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...

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 actual thing, and a Romance word for its reflexion.

Marx misses a trick here by failing to point out why English has this strange dichotomy. When the Normans invaded England in 1066, they implanted a French-speaking aristocracy, ruling over a people who spoke Anglo-Saxon. So the language used in much daily practice was (Germanic) Anglo-Saxon, while the language used in law and administration was French. English retains in its vocabulary traces of something Marx pointed out in The German Ideology, the basis of abstract thought (and hence also ideology) in the division of mental and manual labor:

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

And a few paragraphs later:

Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears. (The first form of ideologists, priests, is concurrent.) From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of “pure” theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc.

However, there may be good reasons why Marx didn’t bring up this point in Capital, because by that point his theory of ideology had changed. In The German Ideology, material relations are themselves transparent, and are only obfuscated by the imposition of an”inverted” ideology generated by the ruling class. The working class, then, are in a position to access the truth through material work. Not so in Capital. Marx develops the theory of commodity fetishism to show how material relations can themselves be mystificatory, how material production can be at the same time the production of illusions about production:

The labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things…. The twofold social character of the labour of the individual appears to him, when reflected in his brain, only under those forms which are impressed upon that labour in every-day practice by the exchange of products. In this way, the character that his own labour possesses of being socially useful takes the form of the condition, that the product must be not only useful, but useful for others, and the social character that his particular labour has of being the equal of all other particular kinds of labour, takes the form that all the physically different articles that are the products of labour. have one common quality, viz., that of having value.

Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it.

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The kind of critique I have in mind is one that sees the problem of capitalism as the “spread of the inert,” the way in which the growing concern with inert objects harms human intersubjective relationships . This line of thought tends to lead into a moralizing critique of consumerism in which the problem with capitalism is our over-absorption with consumer goods (with revolution being, presumably, the symbolic violence towards Ikea furniture in Fight Club).

This might look like a Marxist analysis, as it is, after all, a rejection of commodities. But the point of the analysis of commodity fetishism isn’t that commodities are bad, but rather an exposé of the way in which commodity production makes us misperceive relations between things. That is to say, the critique of inert objects isn’t a critique of commodity fetishism, but rather remains completely caught up within it. Marx’s point is that, as commodities, objects are not inert: tables dance and “evolve out of their wooden brains grotesque ideas” (Capital). Because of this, object oriented ontology’s understanding of objects as active can be helpful in understanding commodities.

But, you might say, doesn’t object-oriented ontology, with its isolated objects that never enter into relations, make the mistake of commodity fetishism to an even greater degree than the anti-consumerism argument, by completely removing objects from the social relations of which they are the bearers? I’m not sure it does. One of the things that object-oriented ontology rightly reminds us of is the importance of distinguishing between ontological dependence and causal dependence. That objects cannot be reduced to their relations does not mean that they could have come to exist without these relations. The relations of production which produce commodities as commodities are no less visible on an object-oriented view. Furthermore, for Marx commodity fetishism is not just an illusion, a misrecognition of relations as objects. Rather, commodity fetishism is a material reality: capitalism really does produce autonomous objects which gain their powers from the relations which produced them. Object-oriented ontology’s account of objects is compatible with this materialist analysis of commodity fetishism, indeed, may be better placed to explain commodities than a philosophy which focuses on the human subject.

And this might show us a way out of commodity fetishism, by directing criticism not towards the commodity, but towards the fetish. The problem with commodity fetishism is the opacity it generates about the relationships in which humans and commodities are captured. The solution to this, then, would not be to reject commodities, but to liberate them from the occulted networks of commodity production, which would allow the independent powers of objects to act, rather than standing over against humans as a store of congealed labor. The end of commodity fetishism would be the liberation of the commodity as much as it would be the liberation of the proletariat (indeed, the two are bound up with one another inasmuch as labor-power is itself a commodity).

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2. “It does no good to the things to say merely that they have being” Recent posts at Object Oriented Philosophy and Larval Subjects made me think it’s worth disentangling a number of different ways in which objects could be thought to be “real.” First would be to maintain that objects cannot be reduced to their components, either physical or sensory (that is, there really...
3. Robots in gen­dered cap­i­talist re­la­tions I think it’s pretty clear that the Transformers films are pathological, but it’s difficult to determine whether the pathology lies in society, the film industry, or in the individual psychology of Michael Bay. Maybe there’s plenty of blame to go round, we can blame the film industry for allowing a...

