Let us accept that all identity is a differential identity. In that case two consequences follow: (1) that, as in a Saussurean system, each identity is what is is only through its differences from all the others; (2) that the context has to be a closed one – if all identities depend on the differential system, unless the latter defines its own limits, no identity would be finally constituted. But nothing is more difficult – from a logical point of view – than defining those limits. If we had a foundational perspective we could appeal to an ultimate ground which would be the source of all differences; but if we are dealing with a true pluralism of differences, if the differences are constitutive, we cannot go, in the search for the systematic limits that define a context, beyond the differences themselves. Now, the only way of defining a context is, as we have said, through its limits, and the only way of defining those limits is to point out what is beyond them. But what is beyond the limits can only be other differences, and in that case – given the constitutive character of all differences – it is impossible to establish whether these new differences are internal or external to the context. The very possibility of a limit and, ergo, a context, is thus jeopardized. (Laclau, Emancipation(s), 52)

This far, Laclau’s argument seems pretty reasonable, and the consequence presumably would be that, indeed, “no identity would be finally constituted,” that is, the differences that establish any identity would be indeterminate, there would be no point at which we could say we could say we “had” the full determination of the identity, and so any discussion of a particular identity would always be open to further questioning and the need for further investigation into the specificities of that identity. Oddly, though, that’s not the conclusion Laclau draws. Having “jeopardized” the possibility of a total context, Laclau nonetheless goes on to assert that a total context is possible, with the limit being provided not by a difference, but by an antagonism, which “poses a threat to (that is, negates) all the differences within that context.”

This is a strange move by Laclau, because it seems to be a (surprisingly un-poststructuralist) attempt to save structuralism, which proceeds via an odd sort of metalepsis in which practice is brought in to save theory. Laclau identifies a theoretical necessity, the need for something to provide a limit to a context; he names the thing that fills this need “antagonism,” which turns out to be the name of a category of political contingency. The examples Laclau gives of antagonisms are political (for example, the antagonism between worker and capitalist), but their role is theoretical, to deal with the problem – “from a logical point of view” – of establishing a Saussurean system of differences. What this means is that theoretical necessity always ends up ruling over the mere contingent details of politics.

Laclau’s position, then, is what we might call a postfoundationalist humblebrag. It looks like a recognition of the limits of theory, a humility before the impossibility of finding an absolute theoretical foundation for knowledge. But it turns out that Laclau’s theory is able to know precisely what these limits are, and, furthermore, to dictate practice on the basis of this knowledge of limits. I’d prefer a more genuine theoretical humility, which emphasizes that the absence of foundations means there’s no point at which we are finally free of further questions, that there’s no way of knowing what the limits are except by trying to answer the questions that arise in the course of trying to find out.

Related posts:

1. The dis­ap­pearing pro­le­tariat Poetic as it is, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” is surely quite false, both as an empirical description of history and as a summary of Marx’s broader theory. For the same reason in both cases, in fact. It’s not true that, throughout...
2. 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...
3. Bridging the class divide Christ, this is repulsive. An organization focused on ending classism by “bridging the class divide.” Actually, I wonder if it wasn’t set up by some old lefty to demonstrate the limitations of the theraputic model of identity politics. I’ve sometimes been worried that certain discussions of, for instance, white privelege,...

One thing that is suggested in the book but I think it would be interesting to think about more is the possibility that the liberal subject as such is sociopathic. Adam makes the more historically specific claim that the kind of subjects that are necessary for and produced by neoliberalism are sociopathic:

One can easily argue that the managers and administrators who control our lives are overpaid, but the callousness they routinely display really does represent a rare skill set. I know that I couldn’t cope with the guilt if I behaved like them – right? Yet perhaps I could. Perhaps the problem isn’t that we are being ruled by sociopathic monsters, but rather by people who are just as susceptible to social forces as the rest of us (8).

