McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H30RY is one of those very rare academic books that makes me envious. I say to myself, “damn — if only I could write something that good.”…
McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H30RY is one of those very rare academic books that makes me envious. I say to myself, “damn — if only I could write something that good.”
Wark’s book is a kind of meta-commentary on computer games. This puts it in a different category from Alex Galloway’s excellent recent gaming book. Galloway theorizes games, analyzing them formally, and pushing toward questions of their socio-political implications, the way they both mirror and help to constitute what Deleuze calls the society of control. But Wark’s book sort of begins where Galloway’s ends: it moves to a higher (meta-) level of abstraction in order to reflect upon how computer games relate to and mirror or encapsulate the world, and vice versa. Wark is less concerned with delineating either the communities surrounding gaming or the formal properties of games, than he is in tracing the computer game as a diagram of larger social processes. For Wark, all of social reality today is a vast “gamespace,” dominated by the algorithmic codifications and unequal power relations that are displayed within computer games in their purest and clearest form. Social reality today is governed by the same “military-entertainment complex” that actually manufactures and distributes computer games. Wark uses actual computer games as lenses or prisms to examine the “gamespace” of our media-saturated, simulacral world, and to discover the structures of feeling, or forms of subjectivity, that we find ourselves exhibiting as inhabitants of that world.
GAM3R 7H30RY — like Wark’s previous book, A Hacker Manifesto — is written with a lapidary precision. There are nine chapters, each of which consists of exactly 25 numbered paragraphs. The chapter titles are arranged in alphabetical order (though Wark only gets a little bit of the way through the alphabet; the last chapter is CONCLUSIONS). Each chapter refers to one particular computer game (they range from Deus Ex to The Sims to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City). The exception is the first chapter, AGONY, which refers not to any actually existing computer game but to The Cave(TM), as in Plato’s cave: which is to say, to the lived social world as illusory “gamespace,” from which there is little hope of escape to the outside world of sunlight, and to the spaces of actual computer games as allegories or models or idealized maps of this world-as-gamespace. Wark relentlessly tracks this more-than-metaphor through his chosen series of games. The 25 paragraphs of each chapter present a linear argument, but they do so by introducing one or two key concepts, and then relentlessly mulling over alternative implications and ambiguities of these contents. All this in a honed-down, sharpened prose that is almost mathematical — or algorithmic — in its repetitions and pitiless clarity. Each game is thereby revealed as an allegorithm — Wark’s neologism, a portmanteau word combining “allegory” and “algorithm” — of social gamespace.
[Added Note: as Wark says in the comments, the neologism “allegorithm” was in fact first invented by Alexander Galloway.]
The result is a book that is very schematic and abstract. But this is justified, because the features of social life that Wark abstracts away from in order to perform his analyses are those very features that games themselves — and the game-like simulation models that control social reality in business, in education, in military action, and so on — themselves ignore, repress, and abstract away from. Computer games clarify the inner logic of social control at work in the world. Games give an outline of what actually happens in much messier and less totalized ways. Thereby, however, games point up the ways in which social control is precisely directed towards creating game-like clarities and firm outlines, at the expense of our freedoms. In this way, Wark remains alert to the ambiguities that infect the gaming paradigm, but he also registers the very way that this paradigm works to keep those ambiguities at bay, to reduce or destroy them.
Wark’s analyses thereby point to the ways in which “postmodern” society:
- is increasingly virtual,
- is saturated by digital media,
- is oblivious of time or history and indifferent to particularities of space or topography,
- is governed by impersonal algorithms that tend to reify “choice” as a series of binary options without ambiguity,
- is increasingly homogeneous as it absorbs any possible “outside” within itself,
- is increasingly being reduced, not just to a spectacle, but to a “pure agon,†a perpetual Darwinian competition, a struggle that no longer respects divisions between work and leisure, or between private and public, and that never ends, but that nonetheless continually divides the world into “winners” and “losers.”
Although each chapter of GAM3R 7H30RY is pretty much self-contained, the book as a whole traces a Marxist/McLuhanite metanarrative, or historical progression, from “topical†to “topographic†to “topological†conceptions of space, and from books to movies to games as media forms. Like Adorno and Debord and Foucault, Wark sees the history of technological progress as also a history of increasing subjection. It is not that he idealizes the past in any way, but that he insists on the configurations of unfreedom that constitute the present, and that inhabit our very narratives of liberation and progress. In a certain sense, GAM3R 7H30RY is the dystopian flip side of A Hacker Manifesto, in which Wark presented a utopian, post-Marxist (or, as Wark himself put it, “crypto-Marxist”) vision of liberation, by rethinking the slogan (or the truism) that “information wants to be free” in the context of class analysis and “the property question.” In, GAM3R 7H30RY, in contrast, Wark looks at the structure of space, rather than the narrative of liberation that (necessarily) unfolds in time. For the time that it takes to play a computer game is in a certain sense an illusion, since all the game’s possibilities are given in advance by the algorithm that constitutes and governs it. “Gamespace” is therefore a maze that seems to be closed or closed off (though the last two chapters flirt with the very distant possibility of a way out of the maze, a possible escape from the closure of a space in which every contingency is governed by an algorithm).
In the penultimate paragraph (224 of 225), Wark states that “only by going further and further into gamespace might one come out the other side of it, to realize a topology beyond the limiting forms of the game.” This is both a warning, and a hope. It’s a warning that we will not get anywhere by expressing horror at “gamespace” or by yearning for an older world, and older media, before the algorithmic calculations of the military-entertainment complex ruled everything. We can’t ever go back; the only way out is through. The hope is that there is something better if we do go through. It’s a process, Wark says, of “pressing against the limits of the game from within, to find the contrary terms behind the agon.” Such is the hope; it is really a matter of faith. It is demonstrated within the pages of GAM3R 7H30RY only by the dry exuberance of Wark’s prose itself, as it pushes against the limits by which it is circumscribed, the limits of the games themselves and their ruling algorithms. The exhilaration of gameplay comes from the working out, the mastering, of its algorithms. Wark suggests that this exhilaration, this victory, is ultimately the sign of a deeper subjection; but he still holds out the fugitive hope of a different kind of victory, an active playing against the game. Is it even possible?
Alexander Galloway‘s new book, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, has recently been published. And McKenzie Wark has made his forthcoming book, Gamer Theory (or, rather, GAM3R 7H30RY), available on the Web. These books are quite different from one another, but both provide considerable insight on the subject of video games or computer games. Both rightly regard these games as the major media form of the early 21st century, playing the role for us today that film and television did for most of the 20th century. I will comment about Galloway’s book here, and Wark’s in a subsequent post.
Alexander Galloway‘s new book, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, has recently been published. And McKenzie Wark has made his forthcoming book, Gamer Theory (or, rather, GAM3R 7H30RY), available on the Web. These books are quite different from one another, but both provide considerable insight on the subject of video games or computer games. Both rightly regard these games as the major media form of the early 21st century, playing the role for us today that film and television did for most of the 20th century. I will comment about Galloway’s book here, and Wark’s in a subsequent post.
Gaming is a useful and thoughtful investigation of some of the formal properties and political possibilities of computer games. His five chapters are pretty much separate essays. “Gamic Action, Four Moments” presents a typology of the kinds of activities that take place in computer games; such activities can be initiated either by the “operator” (i.e. the person playing the game) or by the machine itself; and these activities can be either diegetic or not. (“Diegetic is a term taken from film theory; it refers to the parts of the movie that are parts of the actual action; i.e., something we see a character do is diegetic, but the theme music playing while she does it is nondiegetic, since the character doesn’t hear this music, only we do. Similarly, in a first-person shooter game, firing a gun and killing a monster is diegetic, but the readout of the player’s points, energy level, etc., is nondiegetic). This first chapter is useful simply on formal grounds, because it gives us a more precise vocabulary for talking about what actually happens in various games. It also begins to explore some of the deeper issues Galloway is interested in; particularly the import of “play” as a human activity, and the question of what it means to be in a space governed by algorithms and the programmatic reduction of ambiguity.
The second chapter, “Origins of the First-Person Shooter,” considers the history of the “subjective shot” in film — the shot taken directly from through the eyes of a character — and follows the mutation of this unusual sort of shot into the predominant point of view of shooter games like Doom. In film, it is quite common to see things from a particular character’s point of view (POV); but this shot is usually not literally equated with what the character sees with his/her own eyes. Rather, we are “sutured” into the character’s POV precisely by seeing the character’s act of seeing, together with what he/she sees. We look from over the character’s shoulder, for instance, or we have a cut between a shot of the character looking, and a shot of what he/she sees. Actual subjective shots, on the other hand, are quite rare. They often seem awkward, and fail to get the audience to identify with the character through whose eyes we are seeing. A classic example is Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1946): nearly the whole film is shot through the eyes of Philip Marlowe, and the effect is weirdly (and unintentionally) alienating. Probably because they seem alienating or unnatural, subjective shots were often used in the 1970s and 1980s to give us the POV of the monster in horror films (like the shark in Spielberg’s Jaws, and the killer in the Halloween films). And Galloway points out how these shots have also been used to signify machinic, robotic, or otherwise inhuman vision: as in the Terminator and Robocop films. But if these shots are alienating in the cinema, why are they so successful in first person shooter computer games? Galloway suggests that this is because computer games involve active movement through space (whereas films are more about the passive contemplation of space, or — a la Josef von Sternberg — of patterns of light). Gamespace must be “fully rendered, actionable space” (63); the operator/player must be able to roam through this space at will (as is never the case in film, where the camera angles and shots are all determined in advance). This gamic sense of active space makes montage superfluous (64), and instead demands full freedom of movement. So the subjective shot works in games, as it does not in films, because the gamer is active in ways that the cinematic spectator cannot be. All in all, I found this chapter powerful and persuasive from my own point of view, or subjective stake, as a film scholar (but as someone who is determined not to see film as the be-all and end-all of media evolution).
The third chapter, “Social Realism,” and the fourth, “Allegories of Control,” go more deeply into the political consequences of computer games’ formal properties. In the former, Galloway considers the various senses in which computer games might (or might not) be thought of as “realistic.” He tries to shift the emphasis away from mere representational naturalism (that the world of the game looks, as much as possible, like the “real world”) and towards the more interesting questions of how games might intervene in social reality, or relate to the outside-the-game experiences of the people who play them — how they might have “a special congruence between the social reality depicted in the game and the social reality known and lived by the player” (83). This leads, on the one hand, to further questioning of the concept of “play,” and on the other, to a consideration of games and war. Though “play” is supposed to be, by definition, apart from the “serious” business of living in the world, in fact, “with the growing significance of immaterial labor, and the concomitant increase in cultivation and exploitation of play… as a productive force, play will become more and more linked to broad social structures of control” (76). War, similarly, has become progressively more entwined with gaming: from the presentation of bombing raids as being like video games in the First Gulf War, to the promotion today of games like America’s Army as recruitment tools for the actual US Army. In both these ways, the question of “realism” in games is tied up with the question of action: of what actions players can take in the games, and how these resonate with actions we are allowed or incited to do in the real world.
“Social Realism” is really just a preparation for the larger arguments of the fourth chapter, “Allegories of Control.” Here Galloway points up the insufficiency and lameness of content criticism of games (e.g. that they are too violent, misogynistic, Western-centered, etc.), and points up the need instead for a more system- and media-based (I am inclined to say McLuhanist, though Galloway himself does not say this) form of critique. The real limitations of a game like Civilization reside less in its dubious, ethnocentric assumptions about world history, than in the way in which, precisely, Civilization embodies “the logic of informatic control itself” (101). What’s crucial is not the particular content, but the basic algorithmic logic of computer games, the way that they reduce everything to quantifiable bits of “information.” It is in this formal dimension that computer games not only reflect, but actively participate in, what David Harvey calls the regime of “flexible accumulation,” and what Deleuze calls the “control society.” Gameplay promises freedom, at least imaginatively and allegorically — that is to say, at least in “play” — to the gamer; but at the same time it reproduces the very structures of domination that are becoming increasingly prevalent in postmodern, or “late” capitalist, society. “A game’s celebration of the end of ideological manipulation is also a new manipulation, only this time using wholly different diagrams of command and control” (106).
