Octavia E. Butler’s new novel, Fledgling, is a vampire story. But its dynamics are far different from any other vampire tales I know. Vampires are usually disruptive forces from the unconscious. They give body to our least avowable desires and fears. But there’s nothing atavistic about Butler’s Ina (as her vampires call themselves): they have a culture, with laws and customs, kinship groups, a religion and an ethics and a politics, and disputes and power struggles about all these things — just as any group of human beings does. Butler is after something subtler than our usual (and far too familiar and commodified, at this point) romances with the “dark side” (not to mention that we ought to be more aware than we — or white people, at least — usually are of the racial connotations of a phrase like “dark side.”)
[WARNING: THE REST OF THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS].
Let me begin again. Fledgling is, among other things, a book about the mystery of beginnings. Fledgling begins with a narrator who awakens in the dark, knowing nothing except an immense hunger. She can’t remember who or what she is; she doesn’t even know her own name. She has language, but many of her words lack referents. She knows there are others, and therefore she feels alone; but she doesn’t know who those others are. She is wounded, in great pain; but gradually she heals, and finds that she knows how to do what she needs to do: hunt, kill, and feed. There is no blank slate, no pure origination: even as the narrator comes into the world afresh, entirely alone, and seemingly new, there are webs of meaning and obligation and history that surround her, and affect her — although she is ignorant of these things, and must discover them as if for the first time.
The narrator’s name, we eventually learn — as she eventually learns — is Shori Matthews. She looks like a 10-year-old black girl. But actually, she is a 53-year-old vampire; though 53 years old is stilll pre-pubescent, in vampire terms. Shori is almost completely amnesiac, as a result of trauma. Her entire (extended) family has been murdered; she alone has survived. She will never regain the memories she has lost; she cannot even really mourn her mothers and fathers, her sisters and brothers, and all their loved ones, because they have been so entirely erased from her memory. Her new beginning is the result of loss beyond loss, a loss even of the possibility of feeling loss. She must learn afresh, as if from the outside, all that she previously knew through the experience of growing up. She must learn about both the human world and the vampire world. She must reacquire, at second hand, all the referents and contexts that go along with the the only things she still possesses: he language and her sensory-motor skills.
Reading Fledgling, we learn about Ina society as Shori does. Butler invents a whole biology and anthropology of vampire life. The Ina live for 500 years or more. When injured, they can self-repair (as Shori does) on a diet of red meat. When they are well, they live exclusively off human blood. They possess an extraordinary sense of smell, together with more acute sight and hearing than human beings do; all these senses come into play in their relationships with one another, as well as with human beings. Ina society is more or less matriarchal — female Ina are more powerful than male — and is organized around gender-segregated extended families. They mate and reproduce in family-based groups (a group of brothers mates with a group of sisters from another family). The male young live with the family of their fathers, the female with the family of their mothers. The Ina also have complex relationships with their “symbionts,” the human beings upon whom they feed. In Fledgling, vampires almost never kill their human prey: they live together with them, and have sex with them, in extended families of seven or eight human symbionts for each vampire. Whether male or female, vampires generally have symbionts of both genders, and the symbionts often develop sexual relationships with one another. So all in all, Ina society involves both vampires and human beings, involved in complex webs of polyamory. (Vampires seem to be strictly heterosexual with one another, but human/human relationships, as well as cross-species vampire/human relationships, involve all sorts of gender pairings and sexual play).
What does it mean to be the human symbiont of a vampire? Since Shori is a vampire, and we only see human thoughts and feelings through her narration, it’s difficult to know precisely. Vampire saliva is both addictive and antiseptic for human beings: the human beings experience an immense sexual pleasure from being bitten, and quickly become dependent upon — no, in love with — their vampire captors. Vampire saliva also results in their leading long and healthy lives: they never get sick, and they live much longer than ordinary human beings (though not quite as long as the vampires). But symbionts must give up their autonomy in return for love, pleasure, health and long life. Somebody who has been bitten cannot disobey their vampire’s orders. Their lives are ultimately ones of servitude. Most vampires are ethical enough to give their human prey some modicum of choice, allowing them to leave at some early stage in the relationship, before they have become so addicted to their vampire’s bites that departure would be physically impossible. But emotional dependency precedes physiological dependency, and so the symbionts almost never choose to leave. In general, symbionts are chosen by their vampires, and almost never the reverse (though rarely, human beings who have grown up in Ina culture, with symbiont human parents, do make the decision to become symbionts themselves).
I’ve described Ina culture in almost too much detail here, giving a flat, reductive, and schematic sketch of things that slowly unravel and become evident in the course of the novel. (And learning these things gradually, as Shori herself relearns them, is one of the pleasures of reading Fledgling). But I hope my summary gives a sense both of the richness of the novel, and of some of the things that are at stake in the narrative. Butler has often written of how love involves dependency, loss of autonomy, and unequal power relations: even when both sides in the relationship have both given themselves over unconditionally to an Other, they are never equal in (self-)abandonment. This leads to paradoxes and impasses that are almost too painful to contemplate. (Levinas is right to say that my relation to an Other is non-symmetrical, because it involves my self-abandonment beyond any possibility of recuperation or return. But he is wrong to think that this dispenses with power relations; the non-symmetry between lover and beloved is not felt symmetrically, or in the same way, on both sides). Butler has often conveyed this painful sense of dependency in love from the point of view of the dominated partner (I am thinking both of the narrator of the short story “Bloodchild”, and of the human beings, in relation to their alien captors, in the Xenogenesis or “Lilith’s Brood” novels). But here she approaches the same knot of dependency and inequality — which is yet love — from the point of view of the dominating partner. (And this is not even to get into the disturbing fact that, from a human perspective, from the point of view of the human beings who are giving her blood and having sex with her, Shori looks like a ten-year-old girl).
Fledgling is also, like most of Butler’s work, a story about race. The Ina are of European origin (though the novel takes place entirely in the contemporary United States); they are a separate species from human beings, but they have lived in the human world for thousands of years, like a hidden elite, with a certain ability to manipulate human opinion in their own favor, but also with a well-grounded fear of human prejudice and hatred. No matter how ethical they try to be, after all, they are still ultimately predators (or parasites), having their own society in secret, while feeding upon the surrounding human community. This makes the Ina seem a lot like Jews (I mean, both like Jews as they actually were in European society for so many centuries, and like the images of “Jews” as anti-Semitic Christian bigotry portrayed them). But together with this, the Ina are nocturnal: they are allergic to the sun — they burn in it if they go outside, and they are physiologically unable to stay awake during the daytime — and their physical appearance is almost grotesquely albino. (This is one of the very few traits that Butler retains from traditional vampire fiction). Shori is a minority within this minority, as she is the world’s only black vampire. She learns that she is the result of genetic experiments, performed by her mothers: genes from black human beings have been mixed into her otherwise-Ina genome, giving her skin enhanced melanin expression, and thereby allowing her to stay awake during the day, and even to endure some limited exposure to the sun. And it emerges that racism among the Ina is why her family has been murdered and she is a target. The Ina cling to their unique heritage, and this leads some of them to a fanatical belief in their racial purity and superiority. They hate Shori because she is “part human” (though from a biological point of view this is a meaningless statement), amplified by the fact that the “human” part of her is black.
