W. is impressed by my stammer.—‘You stammer and stutter’, says W., ‘and you swallow half your words. What’s wrong with you?’ Every time I see him, he says, it gets a little worse. The simplest words are beginning to defeat me, W. says. Maybe it’s mini-strokes, W. speculates. That would account for it.—‘You had one just there, didn’t you?’

Perhaps, W. muses, my stammering and stuttering is a sign of shame. W. says he never really thought I was capable of it, shame, but perhaps it’s there nonetheless.—‘Something inside you knows you talk rubbish’, he says. ‘Something knows the unending bilge that comes out of your mouth’. (Lars Iyer, Spurious)

Equality is a central term for Rancière, but it is quite a circumscribed equality, the equality specifically and only of speaking beings. Which immediately raises the question, what about non-speaking beings? Animals would be the most obvious example, but there are also human beings prevented from speaking by age and infirmity, disability, oppression. Rancière might object that these examples of non-speaking don’t exclude people from the class of equals, which isn’t strictly speaking beings, but rather beings that have the logos, that have access to language; and, furthermore, it is the structure of the logos, of language, which ensures this equality. However, in the way Rancière makes his argument, speech is indeed theoretically central, and problematic. The argument for axiomatic equality occurs in what is, as it were, the primal scene of politics for Rancière, the moment at which a master gives an order to a slave. This contains the central contradiction of politics: the master presents themselves as of a different order from the slave and so as entitled to give the slave orders; but in the process of giving the order, the master assumes that the slave is capable of understanding the order, that is, that master and slave are equal in their possession of language. This argument doesn’t depend on speech literally understood – it would work if the order was handed over in written form or using sign language – but it does depend on features of speech broadly construed: the two participants must be in the same place at the same time for their equality, the possibility of the slave speaking back to the master, to manifest itself.

That is, Rancière’s argument for the equality of speaking beings is phonocentric in Derrida’s sense. Phonocentrism is the belief that spoken language is more authentic or primary than written language. The two features that are supposed to give spoken language this primacy are the presence and synchronicity it is supposed to require; through this presence, the speaker retains the ability to directly authenticate the meaning of their words. Writing, on this theory, is a poor copy of speech, where, in the absence of the author, the written text is parasitic on the authority which the primary speech situation provides. Derrida points out, however, that the asynchrony and absence which characterize writing are features that are inherent to all language, and are present as possibilities in spoken language as well. The absence of language is the condition of possibility of its presence.

This isn’t just a philosophical position for Derrida; rather, the prioritization of spoken language in philosophy supports the prioritization of those authorized to speak, particularly white men. Irigaray makes a somewhat similar argument, that philosophical accounts of meaning in language depend on excluding the non-meaningful in a gendered way, constructing the category of femaleness through this exclusion from language. What differentiates Derrida’s and Irigraray’s positions from Rancière’s is that, for Rancière, exclusion from language is a ruse of the powerful (slaves are persuaded of their inability to speak, and thus their inequality, but this is a false belief, the falsehood of which they can realize), whereas for Derrida and Irigaray exclusion from language is a result of the operation of language itself.

This suggests an alternative to Rancière’s idea of the equality of all speaking beings: where we are equal, rather, is in our status as non-speaking beings, in that moment of faltering hesitation that may (or may not) precede speech. This idea of a community of non-speaking beings is part of Adam’s idea of “radical awkwardness,” although this awkwardness may be a more general sociality than just the linguistic; nevertheless, I think a specifically linguistic inarticulacy is an important part of the phenomenology of awkwardness. Thinking about awkwardness primarily in terms of language also allows us to use a whole history of thinking about the relationship between women and language to think about the relationship between awkwardness and gender.