Galloway’s final chapter, “Countergaming,” describes the (would-be) subversive strategies of net artists who have made works that try to mess with, or actively subvert and critique, the formal structures and political implications of mainstream games. He compares the work of JODI and other “countergaming” artists to the “countercinema” of Godard and others in the 1960s. His account of these artists, and their work, is detailed and sympathetic, but he concludes (rightly in my estimation) that they do not succeed in their subversive mission, either aesthetically or politically. Works by JODI, for instance, mimic the look and feel of games, but frustrate the gameplayer’s expectations, because progression through the game becomes impossible; instead, you get simulations of crashes and breakdowns and random output on the screen. But this means that “countergaming is essentially progressive in visual form but reactionary in actional form” — and in games, actional form is the most important thing. “It serves to hinder gameplay, not advance it. It eclipses the game as a game and rewrites it as a sort of primitive animation lacking any of the virtues of game design” (125). Galloway concludes, therefore, that JODI is no Godard, and that countergaming is still “an unrealized project” (126). I find this harsh conclusion both sobering and extremely important. Computer games are a relatively new medium; and we still do not really know what they can do, or what we can do with them or to them. When it comes to creative resistance, or radical re-creation, we still haven’t caught up with them.
Galloway’s own book, I think, itself participates in the very dilemma it describes. Galloway declares in his Preface that “this book is about loving video games. It’s about exploring their artistry, their political possibility, their uniqueness” (xii). And clearly his lucid and powerful formulations could only have come from somebody who has spent a lot of time with video games, who has lived them and loved them, who has experienced them from the inside. Yet ultimately Gaming testifies to a kind of blockage, and failure of imagination — not on Galloway’s part so much as on that of all of us. For the book points to a political deadlock — the ubiquity of the new systems of control — and to the inability of gamers (of players, designers, artists, and activists) thus far to oppose, to work through and work out of, these systems of control. Galloway powerfully describes some of the parameters of the new media environment in which we (even those of us who don’t play computer games) find ourselves living today. But he also testifies to our continuing inability to think — or to act — with it, through it, and around it.
In Milton Lumky Territory is one of Philip K. Dick’s non-science-fiction (i.e. “realist”) novels, that he wrote in the late 1950s, but that wasn’t published until after his death…
In Milton Lumky Territory is one of Philip K. Dick’s non-science-fiction (i.e. “realist”) novels, that he wrote in the late 1950s, but that wasn’t published until after his death. It’s quite an affecting book, based on that 1950s obsession, the figure of the traveling salesman (cf. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman). It’s set in Idaho — Boise, mainly, though the characters get all over the West when they are on the road — and really concerns the dreams and dead ends of small-town America (as it was already starting to vanish when Dick wrote the novel). What’s peculiar (and compelling) about it is the way it drowns itself in the hopelessly mundane. Most of the novel is about Bruce Stevens’, the main character’s, quest to make a killing by getting a franchise for, and selling, imported Japanese electronic typewriters. He never succeeds, but the way the novel obsessively details his quest, the deals he cuts, the tests he makes, the things he learns about typewriters, and the endless hours he puts in driving from Boise to San Francisco to Pocatello to Seattle to Boise to Reno and back to Boise — all this becomes almost surreal, just because the focus is so narrow, so doggedly persistent, so unrelieved by adventure or difference.
The eponymous Milton Lumky is not the protagonist of the novel, but a subsidiary character, somebody Bruce Stevens meets: a bitter, twisted, cynical and ironic traveling salesman who seems to embody what Bruce might be in danger of turning into, if he weren’t so unimaginative and all-American. But Bruce is incapable of insight; he seems never to have emotionally outgrown his teen years. Besides his fixation on selling typewriters, 24-year-old Bruce meets and marries a woman, Susan, who is ten years his senior, and who in fact had been his fifth-grade teacher. Bruce veers back and forth between submission to, and adolescent rebellion against, this maternal figure. Susan comes off as willful and smothering, but in a way that is sufficiently enigmatic (and sufficiently desirable to Bruce, and perhaps to the author as well) that she never fits into the misogynistic, castrating-bitch type who so often crops up when Dick writes female characters. The relationship is clearly doomed from the beginning, and the interaction between Bruce and Susan veers between self-deception and sheer incompatibility. Except that the novel ends, remarkably, with a regressive fantasy, in which Bruce — after having walked out on Susan for good — first reverts back to the fifth grade, and his fixation on Susan as his teacher, and then flashes forward from that to imagine them together, raising Susan’s daughter and running a small business, in reasonable contentment if not outright bliss. It’s a “happy ending” that the entire rest of the novel belies, and that startles because, as a fantasy, it is so pallid and humdrum — clearly Bruce cannot imagine anything other or better, and if he could, he would only drown in Milton Lumky bitterness — or worse. It’s as if this narrow, constricted universe were the only alternative to, or the only defense against, the schizophrenic horrors of Dick’s later, and greater, fiction. The oppressive ontological solidity of the novel is the flip side of, and just as alienating as, the continually shifting and collapsing realities of Dick’s major SF novels.
(This post is weeks overdue; let me try to finish it quickly. More and better on Whitehead later, I promise).
Thanks to the Distributed Whitehead Network, I was able to access, live, the streaming webcasts of three recent symposia on the theme of “Whitehead Today” (and simultaneously contribute to discussion via a chat room). For lack of time, I will only comment on the first symposium here.
I’ve written many times on this blog about my enthusiasm for Whitehead (especially here, here, and here). I also have an article about Whitehead in relation to Kant(warning: fairly academic in manner) (forthcoming in some anthology or other) which is available for download here. But enough self-citation; I was grateful to the Whitehead Today symposia for the way they brought me back to some of the perplexities, or unresolved issues, I have both with understanding Whitehead’s thought, and with figuring out just how he might be relevant today, both generally and (here’s the self-citation again, sorry) in my own work.
The first symposium, at Stanford, featured Isabelle Stengers, whose great book on Whitehead (published in France in 2002 and alas, still untranslated into English) was my own introduction to his thought. Stengers’ talk was less a summary of the book — which (at 550 pages or so) is too varied and capacious to be summarized briefly — than a discussion of why and how Whitehead might matter to us, now; what his fine metaphysical distinctions and abstruse vocabulary (ripe for scholasticization, I fear) contribute to contemporary arguments and discussions.
In addition, there were two “respondents,” neither of whose talks were particularly useful in actually coming to grips with either Whitehead or Stengers. Donna Haraway talked about dogs, and in particular about her relationship with her own dog: this was all quite wonderful in itself — refreshingly nutty, and at the same time surprisingly cogent and incisive just when you thought it was going to drift off into the aether. Haraway was particularly good on the way that the human-dog relationship cannot just be one of domination and instrumentality, but was a true partnership; while at the same time (in rejection of animal-rights activism) did necessarily have to involve a hierarchy, and ultimately a human power of life and death, over the dog. But, although Haraway proclaimed her love of Whitehead, linked the human-dog relationship to Whitehead’s notion of “societies” (of which more below), none of this had all that much to do with Whitehead’s thought, or Stengers’ articulation of it.
The second respondent, Richard Rorty, basically said (in fatuous tones) that Whitehead was worthless, because (leaving aside Whitehead’s metaphysics, which is what Rorty does, and which is pretty much equivalent to, say, taking account of Einstein while leaving aside his physics, or taking account of Marx while leaving aside his economics and politics), all he could get out of Whitehead was that Whitehead’s ruminations might make somebody who was depressed (by the death of a loved one, in particular: since Rorty biographically attributed Whitehead’s turn from mathematical logic to metaphysics to grief over the death of his son in the First World War) feel a bit better. Rorty added that this was merely a replication of what Wordsworth and Shelley had already done a century before Whitehead. Presumably what Rorty was referring to was Whitehead’s idea of “objective immortality.” What this comes down to, ignoring its metaphysical content (which is a highly original way of thinking about relations — about how things connect to one another — and about how these connections perpetuate themselves over time), is the common idea that as long as living people still think about a dead loved one, still hold him or her in their memory, the deceased person is not truly, or not entirely, dead). This latter commonplace is apparently the only content that Rorty is able to discern in Whitehead, Wordsworth, or Shelley. Such an inanely reductive “reading,” if one can even call it that, is woefully inadequate to understanding either poetic texts or metaphysical ones. I fail to understand why anybody takes Rorty seriously as a thinker at this point.
Stengers’ talk focused on what it meant for Whitehead to “understand” something; and how this might be relevant for theoretical debates we are embroiled in today. Whitehead, coming from a mathematical background, emphasizes the difference between “necessary conditions” and “necessary and sufficient conditions.” The crucial point is that the former does not necessarily imply the latter. Certain genes are necessary conditions for human behavior, including those behaviors that involve language and society. But this does not mean that these particular genes are sufficient conditions for that behavior as well. This is the problem that always comes up in genetic explanations of all sorts of human behavior; even if scientists have indeed found the genes “for” some sort of behavior (and many claims of doing so are dubious, because the research methodology is shoddy), the working of these genes does not account for the behavior (speech, altruism, homosexuality, whatever) — in itself it simply isn’t sufficient. Scientists may have explained one aspect of “human nature”; but this explanation is not enough for us to understand the behavior, which is what Whitehead says that we, as speaking and reasoning beings, “require.” For “knowing is about closed facts,” Stengers says, “facts we are able to define.” But “understanding entails for Whitehead an experience of transformative disclosure,” that goes beyond mere definition, or mere identification of necessary preconditions.
Now, this may seem to be a rather obvious critique. Where it gets interesting is where Stengers extends the argument beyond positivist science. The definition of ourselves as linguistic beings — which we find in Heidegger, Lacan, and most of the philosopies and “human sciences” of the 20th century — is subject to the same Whiteheadian criticism as genetic reductionism. “When we make language our creator,” Stengers says, “we explain away” our need for a broader understanding, our capacity to explore and realize alternatives, our non-reduction to any sort of total programming, and instead “stick again to the usual business of finding an explanation for human experience.” Finding an explanation is itself a form of blockage, a way of policing behavior, a way of shutting down alternatives — even if the explanation is (in its own terms) correct. Against this, Whitehead gives us a way to avoid letting any one explanation become exhaustive and impose its sufficiency against all the other possibilities that are out there.
(This post is weeks overdue; let me try to finish it quickly. More and better on Whitehead later, I promise).
Thanks to the Distributed Whitehead Network, I was able to access, live, the streaming webcasts of three recent symposia on the theme of “Whitehead Today” (and simultaneously contribute to discussion via a chat room). For lack of time, I will only comment on the first symposium here.
I’ve written many times on this blog about my enthusiasm for Whitehead (especially here, here, and here). I also have an article about Whitehead in relation to Kant(warning: fairly academic in manner) (forthcoming in some anthology or other) which is available for download here. But enough self-citation; I was grateful to the Whitehead Today symposia for the way they brought me back to some of the perplexities, or unresolved issues, I have both with understanding Whitehead’s thought, and with figuring out just how he might be relevant today, both generally and (here’s the self-citation again, sorry) in my own work.
The first symposium, at Stanford, featured Isabelle Stengers, whose great book on Whitehead (published in France in 2002 and alas, still untranslated into English) was my own introduction to his thought. Stengers’ talk was less a summary of the book — which (at 550 pages or so) is too varied and capacious to be summarized briefly — than a discussion of why and how Whitehead might matter to us, now; what his fine metaphysical distinctions and abstruse vocabulary (ripe for scholasticization, I fear) contribute to contemporary arguments and discussions.