These social forces may be broader than neoliberalism, and the particular callousness of neoliberal administrators, and extend to the subject assumed by liberalism from the 17th century to the present. The fantasy sociopath is defined by a lack of social connections which gives them the autonomy to pursue their goals through an instrumentalization of social connections. This is the liberal subject, right? Independent, autonomous, instrumental. If that’s right, Adam’s project of redeeming the fantasy sociopath would involve a pretty wide reaching rethinking of subjectivity, and the liberal political theory which depends on it. I can think of a few theorists we might look to to develop this further: Derrida’s critique of sovereign ipseity, Nietzsche’s rejection of the idea of a “doer” behind the “deed,” or Agamben’s community united by no social bond beyond a purely generic “whatever” singularity; can we rethink any of these ideas in terms of sociopathy?

Another fun thing about the book is that you can pick your own favorite TV sociopath and see how they fit with Adam’s analysis. Two examples that I like are Tracy Barlow from Coronation Street and Alex Russo from Wizards of Waverley Place. Tracy Barlow is unusual among soap characters, I think, in that she committed a pre-meditated, cold-blooded, murder, but has been allowed to stay in the show as a more-or-less sympathetic character. She mostly fits into Adam’s template of the scheming sociopath, who attempts to screw people over purely out of a destructive joy. However, she is both more self aware and exhibits more pathos than the schemers Adam discusses, who are generally cartoonish (whether literally, like South Park‘s Cartman, or metaphorically, like the characters in Seinfeld). In the process of her scheming, Tracy frequently sabotages her happiness, particularly the possibility of a relationship with Steve, the father of her child. The interesting thing is that she doesn’t seem to care very much about these consequences: she is committed to her scheming such that she would rather be unhappy than stop scheming, which I think is a kind of Nietzschean pessimism of strength. In this she has a similar sociopathic commitment to the one Adam identifies in House (from the show of the same name), but in a less easily redeemable way. House’s anti-social commitment to the joy of discovery ends up making him a superhumanly effective doctor, an eminently social end, while Tracy is a more purely anti-social sociopath.

Alex Russo is also probably, in Adam’s categories, a schemer, but with a bit of a twist. For the characters he discusses, scheming is a response to the problem of boredom, “the need to find something, anything, to do!” This is not Alex’s problem; what makes her anti social is her desire not to do anything, her spectacularly extravagant laziness. Furthermore, as with Tracy Barlow and House, there is a kind of ethical commitment to this anti-sociality. Perhaps this is a kind of zero degree of scheming, a not merely accidentally petty or pointless scheming, but a scheming which is intentionally directed at pointlessness, at achieving nothing. This would be a sociopath as the Agambenian (originally, Kojèvian) character after whom this blog is named, the voyou désœuvré or lazy rascal. This would also provide a way of thinking of subjectivity in suspension, which depends not on a sovereign autonomy, but on a radically contingent passivity.

Related posts:

1. “I don’t come any nicer than this, ask anyone” Nietzsche, as ever, has just the right words to describe Tracy Barlow: Mischief-makers overtaken by punishments have for thousands of years felt in respect of their “transgressions” just as Spinoza did: “here something has unexpectedly gone wrong,” not: “I ought not to have done that.” — The Genealogy of Morals...
2. Non-​speaking beings 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...
3. Race and the para­noia of awk­ward­ness 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...

(A brief interlude on another film which shares some of the same temporal markings, Justin-Timberlake-vs-real-subsumption thriller In Time. Whereas The Hunger Games overlays the 40s and the 70s, however, In Time puts them side by side, with the rich living in elegant inter-war decadence, while the poor are exiled to sites reminiscent of images of de-industrialization from the late 70s to today. The only advanced technology we see is that necessary for the film’s central conceit, in which money is replaced with a direct accounting of the amount of time one has left to live. Everything else – the buses and payphones – suggests that the film takes place sometimes shortly after the 1979 energy crisis. This setting is, inter alia, a critique of Proudhon, with the film pointing out that the transparency of money as a representation of time makes capitalism no less oppressive. I can’t decide if the ending of the film is Proudhonian or not. On the one hand, it involves a – potentially Proudhonian – kind of direct-action monetary reform, in the shape of redistribution through bank robbery; on the other hand, this is intended to produce a specifically political disruption, rather than a mere Proudhonian economic reform; on a third hand, though, this political disruption – the migration of the previously poor to the gated communities of the rich – is imagined as taking place solely through money, with no suggestion that the state would, in the last instance, protect capitalism from itself through force.)

