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...

The supposed strategic advice is based on the idea that, if we act in certain ways, the media and police will react in particular ways. But the media has a bunch of structures around which they build stories, and they will slot the actual events into these structures as they see fit; so, whatever the the most militant or photogenic action of the day happens to be gets wedged into the “outrage” slot, if the script calls for an outrage, and whether that particular outrage is property damage or something else is basically irrelevant. As reclaimuc put it on Twitter, “the media will always be terrible, no matter what we do.” This is even more true of the idea that property damage “provokes” the police, which really badly misunderstands the way in which public order policing works. Police responses are not, in general, decided by individual police witnessing specific events, but by senior police and political leaders deciding how to deal with the protest as a whole. If the police attack protestors, it’s because they’ve decided to attack protestors, not because of anything the protestors did (this is also why worrying about police infiltrators is usually pointless; police may use provocateurs to stage-manage their intervention, but the form of their intervention is decided in advance and is independent of what either protestors or provocateurs do).

In both cases, the liberal position is based around a belief that we can control how we are perceived, and how the state (and its ideological apparatuses like the media) will respond to us. Or actually this could be put more strongly: the criticism reveals the liberal’s desperate need to be in control. The fact that protestors have very limited ability to prevent state crackdowns, and certainly individual protestors can do almost nothing, is scary, and it conflicts with deeply held liberal beliefs about how the state works, and how protesting can change it.

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3. Britain’s stu­pidest public in­tel­lec­tual (with bonus St Au­gus­tine content) The Guardian last week saw some particularly high-quality entries in the competition to write the stupidest thing possible about religion. Tobias Jones is terrified of “totalitarian” Richard Dawkins, who is apparently poised to carry out a genocide of religious believers. A. C. Grayling fights back, accusing homophobic protestors of “an...

Everyday objects become absurdly aggressive robots (video)

I take it that Michael Bay has some kind of unconscious awareness of the intuition behind Evan Calder Williams’s Hostile Object Theory. Williams argues that objects under capitalism “are the material organisation of all the toil, struggle, and negative affect that went into them, that thwarted, pissed-off agency, a clenched fist that keeps pulling punches and punching clocks,” and they hate us because of it. The second Transformers film, Revenge of the Fallen really doubles down on the hostility of objects, but goes beyond Williams, primarily in terms of creepiness, but also theoretically, by sexualizing the hostility of objects.

Creepy, sexualized robots (video)

A remarkable proportion of the runtime of Revenge of the Fallen is made up of this kind of body horror, showcasing Shia LaBeouf’s horror as feminized robots attempt to insert parts of their metallic anatomy into him. The robot as hostile object becomes, for Bay, a simultaneously horrifying and arousing object (and horrifying because it is arousing, and perhaps also vice versa).

There is, of course, another sexualized object in the Transformers films: Megan Fox. As LaBeouf puts it, “some people think [Michael Bay] is a very lascivious filmmaker, the way he films women,” although LaBeouf disagrees, saying that “the one thing Mike lacks is tact. There’s no time for  ‘I would like you to just arch your back 70 degrees’” (I guess specifying the precise angle at which you want an actor to arch her back doesn’t count as lascivious; to her credit, Fox responded by calling Bay “Hitler,” and getting herself fired). The films then provide an interesting mirror image: women sexualized by objectification, and objects sexualized by feminization. I think the hostility of objects is the truth underlying this mirror image. The way Bay objectifies women is, as LaBeouf’s attempted defense shows, about control, and underlying this desire for control is a fear of an assumed hostility about to break free of control. The hostile robots in Transformers, that is, are the return of the repressed of the portrayal of women in the films.

What Williams’s Hostile Object Theory emphasizes is how the hostility of objects results from the place of the commodity in capitalism; applying this to the particularly gendered objects in Transformers reminds us of the way in which the commodity is gendered. Dumb but treacherous, commodities have something in common with misogynist depictions of women reaching back to Rousseau’s Sophie (we can also see the feminization of the commodity in the connection that is often made between femininity and consumerism, so ably criticized by Ellen Willis back in 1969). This should, I think, encourage us to be careful about construing our opposition to capitalism in terms of a proletariat which is defined by its subjectivity. My worry is that, as the category of subjectivity has a long association with masculinity, emphasizing the subjectivity of the proletariat risks repeating a pattern of gendered subject/object hostility.