In addition, there were two “respondents,” neither of whose talks were particularly useful in actually coming to grips with either Whitehead or Stengers. Donna Haraway talked about dogs, and in particular about her relationship with her own dog: this was all quite wonderful in itself — refreshingly nutty, and at the same time surprisingly cogent and incisive just when you thought it was going to drift off into the aether. Haraway was particularly good on the way that the human-dog relationship cannot just be one of domination and instrumentality, but was a true partnership; while at the same time (in rejection of animal-rights activism) did necessarily have to involve a hierarchy, and ultimately a human power of life and death, over the dog. But, although Haraway proclaimed her love of Whitehead, linked the human-dog relationship to Whitehead’s notion of “societies” (of which more below), none of this had all that much to do with Whitehead’s thought, or Stengers’ articulation of it.
The second respondent, Richard Rorty, basically said (in fatuous tones) that Whitehead was worthless, because (leaving aside Whitehead’s metaphysics, which is what Rorty does, and which is pretty much equivalent to, say, taking account of Einstein while leaving aside his physics, or taking account of Marx while leaving aside his economics and politics), all he could get out of Whitehead was that Whitehead’s ruminations might make somebody who was depressed (by the death of a loved one, in particular: since Rorty biographically attributed Whitehead’s turn from mathematical logic to metaphysics to grief over the death of his son in the First World War) feel a bit better. Rorty added that this was merely a replication of what Wordsworth and Shelley had already done a century before Whitehead. Presumably what Rorty was referring to was Whitehead’s idea of “objective immortality.” What this comes down to, ignoring its metaphysical content (which is a highly original way of thinking about relations — about how things connect to one another — and about how these connections perpetuate themselves over time), is the common idea that as long as living people still think about a dead loved one, still hold him or her in their memory, the deceased person is not truly, or not entirely, dead). This latter commonplace is apparently the only content that Rorty is able to discern in Whitehead, Wordsworth, or Shelley. Such an inanely reductive “reading,” if one can even call it that, is woefully inadequate to understanding either poetic texts or metaphysical ones. I fail to understand why anybody takes Rorty seriously as a thinker at this point.
Stengers’ talk focused on what it meant for Whitehead to “understand” something; and how this might be relevant for theoretical debates we are embroiled in today. Whitehead, coming from a mathematical background, emphasizes the difference between “necessary conditions” and “necessary and sufficient conditions.” The crucial point is that the former does not entail the latter. There are many preconditions necessary for any phenomenon in the world, but the phenomenon generally exceeds what is given in these preconditions — something new happens in the coming-together of the necessary conditions, none of which (nor even them all together) is sufficienct for the phenomenon that arises from them.
For instance. Certain genes are necessary conditions for human behavior, including those behaviors that involve language and society. But this does not mean that these particular genes are sufficient conditions for that behavior as well. This is the problem that always comes up in genetic explanations of all sorts of human behavior; even if scientists have indeed found the genes “for” some sort of behavior (and many claims of doing so are dubious, because the research methodology is shoddy), the working of these genes does not account for the behavior (speech, altruism, homosexuality, whatever) — in itself it simply isn’t sufficient. Scientists may have explained one aspect of “human nature”; but this explanation is not enough for us to understand the behavior, which is what Whitehead says that we, as speaking and reasoning beings, “require.” For “knowing is about closed facts,” Stengers says, “facts we are able to define.” But “understanding entails for Whitehead an experience of transformative disclosure,” that goes beyond mere definition, or mere identification of necessary preconditions.
Now, this may seem to be a rather obvious critique. Where it gets interesting is where Stengers extends the argument beyond positivist science. The definition of ourselves as linguistic beings — which we find in Heidegger, Lacan, and most of the philosopies and “human sciences” of the 20th century — is subject to the same Whiteheadian criticism as genetic reductionism. “When we make language our creator,” Stengers says, “we explain away” our need for a broader understanding, our capacity to explore and realize alternatives, our non-reduction to any sort of total programming, and instead “stick again to the usual business of finding an explanation for human experience.” Finding an explanation is itself a form of blockage, a way of policing behavior, a way of shutting down alternatives — even if the explanation is (in its own terms) correct. Against this, Whitehead gives us a way to avoid letting any one explanation become exhaustive and impose its sufficiency against all the other possibilities that are out there.
I’ve been reading, with a combination of exasperation and illumination — but alas, more of the former — the discussion of Gayatri Spivak’s “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value” that has been going on at Long Sunday and other places. The discussion led me to reread Spivak’s article itself, which I hadn’t looked at for many years, but which touches on, in various ways, the project on commodity fetishism and aesthetics in which I am currently engaged. I don’t have the energy or focus to write a full-fledged discussion of the essay the way that the folks at Long Sunday have done, but I’d like to make a few comments provoked by reading all that commentary in the light of rereading the essay itself.
The thing that exasperates me the most about much of the discussion is the emphasis on Spivak’s alleged difficulty or incomprehensibility (I am not singling out any of the postings in particular here, just recording a general impression). The level of objection seems to me to be excessive, out of proportion with the actual challengingness of Spivak’s essay, and hence is probably symptomatic. Spivak writes in a theoretical shorthand; that is to say, she assumes a lot of background knowledge on the part of the reader — something which is unavoidable, given the fact that you cannot make a sophisticated argument at all if you have to spell out your points of reference in beginners’ terms every time you try to write anything. Now admittedly, Spivak’s particular presupposed knowledge is stuff I have a reasonable grasp upon — certain strains in Marxist economic theorizing, as well as Derridean deconstruction and its general philosophical-historical background. But I don’t see that Spivak is somehow intrinsically impenetrable. If you lack the requisite backgrounds, you will have the same difficulties that I have in reading Badiou’s Being and Event (because I lack any familiarity with or understanding of set theory), or most recent American analytic philosophy (because I lack the proper comprehension of propositional logic), of for that matter articles discussing the Federal Reserve Bank’s monetary policy or the intricacies of narrative theory. Spivak’s writing is in fact much more engaging and interesting than most of these other sorts of writing — because of the way it makes connections across disciplinary boundaries and contextualizes together things that are usually left apart (like, literary canonization on the one hand and the international division of labor on the other) in ways that few of the other examples I have cited ever dare to do. And I don’t think that Spivak is obscurantist or unnecessarily diffficult in any of the ways these other sorts of writing aren’t.
Putting the bogeyman of “difficulty” aside, it seems to me that “Scattered Speculations” is useful precisely for the way that it reaffirms the importance of Marx’s insights (or theoretical formulations, if you prefer) about exploitation and surplus value for any understanding of culture and society — including but not limited to the discourses of literary studies and interdisciplinary “theory” — today. Among the crucial points Spivak makes (without trying to give a complete account, or putting into more rigid order what we are told right at the start are “scattered” — and provisional — “speculations”) are the following. Cultural studies gets too comfortable and complacent when it considers questions of domination, and power, without also considering the specific importance of exploitation. Marx’s sense of “the labor theory of value,” and thereby of the functioning of exploitation in a specifically economic sense, needs to be defended against both the old-fashioned marxist fundamentalists who would read the theory in an essentialist or “continuist” manner, and the up-to-date theorists (including many so-called deconstructionists) who reject the theory outright on the grounds that it is (supposedly) essentialist or continuist.
Against this, Spivak emphasizes the “textual” indeterminacy of the relations of (the socially necessary) labor embodied in a commodity to the exchange-value of that commodity, to the money form in a capitalist economy, to capital as an object of quantitative accumulation. Labor-power, the commodity that workers must sell to capitalists in order to survive, is defined by Spivak as a materialist predication of the subject (i.e. a definition of what constitutes the human subject — one that is made in “materialist” terms in contrast to the “idealist” definition of subjectivity in terms of consciousness or intentionality) that relies on a fundamental non-identity, “the irreducible possibility that the subject be more than adequate — super-adequate — to itself.” This non-identity is precisely the basis on which exploitation (the extraction of surplus value) is possible; and it indicates how surplus value has to do with a basic incommensurability between the identity (defined via exchange value) of a subject, and the productive labor-power that such a subject is able to deploy. The latter is the use value of the worker’s labor power for the capitalist employer. To see this incommensurability is also to see that use value itself cannot be defined in essentialist terms as some sort of fixable need. (Cf. my previous post on the non-essentialist definition of use value).
So Spivak uses the concept of use-value as a “deconstructive lever” to unsettle any normalization of the hierarchies of value. This means continuing to insist upon the inequities of (worldwide) exploitation, as a process that gets left out of “radical” critiques that only consider systems of domination. Spivak cites as examples both the self-mystifying language of business schools and corporations, and the uncritical celebration of(supposed) empowerment via new computing and telecommunications technologies that has been so prevalent in some “postmodern” quarters. While criticisms like Spivak’s are often read as “politically correct” handwringing, or as what Spivak herself calls a stance “that the ‘disinterested’ academy dismisses as ‘pathos’,” Spivak is careful to spell out the links between the ideology of empowerment that pomo and business academics (unbeknownst to each other) share, and the ‘objective’ way these groups benefit from exploitation via the international division of labor.
I could go on with this, which would seem to me to be just a fairly banal and obvious reading of Spivak’s essay, were it not that so many readers/commentators find it impenetrable. Other aspects of Spivak’s argument are also worth citing, including the way Marxist/economic notions of value are necessarily entwined with other sorts of declarations of Value (such as aesthetic and moral specifications of value). Many of the commentators on the article have in fact moved their focus from economic value to these other sorts of value, without noticing that Spivak is explicitly objecting to such a (economics-effacing) refocusing. But I lack the patience to continue with this close reading, so I will close with a few questions.
If there is one area where I would (mildly) dissent from Spivak’s formulations, it is on the question of whether the “textualist” (or deconstructionist) reading/metaphor/angle of approach is really the best one for raising the issues Spivak wants to raise. I tend to doubt that it is, for reasons that are not unrelated to the ones that Jodi raises. Jodi asks: “what makes the subject materialist or, to use Spivak’s language, why are we working with a materialist predication of the subject or why is a materialist predication of the subject necessarily a predication linked to labor power?” And, following Zizek, she proposes “a different account of the subject, perhaps in terms of the lack, gap, or irreducibility between the idealist and materialist predications.” Now, I am not willing to follow Jodi in making such a move; it seems to me that positing a subject in terms of Lack or negativity is precisely moving in the wrong direction, back to the “idealist” predication that Spivak both wants to get away from, and (as a good deconstructionist) admits we can never eliminate altogether. I think that Spivak’s deconstructionist posing of the idealist/materialist alternative is more destabilizing, and more nuanced, than the Zizekian parallax Jodi proposes. So I’d want to return to Jodi’s cogent question, but give it a different suggestion for the answer. The materialist predication in terms of labor power is important precisely because of the “super-adequation” it entails — and this sort of formulation is preferable to one in terms of lack. But I’d like to say that this predication, although a necessary one for defining the subject, is not a sufficient one. (I take this distinction from Isabelle Stengers’ discussion of Whitehead, in a forthcoming, but as yet unpublished, article. Stengers shows how Whitehead transfers this initially mathematical distinction into metaphysics and ontology). “Super-adequation” itself embodies such a distinction (as a term, it implies a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition, which is precisely why it resists “continuist” or properly representational coding). But the weakness of deconstructive, textualist approaches, to my mind, is precisely that it relocates the gap between necessary and sufficient (a gap which is not a “negativity” or a “lack”, but a space open to other movements, other predications) back into language, into the super-adequate term itself, rather than allowing for the proliferation of other (continuingly disjunctive or non-adequate) terms and entities. So I agree with Jodi that (as she puts it) “materialism, properly conceived, can emphasize both economic determination and openness,” but not quite with the way she proposes doing this; and I agree with Spivak on insisting on the insurpassibility of the economic, and on recognizing “the complicity between cultural and economic value-systems,” but without necessarily following her textualist drift.
Doubtless all this is as abstract-theoretical and jargon-clotted as Spivak’s critics have found her work to be, but without her stylistic elegance and philosophical penetration. Nonetheless I will post it now, since too many other (pragmatic and economic) matters are pressing on me to devote more time to it.