Except, this mathematical inability turns out to reveal something important about Marx’s method. One of the most important aspects of skill in maths, I think, is a certain facility with abstraction, recognizing that the same thing can bear many different roles, and shuffling between these roles. The number 2, for example, can be a numerator or a denominator, or both, while still remaining the number 2. This kind of abstraction seems something Marx is incapable of. Perhaps the most obvious example is the way Marx doesn’t distinguish between a property and the way it is measured , and so rather than talking about, say, labor time and price as two different ways of representing the value of a commodity (in the way that, say, centigrade and and fahrenheit are two different ways of representing a temperature that exists separately from the representation), he discusses these as two separate things, which must be worked on to transform one to the other.

This resistance to a too-easy abstraction is, though, rather the point for Marx, because one of the things he wants to demonstrate in Capital is that capitalism is a system of real abstractions. Abstraction, that is, is not simply a mental process which leaves the world being abstracted unchanged. Instead, abstraction involves the production of social relations such that the abstraction can be acted on, and only then grasped by the mind. Abstract labor might be Marx’s best example of this, as he argues that the idea of work in general, as opposed to some particular type of work, depends on the whole process of primitive accumulation which brought about the existence of a class of wage laborers. It’s this idea that abstractions always arise from particular social relations which we can see at work in Marx’s laborious operations on the mathematics he discusses. Given the way that the abstractions of mathematical economics increasingly serve to evacuate any discussion of or resistance to social relations, Marx’s mathematics of suspicion, as we might call it, is salutory.

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2. The dis­ap­pearing pro­le­tariat Poetic as it is, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” is surely quite false, both as an empirical description of history and as a summary of Marx’s broader theory. For the same reason in both cases, in fact. It’s not true that, throughout...
3. Com­modity fetishism and object lib­er­a­tion On of the criticisms of object-oriented ontology which has some currency is the suggestion that it is a form of, or a philosophized alibi for, commodity fetishism. And this has a superficial plausibility; doesn’t the focus on objects enact the kind of reification that Marx criticizes. I don’t think this...

The film concerns a Montreal teenager, Leon Bronstein, who, discovering that he has the same name as Trotsky, comes to the conclusion that he is the reincarnation of Trotsky, which he interprets as meaning that his life will follow Trotsky’s in quite some detail. What’s interesting is how the film shows Leon responding to this destiny: he takes it as an opportunity to throw himself into the role of Trotsky completely, even though, as we see at the beginning of the film, he believes this means he will eventually be assassinated and, as we see at the end of the film, he believes the relationship to which he is at that point completely committed (as a result of fortuitously meeting an older woman with the same name as Trotsky’s first wife) will inevitably end fairly soon.

I was hoping this would be taken as a springboard for a discussion of the role of determinism within Marxism, particularly as this is a particular point of tension within Bolshevik theory. It would have been great if the film had ended with Leon discovering that, as his own historical moment is different from Trotsky’s, his life, even as a reincarnation of Trotsky’s, would necessarily be different, that is, with him discovering that the theory of permanent revolution applied to his own life. Still, the way Leon responds to determinism with activity rather than fatalism is a genuinely charming feature of the character, and I think is part of what makes the performance, which could easily be caricature, quite sympathetic.

The other interesting theme that pops up in a few points in the film is Leon’s defense of boredom.

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Wondering whether his fellow students are bored or apathetic, Leon concludes that they are bored, and that this is a good thing: where apathy is a withdrawal from engagement, boredom is engagement in its potential rather than actual state. Here he seems to be channeling not Trotsky but Benjamin:

We are bored when we don’t know what we are waiting for. That we do know, or think we know, is nearly always the expression of our superficiality or inattention. Boredom is the threshold to great deeds.—Now, it would be important to know: What is the dialectical antithesis to boredom? (Arcades, D2,7)

Boredom is a warm gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks. In this fabric we wrap ourselves when we dream. We are at home then in the arabesques of its lining. But the sleeper looks bored and gray within his sheath. And when he later wakes and wants to tell of what he dreamed, he communicates by and large only this boredom. For who would be able at one stroke to turn the lining of time to the outside? Yet to narrate dreams signifies nothing else. And in no other way can we deal with the arcades—structures in which we relive, as in a dream, the life of our parents and grandparents, as the embryo in the womb relives the life of animals. Existence in these spaces flows then without accent, like the events in dreams. Flânerie is the rhythmics of this slumber. In 1839, a rage for tortoises overcame Paris.  One can well imagine the the elegant set mimicking the pace of this creature more easily in the arcades than on the boulevards. (Arcades, D2a,1)

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2. Zombies of Marx Derrida’s Spectres of Marx is a frustrating book. For someone capable of such careful readings, Derrida’s references to Marx are remarkably sloppy, and, as with a lot of his later work, the obsessively spiraling style appears hollow rather than beguiling (it’s not as bad as The Politics of Friendship, but...
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,...

Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies covers a huge variety of Marx’s writings on these topics from 1850 up until his death. Some of these are fairly well known, such as the 1853 articles on India, the Grundrisse, and his 1881 letter to Russian socialist Vera Zasulich; others are less well known, such as 1850s writing on China and Indonesia and the changes Marx made for the French version of Capital; finally, Anderson covers some currently unpublished late notebooks of Marx on pre- and non-capitalist societies. In one sense, I suppose, there’s nothing terribly surprising in all this material: we see Marx’s interest in the global nature of capitalism and his tracking of different revolutions across the world. What Anderson provides, though, is a much wider context which makes it harder to consider these well-known writings as aberrations or mere side-interests of Marx; rather, questions of colonialism and ethnicity were central to Marx’s work from the 1850s onwards.

Particularly interesting, I thought, are the discussions of the relationship between anti-slavery campaigns in the US at the time of the civil war, and then campaigns against British rule of Ireland, and the development of working-class politics in England; the struggle of the US north against slavery, and of the Irish against British rule, where enthusiastically embraced by that section of the English working class which was also most interested in Marxism (and most influential on Marx). This suggests a much closer connection between Marx’s theoretical interest in race and nationality, and his practical engagement in politics, than standard accounts would have it: it’s not just that Marx was invested in non-class forms of struggle, it’s that the working-class struggles we take to be primary for Marx were themselves deeply enmeshed with struggles expressed in terms other than class.

Where the book maybe disappoints, though, is that it only suggests this connection, doing less than I would like to really establish it. The method of the book is a kind of chronological aggregation. It is organized into thematic chapters, with each chapter presenting a series of texts to us in a strictly chronological order. This ordering does provide some implicit support for one of the main arguments of the book, namely that Marx’s position changed from a fairly Eurocentric, developmentalist, position in the Manifesto, to a “multilinear” position in later work, inasmuch as we are supposed to be able to see the steps of this development in the chronological selection of texts. The problem, though, is that this support is largely implicit: Anderson doesn’t give us much of an account of what exactly changed in Marx’s work, and still less of why it changed. What we get is mostly descriptive, but doesn’t address the question of what aspects of, and changes in, Marx’s theory underwrote this changing approach to the non-Western world.

This resistance to theory is, I think, the cause of a tendency to moralism which unfortunately mars the book, especially in its discussion of Marx’s views on race. In the context of Marx’s attitude to Poland and Russia, for instance, Anderson quotes Marx describing something as “characteristic of the Slavonic race” and writes that this is a rare example of Marx using race as an explanation. However, at this point Anderson has just quoted a number of places where Marx attributes various things to Slavic culture, and the only distinguishing feature of this later sentence seems to be its use of the word “race.” Anderson doesn’t investigate the relationship between racial and cultural explanations here, which is a problem because race is a concept that has mixed biological and cultural explanations in a range of different ways, and I don’t think it’s at all clear that the categories worked the same way in the 1850s as they do now (for example, Marx’s writings here predate the publication of The Origin of Species, which had a huge influence on the biologization of race). A similar problem occurs with Anderson’s discussion of  Marx’s use of racist terms, especially the n-word, in his discussion of the US Civil War. Anderson makes the sensible point that Marx used (what we would consider) racist language to make (what we would consider) anti-racist points, but doesn’t consider that this contradictory relationship between what we would consider racism and anti-racism may not map very cleanly to the role of race in Marx’s own thinking; it’s not really clear that  “racist” or  “anti-racist” are roles that would have been open to Marx.

Anderson’s method is aggregative again here, although in a slightly different sense. Various contemporary standards are laid out (racism, eurocentrism) and a score is totaled up as Marx adheres to or violates these standards. The reason I call this as moralism is that it employs standards that are external to Marx’s work without considering how these standards might be modified to bring them into dialog with that work: in the case of race, we should ask what conception of race Marx had (or, in his context, could have had), and how that informed his writing; in the case of eurocentrism, again we should ask how understandings of “Europe” relate to Marx’s analysis of capitalism (and Anderson certainly does do us a great service in showing that, if Marx did privilege Europe, it wasn’t simply through ignorance of the rest of the world).