Related posts:

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2. The pathos of com­modi­ties I think Lenin underestimates the genuine pathos of the Toy Story films in his review, which reinforces (and is reinforced by) his pedagogical theory of ideology, which tends to emphasize the power of cultural products to impart ideology, thereby underemphasizing why audiences accept and inhabit this ideology. To describe the...
3. Ap­pear­ances are es­sen­tial We have all reason to rejoice that the things which environ us are appearances and not steadfast and independent existences; since in that case we should soon perish of hunger, both bodily and mental. (Hegel) If aesthetics is first philosophy, perhaps we should replace the question “why is there something...

This does, though, raise a problem with the documentary, and indeed with Curtis’s work more generally. I think he’s doing this kind of Foucaldian tracing of discourses, but I’m basically guessing, because he’s not very explicit about what he is doing. There are various things about the way the program is put together that imply certain things about the epistemology, although they’re also rather contradictory. Curtis’s signature method, the construction of a documentary largely from archive footage some distantly, some closely related to the point being made, emphasizes the intellectual configuration being constructed is partial. In particular, building the program around juxtaposition tends to push against interpreting the relationships between the elements as causal, which of course is emphasized by the jumps in time throughout the program.

However  the soundtrack pushes in the other direction. The ominous music that frequently plays under apparently innocuous scenes keys us to expect bad consequences, and so imbues the program with a teleology, in which the negative consequences are already present in potential form at the origin of an idea. This is what Nietzsche calls “a perverse type of genealogical hypothesis of a genuinely English style” in which everything is explained by reference to an essence lying in its origins, rather than by appealing to something  “first brought in under a specific set of conditions and always as something incidental, something additional” (On the Genealogy of Morals).

It’s the punctual and incidental aspects, not the teleological, that I think make the program worth our engagement. I do, though, have one concern about the intellectual collection that Curtis assembles, as I think he may be missing some distinctions in the way various concepts change over time. Specifically, he may subsume too much under the idea of the “machine.” Isn’t there quite a difference between the mechanism of industrial machinery, the circuits of electrified machines, and the information flows of networked machines and genes? And this difference would correspond to a distinction between the cybernetic systems with which Curtis begins, and the bioinformatic ones with which he ends (I think this might understood in terms of  a move from Parson’s cybernetic systems theory to Luhmann’s autopoesis, though I don’t know enough about Luhmann to be sure).

Curtis emphasizes the role of feedback in cybernetics, but he doesn’t mention that this was interpreted as making cybernetics the science of control, something which was very much of a piece with the technocratic interventionism of 1950s politics. The association of feedback systems with a form of self-regulation that eludes control comes later; at one point, Curtis briefly mentioned the move from mainframes to networked personal computers, which is  a mark of this change, from self-regulating systems which are centralized and basically comprehensible, and so controllable, to systems which are self-regulating because they are so complex they elude our grasp. In this, the failure of ecological systems theories would be a further step in the development of our contemporary homeostatic “common sense,” and not, as Curtis seems to suggest, a scientific refutation of it. (“Black ecology” would then be a further development of the same theme.)

This does not mean that Curtis’s argument is wrong, just that it could be enriched by making some further distinctions. In particular, I think this move from understanding systems in terms of control to understanding them in terms of complexity helps to think about the political implications of the story Curtis is telling. The problem Curtis identifies have, I think, a lot in common with Jodi’s criticisms of left enmeshment in communicative capitalism. It’s important, then, to recognize how close those of us on the anti-hierarchical left are to some of the ideas Curtis identifies as problematic (how could we not be, as they are ideas which really do structure much of our time), as well as ways we have of interpreting and using these ideas differently.

(The title of this post is from the poem which gave Curtis his title, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” by Richard Brautigan.)

I crossposted this to An und für sich, where there’s some discussion and criticism of Curtis.

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2. Obama: America’s Sarkozy? I was impressed with his willingness to look at the issues that France faces in a new ways, not bound by tradition and dogmas. — Obama on Sarkozy Of course, the main reason to hate Obama is the worry that, in a certain depressing sense, he’s right. Like Sarkozy, Obama...
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On a slightly more general level, the moral defense of teachers is appealing because it fits with the model of education as salvation which is so popular in America (and increasingly so in the UK). This also probably means that it ends up reinforcing this model, which is unfortunate, because the model is damagingly individualist, in two ways. First, there’s the focus on the heroic teacher, the teacher who due to their personal talent is capable of radically changing students’ lives. As far as I know, no-one has yet discovered a way of measuring teaching effectiveness according to which the quality of teachers makes much difference to students’ educational outcomes. This is not to say that teachers shouldn’t try to be as good as they can, just that this probably won’t produce “exceptional” teachers, just broadly comptetent, reasonably conscientious ones, and that’s perfectly fine. The mythology of exceptional teachers distracts attention from making structural changes to schools, or even better outside of schools, that would make a real improvement to children’s education.