I’ve been reading, with a combination of exasperation and illumination — but alas, more of the former — the discussion of Gayatri Spivak’s “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value” that has been going on at Long Sunday and other places. The discussion led me to reread Spivak’s article itself, which I hadn’t looked at for many years, but which touches on, in various ways, the project on commodity fetishism and aesthetics in which I am currently engaged. I don’t have the energy or focus to write a full-fledged discussion of the essay the way that the folks at Long Sunday have done, but I’d like to make a few comments provoked by reading all that commentary in the light of rereading the essay itself.
The thing that exasperates me the most about much of the discussion is the emphasis on Spivak’s alleged difficulty or incomprehensibility (I am not singling out any of the postings in particular here, just recording a general impression). The level of objection seems to me to be excessive, out of proportion with the actual challengingness of Spivak’s essay, and hence is probably symptomatic. Spivak writes in a theoretical shorthand; that is to say, she assumes a lot of background knowledge on the part of the reader — something which is unavoidable, given the fact that you cannot make a sophisticated argument at all if you have to spell out your points of reference in beginners’ terms every time you try to write anything. Now admittedly, Spivak’s particular presupposed knowledge is stuff I have a reasonable grasp upon — certain strains in Marxist economic theorizing, as well as Derridean deconstruction and its general philosophical-historical background. But I don’t see that Spivak is somehow intrinsically impenetrable. If you lack the requisite backgrounds, you will have the same difficulties that I have in reading Badiou’s Being and Event (because I lack any familiarity with or understanding of set theory), or most recent American analytic philosophy (because I lack the proper comprehension of propositional logic), of for that matter articles discussing the Federal Reserve Bank’s monetary policy or the intricacies of narrative theory. Spivak’s writing is in fact much more engaging and interesting than most of these other sorts of writing — because of the way it makes connections across disciplinary boundaries and contextualizes together things that are usually left apart (like, literary canonization on the one hand and the international division of labor on the other) in ways that few of the other examples I have cited ever dare to do. And I don’t think that Spivak is obscurantist or unnecessarily diffficult in any of the ways these other sorts of writing aren’t.
Putting the bogeyman of “difficulty” aside, it seems to me that “Scattered Speculations” is useful precisely for the way that it reaffirms the importance of Marx’s insights (or theoretical formulations, if you prefer) about exploitation and surplus value for any understanding of culture and society — including but not limited to the discourses of literary studies and interdisciplinary “theory” — today. Among the crucial points Spivak makes (without trying to give a complete account, or putting into more rigid order what we are told right at the start are “scattered” — and provisional — “speculations”) are the following. Cultural studies gets too comfortable and complacent when it considers questions of domination, and power, without also considering the specific importance of exploitation. Marx’s sense of “the labor theory of value,” and thereby of the functioning of exploitation in a specifically economic sense, needs to be defended against both the old-fashioned marxist fundamentalists who would read the theory in an essentialist or “continuist” manner, and the up-to-date theorists (including many so-called deconstructionists) who reject the theory outright on the grounds that it is (supposedly) essentialist or continuist.
Against this, Spivak emphasizes the “textual” indeterminacy of the relations of (the socially necessary) labor embodied in a commodity to the exchange-value of that commodity, to the money form in a capitalist economy, to capital as an object of quantitative accumulation. Labor-power, the commodity that workers must sell to capitalists in order to survive, is defined by Spivak as a materialist predication of the subject (i.e. a definition of what constitutes the human subject — one that is made in “materialist” terms in contrast to the “idealist” definition of subjectivity in terms of consciousness or intentionality) that relies on a fundamental non-identity, “the irreducible possibility that the subject be more than adequate — super-adequate — to itself.” This non-identity is precisely the basis on which exploitation (the extraction of surplus value) is possible; and it indicates how surplus value has to do with a basic incommensurability between the identity (defined via exchange value) of a subject, and the productive labor-power that such a subject is able to deploy. The latter is the use value of the worker’s labor power for the capitalist employer. To see this incommensurability is also to see that use value itself cannot be defined in essentialist terms as some sort of fixable need. (Cf. my previous post on the non-essentialist definition of use value).
So Spivak uses the concept of use-value as a “deconstructive lever” to unsettle any normalization of the hierarchies of value. This means continuing to insist upon the inequities of (worldwide) exploitation, as a process that gets left out of “radical” critiques that only consider systems of domination. Spivak cites as examples both the self-mystifying language of business schools and corporations, and the uncritical celebration of(supposed) empowerment via new computing and telecommunications technologies that has been so prevalent in some “postmodern” quarters. While criticisms like Spivak’s are often read as “politically correct” handwringing, or as what Spivak herself calls a stance “that the ‘disinterested’ academy dismisses as ‘pathos’,” Spivak is careful to spell out the links between the ideology of empowerment that pomo and business academics (unbeknownst to each other) share, and the ‘objective’ way these groups benefit from exploitation via the international division of labor.
I could go on with this, which would seem to me to be just a fairly banal and obvious reading of Spivak’s essay, were it not that so many readers/commentators find it impenetrable. Other aspects of Spivak’s argument are also worth citing, including the way Marxist/economic notions of value are necessarily entwined with other sorts of declarations of Value (such as aesthetic and moral specifications of value). Many of the commentators on the article have in fact moved their focus from economic value to these other sorts of value, without noticing that Spivak is explicitly objecting to such a (economics-effacing) refocusing. But I lack the patience to continue with this close reading, so I will close with a few questions.
If there is one area where I would (mildly) dissent from Spivak’s formulations, it is on the question of whether the “textualist” (or deconstructionist) reading/metaphor/angle of approach is really the best one for raising the issues Spivak wants to raise. I tend to doubt that it is, for reasons that are not unrelated to the ones that Jodi raises. Jodi asks: “what makes the subject materialist or, to use Spivak’s language, why are we working with a materialist predication of the subject or why is a materialist predication of the subject necessarily a predication linked to labor power?” And, following Zizek, she proposes “a different account of the subject, perhaps in terms of the lack, gap, or irreducibility between the idealist and materialist predications.” Now, I am not willing to follow Jodi in making such a move; it seems to me that positing a subject in terms of Lack or negativity is precisely moving in the wrong direction, back to the “idealist” predication that Spivak both wants to get away from, and (as a good deconstructionist) admits we can never eliminate altogether. I think that Spivak’s deconstructionist posing of the idealist/materialist alternative is more destabilizing, and more nuanced, than the Zizekian parallax Jodi proposes. So I’d want to return to Jodi’s cogent question, but give it a different suggestion for the answer. The materialist predication in terms of labor power is important precisely because of the “super-adequation” it entails — and this sort of formulation is preferable to one in terms of lack. But I’d like to say that this predication, although a necessary one for defining the subject, is not a sufficient one. (I take this distinction from Isabelle Stengers’ discussion of Whitehead, in a forthcoming, but as yet unpublished, article. Stengers shows how Whitehead transfers this initially mathematical distinction into metaphysics and ontology). “Super-adequation” itself embodies such a distinction (as a term, it implies a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition, which is precisely why it resists “continuist” or properly representational coding). But the weakness of deconstructive, textualist approaches, to my mind, is precisely that it relocates the gap between necessary and sufficient (a gap which is not a “negativity” or a “lack”, but a space open to other movements, other predications) back into language, into the super-adequate term itself, rather than allowing for the proliferation of other (continuingly disjunctive or non-adequate) terms and entities. So I agree with Jodi that (as she puts it) “materialism, properly conceived, can emphasize both economic determination and openness,” but not quite with the way she proposes doing this; and I agree with Spivak on insisting on the insurpassibility of the economic, and on recognizing “the complicity between cultural and economic value-systems,” but without necessarily following her textualist drift.
Doubtless all this is as abstract-theoretical and jargon-clotted as Spivak’s critics have found her work to be, but without her stylistic elegance and philosophical penetration. Nonetheless I will post it now, since too many other (pragmatic and economic) matters are pressing on me to devote more time to it.
Mladen Dolar’s beautiful new book, A Voice and Nothing More, is as lucid and compelling an account of Lacanian theory as I have encountered anywhere. Dolar, like his friend and sometime collaborator, Slavoj Zizek, is a philosopher from Ljubljana, Slovenia, who has deployed Lacan for the understanding of contemporary culture. In the course of A Voice and Nothing More, Dolar goes through the question of voice as it is manifested in linguistics, in metaphysics, in “physics” (having to do with both the physics of sound and the physicality of the body), in ethics, and in politics. He then concludes with two lengthy readings of Voice in Freud and in Kafka (the latter through brilliant readings of some of Kafka’s parables, and of his often-ignored stories “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” and “Investigations of a Dog”).
A Voice and Nothing More as its title indicates, works to complicate our understanding of the role and meaning of the human voice in culture. Dolar rejects as overly simplistic Derrida’s famous opposition between voice and writing. For Derrida, the stress on voice and speech, at the expense of writing — a valorization found in philosophers from Plato to Rousseau, and also in such modern thinkers as Heidegger — is a symptom of the metaphysics of phonocentrism and logocentrism. To champion the voice against writing means to embrace the illusions of self-presence, immediacy, identity, interiority, etc. And Derrida works hard to show how all the assertions of the authenticity of the voice, throughout the Western philosophical canon, in fact surreptitiously discredit or ‘deconstruct’ themselves, by calling in spite of themselves upon the difference and mediation and metaphoricity which are figured by writing in contrast to vocal speech.
Dolar, however, argues and demonstrates that the phenomenon of Voice is in fact far more uncanny and slippery, and already inclusive of difference, than Derrida gives it credit for. The voice always stands in between: in between body and language, in between biology and culture, in between inside and outside, in between subject and Other, in between mere sound or noise and meaningful articulation. In each of these instances, the voice is both what links these opposed categories together, what is common to both of them, without belonging to either. The logic here is in fact not all that different from a Derridean or deconstructionist one, except for two things. First, it complexifies the role of the voice in the deconstructionist schema of binary oppositions and the instance that both produces and disqualifies them. And second, it gives a psychoanalytic location — in terms of the contradictory imperatives of desire and drive — to what tends to remain just a cognitive or logical paradox in deconstruction.
A Voice and Nothing More clarifies for me a distinction that Dolar, Zizek, and Alenka Zupancic have long made about the changes that occurred in the course of Lacan’s teaching. If a certain (early, 1950s) Lacan suggested that everything in the human, cultural-social world passed through the articulations of language of the signifier, then the more mature (later, 1970s) Lacan emphasized, conversely, the points of resistance to linguistic totalization and articulation, the Real that insisted outside every invocation of the Symbolic. The “object-voice” (voice as objet petit a) is one crucial example of this resistance. For if the voice-as-speech is entirely within language (this is what differentiates speech from screams, inarticulate cries, and animal calls), it also, at the same time, manifests an embodiment that goes beyond, or is irreducible to, the idealized and non-physical differences that define the signifier.
Throughout the book, Dolar focuses on the “object voice,” the voice as paradoxical objet petit a, in explicit contrast to two tendencies. On the one hand, there is the metaphysical sort of understanding that would ignore the quality of the voice, ignore its physicality, in order just to extract its signification, its Symbolic import, the meaning of its words. To do this, of course, is to miss the whole point of the voice, to ignore its uncanny presence. On the other hand, there is the converse aestheticization of the voice, the failure that comes from “turn[ing] it into an object of aesthetic pleasure, an object of veneration and worship, the bearer of a meaning beyond any ordinary meanings. The aesthetic concentration on the voice loses the voice precisely by turning it into a fetish object” (4). If the first approach ignores the insistence of the voice in order to extract its signification, the second ignores the signification in order to extract and valorize its pure expressive potential, or what Roland Barthes called “the grain of the voice… the materiality of the body singing its mother tongue” (cited disapprovingly by Dolar in a note on page 197). Both these approaches, Dolar says, look at one side of the paradoxical duality of the voice, and ignore the other; both therefore obscure or “obfuscate” the object voice.