A number of  reviews of Awkwardness pointed out that all the awkward characters discussed in the book are male, and this somewhat blunts the potentially radical force of awkwardness. Judith Halberstam has a useful analysis of a related phenomenon, the difference between male and female stupidity (using as examples Dude, Where’s My Car? and 50 First Dates, respectively). Although stupidity is the opposite of the intellectual competence traditionally assigned to men, male stupidity isn’t opposed to this stereotype; “though we punish and naturalize female stupidity,” a man’s stupidity “is quickly folded back into his general appeal as a winning form of vulnerability…. Male stupidity masks the will to power that lies just behind the goofy grin, and it masquerades as some kind of internalization of feminist critiques” (The Queer Art of Failure, 55-7). So too with male awkwardness, which, as in the Apatow comedies Adam discusses (and as Adam points out) raises the possibility of a critique of articulacy only in order to resolve the problem in a new and non-awkward male homosociality. Embracing female awkwardness would be more radical, because it would involve an upending of the standards which exclude women by privileging the possession of language.

This is particularly relevant in the post-Fordist context that Adam discusses, because of the increasing economic importance of articulacy, an articulacy which is increasingly feminized. Just as Apatovian male awkwardness is ironic, a mask for continued male power, so too is post-Fordist female articulacy; this image of the sorted, omnicompetent woman is produced at the same time that possession of language is increasingly tightly integrated with the forms of control involved in wage labor, which means that language is increasingly experienced not as a capability but as a demand. In One Dimensional Woman, Nina discusses the way in which post-Fordism feminizes labor, and connects this in particular to “the demand to be an ‘adaptable’ worker, to be constantly ‘networking,’ ‘selling yourself,’ in effect to become a kind of walking CV” (21). Linguistic labor requires a compulsory sociality, which repurposes earlier ideas about women’s work and women’s greater social skills as a paradigm of labor.

This shows how post-operaismo discussions of linguistic labor as the basis for the construction of the multitude may be overly optimistic. Virno does recognize that the rise of linguistic labor in post-Fordism  is “ambivalent,” in that it can give rise to forms of domination as well as forms of liberation. However, there is still an underlying optimism in the idea that post-Fordist linguistic labor involves a “fundamental mode of being,” as Virno says (A Grammer of the Multitude, 84), because the suggestion is that the communication involved in post-Fordist labor involves a kind of fundamental human universality, which is liberated, or produced in a more direct form (and so in principle at least available for re-appropriation) in these new forms of capitalism.

But what if it is not speech, but non-speaking, which is the fundamental human universality? Then awkwardness would not only be, as Adam argues, the potential grounds for a radical politics, it could also be a mode of resistance. Discussing an earlier form of compulsory sociality, Shulamith Firestone describes a kind of weaponized awkwardness:

My ‘dream’ action for the women’s liberation movement: a smile boycott, at which declaration all women would instantly abandon their ‘pleasing’ smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them (The Dialectic of Sex).

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2. Bour­geois equality It was very considerate of Nina Power to publish an article on Rancière, Feuerbach and the early Marx just when I’ve been trying to figure out this relationship, and so when I’m in a position to take advantage of her very clear discussion. One thing that’s not clear to me,...
3. German, the lan­guage of real life A footnote in Capital: In English writers of the 17th century we frequently find “worth” in the sense of value in use, and “value” in the sense of exchange value. This is quite in accordance with the spirit of a language that likes to use a Teutonic word for the...

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This inserts us in a future world in which the apocalypse somehow took place in the 50s, or at least, in the aesthetic of the 1950s, as we see in the decaying Googie architecture and atomic-age trash that clutter the landscape in both. This strikes me as an interesting limit-case of the way our image of the future is still tied to the way in which the the future was imagined in the 50s (the “where’s my jetpack” problem). We’re so incapable of imagining a new future, we can’t even imagine the end of the world without borrowing from the past. This especially a problem for Wall-E; in Fallout, the apocalypse is a nuclear holocaust arising from war with China, that is, it is an apocalypse on a 1950s model. But the environmental disaster in Wall-E is much more modern; that even this has to be imagined via the 50s suggests some fairly significant limitations to our historical imagination.

