolerate in any way . . .
that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that
humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging.”
Yet the State has from time to time tolerated and used the mass, a form of
co-belonging without representable condition. The mass can threaten or support
it, subvert or sustain it. In Baudrillard’s terms, the mass is neither a
group-subject nor an object. It does not become a conscious revolutionary force
but neither does it submit to attempts to make it speak. Surveys and statics
may simulate it, but the mass remains ungraspable, particularly as these very
surveys are implicated in the reflexive constitution of the mass they survey.
The absence of the mass, Baudrillard says, “is nevertheless intolerable.” Thus,
it drives the repetitive processes of polling and testing. The implications of
the mass, then, are not only that the state can and has tolerated forms of
co-belonging that do not affirm an identity, but that the absence of an
identity can itself generate processes of surveillance and incitement-to-speech
useful for producing and maintaining power.
Baudrillard claims
that the masses “accept everything and redirect everything en bloc into the spectacular, without requiring any other code,
without requiring any meaning, ultimately without resistance, but making
everything slide into an indeterminate sphere which is not even that of
non-sense, but that of overall manipulation/fascination.” This
view of unification without meaning aligns with Debord’s account of the
spectacle as an unreal unity masking class division.
Agamben’s account of the coming community as the end of the era of the
spectacle, while explicitly engaging Debord, can also be read as an implicit
engagement with Baudrillard. He takes
from each critique of the spectacle “a positive possibility that can be used
against it.” Agamben conceives the spectacle as language or
communicativity. It is a form for the expropriation of linguistic being, a form
that alienates people from language. Yet, this very expropriation and
alienation opens up a new experience of language and linguistic being: “not
this or that content of language, but language itself, not this or that true proposition, but the very fact that
one speaks.” Baudrillard’s
view of the spectacular as without code and meaning becomes the positive
experience of language as such. The division between sense and non-sense is
overcome within the real commonality of the taking place of language.
Debord writes, “Whatever
lays claim to permanence in the spectacle is founded on change, and must change
as the foundation changes.” Agamben’s
whatever beings are the foundation of the spectacle. They shift and mutate, are
reformatted and reconfigured. They are the thus of change, the thrust of
change, change as the capillary, plastic movement of drive.
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