My own interest, which I will only cite here and not endeavor to “prove,” or pursue in any more detail, is to affirm — to rehabilitate and pursue — the fetishization and aestheticization of the voice. Think of Bob Dylan’s voice; Joey Ramone’s voice; James Brown’s voice; Diamanda Galas’s voice; Roxanne Shante’s voice; Ghostface’s voice. I want to pose this aestheticization of the voice against Dolar’s psychoanalysis of the voice. If the danger of aestheticization is the attribution to the fetishized/aestheticized object of “a meaning beyond any ordinary meanings,” then the promise of aestheticization is a “fetishistic” (the psychoanalysts would say) suspension apart from meaning, before or after meaning, in something that is other to any meanings (the other of all meanings?). Both this dangerous attribution of higher meaning, and the aesthetic promise of release from it, are present in Kant’s Third Critique, the text I am incessantly drawn back to. The “aesthetics of voice” is the chapter missing from Dolar’s book, because he dismisses its possibilities too quickly; it’s this aesthetics, and the labyrinth into which it leads us — the labyrinth, I suspect, of what Hegel wrongly disparages as the “bad infinity” — that I still need or want to explore.
Mladen Dolar’s beautiful new book, A Voice and Nothing More, is as lucid and compelling an account of Lacanian theory as I have encountered anywhere. Dolar, like his friend and sometime collaborator, Slavoj Zizek, is a philosopher from Ljubljana, Slovenia, who has deployed Lacan for the understanding of contemporary culture. In the course of A Voice and Nothing More, Dolar goes through the question of voice as it is manifested in linguistics, in metaphysics, in “physics” (having to do with both the physics of sound and the physicality of the body), in ethics, and in politics. He then concludes with two lengthy readings of Voice in Freud and in Kafka (the latter through brilliant readings of some of Kafka’s parables, and of his often-ignored stories “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” and “Investigations of a Dog”).
A Voice and Nothing More as its title indicates, works to complicate our understanding of the role and meaning of the human voice in culture. Dolar rejects as overly simplistic Derrida’s famous opposition between voice and writing. For Derrida, the stress on voice and speech, at the expense of writing — a valorization found in philosophers from Plato to Rousseau, and also in such modern thinkers as Heidegger — is a symptom of the metaphysics of phonocentrism and logocentrism. To champion the voice against writing means to embrace the illusions of self-presence, immediacy, identity, interiority, etc. And Derrida works hard to show how all the assertions of the authenticity of the voice, throughout the Western philosophical canon, in fact surreptitiously discredit or ‘deconstruct’ themselves, by calling in spite of themselves upon the difference and mediation and metaphoricity which are figured by writing in contrast to vocal speech.
Dolar, however, argues and demonstrates that the phenomenon of Voice is in fact far more uncanny and slippery, and already inclusive of difference, than Derrida gives it credit for. The voice always stands in between: in between body and language, in between biology and culture, in between inside and outside, in between subject and Other, in between mere sound or noise and meaningful articulation. In each of these instances, the voice is both what links these opposed categories together, what is common to both of them, without belonging to either. The logic here is in fact not all that different from a Derridean or deconstructionist one, except for two things. First, it complexifies the role of the voice in the deconstructionist schema of binary oppositions and the instance that both produces and disqualifies them. And second, it gives a psychoanalytic location — in terms of the contradictory imperatives of desire and drive — to what tends to remain just a cognitive or logical paradox in deconstruction.
A Voice and Nothing More clarifies for me a distinction that Dolar, Zizek, and Alenka Zupancic have long made about the changes that occurred in the course of Lacan’s teaching. If a certain (early, 1950s) Lacan suggested that everything in the human, cultural-social world passed through the articulations of language of the signifier, then the more mature (later, 1970s) Lacan emphasized, conversely, the points of resistance to linguistic totalization and articulation, the Real that insisted outside every invocation of the Symbolic. The “object-voice” (voice as objet petit a) is one crucial example of this resistance. For if the voice-as-speech is entirely within language (this is what differentiates speech from screams, inarticulate cries, and animal calls), it also, at the same time, manifests an embodiment that goes beyond, or is irreducible to, the idealized and non-physical differences that define the signifier.
Throughout the book, Dolar focuses on the “object voice,” the voice as paradoxical objet petit a, in explicit contrast to two tendencies. On the one hand, there is the metaphysical sort of understanding that would ignore the quality of the voice, ignore its physicality, in order just to extract its signification, its Symbolic import, the meaning of its words. To do this, of course, is to miss the whole point of the voice, to ignore its uncanny presence. On the other hand, there is the converse aestheticization of the voice, the failure that comes from “turn[ing] it into an object of aesthetic pleasure, an object of veneration and worship, the bearer of a meaning beyond any ordinary meanings. The aesthetic concentration on the voice loses the voice precisely by turning it into a fetish object” (4). If the first approach ignores the insistence of the voice in order to extract its signification, the second ignores the signification in order to extract and valorize its pure expressive potential, or what Roland Barthes called “the grain of the voice… the materiality of the body singing its mother tongue” (cited disapprovingly by Dolar in a note on page 197). Both these approaches, Dolar says, look at one side of the paradoxical duality of the voice, and ignore the other; both therefore obscure or “obfuscate” the object voice.
My own interest, which I will only cite here and not endeavor to “prove,” or pursue in any more detail, is to affirm — to rehabilitate and pursue — the fetishization and aestheticization of the voice. Think of Bob Dylan’s voice; Joey Ramone’s voice; James Brown’s voice; Diamanda Galas’s voice; Roxanne Shante’s voice; Ghostface’s voice. I want to pose this aestheticization of the voice against Dolar’s psychoanalysis of the voice. If the danger of aestheticization is the attribution to the fetishized/aestheticized object of “a meaning beyond any ordinary meanings,” then the promise of aestheticization is a “fetishistic” (the psychoanalysts would say) suspension apart from meaning, before or after meaning, in something that is other to any meanings (the other of all meanings?). Both this dangerous attribution of higher meaning, and the aesthetic promise of release from it, are present in Kant’s Third Critique, the text I am incessantly drawn back to. The “aesthetics of voice” is the chapter missing from Dolar’s book, because he dismisses its possibilities too quickly; it’s this aesthetics, and the labyrinth into which it leads us — the labyrinth, I suspect, of what Hegel wrongly disparages as the “bad infinity” — that I still need or want to explore.
I’ve spent the last two days in Buffalo, N.Y., attending a conference honoring, and discussing, the works of Samuel R. Delany. It was exhilarating and intense (as well as a big exhausting) to spend so much time concertedly thinking and talking about the writing of one of our greatest living novelists and essayists. Delany’s work in what he has called the “paraliterary” genres of science fiction and pornography, together with his essays and interviews, constitute a body of work that has reflected on the deepest aspects of personal and social life, on the singularity and discomfort of desire, on the importance of pleasure and civility, on the codes and constraints of race, gender, and sexual orientation, not to mention class and Capital; and that has (seemingly) effortlessly covered an entire span between the most intimate autobiographical revelations and the most far-reaching and abstract theoretical speculations on subjectivization and identity and the forms of social and political (dis)order.
I fear my own attempts to describe the importance and impact of Delany’s writings have descended into vague and pompous generalities. In Western culture we have tended for centuries to put our writers and artists on Great Man (usually man rather than woman) pedestals, at the price of obscuring the minute particulars of their work. But I don’t know how to “mediate” between the particulars of Delany’s sinuous prose and the dazzling breadth of his vision. One minute he is writing in exquisite detail about the erotic appeal of a hand with dirty, bitten-down-to-the-nub fingernails; the next he is powerfully speculating on the way that relationships of power and subordination both incite and regulate desire, and how sexuality both permeates and fuels, and yet steps away from, or subtracts itself from, the predominant economy of exchange in capitalist (and, contrastingly, in pre- and post-capitalist) societies. The thing about Delany is that he doesn’t, himself, mediate between the singular and the universal, or (not quite the same dichotomy) the concretely, immediately personal and the wide-ranging abstraction; rather, his fictions draw us into a world (which is our own, only seen now from a different, and shockingly acute, angle of observation) in which making such broad and clumsy distinctions, let alone trying thereby to mediate between them and re-connect them, seems hopelessly naive.
(I suppose I should mention that I wrote, with more particularity than I am capable of here, about Delany’s recent novel Phallos in an earlier blog entry.)
Anyway, in the last two days I heard smart and passionate talks on subjects ranging from Delany’s writerliness and self-referentiality, to the proclivity many of his characters share for consuming and wasting bodily products (sperm, shit, snot, piss), to the way that visual artists have appropriated and been inspired by his words, and to the ways that his novels invent, imagine, and explore a queer space and a queer time, distinct from those of the dominant heteronormativity.
There’s no way to incorporate all the things that everyone said into some single, central thesis. But thinking about Delany’s work through the various angles the various speakers presented to us, I was able more clearly to see how Delany is a writer with a vision of excess, abjection, and waste that puts Bataille to shame (or reveals Bataille, by contrast, as the timid Catholic schoolboy he in some sense was) while at the same time — and this is perhaps the most radical thing about Delany’s fiction — this “vision of excess” has little or nothing to do with the thematization of capital-D Desire and/as transgression that was not only Bataille’s major concern, but that of so much 20th century modernism. For Delany, even excess to the point of exhaustion, and the most outrageous and “transgressive” (in the commonplace sense of this word) sexual acts (from eating shit to incest) have little to do with any dialectic of law and its transgression, but are rather articulated in terms of range or series of bodily pleasures and potentials that both connect people to one another and to the world, and help define the nature of a “self” that doesn’t pre-exist them. Delany, like Bataille, is concerned with expressing, articulating, and enacting a range of desires and deeds that escape the “economy” of capitalist exchange; but Delany’s vision of expenditure beyond exchange-value does not have any of the Bataillean connotations of sin, unnaturalness, “perversion,” and guilt. Bataille was both the most lucid, and yet the most helplessly ensnared, witness to and visionary of the hopes and horrors of the twentieth century. Delany, for the last thirty-five years or more, has already been looking forward to a possible new articulation of desire — and civility and compassion, and excess and extremity — for the twenty-first (though we are unlikely to realize anything close to the hopes and cravings he gives voice to, without a radical change for the better in our social, political, economic, and environmental conditions).
I am still defining the position of Delany’s fiction more in terms of what it is not, than of what it is. There are no utopian blueprints in Delany’s fiction or essays, and his vision always has a sense of limits and boundaries somewhere: we don’t ever abolish dissatisfaction, we don’t ever have everything; we always still face the unexpected, inevitable surprise and contingency and change. (Indeed, his novel Trouble on Triton is subtitled “an ambiguous heterotopia”; it depicts a world in many respects far better and more open to diversity and desire and mutability than our own, but still one in which there is war and resentment and class friction and willful stupidity — this last embodied in the rather obnoxious protagonist). But in the loops and digressions of Delany’s fiction, in its dazzling intellectual range, in its startling concreteness at so many points, and in its seemingly inexhaustible fecundity (even when it is thematizing, as several speakers at the conference pointed out) exhaustion and waste), there is something of a sense of what SF critics like Jameson and Freedman have called the utopian. It’s a call to think otherwise, more richly and broadly, but also a demonstration of how this richness and breadth is potentially graspable in the here and now, in the body, in human and social relationships.
Delany himself was present for the conference. This was a bit intimidating, as we were all talking about his work; but his comments and interventions, and his generous responses to all our presentations, played no small part in making the conference so satisfying an experience. The final evening, Delany gave a reading from some of his new work: he read the Coda to his current novel-in-progress, called Shoat Rumbling, His Sensations and Ideas. These pages just blew me away: they were luminous and deeply moving, a sort-of meditation (by one of the characters in the novel, the father of the eponymous character) on sexuality (of course) and compassion and fatherhood (this last, which I cannot help being concerned with as the father of two young girls, was approached with beauty and entirely without the sappiness that so often vitiates discussions and evocations of the subject for me).