What makes the film’s use of the aesthetics of austerity nostalgia critical, I think, is the way it combines this with some very 21st-century concerns with biopolitics, financialization, the society of control, and surplus population. The whole idea of the Hunger Games, ritualized teenage murder as social bonding mechanism, is fairly biopolitical in itself, particularly as the film ties this stark example of control over life to the wider structure of its imagined society. Part of this concerns debt and financialization; the poor can borrow money to buy food against the “collateral” of an increased chance of being picked to take part in the Games, while the rich can bet on and influence the Games by sponsoring their favorite participants. Biopolitical control also shows up in the treatment of the contestants in the Games, which stretches out to include those potential contestants, i.e., all young people who find their adolescence monitored and administered. Maybe most interesting, but also somewhat ambiguous, is the relationship between the Games and the biopolitics of surplus population. The general way the world of the film is described, with the country divided into districts which are each tasked to produce some class of goods, suggests an image of capitalism as exploiting through the extraction of productive labor. However, we see almost no actual productive labor in the film (the one exception, I think, is a brief scene of Katniss’s father working as a miner), and the early scenes set in Katniss’s home district seem much more like an informal economy exploited by capital in the mode of exclusion, with its barter and gift economies of whatever leftovers can be poached or scavenged.

Another way in which the 70s influence is felt in the film is in the striking strand of second-wave feminism that runs through it (well, I thought it was striking, but I spent the day prior to watching the film reading the feminist genealogy in Janet Halley’s Split Decisions, so maybe I was just primed to look at things in these terms). We see this at the beginning of the film, when Katniss is instructed to wear a dress for the ceremony which precedes the Hunger Games, in the fact that one of the biopolitical indignities she suffers in preparation for the Games is having her legs waxed, and in her unwillingness to perform a pleasing femininity in order to win supporters in the Games; all places, that is, where the film emphasizes the social construction of the feminine. I write “social construction of the feminine” rather than “social construction of gender” advisedly, because unfortunately the film also repeats a problematic gesture of some second-wave feminisms, which expressed a hostility to the imposition of compulsory femininity in a hostility to femininity as such, which can reinforce a traditional misogynistic trope in which women are criticized for inauthenticity and artifice. The evilness of Katniss’s main antagonists within the Games themselves, for instance, is demonstrated by their willingness to wear pretty dresses, which marks them as “mean girls.” More generally, the decedance of the Capitol (which runs the Games), as opposed to the virtue of the Districts from which Katniss comes, takes the visual form of feminization, in pink clothes and elaborate make-up. On the other hand, though, the film ends with Katniss, now a winner of the Hunger Games, wearing a pretty dress herself, and her greatest ally throughout the films is her stylist, who teaches her how to use dress and performance to her advantage, so perhaps we will see further dialectical developments of this theme in the subsequent films.

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2. Robots in gen­dered cap­i­talist re­la­tions I think it’s pretty clear that the Transformers films are pathological, but it’s difficult to determine whether the pathology lies in society, the film industry, or in the individual psychology of Michael Bay. Maybe there’s plenty of blame to go round, we can blame the film industry for allowing a...
3. The Big Brother Truth Move­ment One shouldn’t go around believing in them, of course, but I think there’s something to be said for the construction of conspiracy theories as a mode of political analysis; trying to come up with an entertaining conspiralogical explanation for events is a nice way of exploring the various interests and...

Lakey: Running does not heighten the contrast between the activists and the purveyors of violence. The running, to a T.V. or a news photographer or a bystander just looks like a riot and it gets reported in the news, that black people rioted on the streets of Birmingham or whatever. So sometimes you need to heighten the contrasts in order to make your point, and if that means getting people on their knees so they won’t run, great.

A good example of the movement not understanding that was Chicago in 1968 in the Democratic National Convention, where demonstrators coming from all over the country were set upon by the police. They started to run away and the police chased them and bloodied them even in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel, where the police finally caught up with some of the demonstrators and beat them to a pulp inside the lobby on the expensive carpet. But the way it was covered in the media was: Activists Riot in Chicago. It took a national investigation to determine it was actually the police who rioted; it wasn’t the students who rioted. There’s no reason for Occupy people to make all of these same mistakes again.

