White audience members’ consequent “panic,” she notes, is simultaneously posited as an intended effect, a positing that locates and circumscribes [artist Adrian] Piper as a strategizing subject. Rather than remaining cognizant of how their panic is produced in the moment of their own receptive uptake, white interlocutors instead construe Piper as the sovereign and willful originator of their discomfort, disorientation, and shock. (Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance, 186)

Watch video

(Note that this video contains repeated uses of the n-word.)

One of the best things about Curb Your Enthusiasm is its recognition of race as a site of particular awkwardness in the US. In the episode from which these clips are taken, Larry experiences the world as it appears to the paranoid opponent of political correctness; people of color, in this mindset, only exist in order to arrive just at the moment the (white) person is telling the “truth” about race, to entrap the white person into political incorrectness. By playing this worldview straight, Curb Your Enthusiasm shows how ridiculous it is, and so, I think, comments rather well on the sense, which pervades discussions of race in America, that the awkwardness that surrounds the topic is somehow the fault, or even the willed action of, people of color.

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I was happy to see this successful response, because the response from the University administration had been (predictably) useless, and the response from Student Government (perhaps not quite as predictably), also awful.

The ASUC passed a deeply stupid bill that, didn’t condemn, or even mention, the actual racist bake sale, but:

would provide guidelines for respectful conduct by campus organizations. Among other provisions, the bill “condemns the use of discrimination whether it is in satire or in seriousness by any student group.”

This is so wrongheaded I’m not sure where to start. To say that their bake sale is “discriminatory” is not a criticism, on the contrary, it accepts the premise of their faux-naïf argument. Racist former UC Regent Ward Connerly, who showed up to support the bake sale, made this clear:

“This bake sale is racist,” he said. “It’s only the way to call attention to the problem [of affirmative action].”

By complaining about the formal discrimination at the bake sale, the ASUC gives the College Republicans the opportunity to nod solemnly and say, “but don’t you see, isn’t affirmative action even more discriminatory?” Worse, the ASUC ‘s bill commits them to agreeing with this, and condemns the ASUC’s own event in support of affirmative action because, of course, affirmative action is formally discriminatory; what justifies this formal discrimination is the context it takes place in. The problem with the bake sale isn’t that it discriminates on the basis of race (who really cares about 50 cents difference in the price of a cupcake?). The problem is that the attempt to present this trivial discrimination as in any way relevant to affirmative action, which attempts to redress a long history of the most appalling discrimination. To think the two are in any way comparable is incredibly stupid; to pretend to be that stupid for publicity is racist.

In other news, Wendy Brown decided to adopt a lulz-based anti-racist strategy, of which I also approve:

The College Republicans started selling baked goods at 10am PT this morning. Their first customer was UC Berkeley Professor of Political Science Wendy Brown, who tried to buy all the baked goods but wasn’t allowed. “I thought the Republicans were free enterprise, but they won’t let me buy all the cupcakes.”

(Picture from thenoobyorker)

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One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

It’s no accident that the description of contemporary racism in terms of past racism appeals to progressives, because the structure of the argument is itself progressive; that is, it suggests that there is a natural tendency for things to get better, and things which are bad are bad because they are outdated. This view presents racism as an atavism, and, in doing so, actually downplays the importance and persistence of racialized inequality; racism, it suggests, should have ceased to exist some time back in the 50s, but mysteriously has failed to do so.

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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 with MIA’s new video is not, as Anna Pickard claims, that it is “too shocking,” it is that it is not shocking enough. The video’s big “reveal,” that the state’s violence is directed at the redheaded, turns any possible shock into pure silliness. Now, I imagine someone will say that I’m missing the point here, that prejudice directed against redheads is really no more silly than prejudice directed against black people or Muslims, and that by showing us this, the film makes a serious point about the arbitrariness of racism. This is wrong: racism is indeed unfounded and constructed and arbitrary, but it is not silly. The mistake here lies in thinking that, because racism is based on a social construction rather than a biological reality, it is therefore unreal, a mere error or fiction with only a mental existence in the psyche of racists. But in fact there is little more real than social constructions, because they create, and exist through, a material reality of practices and distributions of people and things. By eliding this materiality, and suggesting that an alternative racial reality could be produced simply by an arbitrary switch of what signifiers are racialized, the MIA video flatters its liberal audience, reinforcing the belief that racism a matter of ignorance or error that can be avoided by the sufficiently enlightened.