The out-of-place 50s aesthetic also reveals something interesting about the way in which Wall-E understands environmental catastrophe, which becomes apparent when the action in the second half of the film moves from the Googie-detritus-cluttered Earth to the luxurious spaceship. As Wall-E zoomed into the neon-lit interior of the spaceship, I thought we had moved to Shanghai. The film’s model for the decadent future, that is, the quintessential postmodern, postfordist city, which is contrasted with the stilled machinery and modernist skyscrapers of the first half of the film. What this seems to set up is a strange vision of Fordism as a kind of virtuous Eden; Wall-E is the Fordist worker, engaged in proper work, before the fall caused by the introduction of a consumer society, and this is reinforced by the human return to Earth, and to manual labor, at the end of the film. This doesn’t make much sense as an analysis of Fordism: a social system of mass consumption is what makes the economics of Fordism possible; the incoherence is reinforced by the aesthetics, because Googie is not a dour and industrial style, but a consumerist one.

Indeed, what seems to really exercise the film is not so much consumerism or environmental destruction, but virtualization or immateriality. This is clearest in the way the fat humans in space are surrounded by their screens, using videophones to communicate even with people next to them, with one human being liberated by Wall-E’s interruption, forcing her to turn off her screen and confront the unmediated world (and, later, another human) apparently for the first time (leading to a weird moment where she gazes in wonder at the beauty of the neon billboards, which she’s never previously seen; if the humans are all embedded in their virtual world, to whom are the billboards directed?). More subtly, it seems to me this horror of the immaterial is embedded in the consumption we see in the second half of the film. While the humans are fat and consume both ravenously and lazily, the film doesn’t seem to be so concerned by the fact that, say, what they are drinking is full of sugar, as that it comes in a giant, Buy-and-Large branded, cup. It’s not the consumption of things which is the problematic part of consumerism, in other words, but the consumption of symbols.

This also explains another puzzling feature of the film: the valorization, in a film supposedly worried above all about waste and useless trash, of Wall-E’s collection of the discarded ephemera he finds among the trash-heaps of Earth. Why are these objects worthy of respect and preservation, rather than being further examples of where consumer society has gone wrong? I think the answer is that they genuinely are objects, divorced from the symbolic context of branding and immaterial capitalism: even though they may be mass produced, they do not share the kind of  symbolic production that produces commodities as branded commodities. Writing back when the film came out, k-punk described Wall-E as a “bricoleur-hauntologist, reconstructing human culture from a heap of fragments.” It is the disconnection of objects from meanings which makes reconstruction both possible and necessary, and it also raises the possibility that the culture reconstructed might be different from the original construction (I’m reminded of Joseph Cornell’s collages). This suggests a more positive political program than the Fordist nostalgia and moralizing anti-consumerism that make up the most obvious message of the film. Can we ourselves, without waiting for the ecological apocalypse (or, even in the shadow it casts from the future) undertake this kind of bricolage, and liberate commodities from their commodification, assigning them new meanings and new uses?

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2. The pathos of com­modi­ties I think Lenin underestimates the genuine pathos of the Toy Story films in his review, which reinforces (and is reinforced by) his pedagogical theory of ideology, which tends to emphasize the power of cultural products to impart ideology, thereby underemphasizing why audiences accept and inhabit this ideology. To describe the...
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Even as emotionally invested as I am in Radio 1, though, the reactionaryness of the coalition is obviously more worrying, although it does occur to me that there is a way in which New Labour was more neoliberal than the coalition are. It’s an often-remarked paradox that the transition to  neoliberalism under Thatcher didn’t involve a movement of power away from the state, but rather a centralization of power in order to allow for the dismantling of local state structures and the imposition of market mechanisms. The marketization of society, that is, required that the state increase its separate and sovereign political character. But the state under New Labour was anything but a unified sovereign; it frequently seemed to have no idea what it was doing at all. Think of higher education policy, in which the government was obsessed with the idea that everyone should attend university, while seeming to give no thought to what the distinctive value of university education might be (thus the policy managed to be both elitist and philistine at the same time).