All this, too, is only revealed gradually in the course of the novel; and it leads into some extraordinary conceptual and emotional tangles. Things do get at least provisionally resolved by the end of the book; though the resolution is emphatically not accomplished by the recourse to action/adventure that usually does this work in most genre fiction. Rather, it comes about strictly within the anthropological (vampirological?) framework that the novel has constructed for itself. I won’t say more, in order not to spoil the few secrets of the narrative that I haven’t already revealed. I’ll conclude instead with a few more general observations. One of the greatest virtues of Fledgling — as, indeed, of much of Butler’s fiction — is that it makes debates about “genetic determinism” and “social construction” almost entirely irrelevant. In Butler’s world, we are bound and limited both by our genes and by our cultural inheritance; both are constraints that we cannot ignore, and yet both are susceptible (under certain conditions) to alteration. So the question is never whether something is “in our genes” or merely a “cultural construction”: everything is both, and there is no reason to see either “nature” or “culture” as more restricting than the other. The question, with both culture and biology, is how we are constrained and how we are free; what our limits are, and what powers we can exercise within (and despite) those limits. From Butler’s perspective, we can entirely dismiss both the Hobbesian reductionism of someone like Steven Pinker, and the “blank slate” Rousseaueanism that is Pinker’s caricatural view of those who don’t share his narrow determinism. In nature as in culture, everything is changeable — that is part of the meaning of evolution. But in culture as in nature, the forces of tradition, convention, and so on are so strong that changing them is quite difficult. We are never free from our histories and their entanglements, for their inertia is the largest part of what constitutes “us” in the first place. Butler imagines alternative genetic and cultural histories, reminding us that life can always be otherwise. But these alternatives aren’t “utopian”: each of them represents a different set of constraints and possibilities than we are used to, but there are still both constraints and possibilities.
The other great thing about Fledgling has to do with the way that it is so powerfully an affective text, at the same time that it is so powerfully a cognitive one. Butler’s writing tends towards the spare and descriptive, rather than towards the stylistically elaborate and rhetorically self-reflexive. Yet there is something about it that gives it an incredible intensity and poignancy, when it evokes states of hunger and grief, doubt and hope, craving and lust and love, longing and anger and bitterness and rage and hatred. Fledgling traffics in currents of emotional turmoil that are almost too overwhelming to be borne, and that push us to the limits of who and what we are (whoever “we” are, human or vampire). The novel produces affects that exceed the human, and that therefore imply new, different forms of subjectivity than are recognized in ordinary life (or in ordinary, “mimetic” fiction). This is why, among other things, although Butler’s novels continually raise issues of gender and race, they cannot be said to allegorize particular existing conditions of gender and race inequality: for they constantly push the hierarchies and power relations of gender and race into new configurations. Butler’s fictions, through their affective intensities, both suggest the need (and the possibility) for metamorphosis (and the hope that comes through this possibility), and suggest that (as Zizek might put it) trauma and social antagonism are uneliminable, not subject to rational adjudication. At the end of Fledgling, Shori has been freed from the death sentence with which she had been threatened — if not forever, then at least for 300 years (though that is a shorter stretch in vampire time than it would be in human time), and the way has been cleared for her to create her own Ina extended family. But she will never regain all that she has lost, nor even regain the memory of having lost it.
Octavia E. Butler’s new novel, Fledgling, is a vampire story. But its dynamics are far different from any other vampire tales I know. Vampires are usually disruptive forces from the unconscious. They give body to our least avowable desires and fears. But there’s nothing atavistic about Butler’s Ina (as her vampires call themselves): they have a culture, with laws and customs, kinship groups, a religion and an ethics and a politics, and disputes and power struggles about all these things — just as any group of human beings does. Butler is after something subtler than our usual (and far too familiar and commodified, at this point) romances with the “dark side” (not to mention that we ought to be more aware than we — or white people, at least — usually are of the racial connotations of a phrase like “dark side.”)
[WARNING: THE REST OF THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS].
Let me begin again. Fledgling is, among other things, a book about the mystery of beginnings. Fledgling begins with a narrator who awakens in the dark, knowing nothing except an immense hunger. She can’t remember who or what she is; she doesn’t even know her own name. She has language, but many of her words lack referents. She knows there are others, and therefore she feels alone; but she doesn’t know who those others are. She is wounded, in great pain; but gradually she heals, and finds that she knows how to do what she needs to do: hunt, kill, and feed. There is no blank slate, no pure origination: even as the narrator comes into the world afresh, entirely alone, and seemingly new, there are webs of meaning and obligation and history that surround her, and affect her — although she is ignorant of these things, and must discover them as if for the first time.
The narrator’s name, we eventually learn — as she eventually learns — is Shori Matthews. She looks like a 10-year-old black girl. But actually, she is a 53-year-old vampire; though 53 years old is stilll pre-pubescent, in vampire terms. Shori is almost completely amnesiac, as a result of trauma. Her entire (extended) family has been murdered; she alone has survived. She will never regain the memories she has lost; she cannot even really mourn her mothers and fathers, her sisters and brothers, and all their loved ones, because they have been so entirely erased from her memory. Her new beginning is the result of loss beyond loss, a loss even of the possibility of feeling loss. She must learn afresh, as if from the outside, all that she previously knew through the experience of growing up. She must learn about both the human world and the vampire world. She must reacquire, at second hand, all the referents and contexts that go along with the the only things she still possesses: he language and her sensory-motor skills.
Reading Fledgling, we learn about Ina society as Shori does. Butler invents a whole biology and anthropology of vampire life. The Ina live for 500 years or more. When injured, they can self-repair (as Shori does) on a diet of red meat. When they are well, they live exclusively off human blood. They possess an extraordinary sense of smell, together with more acute sight and hearing than human beings do; all these senses come into play in their relationships with one another, as well as with human beings. Ina society is more or less matriarchal — female Ina are more powerful than male — and is organized around gender-segregated extended families. They mate and reproduce in family-based groups (a group of brothers mates with a group of sisters from another family). The male young live with the family of their fathers, the female with the family of their mothers. The Ina also have complex relationships with their “symbionts,” the human beings upon whom they feed. In Fledgling, vampires almost never kill their human prey: they live together with them, and have sex with them, in extended families of seven or eight human symbionts for each vampire. Whether male or female, vampires generally have symbionts of both genders, and the symbionts often develop sexual relationships with one another. So all in all, Ina society involves both vampires and human beings, involved in complex webs of polyamory. (Vampires seem to be strictly heterosexual with one another, but human/human relationships, as well as cross-species vampire/human relationships, involve all sorts of gender pairings and sexual play).