Street Spirit: Something very similar to that occurred in Oakland. The police attacked marchers on January 28 and were terribly violent to them. But when they ran, and escaped through the YMCA, it looked to the public like they were at fault when they were just trying to escape the violence.

Lakey: Exactly.

So, a nonviolence expert assures us that running away from the police when they are beating you to a pulp is “not non-violent.” This passage is a great illustration of the problem with self-identified “non-violent” activists. Of course, the tactics of non-violent civil disobedience, sit-ins, courting mass arrests, and so on, are perfectly legitimate tactics which may well be useful in many cases, and many non-violent activists are doubtless sincere people, but this personal goodness is in tension with the fact that, as a strategy, non-violence is fundamentally hostile to solidarity. The problem is that calling yourself a “non-violent” activist casts anyone who doesn’t adopt your strategies as violent; indeed, that’s the point, because you are supposed to “heighten the contrast between the activists and the purveyors of violence.” Worse, because the point is to be perceived as non-violent, non-violent activists cede the ability to define what counts as violence to the state and its ideological apparatuses. Hence the absurd situation where “non-violence” apparently requires forcing people to kneel down so that the police can beat them more effectively.

“Non-violence” takes a distinction created by the state (between violence and non-violence) and then applies this moralistically to the tactics of the movement, such that any stepping outside of these boundaries becomes, not a disagreement about tactics, but an occasion for condemnation (this, incidentally, is why neither Martin Luther King nor Gandhi are “non-violent” activists in the contemporary sense – while they had strong moral convictions about non-violence, they did not wield these convictions moralistically; solidarity trumped moral correctness). The situation where “non-violent” activists cooperate with the state in condemning their supposed comrades is not accidental, but flows directly from their philosophy; it is to the credit of those non-violent activists who refuse to do this that they put solidarity ahead of their philosophy.

The alternative, of course, is not to advocate “violence,” but to stop defining oneself dogmatically in terms of a spurious distinction between violence and non-violence; or perhaps to insist on a definition of non-violence which is responsive to the needs of the movement rather than the tastes of an imagined audience, as did this Egyptian activist quoted by David Graeber:

I remember my surprise and amusement, the first time I met activists from the April 6 Youth Movement from Egypt, when the issue of non-violence came up. “Of course we were non-violent,” said one of the original organizers, a young man of liberal politics who actually worked at a bank. “No one ever used firearms, or anything like that. We never did anything more militant than throwing rocks!”

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2. No-​one cares about prop­erty damage Given the amount of time spent discussing the handful of bank windows smashed during Wednesday’s Oakland general strike, you might imagine that many people care about property damage; and yet, if you look for such people, who are they? Liberals complain about property damage during the various marches and actions,...
3. Ter­ri­fying and insane, or, coali­tion gov­ern­ment I’ve recently returned from a month in coalition Britain, and I’ve been trying to figure out how, if at all, the general ideological tenor of the country has changed. Certainly Radio 1 is much more reactionary than it used to be; I think it’s managed to get worse every time...

I was thinking of this because I’ve been reading various interpretations of Capital that seek to find where Marx is being “ironic,” and so where his true belief is the opposite of the position he puts forward.Wolff’s Moneybags Must be so Lucky: On the Literary Structure of Capital is a particularly good example because he spends some time explaining what he means by irony and why he thinks Marx employs it, which makes his position more defensible than some, although still, I think, wrong. What Wolff thinks is ironic is Marx’s development of the labor theory of value, in which commodities have value because they are the embodiment or crystalization of the non-material stuff of abstract labor time. Wolff writes:

What can Marx possibly have in mind by advancing so manifestly absurd an account of the commodity? That he does consider this theory of “crystals of abstract homogeneous socially necessary labor” to be absurd is demonstrated by the language in which he chooses to expound it. The chapter on commodities, in which this extraordinary doctrine is introduced, is strewn with religious metaphors. (48)