I’ve spent the last two days in Buffalo, N.Y., attending a conference honoring, and discussing, the works of Samuel R. Delany. It was exhilarating and intense (as well as a big exhausting) to spend so much time concertedly thinking and talking about the writing of one of our greatest living novelists and essayists. Delany’s work in what he has called the “paraliterary” genres of science fiction and pornography, together with his essays and interviews, constitute a body of work that has reflected on the deepest aspects of personal and social life, on the singularity and discomfort of desire, on the importance of pleasure and civility, on the codes and constraints of race, gender, and sexual orientation, not to mention class and Capital; and that has (seemingly) effortlessly covered an entire span between the most intimate autobiographical revelations and the most far-reaching and abstract theoretical speculations on subjectivization and identity and the forms of social and political (dis)order.
I fear my own attempts to describe the importance and impact of Delany’s writings have descended into vague and pompous generalities. In Western culture we have tended for centuries to put our writers and artists on Great Man (usually man rather than woman) pedestals, at the price of obscuring the minute particulars of their work. But I don’t know how to “mediate” between the particulars of Delany’s sinuous prose and the dazzling breadth of his vision. One minute he is writing in exquisite detail about the erotic appeal of a hand with dirty, bitten-down-to-the-nub fingernails; the next he is powerfully speculating on the way that relationships of power and subordination both incite and regulate desire, and how sexuality both permeates and fuels, and yet steps away from, or subtracts itself from, the predominant economy of exchange in capitalist (and, contrastingly, in pre- and post-capitalist) societies. The thing about Delany is that he doesn’t, himself, mediate between the singular and the universal, or (not quite the same dichotomy) the concretely, immediately personal and the wide-ranging abstraction; rather, his fictions draw us into a world (which is our own, only seen now from a different, and shockingly acute, angle of observation) in which making such broad and clumsy distinctions, let alone trying thereby to mediate between them and re-connect them, seems hopelessly naive.
(I suppose I should mention that I wrote, with more particularity than I am capable of here, about Delany’s recent novel Phallos in an earlier blog entry.)
Anyway, in the last two days I heard smart and passionate talks on subjects ranging from Delany’s writerliness and self-referentiality, to the proclivity many of his characters share for consuming and wasting bodily products (sperm, shit, snot, piss), to the way that visual artists have appropriated and been inspired by his words, and to the ways that his novels invent, imagine, and explore a queer space and a queer time, distinct from those of the dominant heteronormativity.
There’s no way to incorporate all the things that everyone said into some single, central thesis. But thinking about Delany’s work through the various angles the various speakers presented to us, I was able more clearly to see how Delany is a writer with a vision of excess, abjection, and waste that puts Bataille to shame (or reveals Bataille, by contrast, as the timid Catholic schoolboy he in some sense was) while at the same time — and this is perhaps the most radical thing about Delany’s fiction — this “vision of excess” has little or nothing to do with the thematization of capital-D Desire and/as transgression that was not only Bataille’s major concern, but that of so much 20th century modernism. For Delany, even excess to the point of exhaustion, and the most outrageous and “transgressive” (in the commonplace sense of this word) sexual acts (from eating shit to incest) have little to do with any dialectic of law and its transgression, but are rather articulated in terms of range or series of bodily pleasures and potentials that both connect people to one another and to the world, and help define the nature of a “self” that doesn’t pre-exist them. Delany, like Bataille, is concerned with expressing, articulating, and enacting a range of desires and deeds that escape the “economy” of capitalist exchange; but Delany’s vision of expenditure beyond exchange-value does not have any of the Bataillean connotations of sin, unnaturalness, “perversion,” and guilt. Bataille was both the most lucid, and yet the most helplessly ensnared, witness to and visionary of the hopes and horrors of the twentieth century. Delany, for the last thirty-five years or more, has already been looking forward to a possible new articulation of desire — and civility and compassion, and excess and extremity — for the twenty-first (though we are unlikely to realize anything close to the hopes and cravings he gives voice to, without a radical change for the better in our social, political, economic, and environmental conditions).
I am still defining the position of Delany’s fiction more in terms of what it is not, than of what it is. There are no utopian blueprints in Delany’s fiction or essays, and his vision always has a sense of limits and boundaries somewhere: we don’t ever abolish dissatisfaction, we don’t ever have everything; we always still face the unexpected, inevitable surprise and contingency and change. (Indeed, his novel Trouble on Triton is subtitled “an ambiguous heterotopia”; it depicts a world in many respects far better and more open to diversity and desire and mutability than our own, but still one in which there is war and resentment and class friction and willful stupidity — this last embodied in the rather obnoxious protagonist). But in the loops and digressions of Delany’s fiction, in its dazzling intellectual range, in its startling concreteness at so many points, and in its seemingly inexhaustible fecundity (even when it is thematizing, as several speakers at the conference pointed out) exhaustion and waste), there is something of a sense of what SF critics like Jameson and Freedman have called the utopian. It’s a call to think otherwise, more richly and broadly, but also a demonstration of how this richness and breadth is potentially graspable in the here and now, in the body, in human and social relationships.
Delany himself was present for the conference. This was a bit intimidating, as we were all talking about his work; but his comments and interventions, and his generous responses to all our presentations, played no small part in making the conference so satisfying an experience. The final evening, Delany gave a reading from some of his new work: he read the Coda to his current novel-in-progress, called Shoat Rumblin, His Sensations and Ideas. These pages just blew me away: they were luminous and deeply moving, a sort-of meditation (by one of the characters in the novel, the father of the eponymous character) on sexuality (of course) and compassion and fatherhood (this last, which I cannot help being concerned with as the father of two young girls, was approached with beauty and entirely without the sappiness that so often vitiates discussions and evocations of the subject for me).
I’ve been reading through Marx’s Grundrisse, which unaccountably I had never read before. It’s clear that this huge manuscript consists of rough notes, in various degrees of development. Marx never could have intended publication in this form. Parts of the manuscript are dazzlingly brilliant, and other parts are rather tedious (like the places where Marx, who was a philosophical giant, but evidently not a math wiz, takes twenty or thirty pages of tedious arithmetic calculations to establish, for instance, the fact that fractions which have the same numerator but different denominators are not, in fact, equal to one another). But against that, there’s the excitement of seeing Marx actually work through and work out philosophical and historical arguments (like that about what he later came to call “primitive accumulation”) which are only presented in finished form in Capital.
Here, too, Marx first works out the argument about “surplus value”: which is where we get a lot of the tedious and painfully elementary mathematics, but also where we get a full statement of the argument — not quite articulated in this way in Capital, or anywhere else in Marx’s writing, as far as I can remember — about how the whole notion of surplus needs to be thought in the sense of a radical incommensurability.
What I mean is this. (A lot of this is very elementary, but I need to write it all down here as part of the process if working it out for myself). The so-called labor theory of value, together with the quantitative calculation of surplus value, have long been the most contentious points in Marxist theory. This is largely for mathematical reasons which Marx clearly had a lot of trouble with (and which I myself can only partly understand). Basically, Marx (following Smith and Ricardo) defines the “value” of commodities and products in terms of the human labor that has been required to make them (even things like raw materials can be defined in these terms, since their value = the amount of human labor that was required to extract and appropriate them in the first place). Overall, this is an argument about how resources and productive forces are allocated by society as a whole, in terms of both production and distribution.
The trouble is that such a global concept of “value” does not actually correspond to the way that individual commodities are actually bought and sold. There is no direct equivalence between a commodity’s value as Marx defines it, and its empirical price in the marketplace. These are two separate dimensions; Marxian values have to do with the overall social organization of the economy, while prices have to do with the fluctuations of supply and demand (and especially marginal supply and demand). Marx endeavored at great length to figure out the mathematics of how value could be converted into price (or more precisely, how value — as a reality at the level of economic production — is in fact transformed into price, and surplus value correspondingly turned into profit, in the actual movements of the marketplace). But he failed; his mathematics was flawed, and apparently no general mathematical solution is even possible, aside from very special circumstances. (This is the so-called transformation problem. Marxists have offered various ways around the problem, usually based on questioning the premises under which the mathematical calculations are carried out in the first place: for instance, all the models imply a situation of equilibrium in the economy as a whole; but Marx is always suggesting that this equilibrium cannot be pre-assumed, since capitalism really moves in terms of disequilibrium and crisis).
If value cannot be calculated in empirical terms, then neither can surplus value (or the quantitative amount that capitalists are appropriating from workers). Marx knows that there is no simple one-to–one correspondence between the rate of exploitation in a given firm or industry, and its profit; rather, the entire social surplus (the excess of what is produced over what is paid for in production costs) gets distributed among capitalist enterprises through the market. But again, Marx never succeeded in linking the macro-level to the micro-level mathematically. This has led the majority of economists to conclude that questions of value and surplus value are simply irrelevant, and that Marx’s claim that workers are being exploited is without justification. “Value” is considered by these economists to be merely a metaphysical notion; for them, the positive quantities of price are all that matters, since they are all that can be calculated empirically.
Throwing out the whole dimension of value, however, is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. You need some concept like value if you are ever to try to look at the economy (of the world, or of a given nation or society) systematically rather than just atomistically. The “price” paid by neoclassical marginalist economics, which looks only at prices, is precisely that all sorts of politico-economic questions are ruled out of bounds, and only “purely” economic issues are addressed. You can talk about the effect of an interest rate increase on the rate of inflation, but not about its effect on class relations. (I called this a “price” paid by neoclassical economics, but actually it is not a bug, but a feature: the whole purpose of neoclassical economics is to rule out the sort of question that would put the naturalness and inevitability of capitalist relations into doubt).
But how do we make sense of Marx’s whole theory of value, if we stand apart from the questions of calculation that he tried but failed to put into practice? All sorts of answers have been given in the course of the last century. I am inclined to accept Karatani’s suggestion that the theory of value needs to be regarded, not as an empirical phenomenon, but as the “transcendental condition,” in a Kantian sense, for the functioning of a capitalist-commodity mode of production and distribution. Marx acutely notes at one point in Grundrisse that “language as the product of an individual is an impossibility. But the same holds for property” (490). It is much more familiar today than it was in Marx’s time to note that, although I express myself through language, the language in which I make this expression is not properly mine, and does not belong to me, because it is social and communicative, and even precedes me. Marx says that the same is the case with “private property”: it is only in a given social framework, only when there are others, and myself and those others stand in various forms of relation, that I can even make the claim that something is mine, that it represents me, that it belongs to me. Property relations, like language, already have to be given before the issues of personal expression and personal presence and personal belonging even arise in the first place.
Grundrisse actually helps with fleshing out this claim about the pre-existing, transcendental supposition of property relations and of what Karatani calls the “value-form.” For here, in first working out the theory of surplus value, Marx emphasizes the incommensurability between workers’ wages on the one hand, and the productivity of their labor power, on the other. There is no common measure between the way, as a worker who sells my labor power, I replenish on a daily basis my own conditions of existence (I may get more money rather than less, and have a higher living standard than other workers, but I am still always a paycheck away from default, bankruptcy or ruin, since my wages basically only allow me to reproduce my own standard of life), and the way that the production process as a whole creates values that expand the material wealth of society as a whole, leading to the expansion and accumulation of capital. I sell my labor-power as a commodity in order to get the money to pay for the commodities that I need in order to make it to another day of selling my labor power all over again (Marx calls this the circuit of C-M-C). Whereas a corporation invests money in the production of commodities, in order thereby to sell the commodities and end up with an expanding quantity of money (Marx calls this the circuit M-C-M’). A social surplus is always being produced (except in conditions of grave economic dislocation, or when there are disasters like famine, tsunami, earthquake, and plague), and this surplus is always credited to the account of capital (which grows and accumulates directly; the ultimate result may be something of an increase in my standard of living as a worker, but this only happens secondarily, as part of a “trickle-down” process).