In any case, by definition not every teacher can be exceptional, which gets to the other problem with the salvationist model of education, in which education is supposed to provide the primary means of improving society. The problem with this is that the kind of benefits education is usually supposed to provide are positional goods, valuable because of their scarcity; if this is the case, the benefits of education can’t be provided to everyone. For instance, neoliberal education reformer Geoffrey Canada talks about his goal to have every child in Harlem graduate high school and go to college, which is fine, but it doesn’t actually do anything to improve society in the long run; you just have college educated people doing the same shit jobs they would previously done without a high school diploma, and the extrinsic benefits of a degree now go only to those who can get postgraduate professional qualifications, or have the right contacts (not coincidentally, usually the same people who would have been getting college degrees in the past). The problem again is individualism, taking a solution that works for individuals (more qualifications so you can out-compete others in the job market), and imagining that you can solve social problems by just generalizing this individual solution.

I’m not sure how these concerns could be articulated in the fight to defend teachers’, and other public sector, unions right now in Wisconsin, and maybe the right thing to do at the moment is just to work with the message that resonates most. Certainly, I don’t think the time is yet right for my preferred slogan: “Mediocre teachers say: sod your kids, pay us more.” But I do think it’s important to get towards a point where this slogan, or something with the same underlying message, could rally a movement. I’m increasingly opposed in principle to discourses of “excellence,” and I think the right to be mediocre is a key right the left should defend.

The ideology of excellence repeats Aristotle’s argument in the Politics, that monarchy is the best constitution, if we are in the happy situation of finding a monarch who really is excellent, obviously and objectively better than everyone else. This is based on Aristotle’s implicit aristocratism: in all of the “good” constitutions, the best are the rulers, whether that is the best individual (monarchy), the group of the best (aristocracy), or the “better nature” or every individual (polity). In contrast, all the deviant constitutions are democratic in Rancière’s sense, in that they involve the rule of people who have no qualifications for rule. We might then call democracy the rule of the mediocre, the rule of everyone who is just barely competent. However, we shouldn’t be satisfied with just political democracy, but should extend this argument to economics, too. No-one’s job prospects should be held hostage to some spurious standard of “excellence.”

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2. 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...
3. Are the liberal arts free enough? By formal disciplinary classification, I’m a political scientist, so I was at this year’s American Political Science Association meeting. As well as attending a number of panels on political theory, and giggling at what the “science” side of the discipline is studying, I went to a number of panels about...

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)

Related posts:

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...
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The editors conclude, on the basis of their own experience of computer games and a spritz of Kant, that games cannot be art because they cannot be disinterested: they always focus on winning. Here the n+1 editors confuse interaction with interest, but it is the former, not the latter, which is the hallmark of computer games (note the slippage when they quote an argument about games offering  “a world in which the player is free to act and to choose,” which they then paraphrase as being about “goal-oriented participation”; the goal orientation is introduced, without argument, by the editors). The distinction is made clear by the existence of games which, although you can complete them, you can’t win: Rameses is probably the most conceptually perfect illustration of this, although Photopia is a more aesthetically successful example (both games can be played directly at the pages linked to, and only take something like twenty minutes each to complete, which I highly recommend you do).

The problem with n+1‘s regurgitation of Kant is that they don’t consider how the construction of an experience of interaction might require that Kant’s arguments be opened up and rethought. They don’t ask how “purposiveness without particular purpose” might be modified when the purposiveness exists in the spectator as well as in the object; they simply apply prefab Kantian categories and, finding that contemporary aesthetic appreciation doesn’t fit, conclude with an ostentatious snub of the contemporary world.