Worse, perhaps, the video ends up letting the actual racism and violence of the US state off the hook. The first half of the video presents us with a mystery: who are these police, and why are they raiding this building? The moment when we see the bus full of red-haired young men functions as an explanation, an explanation which immediately places us in an alternative reality in which the US features a number of signs of oppression that suggest places out side the US: Northern Ireland (murals) or Palestine (kids in keffiyehs throwing rocks). The problem is, that this, it seems to me, strongly suggests that we should see the first half of the video as also part of this alternative reality; but police raids of this sort are of course no “alternative” at all to actually existing US reality.

I don’t think I’ve written much about MIA before, not just because I don’t like her records very much, but because I’m rather uncomfortable with the fact that I don’t like her records. Oh, I can come up with any number of plausible reasons why, but they all seem to have a borrowed kettle quality to them: I have too many reasons for not liking her, none of which are finally quite persuasive. I don’t like the superficiality of her gestures towards politics, but why is this a problem when I’m so happy to take as interesting the surface features of other artists, from Lady GaGa to tATu? Is it that I’m happy to let the girls talk about fripperies like gender and aesthetics, but politics is SRS BSNS that should be left to the men? Perhaps I judge MIA differently because she presents herself as serious about politics; but, again, why do I let my interpretation of her work be determined by  MIA’s interest in politics when I’m more than happy to ignore Britney’s lack of interest? This suggests, I think, a potential problem with popism’s otherwise admirable commitment to the death of the author, which is that it tends to work better when the interpretation of the record is wholly disconnected from the artist’s self-understanding. The problem is that this requires the artist to be ignorant: the female (usually; feminized, in pop, almost always) pop star is forced into the position of the subject not supposed to know.

Or another thing; I dislike the appropriations involved in MIA’s presentation of herself as speaking from a generic third-world position (this is most annoying in the uncredited “baile funk” tracks on Piracy Funds Terrorism, which may be Diplo’s fault rather than MIA’s, and the cringeworthy line about how she “puts people on the map who’ve never seen a map,” which is MIA’s fault); but, for all that I could make arguments about self-made native informants, she surely does have an experience as someone growing up in Sri Lanka and working in the western music industry that qualifies her to say something about the third world; why is it that I somehow want to deny this?

I find myself in the odd position of not being able to trust my judgment about MIA; but I’m pretty sure “Born Free” isn’t as good a record as “Jimmy.”

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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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Your old-school Marxist (and that is who Žižek is channeling in this instance) accepts the identity politics formulation of struggles around race and gender and, recognizing the limitations of identity politics, supposes that class is somehow different. But as this horrible example of class identity politics makes clear, there’s nothing preventing class being assimilated to an identity politics framework, too. The way to avoid the problems of identity politics is not to privelege class. Quite the contrary, making this distinction between class and other organizations of oppression prevents us from understanding any of them. Poulantzas criticizes Foucault for failing to ground his theory of power in class, but Foucault is right here and Poulantzas is wrong; Poulantzas mistakes a form of appearence of economic power, class, for the power itself. The question facing a Marxist theory of power is to figure out how abstract materialities appear as particular stratifications and identifications.

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I was reminded of this recently while listening to Janelle Monaé, who addresses the connection between robots and slaves from a rather more subversive angle, in an album based around an extended analogy treating Black people in the US as cyborgs (including the track from which the title of this post is taken). It’s a neat reversal of the racist trope that Black people are more “natural” than Europeans (shading into animalistic, subhuman). Because there’s clearly a sense in which African Americans are artificial, constructed by the explicit intervention of the slave trade; Monaé is great in turning this artificiality into a kind of futuristic transhumanism. On a first listen to the record, I was rather disappointed that this conceptual futurism isn’t accompanied by musical invention. But I’ve warmed to the record, which is a kind of eerily precise re-creation of an earlier Black futurism, in much the same way as some Outkast stuff is (and, indeed, Andre 3000 is involved in some way, although I’m not exactly clear on his role). It’s appropriately… artificial.

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