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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In most classes I’ve taught, I’ve at some point asked students about the distinction between politics and economics; the first time I did so, I was expecting to challenge them with some Marxist arguments about the interrelation of the two. But I don’t think any of my students have ever thought there was a distinction between politics and economics; they all accept what Friedman thought was controversial in his 1962 Capitalism and Freedom, the neoliberal presentation of politics as simply another domain of the economic. Perhaps the correct response to this is a Žižekian one of overidentification, in which rather than treating the role of money in politics as an object of cynicism, we take it entirely seriously; abandoning left-wing illusions about a potential political control over the economic, and embrace a through-and-through economism.

This is also one of the places where Hardt and Negri are particularly useful. They are certainly not nostalgic for liberal democracy; instead, they see neoliberalism as reconfiguring the political and the economic in a way that calls for a new communist approach to the economy. However, I fear Hardt and Negri are too optimistic about the nature of this reconfiguration, as they see post-Fordism as rendering the economic directly political and, moreover, in an immediately communist way. The advantage of the Žižekian approach would be that it reveals neoliberalism’s obscene underside, its continued reliance on a kind of undead liberal politics. The challenge for the left is to figure out how to exorcise this specter of politics, and thereby insert itself into the economics of neoliberalism

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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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It would be pointless to deny that Marx is sometimes vitalist, although this is not a simple organicist praise of life as vital spirit. Rather, Marx connects life with productive potential, first of all in the figure of “living labor,” but in more depth in Marx’s description of the fundamentally excessive nature of the proletariat, the surplus population necessarily produced by capitalism. In Capital, the descriptions of overpopulation evoke compression and pressure, a pressure that the capitalist authorities quoted inevitably figure in terms of a danger that is equally biological, moral, and political.

However, although Marx does, as Derrida writes, sometimes oppose and seek to exorcise the spectral, he doesn’t do so in the name of this vitalism. On the contrary, Marx rejects spectrality because the specter is too alive, a remnant of life that remains after material death. Marx’s rejection of spectrality occurs in the context of a more general rejection of this vitalism, direct or deferred, and an embrace of a certain sort of unlife, an anti-organicism. Derrida almost sees this in his discussion of commodity fetishism which “is the contradiction of automatic autonomy, mechanical freedom, technical life.” (153) Derrida, however, doesn’t pursue this theme of automaticity, but instead immediately proceeds to assimilate the commodity to the specter, not without some difficulty, because the commodity is the opposite of the specter – not dead matter inhabited by an ineffable remnant of life, spirit or pneuma, but dead matter animated by an eerily unliving automaticity: not a specter, that is, but a zombie.

While Marx’s famous distinction between living labor (the proletariat) and dead labor (commodities) suggests that this zombie character of the commodity is in opposition to the revolutionary character of the proletariat, the difference is not so clear, because the proletariat’s particular role in capitalism comes from the fact that labour-power is a commodity. Benjamin develops in some detail the revolutionary possibilities that might follow from the proletariat sharing this inorganic, unliving, zombie quality with the commodity. In  the Arcades, Benjamin traces the founding of the revolutionary Internationals to the world exhibitions, where “the masses, barred from consuming, learned empathy with exchange value,” by realizing that they, like the commodities they produce, are infinitely exchangible and communicable.

Benjamin locates this revolutionary communicability in the catacombs of Paris (used by the revolutionaries of the Commune), the city of the dead that overdetermines the city of those who are supposedly living. That the city is always the city of the dead is, Benjamin writes, “an essential moment in the image of modernity,”  because modern capitalism, rather than containing and constraining life as it appeared to in Marx’s image of overpopulation, recreates life as unlife. Marx describes this process in his discussion of factory labor (as opposed to small-scale manufacture) in Capital, but Benjamin goes on to connect this process to advertising and fashion, both of which construct an inorganic body for the proletariat. This inorganic body is what allows the proletariat to engage in political struggle, as with the example Benjamin gives of the anonymous horde of pamphleteer during the 1848, who were referred to as “Monsieur Everyone.”