What does it mean to be the human symbiont of a vampire? Since Shori is a vampire, and we only see human thoughts and feelings through her narration, it’s difficult to know precisely. Vampire saliva is both addictive and antiseptic for human beings: the human beings experience an immense sexual pleasure from being bitten, and quickly become dependent upon — no, in love with — their vampire captors. Vampire saliva also results in their leading long and healthy lives: they never get sick, and they live much longer than ordinary human beings (though not quite as long as the vampires). But symbionts must give up their autonomy in return for love, pleasure, health and long life. Somebody who has been bitten cannot disobey their vampire’s orders. Their lives are ultimately ones of servitude. Most vampires are ethical enough to give their human prey some modicum of choice, allowing them to leave at some early stage in the relationship, before they have become so addicted to their vampire’s bites that departure would be physically impossible. But emotional dependency precedes physiological dependency, and so the symbionts almost never choose to leave. In general, symbionts are chosen by their vampires, and almost never the reverse (though rarely, human beings who have grown up in Ina culture, with symbiont human parents, do make the decision to become symbionts themselves).
I’ve described Ina culture in almost too much detail here, giving a flat, reductive, and schematic sketch of things that slowly unravel and become evident in the course of the novel. (And learning these things gradually, as Shori herself relearns them, is one of the pleasures of reading Fledgling). But I hope my summary gives a sense both of the richness of the novel, and of some of the things that are at stake in the narrative. Butler has often written of how love involves dependency, loss of autonomy, and unequal power relations: even when both sides in the relationship have both given themselves over unconditionally to an Other, they are never equal in (self-)abandonment. This leads to paradoxes and impasses that are almost too painful to contemplate. (Levinas is right to say that my relation to an Other is non-symmetrical, because it involves my self-abandonment beyond any possibility of recuperation or return. But he is wrong to think that this dispenses with power relations; the non-symmetry between lover and beloved is not felt symmetrically, or in the same way, on both sides). Butler has often conveyed this painful sense of dependency in love from the point of view of the dominated partner (I am thinking both of the narrator of the short story “Bloodchild”, and of the human beings, in relation to their alien captors, in the Xenogenesis or “Lilith’s Brood” novels). But here she approaches the same knot of dependency and inequality — which is yet love — from the point of view of the dominating partner. (And this is not even to get into the disturbing fact that, from a human perspective, from the point of view of the human beings who are giving her blood and having sex with her, Shori looks like a ten-year-old girl).
Fledgling is also, like most of Butler’s work, a story about race. The Ina are of European origin (though the novel takes place entirely in the contemporary United States); they are a separate species from human beings, but they have lived in the human world for thousands of years, like a hidden elite, with a certain ability to manipulate human opinion in their own favor, but also with a well-grounded fear of human prejudice and hatred. No matter how ethical they try to be, after all, they are still ultimately predators (or parasites), having their own society in secret, while feeding upon the surrounding human community. This makes the Ina seem a lot like Jews (I mean, both like Jews as they actually were in European society for so many centuries, and like the images of “Jews” as anti-Semitic Christian bigotry portrayed them). But together with this, the Ina are nocturnal: they are allergic to the sun — they burn in it if they go outside, and they are physiologically unable to stay awake during the daytime — and their physical appearance is almost grotesquely albino. (This is one of the very few traits that Butler retains from traditional vampire fiction). Shori is a minority within this minority, as she is the world’s only black vampire. She learns that she is the result of genetic experiments, performed by her mothers: genes from black human beings have been mixed into her otherwise-Ina genome, giving her skin enhanced melanin expression, and thereby allowing her to stay awake during the day, and even to endure some limited exposure to the sun. And it emerges that racism among the Ina is why her family has been murdered and she is a target. The Ina cling to their unique heritage, and this leads some of them to a fanatical belief in their racial purity and superiority. They hate Shori because she is “part human” (though from a biological point of view this is a meaningless statement), amplified by the fact that the “human” part of her is black.
All this, too, is only revealed gradually in the course of the novel; and it leads into some extraordinary conceptual and emotional tangles. Things do get at least provisionally resolved by the end of the book; though the resolution is emphatically not accomplished by the recourse to action/adventure that usually does this work in most genre fiction. Rather, it comes about strictly within the anthropological (vampirological?) framework that the novel has constructed for itself. I won’t say more, in order not to spoil the few secrets of the narrative that I haven’t already revealed. I’ll conclude instead with a few more general observations. One of the greatest virtues of Fledgling — as, indeed, of much of Butler’s fiction — is that it makes debates about “genetic determinism” and “social construction” almost entirely irrelevant. In Butler’s world, we are bound and limited both by our genes and by our cultural inheritance; both are constraints that we cannot ignore, and yet both are susceptible (under certain conditions) to alteration. So the question is never whether something is “in our genes” or merely a “cultural construction”: everything is both, and there is no reason to see either “nature” or “culture” as more restricting than the other. The question, with both culture and biology, is how we are constrained and how we are free; what our limits are, and what powers we can exercise within (and despite) those limits. From Butler’s perspective, we can entirely dismiss both the Hobbesian reductionism of someone like Steven Pinker, and the “blank slate” Rousseaueanism that is Pinker’s caricatural view of those who don’t share his narrow determinism. In nature as in culture, everything is changeable — that is part of the meaning of evolution. But in culture as in nature, the forces of tradition, convention, and so on are so strong that changing them is quite difficult. We are never free from our histories and their entanglements, for their inertia is the largest part of what constitutes “us” in the first place. Butler imagines alternative genetic and cultural histories, reminding us that life can always be otherwise. But these alternatives aren’t “utopian”: each of them represents a different set of constraints and possibilities than we are used to, but there are still both constraints and possibilities.
The other great thing about Fledgling has to do with the way that it is so powerfully an affective text, at the same time that it is so powerfully a cognitive one. Butler’s writing tends towards the spare and descriptive, rather than towards the stylistically elaborate and rhetorically self-reflexive. Yet there is something about it that gives it an incredible intensity and poignancy, when it evokes states of hunger and grief, doubt and hope, craving and lust and love, longing and anger and bitterness and rage and hatred. Fledgling traffics in currents of emotional turmoil that are almost too overwhelming to be borne, and that push us to the limits of who and what we are (whoever “we” are, human or vampire). The novel produces affects that exceed the human, and that therefore imply new, different forms of subjectivity than are recognized in ordinary life (or in ordinary, “mimetic” fiction). This is why, among other things, although Butler’s novels continually raise issues of gender and race, they cannot be said to allegorize particular existing conditions of gender and race inequality: for they constantly push the hierarchies and power relations of gender and race into new configurations. Butler’s fictions, through their affective intensities, both suggest the need (and the possibility) for metamorphosis (and the hope that comes through this possibility), and suggest that (as Zizek might put it) trauma and social antagonism are uneliminable, not subject to rational adjudication. At the end of Fledgling, Shori has been freed from the death sentence with which she had been threatened — if not forever, then at least for 300 years (though that is a shorter stretch in vampire time than it would be in human time), and the way has been cleared for her to create her own Ina extended family. But she will never regain all that she has lost, nor even regain the memory of having lost it.