Part of the problem with Wolff’s position is that it is based on a misunderstanding of Marx’s position on religion, and so a misinterpretation of the point of this religious language. Wolff assumes that, because Marx is an atheist, a comparison between a theory of the commodity and religion must be intended to signal that Marx believes the theory to be as false as religion. But Marx doesn’t think religion is simply false; Capital takes seriously theological questions, such as the differences between catholicism and protestantism, and argues for the particular appropriateness, the social validity, of protestantism to capitalism. Further, the chapter on commodity fetishism explains precisely the analogies and disanalogies between commodity fetishism and religion:

In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. (my emph)

So Capital endorses a theory of religion and uses this theory, with modifications, in building a theory of commodities; that is, Marx’s frequent, and often sarcastic, references to religion are not a sign that he “doesn’t mean” what he is saying, but a kind of perverse mark of his sincerity.

What misleads Wolff, I think, is his understanding of irony, which cannot account for this employment of irony in the service of sincerity. The model of irony which Wolff uses in understanding Marx is Socratic irony, which he defines as a statement made with two intended audiences, a naive audience who assume that Marx intends the literal meaning of the statement, and a sophisticated audience who understand that Marx denies the literal meaning of the statement, and also understand why the naive audience would be fooled. But this underestimates the extent to which irony is a rhetorical effect, taking the two audiences simply as given; what reason do we have to believe that there is such a naive audience? The only reason we have to believe in the naive audience is in the ironic writing itself; indeed, the naive audience is purely imagined in order to produce the desired effect, in order to stage a confrontation between intention and literal meaning.

If there is no actual naive audience to be fooled, then, what is the purpose of Marx’s irony? The answer, I think, lies in distinguishing Socratic from romantic irony. Where Socratic irony is used to say something while meaning the opposite, romantic irony is used to say something ironically while actually meaning it seriously; that is, it a response to a crisis of sincerity, a situation in which it seems impossible to say what you mean. This is, indeed, the situation that Marx finds himself in. The transformation of abstract labor into exchange value is indeed absurd, but unfortunately it is not an absurd theory, but an absurd reality, and Marx’s irony is a response to this absurdity, a way of expressing the simultaneous impossibility and necessity of meaning just what he says. The irony in Capital, that is, isn’t a sign of Marx’s duplicity, but of his painful sincerity.

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2. Zombies of Marx Derrida’s Spectres of Marx is a frustrating book. For someone capable of such careful readings, Derrida’s references to Marx are remarkably sloppy, and, as with a lot of his later work, the obsessively spiraling style appears hollow rather than beguiling (it’s not as bad as The Politics of Friendship, but...
3. Marx vs math­e­mat­ical eco­nomics It’s unfortunate Marx was so bad at maths. Well, bad isn’t quite the right word, as he often expends a great deal of effort and creativity establishing the various mathematical conclusions he needs to establish, even when the conclusions are obvious. It’s rather wearing slogging through a whole chapter to...

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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1. Jacques Rancière’s ne­olib­eral ped­a­gogy Reading an excellent article from Nina on the possibility of a more just educational system, which makes a determined attempt to enlist Rancière in this project. As it happens I’ve been reading a chunk of Rancière for my dissertation of late, which has sharpened my skepticism towards him, and I’m...
2. Bour­geois equality It was very considerate of Nina Power to publish an article on Rancière, Feuerbach and the early Marx just when I’ve been trying to figure out this relationship, and so when I’m in a position to take advantage of her very clear discussion. One thing that’s not clear to me,...
3. German, the lan­guage of real life A footnote in Capital: In English writers of the 17th century we frequently find “worth” in the sense of value in use, and “value” in the sense of exchange value. This is quite in accordance with the spirit of a language that likes to use a Teutonic word for the...

In a radical privacy policy shift, Google announced today that it will begin tracking users across all services—email, Search, YouTube and more—sharing information with no option to opt out. The change was announced in a blog post today, and will go into effect March 1.

Now, as Forbes points out, this is bollocks. This is not a policy shift at all, still less a radical one – tracking users across services has been in Google’s privacy policy since 2005. What I’m trying to figure out, though, is why people are freaking out over this. A couple of possibilities occur to me:

1. People misunderstood the description of the change, and took “sharing information” to mean that Google would be, IDK, going through your email to find your mum’s address so that they could email her links to all the videos you watched on YouTube, or something.
2. People didn’t know that Google was already combining information across products. This is plausible, but why would people care? If you’re worried about Google having your information, why does it matter if they have it in two separate databases or in one?
3. People didn’t know that Google stores information about how you use its services.