Which brings up the methodological question I mentioned at the beginning, which could be put: what is the point of studying the work of an author? One could legitimately distinguish between a theoretical approach, in which one attempts to develop ones own theory in dialog with another theorist, and an intellectual-historical approach, in which one attempts to describe accurately the work of the theorist. But it seems to me that even the latter case must necessarily involve a measure of theoretical invention, if one wants to go beyond a pure aggregation of facts of the blandest sort (that a particular text was written at a particular date). To give an account of change in an author’s work, whether an accurate characterization of that change or an analysis of why the change took place, it is not enough to simply present us with the sequence of different expressions of an authors thought, you need to present an account of the theory that underlies these periodic expressions, and this will always involve an element of theoretical work, of construction and not just interpretation. That Marx at the Margins provides a great deal of information which many of us can use for further work of theoretical construction is what makes it such a useful book.

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The problem is the way in which this kind of implicit sociology makes a move towards a premature totalization. The sequence of photographs conjure up a production process, and the society it is embedded within, as a closed and fixed whole, something which can be encompassed, and explained, by the exhibition. The exhibition provides its own metonym for this process in a picture of the cyprus trees growing at the edge of one of the tea plantations, viewed from the factory yard in which the cyprus wood is stacked up prior to being used to fuel the drying and fermenting of the tea: the whole production process is represented as an organic whole which grows its own preconditions from the soil. The falsity of this closure is particular visible in this exhibition, which wouldn’t exist without the funding that derives from the profit Taylors makes selling the tea grown in this area around the world.

This premature totalization separates us from Rwandan tea production in two ways. One is by suggesting that we are unimplicated in it, except perhaps to the extent we choose to involve ourselves philanthropically; the world market of course renders that false. The other way this presentation separates us from Rwandan tea growers is perhaps a bit more subtle, but perhaps also more harmful. This system of social production is something we tend to only see when we are being shown other societies, which works to make the systematic nature of production in our own societies invisible. As I walked around the Mercer Gallery, I imagined a ghost exhibit on the same walls, a series of photographs purporting to explain to us the UK through the interlinked economic process of call centers and mobile phone shops.

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2. 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...
3. Look at me still talking when there’s science to do Perhaps this is a mere contingency of scheduling, but there’s an interesting pairing of exhibitions at SFMOMA right now. “Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination” is a vast collection of Cornell’s collages and boxes. I’d heard of Cornell but knew little about his work. I still know little about him, but...

The life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on organic nature; and the more universal man (or the animal) is, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., constitute theoretically a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art – his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible – so also in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

So we should turn the claim around, I think: to go beyond the human, we also need to go beyond the local.

The other dubious argument that got made in the same session was the suggestion that  we can galvanize opposition to contemporary capitalism by arguing that capitalism doesn’t involve real free markets. I have no idea what people mean when they say this, or what they imagine markets are; they’re certainly not talking about the markets described by neoclassical economics, perhaps falling for the ideological delusion that markets involve choice or diversity. They don’t: the defining characteristic of free markets is equilibrium; markets are vast machines for creating identity.

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1. And I didn’t think I could like Girls Aloud more Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men...
2. Pol­i­tics against markets? It’s not uncommon for people on the left to see neoliberalism as anti-political, the criticism being that neoliberalism attempts to impose market mechanisms, thereby destroying the political. Here for instance is Daniel Bensaïd: Hannah Arendt was worried that politics might disappear completely from the world…. Today we are confronted with...
3. Virtual life Good post by Moll on how the Internet has and hasn’t changed our lives. She’s particularly bang-on about Second Life. The odd thing about Second Life is how much effort has been put in to reproducing real life, but worse in every respect. Moving through physical space (but through the...

I think the Toy Story films (at least, the first two—I haven’t seen the new one) are actually kind of interesting in registering some ambivalences about commodification. A large part of the second film revolves around the theft of Woody by a toy collector, who keeps his toys on display shelves, or, preferably, untouched in the original packaging. From the point-of-view of the film, of course, this is what makes the collector a villain, as he keeps the toys away from their proper role in the lives of children. One could read this as advocating  a certain sort of socialism, in which the evil of capitalism is that it privileges exchange value, where socialism would  only be concerned with use value.