I’ve finally read the second half of Gilbert Simondon’s thesis on “individuation”: L’individuation psychique et collective (Psychological and collective individuation) (thanks to Glueboot for procuring me a photocopy of this hard to find, out-of-print text). (I wrote about the previous volume, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique, here; and Simondon’s other book, on technology, here). (I have just noticed that both “individuation” volumes, together with a previously unpublished section called “Histoire de la Notion d’Individu” — history of the notion of the individual — have just been re-published in a new edition, in France as a single volume, entitled L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information — individuation in the light of the notions of form and information. Unfortunately, there still seems to be no English translation). What follows is more in the order of a bunch of notes, than a coherent presentation, but hopefully it will help me to pull together what I have gotten from this reading.
L’individuation psychique et collective continues the discussion of “individuation” that Simondon began in the previous volume. Here, the emphasis is on human society (where the previous volume dealt more with crystals and colonial organisms like coral). Simondon discusses how the multiple sensations received by our sense organs are turned into unified perceptions (he thus gives a developmental account of the Kantian synthesis of perception); how psychological individuation is an affective process before it is a cognitive one; and how social individuation (the production of social groups larger than the single biological person) takes place.
What is individuation? Simondon’s most basic argument is that the “individual” is never given in advance; it must be produced, it must coagulate, or come into being, in the course of an ongoing process. This means, first, that there is no “preformation”; the DNA in a just-fertilized egg cell, for instance, does not already determine the nature of the individual who will be produced in the course of nine months of gestation and years of growth after birth. DNA is not just a code, it is also a set of potentials, which can unfold in various directions, and which do not attain form except in the actual process of unfolding. Everything always starts in the “preindividual” realm. The preindividual is not a state in which identity is lacking — not an undifferentiated chaos — but rather a condition that is “more than a unity and more than an identity”: a state of radical potentiality, of excess or “supersaturation,” rather than one of negativity. Simondon rejects fixed entities as much as any dialectician; but he offers an account of process that is radically different from the Hegelian or “dialectical” account.
In the second place, this means that an individual is never final; there are always untapped potentials, additional possibilites for metamorphosis, further individuations. “The living organism conserves within itself a permanent activity of individuation” (16). Even at the end of the maturing process, the individual is not a complete and closed entity. A reservoir of untapped potential, of metastable, preindividual being, still remains. Further individuation can happen to any individual, but it can also happen transindividually, on the level of a group. Simondon uses this to talk about a wide range of social formations: in any society, there are additional individuations, and hence additional (incomplete) individuals, that are “collectives,” composed of more than one person or entity. This refers less to society as a whole, in the sense that classic sociologists like Durkheim and classic anthropologists like Levi-Strauss talk of society/societies, than it does to smaller groups that exist within societies, and that define their own identity both internally (in terms of what members of the group share) and externally (in terms of how they relate to the Outside of other members of society and other social groups). Simondon discusses this in terms of politics and religion/spirituality. This whole line of thought is interesting for several reasons: for one, Simondon suggests that a social group (whether a political party, or a religious cult, or the group of, say, fans of Star Trek or readers of romance novels) is in its own right just as much (and as little) an “individual” as is a single (biologically delimited) person. This is a very radical suggestion, if we really follow through on its implications. Another reason this is significant is that, as Fredric Jameson points out in his recent book on science fiction, there are astonishingly few thinkers who have ever even endeavored to theorize the nature of social groups larger than a single person or household/family, but smaller than an entire nation or society or social class (Jameson lists Charles Fourier, and the Sartre of Critique of Dialectical Reason as the only thinkers he knows of who have actually done so; Simondon makes a third in this select company).
The mechanism driving the process of individuation is what Simondon calls transduction. He defines this as “a physical, biological, mental, or social operation by means of which an activity propagates itself from one location to another (de proche en proche) within a given domain, basing this propagation on a structuring (structuration) of the domain operating from one place to another (de place en place): each region of the constituted structure serves the following region as a principle and model, as a beginning (amorce) of its constitution, so that a modification extends itself progressively at the same time as this structuring operation” (24-25). The growth of a crystal is the simplest example of the process of transduction, but Simondon develops the concept much further. Ultimately, transduction is any transfer of information through a material medium. It applies to processes of differentiation and crystallization of all sorts, from the growth of an embryo, to the learning of a concept, to the spread of what today are called “memes” through a society.
For the last twenty years especially, but really since at least the invention of cybernetics in the 1940s, we have been plagued by the idea of the alleged immateriality of information, its supposed independence from any particular material base. (See Katherine Hayles for a history of th ideology of immaterial information) This is, of course, the assumption behind current computing technologies: the way that all sorts of data, no matter how qualitatively distinct, can be coded in terms of digital bits. There is no doubt that such digital coding works; but we have been too dazzled by the magic of our new technologies to ask hard questions about the presuppositions that underlie them. Thus we get such dubious ideas, maintained with a fervor that borders on the religious, as the one that some day we will be able to “download” our minds into computers (Ray Kurzweil), or more generally, the idea that the “same” patterns can be found in all sorts of complex systems, no matter what the material substrate, so that the fluctuations of the stock market or the patterns of housing segregation are made to seem as “natural” and unchangeable as the balance between predators and prey in an ecosystem, or the vagaries of weather and climate (despite all we know about how human interventions are changing the latter). The idea of transduction works, I think, as a materialist explanation of what lies behind such fantasies. Information often seems independent of materiality, because it operates precisely by transduction: it is the continual transfer of patterns both within a given medium, and from one medium to another. But transduction is never independent of its material medium in the way that we sometimes imagine “information” to be. The medium has a great degree of influence on what patterns are possible and how they can be propagated. Just as Simondon shows the process of individuation to take place in between “form” and “matter” — rather than being the sheer imposition of an already-existing form upon a previously shapeless matter — so “information” cannot just be abstractly opposed to the medium in which it is instantiated, or across which it is transmitted. Medium and message intersect. The shape of the information transmitted within a medium, or between media, is in important ways a function of the qualities and potentialities of the medium or media in question. (Besides giving a better account of information than the mainstream cybernetics tradition has done, Simondon also suggests — from the opposite view point — a way of taking information into account that is missing altogether from Deleuze, who follows Simondon in many other respects — see the discussion by Mark Hansen).