Looking at the responses of people on Tumblr, the third seems like it might be the case, but this is very odd. Young Tumblr users are the sort of people who tend to get called “digital natives,” but they seem to lack a basic understanding of how the internet works: Google runs the computers that store your email, so of course they have access to your email; when you search for something you send the search terms to Google’s computers, so again, of course they have access to what you search for . The basic thing which people should understand is that unless you take specific steps to make it otherwise everything you do on the internet is public. It’s public in much the same way as walking down a busy street in a foreign city is public: no-one who has access to the information is likely to care about you, and no-one you care about is likely to have access to the information; but there will always be other people who do have access to this information.

But it’s hard to be sure what’s going on here, because, although I’ve trawled through many of the Tumblr posts on this issue, no-one seems to be explaining exactly what it is that they’re worried about. What, in other words, is the “privacy” that people are worried about here? There are real concerns about privacy, of course, and two of Google’s recent policies – Buzz making people’s email contacts public, and Google+ requiring people use their legal names – potentially expose people to real danger. But this is a concern with services releasing data in ways which are problematic. A lot of concerns about “privacy” seem to be objections simply to the fact of Google tracking data, to the idea that our behavior can be quantified and mathematized. The concern, that is to say, is about privacy in the sense of our true, innermost, self, our bourgeois subjectivity. Or, to put it another way, people are worried about technology stealing their souls.

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“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”
That was almost your
Catchphrase

We might call the ideology of tween media an ideology of perkiness, in which energetic, smart kids learn useful lessons and become better people; so it’s a little marvelous that the longest-running show on the Disney Channel has a main character who is what Sara Ahmed calls an affect alien, someone who refuses perky sociality in favor of laziness, selfishness, and low expectations. It’s particularly welcome that this comes in the form of a female character, Alex, because the demand to be enthusiastic and omnicompetent is directed especially to women in post-Fordist economies.

The connection between the show and the egoist anarchism of Max Stirner first occurred to me when I saw the episode in which Alex paints a large circle-A anarchist symbol but refuses to identify it as the symbol of any ideology (or “spook,” as Stirner would no doubt have it), insisting it is merely a symbol of her own sovereign ego.

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In another episode, it turns out that this surly indolence is an ethical commitment:

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I am, appropriately, too lazy to go and download all the episodes and make a compendium of clips demonstrating this at length. Luckily, the producers of the show condensed this into one episode, so all I need to do is summarize and then let you watch. In “Positive Alex,” Alex is forced to take part in the heteronormative ritual of the school dance. However, because she won’t adopt the normative feminine performance of pleasing smiles, the boys at school consider her too surly, and won’t be her date to the dance. So, she uses a magic spell to make herself more complaisant, an effect which is visually represented by rainbows leaving her body. The pressure, however, of being in this emotional closet makes her crazy, with disastrous consequences.

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Lady Gaga – The Edge of Glory (video)

When “The Edge of Glory” came out, I described it as like Jason Nevins remixing Kelly Clarkson; should probably have clarified that this was intended as praise, an attempt to convey the splendid excessiveness of the song. Indeed, the song has become my favorite track of the year, and the more I listen to it the more it seems to be even more overstuffed than a Jason Nevins remix. Much the same could be said of Born This Way, and while the continuing parade of terrible lyrics, ridiculous outfits, and 13-minute videos got a bit wearing, I think it’s important to maintain fidelity to the Gaga event. The ambition (and Gaga’s obsession with making sure we know about the ambition) and the failure is kind of the point; Katherine St Asaph’s description of the album as “like the patterns you can use to cast invulnerable 73-foot-tall shadows on the wall behind you with your scrawny Wizard of Oz hands” remains the best explanation of what it’s doing, at least when it works.