Monsieur Everyone is a swarm of artificial, unliving commodity-proletarians—a zombie horde, in other words.

This post was inspired in part by Resident Evil: Extinction and Lady GaGa’s video for “Bad Romance.”

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Michaels puts forward a common but quite false presentation of neoliberalism as being unconcerned by economic inequality. But neoliberalism is not a simple anti-government position, but rather an advocacy of government intervention to create a very particular sort of marketized society, and a certain concern with the management and amelioration of inequality is central to that program of marketization, from New Labour to the IMF (some examples of which are discussed in this post on the neoliberalism of “Red Toryism”). Of course neoliberalism cannot in fact abolish economic inequality, but this is not because neoliberals have no desire to do so. The problem is that neoliberalism has no interest in promoting class struggle and the destruction of capitalism, the only things that can in fact abolish economic equality, by abolishing “the economic” altogether; but Michaels, because of the way he understands economic inequality, is just as hostile to these things.

The problem is that Michaels views economic inequality as transparent, as a simple matter of numerical difference (differences of wealth or earnings) that can be directly read off economic statistics. What this misses is the existence of a structure that underlies and produces these differences, and this structure (that is to say, class) is never directly visible; one will search in vain for a numerical boundary that differentiates capitalists from workers. As a recent post on LBO-Talk put it:

Class Struggle as visible Class Struggle never occurs…. The visible struggle is always about something else; that is why it takes analysis to identify what the struggle is, who are the participants, etc.

The upshot of views such as Michaels’s, which reduce the approved grounds of political struggle to visible economic difference, is that they locate the solution in a technocratic and narrowly economic rationality, a manipulation of the distribution of goods and the structure of incentives intended to produce more economically equal outcomes. But this kind of technocratic economic rationality is exactly what neoliberalism is. Far from opposing neoliberalism, Michaels is advocating it.

A genuine alternative to neoliberalism requires that we understand the ways in which the underlying abstract structures of capitalism become visible; these include the visible positivities that usually get called “class” (wage bracket, occupation, social mores), but there are other identity categories that are equally objectifications of capitalism’s logic, and race and gender are foremost among them. Michaels’s assumption that race and gender are mere epiphenomena, while class is a directly visible economic reality, rejects a materialist analysis of race, gender, and class. The difficulty lies in discovering a form of political action which recognizes the forms of appearance of capitalism while also attacking the invisible ground of this appearance. A politics directed solely against these appearances is, as Michaels correctly points out, merely part of the ideological legitimization of capitalism, but, as k-punk points out and contra Michaels’s neoliberal economism, “a protest against capitalism seems designed to fail.” How, then, do we engage in concrete political action against the abstraction that is capitalism?

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In fact, however, the concept of politics is essentially problematic, and there is no aspect of it that can be protected from this difficulty. If politics as a practice is good, that depends in part on an ability to distinguish political practice from non-political practice, which is to already invoke an incipient reification of the political; if the political as an ontological condition is good, we need to explain how it can give rise to the bad institutions of politics. No. Better to recognize that politics or the political, whichever term we choose, is a fundamentally ambivalent category: a practical illusion, as Marx puts it, and we need to wrestle with  the practical need to engage with politics, as we try and overcome the illusions that are cast by it.

As an illustration of what this vacuous distinction covers over, consider Rancière’s theory of politicization as the appearance, or making-appear, of the excluded part of the people. What this misses is the dialectical ambiguity of appearance, which is always both the specific appearance of a thing, and an appearance in contrast to the reality of the thing. The appearance of something new on the political scene is never the full presence of that thing, but rather the production of a gap between the thing and its political appearance.

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I’ve complained on many occasions about people who take class to be a positive identity. The point is that class is not an empirical category, but a structuring abstraction. This is especially true of the proletariat (the most real of the real abstractions that are class, and so also the most abstract). The “propertylessness” of the proletariat is not just a lack of possessions, but a lack of positive qualities: that is what makes the proletariat abstract labor. As abstract labor is a subtraction of distinguishing qualities, so “proletarian” names an absence, the absence around which the whole capitalist system is structured.