Individuation, for Simondon, is always a process of the in-between. It undoes dualities (form and content, message and medium), without entirely abolishing them. Philosophically, this includes the Kantian duality between the contents of perception out there, given to us in passive sensibility, and the forms we impose a priori upon those contents. This means that Simondon radically revises and renews Kant, without altogether abandoning him. In terms of the psychology of perception, Simondon makes an argument that cuts across the opposition between associationism or behaviorism on the one hand, and Gestalt or phenomenological theories of perception on the other — in almost exactly the same way that Kant’s argument cuts across the empiricism vs. rationalism opposition of his own way. Simondon, like Kant, offers a theory of the synthesis of perception. Only where Kant still adheres to a kind of form/content duality in presenting his synthesis, Simondon moves more decisively to an idea of synthesis as a process. “The conditions of possibility of knowledge are in fact the causes of existence of the individuated being” (127). Simondon traces two stages of individuation, the first one producing the individuated subject (which is equivalent to Kant’s a priori transcendental subject), and the second giving rise to the individualized subject (which is equivalent to Kant’s a posteriori empirical subject. This can also be stated in more or less cybernetic terms, as follows: Individuation is a continuous process. Each time an organism resolves a problem in its milieu, it transforms signals into signification (or mere information into meaning), which also means that it reaches past its prior limits and continues to individuate itself at those limits. What exist as fixed structures in Kant thus become continuing processes of becoming in Simondon — but Kant’s fundamental insistence on limits is retained.
(Note: I need to explore this more, but it seems to me that there are important parallels here between Simondon and Whitehead, whose theory of prehension can similarly be read — as I have tried to do in an as yet unpublished paper — as a radical revision of Kant in the direction of emphasizing becoming and process).
The individual, as (continually) produced in a process of individuation, is never an isolated Self. It is always coupled or coordinated with a milieu; the individual can only be understood together with its milieu, and cannot subsist as a unity without it. The contact between individual and milieu (the membrane between them, though Simondon doesn’t emphasize this aspect of the matter) is mediated by affect. Affectivity comes in between inside and outside, just as it comes in between sensation and action. Just as sensation gets oriented along a series of gradients in order to become perception, so (unconscious or preconscious) affect gets oriented along a series of processes of becoming in order to become (conscious) emotion. (The contrast between unconscious, presubjective affect and conscious, subjective emotion is something that both Deleuze and Brian Massumi take ultimately from Simondon).
(Note: This also means that individuation is quite similar to autopoieisis, as expounded by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and as lucidly explicated most recently by Ira Livingston. Both autopoiesis and individuation understand sameness through difference — rather than the reverse — by coupling the living individual with its milieu, and understanding what is unique and enclosed about the individual precisely in terms of its relation to the milieu which it is not, but which it requires contact with and nourishment from. Autopoiesis has become quite popular in recent years, and is a major reference point for (among other things) biological theories that contest the atomism of neo-Darwinist orthodoxy. But I think that Simondon’s theory is in fact superior to Maturana’s and Varela’s, precisely because, while the latter privileges the organism’s basic drive for auto-regulation or self-preservation — or Spinozian conatus — Simondon’s theory instead emphasizes continual change or becoming, not its constancy but its continuing ability to grow by altering itself).
I’ve finally read the second half of Gilbert Simondon’s thesis on “individuation”: L’individuation psychique et collective (Psychological and collective individuation) (thanks to Glueboot for procuring me a photocopy of this hard to find, out-of-print text). (I wrote about the previous volume, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique, here; and Simondon’s other book, on technology, here). (I have just noticed that both “individuation” volumes, together with a previously unpublished section called “Histoire de la Notion d’Individu” — history of the notion of the individual — have just been re-published in a new edition, in France as a single volume, entitled L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information — individuation in the light of the notions of form and information. Unfortunately, there still seems to be no English translation). What follows is more in the order of a bunch of notes, than a coherent presentation, but hopefully it will help me to pull together what I have gotten from this reading.
L’individuation psychique et collective continues the discussion of “individuation” that Simondon began in the previous volume. Here, the emphasis is on human society (where the previous volume dealt more with crystals and colonial organisms like coral). Simondon discusses how the multiple sensations received by our sense organs are turned into unified perceptions (he thus gives a developmental account of the Kantian synthesis of perception); how psychological individuation is an affective process before it is a cognitive one; and how social individuation (the production of social groups larger than the single biological person) takes place.
What is individuation? Simondon’s most basic argument is that the “individual” is never given in advance; it must be produced, it must coagulate, or come into being, in the course of an ongoing process. This means, first, that there is no “preformation”; the DNA in a just-fertilized egg cell, for instance, does not already determine the nature of the individual who will be produced in the course of nine months of gestation and years of growth after birth. DNA is not just a code, it is also a set of potentials, which can unfold in various directions, and which do not attain form except in the actual process of unfolding. Everything always starts in the “preindividual” realm. The preindividual is not a state in which identity is lacking — not an undifferentiated chaos — but rather a condition that is “more than a unity and more than an identity”: a state of radical potentiality, of excess or “supersaturation,” rather than one of negativity. Simondon rejects fixed entities as much as any dialectician; but he offers an account of process that is radically different from the Hegelian or “dialectical” account.
In the second place, this means that an individual is never final; there are always untapped potentials, additional possibilites for metamorphosis, further individuations. “The living organism conserves within itself a permanent activity of individuation” (16). Even at the end of the maturing process, the individual is not a complete and closed entity. A reservoir of untapped potential, of metastable, preindividual being, still remains. Further individuation can happen to any individual, but it can also happen transindividually, on the level of a group. Simondon uses this to talk about a wide range of social formations: in any society, there are additional individuations, and hence additional (incomplete) individuals, that are “collectives,” composed of more than one person or entity. This refers less to society as a whole, in the sense that classic sociologists like Durkheim and classic anthropologists like Levi-Strauss talk of society/societies, than it does to smaller groups that exist within societies, and that define their own identity both internally (in terms of what members of the group share) and externally (in terms of how they relate to the Outside of other members of society and other social groups). Simondon discusses this in terms of politics and religion/spirituality. This whole line of thought is interesting for several reasons: for one, Simondon suggests that a social group (whether a political party, or a religious cult, or the group of, say, fans of Star Trek or readers of romance novels) is in its own right just as much (and as little) an “individual” as is a single (biologically delimited) person. This is a very radical suggestion, if we really follow through on its implications. Another reason this is significant is that, as Fredric Jameson points out in his recent book on science fiction, there are astonishingly few thinkers who have ever even endeavored to theorize the nature of social groups larger than a single person or household/family, but smaller than an entire nation or society or social class (Jameson lists Charles Fourier, and the Sartre of Critique of Dialectical Reason as the only thinkers he knows of who have actually done so; Simondon makes a third in this select company).