The Saturday's – All Fired Up (video)

Another of my favorite tracks was similarly preposterous in its size. The Saturdays’ On Your Radar is the logical endpoint of the increasing indistinction between dance and pop which has coincided with the Saturdays’ time in the charts, largely abandoning conventional pop song structures in favor of dance builds and breaks, taken to an absurd (and, when it works, as in the case of the Xenomania produced “All Fired Up,” brilliant) lengths. Two widely cited bits of musical journalism discussed something related: Daniel Barrow on songs constructed around a textural and emotional intensification, or “soar,” and Simon Reynolds on “digital maximalism.” Both articles are kind of weak, and would have benefited from more historicization of their objects; I mean, Reynolds writes about music which “is up!, preposterously euphoric but genuinely awesome” without mentioning gabba? And confining his discussion to dance music misses how widespread this kind of maximalism is, or what wider cultural trends it might be tapping in to.

Britney Spears – Till the World Ends (video)

The distinctive thing about the maximalism in the charts this year is the apocalyptic tone. You can see this to some extent in the Gaga and Saturdays videos, but the central exponent here was Britney. Appropriately, because she was already developing this trend back in 2007 with the release of Blackout. At the time, I rather underrated the album, seeing it as part of the narcotic rave&B trend that developed from FutureSex/LoveSounds, but it’s actually doing something else, not withdrawing from the world but attempting to obliterate it. The political significance of this apocalyptic maximalism is something I didn’t really focus on in my own review of Britney’s album (although it’s not incompatible – the proletariat, after all, is the class whose destiny it is to abolish its own conditions of reproduction), but The New Inquiry joined the dots between the barely-suppressed insurrectionary fervor of apocalyptic maximalism and the forms of struggle that have been emerging recently.

2NE1 – Can't Nobody (video)

This year I started paying attention to K-Pop, which seems to be an entire genre devoted to maximalism. Last.fm has been periodically playing me K-Pop tracks for a while, although the only one I can remember is Girls’ Generation’s “Gee” from 2009, which is amazing. Anyway, Girls’ Generation are great and all, but their recent tracks are a bit restrained compared to their stuff from 2009, and the last thing I want from K-Pop is restraint. But through YouTube’s knowledge of related videos, Girls’ Generation led me to 2NE1, who are if anything even better. This year they released a mini album featuring a great synth-poppy track, “Hate You,” and a slightly confusing entry in the self-esteem pop genre, “Ugly,” but their best song remains last year’s “Can’t Nobody,” which is just fantastic: the amazingly swagged out rap at the beginning, the diva-ey chorus, the screeching tire sounds,the bit in the video with Minzy wearing a suit….

On the topic of maximalism and swagger, Jay-Z and Kanye’s Watch the Throne was released to howls of frankly bizarre protest about its supposed excess. The worst of these was probably Ryan Briles’s at The Activist, which calls the album “upper class propaganda.” This is so fucking stupid, and is an interpretation which could only be sustained by failing to pay attention to the album itself and the last, IDK, 20 years of hip hop. Yes, Jay-Z is a petit-bourgeois black nationalist rather than a revolutionary socialist, but it’s not like he doesn’t have a worked-out theory of the relationship between material success and the liberation of poor black people, and the album continually thematizes this complicated relationship (perhaps most straightforwardly on “Murder to Excellence”). I don’t know that Watch the Throne is a great album, but it’s better than My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, because MBDTF was about Kanye’s individual and internalized pathologies and self-loathing, which aren’t really all that interesting subjects, while Watch the Throne expands the frame to consider the social context which produces these pathologies. I’m also still mad that that Ryan Briles post completely fails to get Kanye’s very funny joke about forcing his son to be a Republican “so everyone knows he loves white people,” from the album’s best track, “New Day.”

Lil B – Unchain Me (video)

I don’t know if rap hasn’t been very good this year, or if I’ve just lost interest, or what, but the only really good hip-hop album I can think of from this year is Lil B’s I’m Gay. It’s not entirely clear what makes this an album, as opposed to the over 9,000 mixtapes Lil B also released this year, particularly a he put the album up for free download almost as soon as it had been released, but it is both better and more coherent than the mixtapes. Lil B obviously has the most innovative flow in rap since forever, and aside from the entertainment value of his meme-generating lolcat rap, he’s working through a bunch of issues in an honest and interesting, if not always right, way.