The idea of a generic absence structuring a social system sounds a bit like Laclau’s idea of the universal as an empty signifier. The problem with Laclau, though, is that this idea of the empty universal is based purely on an abstract philosophical argument about the nature of meaning, but there’s nothing to tie this argument to actually existing class structures. What Laclau loses is Marx’s historical argument for the development of a particular form of absent universalism in the capitalist system in particular; we’re left with a formless mass of particulars. Ironically, given Laclau’s stress on the importance of the political (as opposed to the supposed “positivity of the social”), this is actually a de-politicizing move. Rejecting the Marxist account of class as an abstract structure underlying empirical social groupings leaves us with no way of evaluating the alignments and movements of these shifting empirical identities (this depoliticization is visible, I think, in Laclau’s theory of populism).

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a question of the opposition of the universal as ‘form’, in the form of universality, and the universal as ‘content’.

In science, for example, an individual can fully perform public affairs, and it is always individuals who do so. But public affairs become actually public only when they arc no longer the affair of an individual but of society. This changes not only the form but also the content (Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State).

Equality would be the universality of form, universality in the sense of a potential accessible to all. But the problem with this kind of formal universality is that it has no content: Rancière’s hypothesis of equality tells us nothing about how collective participation in the universal might be realized. Rancière’s understanding of equality is both individualist and idealist, that is to say, the conception of equality characteristic of capitalism. For all it’s abstraction, it seems to me that Badiou’s notion of the generic is much more materialist, and more useful here, because it forces us to consider the process of construction, that is to say, the process of collective change, required for any achievement of universality

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In addition to being charmed by objects, we ourselves want to emulate them, and wish to charm the world. It is simply not the case that our fundamental wish is to be viewed as dignified free subjects with a chance to speak at the microphone of the universal assembly…. The kind of recognition we would prefer is always far more specific, since we often feel ourselves to be so painfully mutable that any specific role will do…. The one book that all of us would approach with greatest interest, that no human in history would be able to resist opening, would be a book of anecdotes about ourselves as told by other people. The appeal of such a book would not lie in some sort of grotesque human vanity, but in our wish to be something definite, a desire at least as great as our desire to be free. There is a profound need to escape the apparently infinite flexible subjectivity within, which feels far more amorphous to us than to anyone else.

Contrary to the usual view, what we really want is to be objects.

I do like Harman’s description of the “painful mutability” of subjectivity. This pain is compounded by the illusion that we are the only people to experience this mutability: so often everyone else seems to be exactly themselves, with the terrifying and tedious depths confined to ourselves alone. Would it be wrong to see this as one of the ways in which we experience the existence of inaccessible depths in objects?

Experiencing the existence of an object’s inaccessible depths (not, of course, experiencing the depths themselves, otherwise they wouldn’t be inaccessible) is part of  the main problem that animates Guerilla Metaphysics, of reconciling the inaccessibility of objects with their evident interactions with one another. Now, when I see an apparent contradiction like this, my first thought is always “it’s dialectical, innit,”  though I imagine dialectics seems like a nonstarter for Harman, for at least two reasons. The standard thesis/antithesis/synthesis dialectic is what Harman calls an “overmining” position, in that it would reduce any object that appears in it to a mere moment of the final synthesis. Worse, this synthesis occours preeminently between subject and object,  or, rather, between subject and itself mediated by objects; that is, dialectics privileges the human/object relation to such an extent that objects disappear entirely (the opposite of object-oriented philosophy).

However, I don’t think these are necessary features of dialectics, and I wonder what would happen if one attempted to do for Hegel what Harman does for Heidegger, expanding his notion of the relationship between subject and object to encompass the relations of objects to objects. I think you might get something like Marx. This might seem to go against the early Marx’s purported humanism, but his humanism is of a very particular sort in any case, not being about the deification of man, but the integration of humans and nature, which is not so far from an object-oriented idea of humanity existing alongside (rather than ontologically separate from) non-human objects. This appears in the young Marx’s discussion of private property, which he claims is problematic not just because it opposes the humanity of humans, but also because it fails to respect the thingness of things:

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us….