The mechanism driving the process of individuation is what Simondon calls transduction. He defines this as “a physical, biological, mental, or social operation by means of which an activity propagates itself from one location to another (de proche en proche) within a given domain, basing this propagation on a structuring (structuration) of the domain operating from one place to another (de place en place): each region of the constituted structure serves the following region as a principle and model, as a beginning (amorce) of its constitution, so that a modification extends itself progressively at the same time as this structuring operation” (24-25). The growth of a crystal is the simplest example of the process of transduction, but Simondon develops the concept much further. Ultimately, transduction is any transfer of information through a material medium. It applies to processes of differentiation and crystallization of all sorts, from the growth of an embryo, to the learning of a concept, to the spread of what today are called “memes” through a society.
For the last twenty years especially, but really since at least the invention of cybernetics in the 1940s, we have been plagued by the idea of the alleged immateriality of information, its supposed independence from any particular material base. (See Katherine Hayles for a history of th ideology of immaterial information) This is, of course, the assumption behind current computing technologies: the way that all sorts of data, no matter how qualitatively distinct, can be coded in terms of digital bits. There is no doubt that such digital coding works; but we have been too dazzled by the magic of our new technologies to ask hard questions about the presuppositions that underlie them. Thus we get such dubious ideas, maintained with a fervor that borders on the religious, as the one that some day we will be able to “download” our minds into computers (Ray Kurzweil), or more generally, the idea that the “same” patterns can be found in all sorts of complex systems, no matter what the material substrate, so that the fluctuations of the stock market or the patterns of housing segregation are made to seem as “natural” and unchangeable as the balance between predators and prey in an ecosystem, or the vagaries of weather and climate (despite all we know about how human interventions are changing the latter). The idea of transduction works, I think, as a materialist explanation of what lies behind such fantasies. Information often seems independent of materiality, because it operates precisely by transduction: it is the continual transfer of patterns both within a given medium, and from one medium to another. But transduction is never independent of its material medium in the way that we sometimes imagine “information” to be. The medium has a great degree of influence on what patterns are possible and how they can be propagated. Just as Simondon shows the process of individuation to take place in between “form” and “matter” — rather than being the sheer imposition of an already-existing form upon a previously shapeless matter — so “information” cannot just be abstractly opposed to the medium in which it is instantiated, or across which it is transmitted. Medium and message intersect. The shape of the information transmitted within a medium, or between media, is in important ways a function of the qualities and potentialities of the medium or media in question. (Besides giving a better account of information than the mainstream cybernetics tradition has done, Simondon also suggests — from the opposite view point — a way of taking information into account that is missing altogether from Deleuze, who follows Simondon in many other respects — see the discussion by Mark Hansen).
Individuation, for Simondon, is always a process of the in-between. It undoes dualities (form and content, message and medium), without entirely abolishing them. Philosophically, this includes the Kantian duality between the contents of perception out there, given to us in passive sensibility, and the forms we impose a priori upon those contents. This means that Simondon radically revises and renews Kant, without altogether abandoning him. In terms of the psychology of perception, Simondon makes an argument that cuts across the opposition between associationism or behaviorism on the one hand, and Gestalt or phenomenological theories of perception on the other — in almost exactly the same way that Kant’s argument cuts across the empiricism vs. rationalism opposition of his own way. Simondon, like Kant, offers a theory of the synthesis of perception. Only where Kant still adheres to a kind of form/content duality in presenting his synthesis, Simondon moves more decisively to an idea of synthesis as a process. “The conditions of possibility of knowledge are in fact the causes of existence of the individuated being” (127). Simondon traces two stages of individuation, the first one producing the individuated subject (which is equivalent to Kant’s a priori transcendental subject), and the second giving rise to the individualized subject (which is equivalent to Kant’s a posteriori empirical subject. This can also be stated in more or less cybernetic terms, as follows: Individuation is a continuous process. Each time an organism resolves a problem in its milieu, it transforms signals into signification (or mere information into meaning), which also means that it reaches past its prior limits and continues to individuate itself at those limits. What exist as fixed structures in Kant thus become continuing processes of becoming in Simondon — but Kant’s fundamental insistence on limits is retained.
(Note: I need to explore this more, but it seems to me that there are important parallels here between Simondon and Whitehead, whose theory of prehension can similarly be read — as I have tried to do in an as yet unpublished paper — as a radical revision of Kant in the direction of emphasizing becoming and process).
The individual, as (continually) produced in a process of individuation, is never an isolated Self. It is always coupled or coordinated with a milieu; the individual can only be understood together with its milieu, and cannot subsist as a unity without it. The contact between individual and milieu (the membrane between them, though Simondon doesn’t emphasize this aspect of the matter) is mediated by affect. Affectivity comes in between inside and outside, just as it comes in between sensation and action. Just as sensation gets oriented along a series of gradients in order to become perception, so (unconscious or preconscious) affect gets oriented along a series of processes of becoming in order to become (conscious) emotion. (The contrast between unconscious, presubjective affect and conscious, subjective emotion is something that both Deleuze and Brian Massumi take ultimately from Simondon).
(Note: This also means that individuation is quite similar to autopoieisis, as expounded by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and as lucidly explicated most recently by Ira Livingston. Both autopoiesis and individuation understand sameness through difference — rather than the reverse — by coupling the living individual with its milieu, and understanding what is unique and enclosed about the individual precisely in terms of its relation to the milieu which it is not, but which it requires contact with and nourishment from. Autopoiesis has become quite popular in recent years, and is a major reference point for (among other things) biological theories that contest the atomism of neo-Darwinist orthodoxy. But I think that Simondon’s theory is in fact superior to Maturana’s and Varela’s, precisely because, while the latter privileges the organism’s basic drive for auto-regulation or self-preservation — or Spinozian conatus — Simondon’s theory instead emphasizes continual change or becoming, not its constancy but its continuing ability to grow by altering itself).
“Damn, the human mind doesn’t really work the way humans like to think. It’s much more crazed and folded. Backward, switchbacking, switchbladed. Freaked. You humans can’t handle your own heads…” (316).
Tricia Sullivan’s new novel Double Vision (only available in the UK) is her first book since Maul. Like Maul, Double Vision has a double plot, with one strand set in a science-fiction future world, and the other set in (near-)present New Jersey. Karen ‘Cookie” Orbach is an overweight, socially dysfunctional, generally passive young black woman, living in New Jersey in 1984, who hallucinates when she watches TV: instead of seeing the shows everyone else sees, she has visions. Specifically, she becomes a silent eyewitness to a war on another planet. All-woman squadrons of (apparently American) soldiers are attacking, not exactly an enemy army, nor even another species, but a sort of sentient landscape/dreamscape called The Grid, which seems to cover most of the planet. Back in New Jersey, Cookie works for the Dataplex Corporation, which pays her well to report to them what she sees in the war.