How to make a post about a three-month old controversy more relevant? Perhaps with references to a nine-year old game: Metal Gear Solid 2, with its plot hinging on a faked oil spill being used to further all kinds of elite conspiracies, suddenly seemed relevant after the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Recently playing the game, it struck me that it is an interesting example of the relationship of games and art because it presents a quite passionate argument for the importance of artistic expression, and it does so by frequently sabotaging the more utilitarian aspects of its own gameplay. The neatest example of this occurs when, after a fairly long cut-scene, the villain approaches the hero and control is returned to the player while a timer counts down frenetically in the corner of the screen. The player is thus encouraged to try increasingly hard to find away to avoid the villain, but the trick is that the only way to avoid capture is to avoid drawing attention to oneself, that is, to do nothing until the countdown is finished: the game doesn’t merely illustrate, but forces the player to discover, the zero-degree of interactivity.

This takes place on a rather larger scale throughout the second part of the game as key choices are gradually taken away from the player as the constructed nature of the protagonist’s existence and experience is revealed. This culminates in a bizarre and, from a straightforward game design point of view, untenable, 30-minute cut-scene that occurs just before the finale of the game which involves, among other things, two different explanations of the plot being put forward and overturned. What makes this strange game-design decision work, however, is the interplay between the ideas being put forward in this period of enforced noninteractivity, which concern the possibility, if any, of self-creation and self-determination, and the experience of different modes and degrees of interactivity which surround it. The game effectively puts forward a justification for its own status as art, and for the value of art as a practice of self-objectification and self-externalization, which is moving precisely because of the experience of a world of choices in which it is embedded.

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Why insist, against all hope, on the communist idea? Is such insistence not an exemplary case of the narcissism of the lost cause? And does such narcissism not underlie the predominant attitude of academic Leftists who expect a theoretician to tell them what to do?—they desperately want to commit themselves, but not knowing how to do so effectively, they await the answer from a theoretician. Such an attitude is, of course, in itself false, as if a theory will provide the magic formula, capable of resolving the practical deadlock (Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce, 88).

There were a number of excellent papers at the Waiting for the Political Moment conference in Rotterdam last month, among which were keynotes from Benjamin Noys (which he’s put on line) and Jodi Dean (some of the key arguments of which are in this blog post). These two papers are interestingly read together, I think. Jodi argues that our concern about complexity and the difficulty of knowing enough functions as a kind of theoretical alibi for political inactivity:

The recourse to complexity is a move that says there is always more that needs to be known as well as unknown unknowns and unintended consequences of whatever it is that we end up doing. Such a move says, wait, stop, do you know what you are doing?

Benjamin, meanwhile, criticizes the tendency among political theorists to call for a (return to) concrete politics, a call often made by denigrating the abstraction of theory. Now, these two criticisms of contemporary political thought might seem to be in opposition to one another: Jodi calling for just the kind of concrete politics Benjamin considers inadequate, while Benjamin invokes, in the form of abstraction, the complexity Jodi is suspicious of. I don’t think that’s the case, though; in fact, the turn to the concrete and the retreat into complexity are two aspects of the same process.

As luck would have it, on the flight over to Rotterdam, I saw a film which helps clarify the connection between these two perspectives. Roman Polanski’s The Ghost is quite entertaining and extremely stupid (as befits something based on a book by Robert Harris—I’m not sure it’s either as stupid or as entertaining as Archangel, though). The most interesting thing in the film, though, was the particular way in which the moment of revelation was delayed. At one point, the ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) follows the GPS directions left in his predecessor’s car, ending up at the house of an academic who knew the prime minister (for whom McGregor and the previous ghostwriter were ghostwriting). The revelation, however, does not come through discussion with the academic, who, simultaneously avuncular and guarded, skillfully answers all the ghostwriter’s questions without revealing anything. The revelation occurs just a little bit later, when the ghostwriter types the academic’s name, along with “CIA,” into Google (there’s actually a further, even more hilarious, twist, which involves Ewan MacGregor solving an acrostic in the back room of a bookshop). A montage of link-clicking follows, in which the secrets of the film are laid bare.

This is the fantasy that links together the embrace of complexity and the rejection of abstraction. First of all, the call for concrete politics is always a philosophical or political-theoretical call, and, as a call, it is always at least one step removed from the concrete politics it desires (or purports to desire). Furthermore, what is supposed to allow us to take that step is one last theoretical effort, and it is this idea of the final resolution of theory through one last effort which underlies our relation to complexity: the idea is that we cannot act yet, but if we could finally master complexity, we would, at last, be able to act. As Jodi puts it in Publicity’s Secret:

A key technocultural fantasy is that “the truth is out there.” Such a fantasy informs desires to click, link, search and surf cyberia’s networks. We fantasize that we’ll find the truth, even when we know that we won’t, that any specific truth or answer is only a momentary fragment. Still, the fantasy keeps us looking. (8)

The fantasy, that is, is the one that Žižek criticizes, of a theory that would unravel complexity in such a way that it would immediately resolve itself into action, without us having to ever deal practically with this complexity (to choose, to act, to take a risk). This is also the kind of theory that Benjamin resists; the theory he proposes, a theory which attempts to understand abstraction rather than calling for the concrete, for all that it might assist us in deciding how to act, would not provide the alibi for action (or inaction) that, as Žižek says, is all to often what leftist academics look to theory to provide.