Or to put it in another, more pragmatic way: when I go into credit card debt I am making trouble for myself; I will be increasingly unable to pay off the debt. But when a corporation goes into debt, it is generally enabled thereby to expand. Even in cases of bankruptcy: the Congress has recently passed laws making the conditions of recovery much more difficult and punitive for individuals than it was before; while corporations increasingly declare bankruptcy as a way to “reorganize” by breaking their labor contacts, decreasing wages and benefits, etc. (This is happening right now with Northwest Airlines and with the auto parts manufacturer Delphi, both major presences in the Detroit area.
As Deleuze and Guattari say, “it is not the same money that goes into the pocket of the wage earner and is entered on the balance sheet of a commercial enterprise.” For the wage earner, there is “a flow of means of payment relative to consumer goods and use values, and a one-to-one relation between money and an imposed range of products” (Marx’s C-M-C); while for the enterprise, monetary quantities are “signs of the power of capital, flows of financing,” and hence forces of multiplication, of the accumulation of capital itself (Marx’s M-C-M’) (Anti-Oedipus 228).
The qualitiative difference between the two circuits of exchange, that of the wage earner and that of the corporation, remains structurally or transcendentally significant — it determines everything — even if it cannot be specified quantitatively in ways that empirical economics is able to calculate. Though Marx makes repeated efforts to calculate the rate of surplus value throughout Grundrisse, he also foregrounds this basic incommensurability (in a more explicit way than he does later in Capital). For instance, Marx says that surplus labor isn’t just added on top of necessary labor, in such a way that reducing the working day in length would be enough to eliminate exploitation. For “in production resting on capital, the existence of necessary labour time is conditional on the creation of superfluous labour time” (398). The expropriated surplus, in a very real sense, comes first; it is only this surplus that motivates productive investment in the first place. For the capitalist, wages are just a deduction from total profit, an input cost like any other. Without the lure of the surplus, the whole process would come to a halt.
In this way, Marx’s notion of surplus value shows its affinity to the Derridean supplement and to the Lacanian notion of “surplus enjoyment” (which Zizek is always writing about); and beyond these, to Georges Bataille’s “notion of expenditure” (which powerfully influenced both Derrida and Lacan). Bataille is often taken to be anti-Marxist, because of his emphasis on expenditure rather than, and as opposed to, “the principles of classical utility” (Visions of Excess 116). But Marx is no defender of such principles of utility; his whole point about the separation of exchange value from use value points to the way in which capitalist reproduction isn’t really about utility at all. (When Marx writes of use value as serving “needs,” he means this latter word in the broadest sense — not economically basic needs as opposed to superfluous desires, but “need” as anything anybody wants, or is willing to pay for). It seems to me entirely coherent to say that surplus value is the form that Bataille’s excess takes in a capitalist society, and that the problem of expenditure is itself a more generalized form of the problem of overaccumulation or overproduction, which Marx sees as one of the problematic points of capitalism as a whole.
Surplus value is only one of a number of areas in which Marx’s formulations in Grundrisse significantly add to what he presents later, in its polished and publishable form, in Capital. On the other hand, in Grundrisse there is little discussion of the “fetishism of commodities,” such as it is highlighted in the notorious opening chapters of Capital. (Notorious because these opening chapters have discomfited so many readers, including notably Althusser, who urged readers of Capital to skip those chapter altogether). To my mind, and contra Althusser, the discussion of commodity fetishism is crucial and invaluable; Marx had good reasons for opening Capital with it. Commodity fetishism is, as it were, the manner in which we live the world of Capital (what Zizek calls “ideology,” though for various reasons I am not happy with naming it in this way); and as that which constructs our “lived experience,” it is as real as are the “underlying” processes (exploitation, capital accumulation) that it masks.
This brings up the whole issue of subjectivity, and how we can understand it in Marxist terms. In the past, I’ve mentioned my discomfort with psychoanalytic/Lacanian/Zizekian approaches, which seem to me to depart too much from social and economic conditions, in their pursuit of a logic of the unconscious that is ultimately entirely separate from the economic logic of capitalist society. Zizek even says that, while Marxism defines “ideology” as “false eternalization and/or universalization,” the attribution of universality to something that has a specifically social and historical basis, psychoanalysis, to the contrary, denounces “ideology” as consisting in “an over-rapid historicization,” seeing something as merely contingent and historical, when in fact it is absolutely universal, “the Real of the Law, the rock of castration… which returns as the same through diverse historicizations/symbolizations” (The Sublime Object of Ideology 49-50).
Zizek here makes the “Hegelian” move of extending Marx’s logic (in this case, the logic of ideology and fetishism) to the point where he altogether abolishes it. When “ideology” is redefined as the ultimate impossibility at the heart of any subject whatsoever, it’s all of Marx’s analysis of the historical specificity of capitalism — its radical difference from other social formations and relations of production — that disappears. Althusser scandalously argued that some sort of “ideology” would continue to exist even in a communist society. And this seems right to me. But Althusser didn’t take the additional step that Zizek does: the step that dissolves the particularity of one particular regime of ideology. Though it is perhaps unfortunate that Althusser designated “science” as the asubjective alternative to ideology (meaning by “science” something like Spinoza’s understanding sub specie aeternitatis), I find Zizek’s claim to Hegelian/psychoanalytic analysis much more disturbing. Here is a point where a Kantian understanding of limits (or a Whiteheadian understanding of the irreduciblity, and yet the inevitable partiality, of all abstractions) would be helpful.
In Grundrisse, Marx takes a rather different tack, when he proposes that “the production of capitalists and wage labourers is thus a chief product of capital’s realization process. Ordinary economics, which looks only at the things produced, forgets this completely” (512). We need to think more about how subjectivity is itself produced in the capitalist process of production/circulation/realization/appropriation of the surplus. Needless to say, this has little to do with the old-fashioned Marxist distinction according to which consciousness or subjectivity would merely be a “superstructural” effect, determined by an economic “base.” It does have to do, to the contrary, with something like Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the unity-in-division of libidinal and economic flows. Though I think that Toni Negri goes too far, in the opposite direction from Zizek, when he privileges Grundrisse over Capital, on the grounds that only the former work provides an account of class antagonism, and revolutionary subjectivity, Negri laments the absence of such a perspective from the more objective account of capitalist process in Capital itself. It seems to me, however, that Negri is too facile in the way he reads Marx’s demonstrations of the antagonism between workers and capital — class hatred, in short — as itself somehow the motor of a new subjectivity, one that already and immediately embodies Marx’s rather vague statements about how the capitalist mode of production itself already establishes the conditions for a communism that would transcend and abolish it. (All this is the source of the almost embarrassing optimism about the potentialities of the multitude that one finds in Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Multitude — but that is the subject for another post, in which I want to talk about monstrosity: the body of the multitude in relation to the body of capital).
I am even less sure than usual whether this long and rambling post makes any sense — and especially whether it gets the value/price question right — so in order to stop myself from rambling to infinity, I will publish it now.
I’ve been reading through Marx’s Grundrisse, which unaccountably I had never read before. It’s clear that this huge manuscript consists of rough notes, in various degrees of development. Marx never could have intended publication in this form. Parts of the manuscript are dazzlingly brilliant, and other parts are rather tedious (like the places where Marx, who was a philosophical giant, but evidently not a math wiz, takes twenty or thirty pages of tedious arithmetic calculations to establish, for instance, the fact that fractions which have the same numerator but different denominators are not, in fact, equal to one another). But against that, there’s the excitement of seeing Marx actually work through and work out philosophical and historical arguments (like that about what he later came to call “primitive accumulation”) which are only presented in finished form in Capital.
Here, too, Marx first works out the argument about “surplus value”: which is where we get a lot of the tedious and painfully elementary mathematics, but also where we get a full statement of the argument — not quite articulated in this way in Capital, or anywhere else in Marx’s writing, as far as I can remember — about how the whole notion of surplus needs to be thought in the sense of a radical incommensurability.
What I mean is this. (A lot of this is very elementary, but I need to write it all down here as part of the process if working it out for myself). The so-called labor theory of value, together with the quantitative calculation of surplus value, have long been the most contentious points in Marxist theory. This is largely for mathematical reasons which Marx clearly had a lot of trouble with (and which I myself can only partly understand). Basically, Marx (following Smith and Ricardo) defines the “value” of commodities and products in terms of the human labor that has been required to make them (even things like raw materials can be defined in these terms, since their value = the amount of human labor that was required to extract and appropriate them in the first place). Overall, this is an argument about how resources and productive forces are allocated by society as a whole, in terms of both production and distribution.
The trouble is that such a global concept of “value” does not actually correspond to the way that individual commodities are actually bought and sold. There is no direct equivalence between a commodity’s value as Marx defines it, and its empirical price in the marketplace. These are two separate dimensions; Marxian values have to do with the overall social organization of the economy, while prices have to do with the fluctuations of supply and demand (and especially marginal supply and demand). Marx endeavored at great length to figure out the mathematics of how value could be converted into price (or more precisely, how value — as a reality at the level of economic production — is in fact transformed into price, and surplus value correspondingly turned into profit, in the actual movements of the marketplace). But he failed; his mathematics was flawed, and apparently no general mathematical solution is even possible, aside from very special circumstances. (This is the so-called transformation problem. Marxists have offered various ways around the problem, usually based on questioning the premises under which the mathematical calculations are carried out in the first place: for instance, all the models imply a situation of equilibrium in the economy as a whole; but Marx is always suggesting that this equilibrium cannot be pre-assumed, since capitalism really moves in terms of disequilibrium and crisis).
If value cannot be calculated in empirical terms, then neither can surplus value (or the quantitative amount that capitalists are appropriating from workers). Marx knows that there is no simple one-to–one correspondence between the rate of exploitation in a given firm or industry, and its profit; rather, the entire social surplus (the excess of what is produced over what is paid for in production costs) gets distributed among capitalist enterprises through the market. But again, Marx never succeeded in linking the macro-level to the micro-level mathematically. This has led the majority of economists to conclude that questions of value and surplus value are simply irrelevant, and that Marx’s claim that workers are being exploited is without justification. “Value” is considered by these economists to be merely a metaphysical notion; for them, the positive quantities of price are all that matters, since they are all that can be calculated empirically.
Throwing out the whole dimension of value, however, is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. You need some concept like value if you are ever to try to look at the economy (of the world, or of a given nation or society) systematically rather than just atomistically. The “price” paid by neoclassical marginalist economics, which looks only at prices, is precisely that all sorts of politico-economic questions are ruled out of bounds, and only “purely” economic issues are addressed. You can talk about the effect of an interest rate increase on the rate of inflation, but not about its effect on class relations. (I called this a “price” paid by neoclassical economics, but actually it is not a bug, but a feature: the whole purpose of neoclassical economics is to rule out the sort of question that would put the naturalness and inevitability of capitalist relations into doubt).
But how do we make sense of Marx’s whole theory of value, if we stand apart from the questions of calculation that he tried but failed to put into practice? All sorts of answers have been given in the course of the last century. I am inclined to accept Karatani’s suggestion that the theory of value needs to be regarded, not as an empirical phenomenon, but as the “transcendental condition,” in a Kantian sense, for the functioning of a capitalist-commodity mode of production and distribution. Marx acutely notes at one point in Grundrisse that “language as the product of an individual is an impossibility. But the same holds for property” (490). It is much more familiar today than it was in Marx’s time to note that, although I express myself through language, the language in which I make this expression is not properly mine, and does not belong to me, because it is social and communicative, and even precedes me. Marx says that the same is the case with “private property”: it is only in a given social framework, only when there are others, and myself and those others stand in various forms of relation, that I can even make the claim that something is mine, that it represents me, that it belongs to me. Property relations, like language, already have to be given before the issues of personal expression and personal presence and personal belonging even arise in the first place.