The New Jersey narrative is more or less about Cookie learning to affirm herself and take control of her life. The Grid narrative is about… well, it isn’t easy to say. The grid is a hallucinatory, ever-changing labyrinth of pulsing light, and pollen and pheromones, and tree-like branches, all emanating from a thick, viscous, organic liquid called the Well. The Grid is a kind of simulacral mirror: it mimics any organic object or artifact that comes into contact with it, returning it back to you in multiple copies, in a form that is sometimes sinister, and other times just seems like a cruel parody, or a cheap-horror-movie version of the original. The Grid does not recognize the distinctions of cause and effect, subject and object; “it operates according to an acausal connecting principle” (287). The Grid “refus[es] to be nailed down in object form”; it marks a border “between the possible and the actual” (183). The Grid seems to be made of information, yet it is also highly emotional, and somehow “feminine… like anything subject to change, like any body that yields and sacrifices its nature and transforms itself” (99).
The Grid is ontological, in short. It seems to be the matrix of all potentialities and all appearances. It’s dangerous because it messes with your mind, altering you even as it allows itself to be altered by you. But still, it’s unclear why (aside from the usual stupidity of our imperium) American or Earth forces are attacking it, trying to control it or exterminate it, rather than seeking a less violent (more collaborative or dialogic) approach.
But there’s one other thing about the Grid, and it provides the link between the SF story of which Cookie is the observer, and the humdrum reality of her everyday life. The reason that the Dataplex Corporation wants Cookie’s reports from the Grid is that these reports contain, unbeknownst to her, references to advertisements and product placements in the TV shows that Cookie cannot see. Every visual detail, every plot twist, in the war stories that Cookie experiences has its analogue in a very different sort of war: the war of advertising strategies. Analyzing Cookie’s reports, Dataplex is able to inform its corporate clients as to which advertising campaigns will succeed and which will fail. Information about how to penetrate and destroy the Grid is transformed into information about which approaches will penetrate TV viewers’ psychological defenses and influence their purchasing behavior.
Sullivan leaves the relation between these two dimensions of the Grid enigmatic. We live in a world where everything is penetrated by — or better, imbricated with — the flows of capital. Yet of course there is something parasitic about capital. It can’t really create, without hitching a ride, as it were, on forces (nature, bodies, emotions, human labor and pain and passion) that it is unable to originate by and for itself. The Grid is not the power of capital — which is perhaps why the military has been enlisted to destroy it — but it is something that this power cannot do without — which is why the military campaign seems endless, and even why it is in process of being deserted (towards the end of the novel, all the human forces are evacuated from the planet, leaving behind machines to continue the work of destruction… but also leaving behind the disturbingly quasi-human remnants of the Grid’s own mimicries).
For that matter, it’s not entirely clear, either, how the lessons of the Grid help Cookie to pull things more together in her everyday life, to come to terms with being an outsider, a freak, a possible schizophrenic, to overcome her pathological passivity, to deal with the everyday actuality of sexism and boredom and lack of opportunity. But these very uncertainties are what make the novel so compelling. And by the end of the novel, Cookie is able to turn the tables, and — perhaps — channel the powers of the Grid for the here and now of New Jersey, rather than just travel to the Grid as an escape from New Jersey. And that might just mean turning the tables on the culture of advertising and commodities, as well.
“Damn, the human mind doesn’t really work the way humans like to think. It’s much more crazed and folded. Backward, switchbacking, switchbladed. Freaked. You humans can’t handle your own heads…” (316).
Tricia Sullivan’s new novel Double Vision (only available in the UK) is her first book since Maul. Like Maul, Double Vision has a double plot, with one strand set in a science-fiction future world, and the other set in (near-)present New Jersey. Karen ‘Cookie” Orbach is an overweight, socially dysfunctional, generally passive young black woman, living in New Jersey in 1984, who hallucinates when she watches TV: instead of seeing the shows everyone else sees, she has visions. Specifically, she becomes a silent eyewitness to a war on another planet. All-woman squadrons of (apparently American) soldiers are attacking, not exactly an enemy army, nor even another species, but a sort of sentient landscape/dreamscape called The Grid, which seems to cover most of the planet. Back in New Jersey, Cookie works for the Dataplex Corporation, which pays her well to report to them what she sees in the war.
The New Jersey narrative is more or less about Cookie learning to affirm herself and take control of her life. The Grid narrative is about… well, it isn’t easy to say. The grid is a hallucinatory, ever-changing labyrinth of pulsing light, and pollen and pheromones, and tree-like branches, all emanating from a thick, viscous, organic liquid called the Well. The Grid is a kind of simulacral mirror: it mimics any organic object or artifact that comes into contact with it, returning it back to you in multiple copies, in a form that is sometimes sinister, and other times just seems like a cruel parody, or a cheap-horror-movie version of the original. The Grid does not recognize the distinctions of cause and effect, subject and object; “it operates according to an acausal connecting principle” (287). The Grid “refus[es] to be nailed down in object form”; it marks a border “between the possible and the actual” (183). The Grid seems to be made of information, yet it is also highly emotional, and somehow “feminine… like anything subject to change, like any body that yields and sacrifices its nature and transforms itself” (99).
The Grid is ontological, in short. It seems to be the matrix of all potentialities and all appearances. It’s dangerous because it messes with your mind, altering you even as it allows itself to be altered by you. But still, it’s unclear why (aside from the usual stupidity of our imperium) American or Earth forces are attacking it, trying to control it or exterminate it, rather than seeking a less violent (more collaborative or dialogic) approach.
But there’s one other thing about the Grid, and it provides the link between the SF story of which Cookie is the observer, and the humdrum reality of her everyday life. The reason that the Dataplex Corporation wants Cookie’s reports from the Grid is that these reports contain, unbeknownst to her, references to advertisements and product placements in the TV shows that Cookie cannot see. Every visual detail, every plot twist, in the war stories that Cookie experiences has its analogue in a very different sort of war: the war of advertising strategies. Analyzing Cookie’s reports, Dataplex is able to inform its corporate clients as to which advertising campaigns will succeed and which will fail. Information about how to penetrate and destroy the Grid is transformed into information about which approaches will penetrate TV viewers’ psychological defenses and influence their purchasing behavior.
Sullivan leaves the relation between these two dimensions of the Grid enigmatic. We live in a world where everything is penetrated by — or better, imbricated with — the flows of capital. Yet of course there is something parasitic about capital. It can’t really create, without hitching a ride, as it were, on forces (nature, bodies, emotions, human labor and pain and passion) that it is unable to originate by and for itself. The Grid is not the power of capital — which is perhaps why the military has been enlisted to destroy it — but it is something that this power cannot do without — which is why the military campaign seems endless, and even why it is in process of being deserted (towards the end of the novel, all the human forces are evacuated from the planet, leaving behind machines to continue the work of destruction… but also leaving behind the disturbingly quasi-human remnants of the Grid’s own mimicries).