This kind of incoherence isn’t a mistake or a weakness, though (it’s not that the state under New Labour acted less than before, but that it acted less coherently and autonomously); it’s an extension of neoliberalization to the state itself. The new government does seem more ideologically coherent, however, and I’m not sure how this will end up manifesting itself. Where next for the state in neoliberalism? A recentralization to impose a new mode of neoliberal accumulation (but the coalition seems to have no more idea than anyone else what this would be)? Or a neoliberalism that finally really does try and do without the state, rather than reconfiguring or redeploying it (an idea which is both terrifying and insane)?

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2. Lib­er­alism: threat or menace? Why shouldn’t we call out Lib Dem “betrayal”? Because they haven’t betrayed anyone. To think that they have reinforces the mistaken belief that, when they describe themselves as “progressive,” they mean “left.” But Lib Dem progressivism isn’t just a fluffy sort of not quite socialism, it’s a specifically liberal version...
3. Labour MP: em­ploy­ment is pun­ish­ment Well, that’s not what John Denham is actually saying. He doesn’t need to say it or even think it, as it’s the implicit New Labour model behind this bold policy initiative: Unemployed people convicted of crimes should receive tougher sentences than those with full-time jobs or caring responsibilities, a leading...

Put simply, what liberal democracy has provided over the last two centuries is a modest ethical gap between economy and polity. Even as liberal democracy converges with many capitalist values (property rights, individualism, Hobbesian assumptions underneath all contract, etc.) the formal distinction it establishes between moral and political principles on the one hand and the economic order on the other has also served as insulation against the ghastliness of life exhaustively ordered by the market and measured by market values. It is this gap that a neo-liberal political rationality closes as it submits every aspect of political and social life to economic calculation.

This is right, but phrased this way it risks idealizing liberal democracy in just the way Brown wants to avoid. The separation of the political from the economic here looks like an opposition, in which the political is not merely autonomous from the economic, but capable of resisting and controlling it. The question is, though, where does this separation of the political from the economic come from? Poulantzas argues that the source of this separation is itself economic: the autonomy of the political is the specific form taken in capitalism of the interrelation of the economic and the political (although it’s not usually read this way, this is Marx’s point in “On the Jewish Question”).

This desire to defend the autonomy of the political from a supposed encroachment by neoliberalism is an example of the melancholy attachment to liberal democracy that Brown criticizes: what was once an object of left critique—the imbrication of liberal democracy in the capitalist economy—is repressed to allow a hyperbolic defense of this ambivalently missed object. The melancholy attachment to politics is a consistent theme of post-Marxism: certainly in Laclau and Mouffe, probably in Rancière, and perhaps also in Badiou and Žižek. The problem is that it misunderstands what is needed for a reconceptualization of left politics adequate to the changed political circumstances of neoliberalism; the difference is not a matter of a greater or lesser autonomy of the political; rather, we face a different form of the autonomy of the political as a form of its imbrication in the economic.

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3. No on 90 California is, politically, an odd place. It has a reputation as one of the “bluest” states (which, in America’s curious chromo-semantics means “left wing”); but it’s also a home of libertarianism, which coexists with the left in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. This combination makes California an interesting testing-ground for...

On the strength of Adam’s recommendation, I’ve been making my way through the show over the past month. Although from the beginning it was clear that the show looked beautiful and was marvelously acted, some of my initial concern remained: was the show’s 1960s setting anything other than window-dressing?It wasn’t until eight episodes into the first season that the thematic significance of the 1960s advertising industry became clear. The crucial scene comes when Don Draper drops in on his bohemian mistress and argues with her beatnik friends, who tell him that the adverts he creates are merely lies. Don’s response, that “there is no big lie, there is no system,” is quite correct. Advertising doesn’t simply lie about the world, on the contrary, as Don’s practice throughout the show makes clear, it tells, or rather constructs, a particular sort of truth, a kind of dream image of capitalism. In Mad Men, however, this accusation of lying strikes Don particularly closely, because he is a liar, who has been passing himself off under an assumed identity, that of Don Draper, which is not his own. Don has used this name to “make something of himself,” to recreate himself as a different person, but the falsehood leaves a stain of uncertainty, perhaps only visible to himself, in his identity.