Katy B – Broken Record (video)

Also, I guess, falling in the category of maximalism would be brostep. I’m a bit confused by the attempt to delineate brostep, perhaps because “bro” is a bit of an alien category (we don’t, quite, have bros in England). A lot of the dubstep purists’ criticism of brostep reminded me of dismissals of donk a few years back; the difference is the way the process of Bourdieuvian distinction works rather differently in the US than in the UK. In the UK, the crassness of donk was signified primarily in class terms, with donk unsophisticated because northern and working class. In the US, the racialization of class means that the distinction works differently: the crassness of brostep is signified as white and (thus also) middle class; hence the relatively priveleged fratboy brostep listener is contrasted with the faux-bohemian hipster. Which is to say, I’m not at all convinced that the category of brostep has any real coherence, beyond a general name for big, hooky, populist rave tunes. And if that’s what brostep means, the biggest brostep record of the year would be Katy B’s On a Mission, although Katy is no bro.

Last few things about which I don’t have much to say about. Cher Lloyd’s is really good (even “Swagger Jagger” is good if you can persuade yourself to not hear the “O My Darling Clementine” bits, but “Playa Boi” and “Dub on the Track” are better). Selena Gomez released a fairly consistently good album, Demi Lovato released a less consistent album which did have some pretty good tracks. Beyoncé released the best album of her career. Nicola Roberts released a very good album, Florrie and Sky Ferreira released good EPs, Menya and tAtu split up.

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Terminator: Salvation, on the other hand, takes place firmly after the apocalypse, and was released in 2009, when, indeed, the neoliberal apocalypse had already happened. It isn’t exactly a perfect film, with its focus on explosions taking up time that could have been put to better use telling us, really, anything about the main characters, but it’s a lot better than Terminator 3. It’s temporal location may explain why, except for the last 20 minutes or so, Terminator 3 doesn’t have any of the resonance of the other films: it’s set before the apocalypse, but released in 2003, at which point I don’t think anyone thought apocalypse was avoidable; the film is, really, just marking time.

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(A digression inspired by watching Zombieland the other day. What I like about the film is its presentation of the post-apocalypse as amusement arcade; apparently, you only need to walk a hundred yards to find a Hummer full of weapons, or Bill Murray’s house full of food and fine wine. Obviously in one sense this is ridiculous; if there’s no-one working at the power plant, it will take more than flipping a couple of switches to get the theme park rides back up and running. But there’s also something right about this; our apocalypse isn’t an apocalypse of scarcity, but one that leaves us scavenging in the wreckage of superabundance. I also like the way no-one in the film uses their real names, as if the apocalypse has wiped away bourgeois subjectivity.)

The post-apocalypse of Terminator: Salvation is a more conventional in its portrayal of economic and environmental ruin, but what strikes me as interesting is the role that industry still plays in it. You might expect the world produced by a murderous artificial intelligence to be more immaterial but, in a partial reversal of the first film, in Terminator: Salvation, industry is now firmly on the side of the machines. The choice to locate Skynet central in the Bay Area is clever; what is, in our world, the home of post-industrial Web 2.0, becomes, in the film, the real of post-Fordist capitalism, the nightmare factories of China and other free trade zones. And we see that, like neoliberalism, Skynet still has a use for human beings, even if only as bare life to be fed into its machinic labs. But Skynet is presented as so material in the film that it seems to have neglected its immaterial dimension; surely an omnipotent AI would not have a security system that is as easy to hack as John Connor finds Skynet’s to be? The film is perhaps still caught up in the liberatory fantasies of the late neoliberal period, in which the internet was imagined as uncomplicatedly a site of freedom.

The end of the film perhaps complicates this, as John Connor is saved by the robot that does not know it is a robot. I had thought, and hoped, at one point that they were going to go further with this blurring of the human-machine boundary: would it not have been a better ending if the actual John Connor had died in the attempt to free the prisoners from Skynet, but the humanoid robot had decided to continue Connor’s work by taking on his name, with the result that the “John Connor” who started the whole series by sending Kyle Rees back in time to save Sarah Connor, would have been himself a Terminator?

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