The abolition of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object…. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man. (“Private Property and Communism,” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts)

Now, this idea of objects being objects for human beings looks like it privileges humanity; however, Marx extends this idea to all objects, in that an object is an object when it is an object for another object:

To be objective, natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature and sense outside oneself, or oneself to be object, nature and sense for a third party, is one and the same thing.Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled. Hunger is an acknowledged need of my body for an object existing outside it, indispensable to its integration and to the expression of its essential being. The sun is the object of the plant – an indispensable object to it, confirming its life – just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life-awakening power of the sun, of the sun’s objective essential power. (“Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General,” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts)

Here we have a picture of aleatory objects, with a shimmering and contingent existence as they become objects for further objects. I think Harman would probably find such a position too relational; nonetheless, it does seem to me to be a position that neither subsumes objects into something else, nor subordinates them to humans, too key features of object-oriented philosophy. It’s also interesting to discover that Marx shared Harman’s dislike of subject-centered critique:

“Criticism” is transformed into a transcendental being. These Berliners do not regard themselves as men who criticise, but as critics who, incidentally, have the misfortune of being men…. This criticism therefore lapses into a sad and supercilious intellectualism. Consciousness or self-consciousness is regarded as the only human quality. Love, for example, is rejected, because the loved one is only an “object”. Down with the object. This criticism thus regards itself as the only active element in history. It is confronted by the whole of humanity as a mass, an inert mass, which has value only as the antithesis of intellect. It is therefore regarded as the greatest crime if the critic displays feeling or passion, he must be an ironical ice-cold sophos. (Marx to Ludwig Feuerbach, August 11, 1844)

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The more powerful a state and hence the more political a nation, the less inclined it is to explain the general principle governing social ills and to seek out their causes by looking at the principle of the state – i.e., at the actual organization of society of which the state is the active, self-conscious and official expression. Political understanding is just political understanding because its thought does not transcend the limits of politics. The sharper and livelier it is, the more incapable is it of comprehending social problems. The classical period of political understanding is the French Revolution. Far from identifying the principle of the state as the source of social ills, the heroes of the French Revolution held social ills to be the source of political problems. Thus Robespierre regarded great wealth and great poverty as an obstacle to pure democracy. He therefore wished to establish a universal system of Spartan frugality. The principle of politics is the will. The more one-sided – i.e., the more prefect – political understanding is, the more completely it puts its faith in the omnipotence of the will, the blinder it is towards the natural and spiritual limitations of the will, the more incapable it becomes of discovering the real source of the evils of society. (“Critical Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian’”)

I wonder if a lot of this doesn’t also apply to Badiou (perhaps the RCP were right to call Badiou a Rousseauist). Of course it’s not true to say that Badiou believes in the omnipotence of the will, but a blindness to natural and spiritual limitations does sound more on point, particularly as manifested in a difficulty in seeing the sources of social problems. Now, you might object that Badiou, with his advocacy of a critical distance from the state, is in fact doing precisely what Marx advocates here; but this isn’t so, becauase Badiou’s rejection of the state “does not transcend the limits of politics.” Instead, Badiou rejects the state because, in his analysis, the state is not political. This position is not that uncommon among post-Marxists (you can see it in Rancière and Mouffe, too; Jodi Dean discusses this tendency in her recent article on “Politics Without Politics”), but the more I think about it the odder and more indefensible it seems to me.

(I’ve posted a few critical things about Badiou recently, and will post more shortly, so I kind of want to distance myself from the recent-ish Badiou blog backlash; I’m tarrying with the negative here in the process of hopefully coming up with a  discussion of Badiou and Marx at some point in the future that does something more interesting than just criticizing; on the other hand, I’m hoping to get in on the ground floor of the Rancière blog backlash.)

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