Žižek argues that contemporary capitalism is not based around demanding that subjects conform to a specific identity, but rather demanding that they answer the question, “what do you want?” While the classical liberal subject was based on identity defined in relation to a structure of authority, the contemporary subject requires a continuous self-questioning based on a fundamental insecurity. Don Draper is precisely this subject, involved in the dream-construction of capitalism at precisely the time when symbolic authority was eroding and the subject of fixed identity was being replaced by the flexible subject. Mad Men is, in part, a dramatization of this transformation, and so is not about how different the 1960s were, but about how similar they are.

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3. Ad­busters: Pawn of capital Some classic Adbusters stupidity: Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group. The boring point is that this...

Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group.

The boring point is that this is, obviously, false. The idea of a counterculture arises from the same mid-20th century economic and social changes that lead to consumerism and the modern advertising industry. Hipsterism’s close relationship to the advertising industry isn’t something new at all. What is interesting, though, is how this spurious account of hipsters shows Adbusters‘ characteristically paranoid relationship to consumerism.

In an Adbusting frame of mind, advertising is an ever-present danger. What if our thoughts, those very things we think are most individual, were really placed there by adverts? Wouldn’t that be terrible? The sad thing of course is that this has already happened; the problem with consumerism isn’t that people mistakenly believe they are expressing their identities through their purchases; it’s that, under capitalism, our identities really are bound up with the things we purchase, and the activities our economic positions allow us to do (or prevent us from doing). But part of the way this whole structure materializes itself is through the way in which people continue to act as if their choices were those of authentic individuals, even when they are aware  that consumer choices in general are not authentic: so buying Vice magazine is a meaningless consumer choice, but buying Adbusters is a real authentic expression.

It’s this illusory gap between the self and the capitalist system that allows the system to function (I’m ventriloquizing Žižek again here). Not coincidentally, these ideas of authenticity and self-expression are important parts of the idea of the counterculture (and of forerunners to the counterculture, such as romanticism, another modern bourgeois phenomenon). But this isn’t to condemn counterculture; like many features of capitalism, it’s double-edged, or I hope it is, because there’s certainly no getting outside of it. Adbusters would do well to stop worrying so much about advertizing, and doing a bit more to understand it.

So, I was feeling a bit sorry for the poor hipsters, targets of Adbusters‘ flailing moralism (which reaches its nadir in that article when the author attacks a 17-year-old for being a self-important poseur; I mean, shooting fish in a barrel, surely); might I find myself in the position of defending people who are certainly beyond any defense? Luckily, my fat blogger’s hatred was rekindled by reading this enormously fatuous post by Momus (but I repeat myself):

Not only does Haddow fail to see that hip subculture is a big machine for creating sex and art, he fails to see that being hip can be a sort of code of honour, something sadly lacking in the cultural mainstream. The spiritual sloth Haddow accuses the hip subculture of is actually much more prevalent in the general population, which schlepps about in jeans and listens to shapeless, floppy music and sleepwalks through shapeless, floppy jobs. People in the hip subculture are more likely — like chivalric aristocrats — to pay attention to what they’re wearing, to experiment, to innovate. (via)

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If Zoe Williams thinks chavs are poor or victims of deprivation, she clearly knows as little about them as she does about the basis of comedy. Chavs are rarely lacking in disposable income and if they’re deprived of anything, it’s taste. Why do we have to be subjected to Ms Williams’s unsubstantiated Islington/Hampstead/Putney view of the world?

As opposed, you see, to the view of the world held by the author of the letter, from Sutton-at-Hone, Kent.