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1. Adapting a Woody Allen joke So, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault are in some kind of critical theory afterlife. They get talking, and at some point Foucault asks Benjamin, “Do you think sex is boring?” Benjamin grins and nods, and says, “Yes, if you do it right.”...
2. You can’t solve a problem with a ter­mi­no­log­ical dis­tinc­tion I’ve long been suspicious of anyone who attempts to give some kind of theoretical significance to a supposed distinction between “politics” and “the political.” Partly this is just linguistic; if you use “politics” as a noun you’re going want to use its adjectival form, “political,” at some point, and pretending...
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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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Similar considerations could be made with respect to the role of the state, which, after years of being demonized, has recently been reevaluated.

…

Capital was able…to neutralize the subversive potential of the aesthetic strategies and ethos of the counterculture…. To this hegemonic move by capital, it is urgent to oppose a counterhegemonic one.

In other words: once upon a time capital was in favor of the state, so the left was against it; now capital is opposed to the state, so the left should be for it. This tells us a lot about why Mouffe’s conception of hegemony is so wrong.

First, we have the idea of counter-hegemony as a simple inversion of hegemony, which renders any counter-hegemonic project simply reactive. To be fair to Mouffe, she doesn’t always consider counter-hegemony to be quite such a straightforward inversion; nonetheless, I think her concept of hegemony always leaves the initiative to capital. Mouffe defines a hegemonic project as a process of dearticulation and rearticulation, but note that what gets dearticulated and rearticulated are elements of an already existing hegemony. Now of course it’s true that we have to start from where we are, but I don’t think left-wing politics can let the coordinates of its imagination be limited to the coordinates of the existing order. Despite a few quasi-structuralist gestures towards the way in which the meaning of a term depends on its position in a chain of signification, blah, blah, blah, I’ve never seen Mouffe pay serious attention to ways in which left politics might create genuinely new ways of thinking and acting. Should any such novelty occur it is, apparently, both fortuitous and extra-political.

Second, this view of hegemony sees the terrain of struggle as being purely that of capitalist ideology, and so ends up taking capitalist ideology at its word, undermining any possibility of critique. The idea that capital before 1970 was “for” the state, and since 1970 is “against” it, comes from a Reagan speech, not a Marxist analysis; in fact, neoliberalism depends on the state just as much as Fordism did, but it depends on a different kind of state. To fail to realize this, and to simply posit the left as being “for” the state, both supports neoliberal ideology and precludes the kind of rethinking of organizational forms that the left so desperately needs. Mouffe actually makes more-or-less this point in The Return of the Political; the reason why she fails to follow through on her own advice, I think, can be found in a further weakness of her theory of hegemony. Mouffe emphasizes the contingency of the articulation of different elements within hegemony, which is not a bad thing in itself, but it seems to me this contingency is made such a central feature of the ontology that supports hegemony that there is no space to analyze the constraints that operate in any actual political practice. Despite the lip-service paid to the importance of power in constructing hegemony, actual operations of power seem to drop out of the theory: contingency becomes an arbitrary recomposition of given political elements according to the whims of the theorist.

And so, Mouffe’s theory of hegemony ends up turning politics into something like playing with stickle-bricks.

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2. Ide­ology, or, “she would say that, wouldn’t she” The minor flap over the Hilary Clinton Walmart videos seems like an interesting example of the role of cynicism in ideology. My first response, like I imagine a lot of people’s, was standard-issue cynicism: she’s being paid by Walmart, of course she’s going to enthuse about them; it doesn’t mean...
3. Recipes for the delica­tes­sens of the future Discussions of the recent communist conference have me thinking about the relationship between theory and practice, again. Conveniently, I was reading Poulantzas today on the role of theories of the state in revolutionary action: They can never be anything other than applied theoretical-strategic notions, serving, to be sure, as guide...