What this misses is Marx’s point that use value and exchange value are two sides of a dialectic, both of which are implicated in commodity fetishism; we can’t simply extract the one we like and discard the other. Toy Story 2 is actually quite a nice example to use to illustrate this. Although the toy collector runs a toy shop, the toys he collects are not offered for sale, but are arranged solely for display. Commodities are usually transparent—we buy them because we need, or want, them, and then we consume them, and the nexus that connects exchange and use, the commodity form, disappears in these two moments. It is only when the toys are in their display cases and original packaging, suspended between exchange and consumption, that the commodity becomes visible as such. I’m reminded of Benjamin:

The world exhibitions were training schools in which the masses, barred from consuming, learned empathy with exchange value. “Look at everything; touch nothing.” (Arcades, G16,6)

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1. Com­modity fetishism and object lib­er­a­tion On of the criticisms of object-oriented ontology which has some currency is the suggestion that it is a form of, or a philosophized alibi for, commodity fetishism. And this has a superficial plausibility; doesn’t the focus on objects enact the kind of reification that Marx criticizes. I don’t think this...
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. 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...

The way in which a schoolmaster-supposed-to-be-wise can be authoritarian is fairly clear: the master posits a knowledge to which they alone have access, and they control the student by regulating their access to this supposed knowledge. But a pedagogy based on knowledge can also be egalitarian, if the knowledge of the master marks a purely contingent difference: the teacher happens to know something which in principle anyone can know, and the process of teaching consists in offering this knowledge to the student, for the student to do what they wish with. In the case of the ignorant schoolmaster, such equality is not possible. If the schoolmaster and the student are equally ignorant, what differentiates them? Either a purely arbitrary authority, or an authority grounded not in knowledge but in technique; the ignorant schoolmaster does not know what is being taught, but nonetheless knows how to teach it. This supposedly subject-neutral technique is the domain of Department of Education civil servants planning the National Curriculum, or university administrators deciding which departments to ax. Our contemporary Jacotot is Michael Gove.

That a supposed egalitarianism ends up underwriting a marked authoritarianism is consistent with a more general failing of Rancière’s work, which is that his radicalism seems to be limited to that of early 19th century republicanism. The axiom of equality is, after all, an axiom of liberalism, and Rancière’s equality is, like liberalism’s, formal and ultimately obfuscatory. This is illuminated by the connection Nina draws between Rancière’s positing of educational equality and Virno’s discussion of the “general intellect” in post-Fordist, communicative, capitalism. This is an extremely interesting connection but not one which is, I think, ultimately to Rancière’s credit. The fundamental difference between Rancière and Virno is that Rancière’s equality is a posited universal indifferent to any actual realization, while the general intellect is a real abstraction, something that develops through a specific set of material circumstances.

Politically, this means that Rancière focuses on discursive strategies that supposedly obscure this fundamental equality, ignoring the problem of real inequalities, and the material and institutional arrangements that reproduce them, and which might be reconfigured to produce a real equality. When Rancière attempts to show the denial of equality that produces the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, he admits that “it had doubtless ceased  to be said that the members of the modern proletariat, the equivalent of the plebians of antiquity, are not speaking beings. It is simply assumed that there is no connection between the fact that they speak and the fact that they work” (Disagreement, 51). I’m not sure that this was ever true, but it’s surely not true in today’s capitalism, where communication is a crucial instrument of proletarianization.

More generally, Rancière’s focus on an equality that is prior to any actual arrangements of inequality means that he abandons class politics in favor of the kind of liberal universalism criticized by Marx in “On the Jewish Question.” Yes, Rancière claims that equality introduces the political division between the community and the part-with-no-part which has nothing in common with the community but this bare equality. But this assertion of equality works as an assertion of equality of the excluded with the rulers; the plebians “execute a series of speech acts that mimic those of the patricians” (Disagreement, 24). This is an assertion of equality purely on the patricians terms, not one which challenges the structures that produce patricians and plebeians. It is the same politics of dressing-up that Marx identifies in the republicans of 1848, who could only act by mimicking a reflection of a reflection of ancient Rome. What’s missing from Rancière is an understanding of a social revolution which would involve a genuine reconfiguration, rather than a shuffling of appearances: a political movement where “the content goes beyond the phrase.”

(I seem to remember Nina once describing Rancière as a “grumpy anarchist.” I suppose one could see this post as a grumpy—probably too grumpy—Marxist response.)

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1. Ig­no­rant school­mas­ters According to OFSTED, At GCSE, the sheer volume of poetry, with the focus on technical analysis, coupled with “overly didactic teaching methods”, is putting pupils off. I wish I’d been taught technical analysis of poetry when I was doing GCSEs; indeed, a bit of excess didacticism would have made a...
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. Are they aware of pol­i­tics? As the University of California gears up for tomorrow’s day of action, I’ve been hearing one argument against the walkout that deserves a little further attention. This argument proposes that there is a contradiction in a protest in favor of education that proceeds by students and academics halting education for...