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But the reaction of the common man, woman, and child—”That? Why you can’t change that! You must be out of your mind!”—is closest to the truth (The Dialectic of Sex, 1).

I approve, of course, of Firestone’s call for the abolition of childhood. Her refusal to justify naturalized hierarchies is probably more intransigent, and more necessary, in this case even than in her anakysis of women’s oppression. But, as with her discussion of the biological roots of sexed oppression, there’s a frustrating gap in her account between the biological generalities and the historical specifics. Firestone of course recognizes that the particular forms taken by oppression are not fixed; but what remains unclear to me is where these particular forms of opression come from. If the biological is supposed to be determining, but the form taken by the biological is itself determined by something else, isn’t it the “something else” that is really determining (behind the curtain, pulling the strings, as it were)?

This problem is particularly apparent in the discussion of the oppression of children because, in Firestone’s account, the oppression of children seems to have only really got going relatively recently, some time in modernity. But surely the difference in strength between children and adults predated this; so what caused this continuum of capability to become interpreted as a difference between two kinds of people, children and adults? Firestone does suggest an intriguing reason for the rise of the ideology of childhood, although she doesn’t follow it up (and, indeed, it’s not obviously compatible with her overall analysis of children as an oppressed class).

The childmen and childwomen of medieval iconography are miniature adults, reflecting a wholly different social reality: children then were tiny adults, carriers of whatever class and name they had been born to, destined to rise into a clearly outlined social position (86).

The rise of the ideology of childhood, then, was also the rise of a group of people who were not (yet) carriers of a class and name, who were “innocent,” in the sense of unformed by a past or by connections with others. And when you start thinking of children like that, they start to seem a lot like the bourgeois subject.

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There are some things I find difficult to appreciate in a properly dialectical fashion; one of these is Emeryville. A small city effectively carved out of the north-west corner of Oakland, it was once one of the most heavily industrialized parts of the Bay Area. Following an earthquake in 1989, it was redeveloped as a city-sized shopping mall. As such, it’s one of the most extraordinary attempts I am aware of to destroy public space. It’s unbelievably hostile to pedestrians, as walking from shop to shop requires crossing the gigantic car parks the city is built around, or navigating the eerily deserted bridges over the railway, or squeezing through the fences that separate one piece of corporate turf from another.

Advertising hangs like heraldic banners, turning the public spaces of the city into the fortified encampments of different brands.

A potential dialectical key to Emeryville lies in the train station; which was the city’s original reason for existing, and, being seriously damaged by the 1989 earthquake, was also a major catalyst for the redevelopment of the city. But the aesthetics (to say nothing of the political economy) of America railways are interesting. The 1950s styling of the Amtrak’s rolling stock is picked up to the point of parody by the design of Emeryville station. But it’s a parody that’s rater too appropriate to Emeryville, the town rebuilt as a shopping mall. The shopping mall is the dream image of the 1950s, the dream image  post-New Deal prosperity. Part of the horror of Emeryville is seeing that dream made flesh, while still, here and there, haunted by a post-War optimism.

Walking back to the bus stop, over the bridge across the train lines, I saw this problem crystalized in industrial design. The lamp above, kitsch nostalgia as part of late-capitalist security culture.

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1. Adapting a Woody Allen joke So, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault are in some kind of critical theory afterlife. They get talking, and at some point Foucault asks Benjamin, “Do you think sex is boring?” Benjamin grins and nods, and says, “Yes, if you do it right.”...
2. Britney Spears ex­plains the com­modity form We’ve all probably imbibed, in one form or another, a left-wing culture criticism that draws, in one way or another, on Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of the culture industry; even I find it difficult to like Paris Hilton sometimes. But their essay is more interesting than the reflexive anti-commodification that...
3. Against the fiction of “presentism” The true method of making things present is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space). (The collector does just this, and so does the anecdote.) Thus represented, the things allow no mediating construction from out of “large context.” The same method applies, in essence,...