Grundrisse actually helps with fleshing out this claim about the pre-existing, transcendental supposition of property relations and of what Karatani calls the “value-form.” For here, in first working out the theory of surplus value, Marx emphasizes the incommensurability between workers’ wages on the one hand, and the productivity of their labor power, on the other. There is no common measure between the way, as a worker who sells my labor power, I replenish on a daily basis my own conditions of existence (I may get more money rather than less, and have a higher living standard than other workers, but I am still always a paycheck away from default, bankruptcy or ruin, since my wages basically only allow me to reproduce my own standard of life), and the way that the production process as a whole creates values that expand the material wealth of society as a whole, leading to the expansion and accumulation of capital. I sell my labor-power as a commodity in order to get the money to pay for the commodities that I need in order to make it to another day of selling my labor power all over again (Marx calls this the circuit of C-M-C). Whereas a corporation invests money in the production of commodities, in order thereby to sell the commodities and end up with an expanding quantity of money (Marx calls this the circuit M-C-M’). A social surplus is always being produced (except in conditions of grave economic dislocation, or when there are disasters like famine, tsunami, earthquake, and plague), and this surplus is always credited to the account of capital (which grows and accumulates directly; the ultimate result may be something of an increase in my standard of living as a worker, but this only happens secondarily, as part of a “trickle-down” process).
Or to put it in another, more pragmatic way: when I go into credit card debt I am making trouble for myself; I will be increasingly unable to pay off the debt. But when a corporation goes into debt, it is generally enabled thereby to expand. Even in cases of bankruptcy: the Congress has recently passed laws making the conditions of recovery much more difficult and punitive for individuals than it was before; while corporations increasingly declare bankruptcy as a way to “reorganize” by breaking their labor contacts, decreasing wages and benefits, etc. (This is happening right now with Northwest Airlines and with the auto parts manufacturer Delphi, both major presences in the Detroit area.
As Deleuze and Guattari say, “it is not the same money that goes into the pocket of the wage earner and is entered on the balance sheet of a commercial enterprise.” For the wage earner, there is “a flow of means of payment relative to consumer goods and use values, and a one-to-one relation between money and an imposed range of products” (Marx’s C-M-C); while for the enterprise, monetary quantities are “signs of the power of capital, flows of financing,” and hence forces of multiplication, of the accumulation of capital itself (Marx’s M-C-M’) (Anti-Oedipus 228).
The qualitiative difference between the two circuits of exchange, that of the wage earner and that of the corporation, remains structurally or transcendentally significant — it determines everything — even if it cannot be specified quantitatively in ways that empirical economics is able to calculate. Though Marx makes repeated efforts to calculate the rate of surplus value throughout Grundrisse, he also foregrounds this basic incommensurability (in a more explicit way than he does later in Capital). For instance, Marx says that surplus labor isn’t just added on top of necessary labor, in such a way that reducing the working day in length would be enough to eliminate exploitation. For “in production resting on capital, the existence of necessary labour time is conditional on the creation of superfluous labour time” (398). The expropriated surplus, in a very real sense, comes first; it is only this surplus that motivates productive investment in the first place. For the capitalist, wages are just a deduction from total profit, an input cost like any other. Without the lure of the surplus, the whole process would come to a halt.
In this way, Marx’s notion of surplus value shows its affinity to the Derridean supplement and to the Lacanian notion of “surplus enjoyment” (which Zizek is always writing about); and beyond these, to Georges Bataille’s “notion of expenditure” (which powerfully influenced both Derrida and Lacan). Bataille is often taken to be anti-Marxist, because of his emphasis on expenditure rather than, and as opposed to, “the principles of classical utility” (Visions of Excess 116). But Marx is no defender of such principles of utility; his whole point about the separation of exchange value from use value points to the way in which capitalist reproduction isn’t really about utility at all. (When Marx writes of use value as serving “needs,” he means this latter word in the broadest sense — not economically basic needs as opposed to superfluous desires, but “need” as anything anybody wants, or is willing to pay for). It seems to me entirely coherent to say that surplus value is the form that Bataille’s excess takes in a capitalist society, and that the problem of expenditure is itself a more generalized form of the problem of overaccumulation or overproduction, which Marx sees as one of the problematic points of capitalism as a whole.
Surplus value is only one of a number of areas in which Marx’s formulations in Grundrisse significantly add to what he presents later, in its polished and publishable form, in Capital. On the other hand, in Grundrisse there is little discussion of the “fetishism of commodities,” such as it is highlighted in the notorious opening chapters of Capital. (Notorious because these opening chapters have discomfited so many readers, including notably Althusser, who urged readers of Capital to skip those chapter altogether). To my mind, and contra Althusser, the discussion of commodity fetishism is crucial and invaluable; Marx had good reasons for opening Capital with it. Commodity fetishism is, as it were, the manner in which we live the world of Capital (what Zizek calls “ideology,” though for various reasons I am not happy with naming it in this way); and as that which constructs our “lived experience,” it is as real as are the “underlying” processes (exploitation, capital accumulation) that it masks.
This brings up the whole issue of subjectivity, and how we can understand it in Marxist terms. In the past, I’ve mentioned my discomfort with psychoanalytic/Lacanian/Zizekian approaches, which seem to me to depart too much from social and economic conditions, in their pursuit of a logic of the unconscious that is ultimately entirely separate from the economic logic of capitalist society. Zizek even says that, while Marxism defines “ideology” as “false eternalization and/or universalization,” the attribution of universality to something that has a specifically social and historical basis, psychoanalysis, to the contrary, denounces “ideology” as consisting in “an over-rapid historicization,” seeing something as merely contingent and historical, when in fact it is absolutely universal, “the Real of the Law, the rock of castration… which returns as the same through diverse historicizations/symbolizations” (The Sublime Object of Ideology 49-50).
Zizek here makes the “Hegelian” move of extending Marx’s logic (in this case, the logic of ideology and fetishism) to the point where he altogether abolishes it. When “ideology” is redefined as the ultimate impossibility at the heart of any subject whatsoever, it’s all of Marx’s analysis of the historical specificity of capitalism — its radical difference from other social formations and relations of production — that disappears. Althusser scandalously argued that some sort of “ideology” would continue to exist even in a communist society. And this seems right to me. But Althusser didn’t take the additional step that Zizek does: the step that dissolves the particularity of one particular regime of ideology. Though it is perhaps unfortunate that Althusser designated “science” as the asubjective alternative to ideology (meaning by “science” something like Spinoza’s understanding sub specie aeternitatis), I find Zizek’s claim to Hegelian/psychoanalytic analysis much more disturbing. Here is a point where a Kantian understanding of limits (or a Whiteheadian understanding of the irreduciblity, and yet the inevitable partiality, of all abstractions) would be helpful.
In Grundrisse, Marx takes a rather different tack, when he proposes that “the production of capitalists and wage labourers is thus a chief product of capital’s realization process. Ordinary economics, which looks only at the things produced, forgets this completely” (512). We need to think more about how subjectivity is itself produced in the capitalist process of production/circulation/realization/appropriation of the surplus. Needless to say, this has little to do with the old-fashioned Marxist distinction according to which consciousness or subjectivity would merely be a “superstructural” effect, determined by an economic “base.” It does have to do, to the contrary, with something like Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the unity-in-division of libidinal and economic flows. Though I think that Toni Negri goes too far, in the opposite direction from Zizek, when he privileges Grundrisse over Capital, on the grounds that only the former work provides an account of class antagonism, and revolutionary subjectivity, Negri laments the absence of such a perspective from the more objective account of capitalist process in Capital itself. It seems to me, however, that Negri is too facile in the way he reads Marx’s demonstrations of the antagonism between workers and capital — class hatred, in short — as itself somehow the motor of a new subjectivity, one that already and immediately embodies Marx’s rather vague statements about how the capitalist mode of production itself already establishes the conditions for a communism that would transcend and abolish it. (All this is the source of the almost embarrassing optimism about the potentialities of the multitude that one finds in Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Multitude — but that is the subject for another post, in which I want to talk about monstrosity: the body of the multitude in relation to the body of capital).
I am even less sure than usual whether this long and rambling post makes any sense — and especially whether it gets the value/price question right — so in order to stop myself from rambling to infinity, I will publish it now.
Octavia Butler died last weekend. She was only 58. (Newspaper obituaries here and here, and appreciations by other SF writers here, here and here, among other places). What a bummer. I just read Fledgling, which now turns out to have been her last novel, a few weeks ago. Butler’s novels are downbeat, pessimistic, and utterly gripping. They all deal, in various ways, with issues of otherness, pain, and dependency; as well as, obviously, with race and gender, and racism and misogyny. They are never didactic, however, because they are as deeply concerned with affect as they are with cognition: the two simply can’t be separated in Butler’s world. These novels offer little hope of release, transcendence, or liberation. They sometimes flirt with religio-ethical responses in various ways, but they always also emphasize the fictiveness of such responses. They also often envision the posthuman, the transhuman, and the hybrid-no-longer-quite-human; but they never portray these in the salvific terms white technogeeks are so prone to. Above all, Butler’s novels never pretend to alleviate the pain that they so eloquently describe and evoke: in this sense, they are utterly, shockingly clear as to the forms of domination and oppression that are so often taken for granted in our (post)modern, highly technologized, supposedly enlightened world. They bear witness to the intolerable, to how much of our social life today remains intolerable. This makes them indispensable, both aesthetically and (dare I say it) politically. I think that we still have a lot to learn from Butler’s texts: about how to understand human limits and constraints without turning such an understanding into an apologia for the current ruling order; about how to construct a politics of the Other, in a way that goes well beyond today’s alternatives of insipid multiculturalism, Levinasian depoliticized ethics, or Zizek’s and Badiou’s deeply suspect universalism; about how to think the posthuman, the no-longer-merely-human. And above all, about a politics of affect (not a politics of emotions against reason, but one that rejects such binary altenatives altogether, and thus moves away from the common basis of both liberalism and fascism). I never met Butler in person (though I saw her speak or read a couple of times); but I am deeply grieved that we will never get any more novels from her.
Octavia Butler died last weekend. She was only 58. (Newspaper obituaries here and here, and appreciations by other SF writers here, here and here, among other places). What a bummer. I just read Fledgling, which now turns out to have been her last novel, a few weeks ago. Butler’s novels are downbeat, pessimistic, and utterly gripping. They all deal, in various ways, with issues of otherness, pain, and dependency; as well as, obviously, with race and gender, and racism and misogyny. They are never didactic, however, because they are as deeply concerned with affect as they are with cognition: the two simply can’t be separated in Butler’s world. These novels offer little hope of release, transcendence, or liberation. They sometimes flirt with religio-ethical responses in various ways, but they always also emphasize the fictiveness of such responses. They also often envision the posthuman, the transhuman, and the hybrid-no-longer-quite-human; but they never portray these in the salvific terms white technogeeks are so prone to. Above all, Butler’s novels never pretend to alleviate the pain that they so eloquently describe and evoke: in this sense, they are utterly, shockingly clear as to the forms of domination and oppression that are so often taken for granted in our (post)modern, highly technologized, supposedly enlightened world. They bear witness to the intolerable, to how much of our social life today remains intolerable. This makes them indispensable, both aesthetically and (dare I say it) politically. I think that we still have a lot to learn from Butler’s texts: about how to understand human limits and constraints without turning such an understanding into an apologia for the current ruling order; about how to construct a politics of the Other, in a way that goes well beyond today’s alternatives of insipid multiculturalism, Levinasian depoliticized ethics, or Zizek’s and Badiou’s deeply suspect universalism; about how to think the posthuman, the no-longer-merely-human. And above all, about a politics of affect (not a politics of emotions against reason, but one that rejects such binary altenatives altogether, and thus moves away from the common basis of both liberalism and fascism). I never met Butler in person (though I saw her speak or read a couple of times); but I am deeply grieved that we will never get any more novels from her.