For that matter, it’s not entirely clear, either, how the lessons of the Grid help Cookie to pull things more together in her everyday life, to come to terms with being an outsider, a freak, a possible schizophrenic, to overcome her pathological passivity, to deal with the everyday actuality of sexism and boredom and lack of opportunity. But these very uncertainties are what make the novel so compelling. And by the end of the novel, Cookie is able to turn the tables, and — perhaps — channel the powers of the Grid for the here and now of New Jersey, rather than just travel to the Grid as an escape from New Jersey. And that might just mean turning the tables on the culture of advertising and commodities, as well.
What happens when Kojin Karatani reads Marx’s “critique of political economy” through the lens of Kant’s Critiques? This is the big question of the second part of Transcritique. Excuse me for once more dipping into the murky (and not very elegantly written) world of Marxist theory, and moving through the issues somewhat ploddingly, repetitiously, and overly academically, with a lot of Philosophy 101-style paraphrasing of basics. Unfortunately, this is the only way I can make these matters clear to myself.
In Karatani’s account, Marx delineates the “transcendental conditions” of a capitalist economy. But these conditions involve Antinomies, which can only be traversed (since they are never definitively resolved) by a process of continual “parallax,” or shifting of focus between one position and another. A Kantian “transcendental deduction” occurs in the form of what Karatani calls “transcritique,” a shuttling back and forth between the disparities generated by the shifts in perspective. Karatani discusses at great length the various parallax shifts in Marx’s argument; as Marx moved from Germany to France to England, he also moves from the critique of German idealism (Hegel and the young Hegelians), to the critique of French “utopian” socialism and political theory, to the critique of British empiricism and political economy. (I will pass over the interesting way that Karatani reads Marx’s essay on The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as a “critique of national politics” (151), putting forward a theory of the State that, according to Karatani, the later Marxist tradition has failed to take the full measure of).
Marx, in a certain sense, repeats the Kantian Antinomy between idealism and empiricism, by working through the parallax between Hegelian dialectics, on the one hand, and British empiricism and utilitarianism, on the other. But more specifically, Marx examines such an Antinomy within the tradition of British empirical political economy itself. On one side, there’s the political economy of Ricardo, grounded in the labor theory of value: Marx is commonly regarded as the great inheritor of this tradition. But on the other hand, there is the political economy of Samuel Bailey, who criticizes Ricardo (in 1825) on the grounds that there is no intrinsic substance of value, neither “labor time” nor anything else. Bailey argues instead that value is a purely relational (today we would say “structural”) phenomenon: it exists only as a marker of the way that commodities are related to other commodities for which they can be exchanged. Karatani suggests that Bailey is the forgotten precursor of the neoclassical economics that was developed in the later 19th century and still holds sway in “bourgeois economics” today. The neoclassicists, like Bailey, reject the labor theory of value, or any other theory of intrinsic value; they claim that values are only formed “on the margin,” in the process of sale and purchase, as affected by shifts in supply and demand. From the point of view of neoclassical economics, Marx is simply dismissed as irrelevant, on the grounds that he still holds to the essentialism of the labor theory of value. Of course, this serves as a perfect alibi for neoclassical economics to ignore all the issues that Marx brings up: questions of the ownership and distribution of capital, of exploitation, in short, of class. Instead, neoclassical economics only considers questions of “efficiency” and “utility”: it takes the politics out of “political economy,” and becomes just plain “economics” instead.
Karatani claims that Marx’s reading of Bailey shook him out of his previously unquestioned Ricardianism, in the same way that Kant’s reading of Hume shook him out of the “dogmatic slumber” of idealist rationalism. Karatani doesn’t give any evidence for this claim; nor could I discern any special importance given to Bailey when I took a cursory glance at Marx’s discussion of Bailey in Theories of Surplus Value. But whether or not Marx actually got important insights from Bailey, I do find Karatani’s overall account of Marx’s thought plausible and convincing. Some Marxist economists (such as Stephen Resnick and RIchard Wolff) have long argued that Marx rejects Ricardian essentialism. Karatani argues that Marx’s “critique of political economy” operates precisely in the Antinomy, or parallax, between the labor theory of value, on the one hand, and Bailey’s (and the neoclassical economists’) positivistic dismissal of value theory altogether on the other. Karatani notes, first, that even the theory of surplus value was not original to Marx; left-wing Ricardians had already developed it as an explanation for profit and exploitation, in much the same way that the leftist Young Hegelians, like Feuerbach, had already developed a theory of alienation, and a critique of religion, upon which the young Marx originally drew, but which he later rejected as inadequate. As for the other half of the antinomy, Karatani notes that “Bailey’s skepticism [regarding the labor theory of value] is similar to Hume’s criticism that there is nothing like a Cartesian ego cogito” (5). And just as Kant responds to Hume by saying that Hume is right, in the sense that the Cartesian ego does not substantively exist, but also that Hume is wrong, in that the unifying form of the ego must nonetheless be posited as a transcendental condition of apperception — so similarly, according to Karatani, Marx rejects Ricardian essentialism (the labor theory of value in its classical form), but also insists, against Bailey’s (and later, neoclassical) nominalism, that a “transcendental reflection on value” (6) is necessary in order to make sense of capitalism as a system.
In other words: just as what Kant calls “apperception” would break down entirely, if it were truly as atomized as Hume maintains it is, so the capitalist order would cease to function altogether, if it were truly as atomized and relativistic as Bailey and, after him, the neoclassical marginalists, claim. What keeps perceptual experience together, Kant says — what allows it to maintain some sort of identity through time — is indeed an “I”; but this “I” is not substantial as the Cartesian tradition claims, for it is merely an empty form, “a transcendental subject of thoughts = x” (First Critique, A346/B404). (This could bring us to a consideration of Marx in terms of Kant’s Paralogisms as well as his Antinomies. I won’t pursue this here, as Karatani does not mention it; but it is something I want to think about further, and write about at some later point. Deleuze and Guattari describe the “paralogisms” of psychoanalysis in terms that derive from Kant’s critique of the paralogisms of Rational Psychology). In a parallel way to how the empty, transcendental form of the “I” keeps subjectivity together through time, so the transcendental category that Marx calls the “value-form” keeps the capitalist economy together, allowing it to replicate itself through time, impelling and indeed compelling it to expand through time. Marx is making a Kantian “transcendental” argument, when he posits the double value-form of the commodity (use-value and exchange-value) against both Ricardo’s essentialist (substantive) labor theory of value, and against the nominalist, positivist and ultimately neoclassical rejection of the very category of “value.”
This kind of reading leads directly to the so-called “transformation problem,” one of the most vexing questions in Marxist political economy. Basically, in Volume 1 of Capital Marx uncovers the structure of exploitation in terms of “surplus value”: roughly, the incommensurability between the value of labor-power itself as a commodity (i.e. what the workers are paid) and the value of the commodities produced by labor. The excess of the latter over the former is abstracted and extracted from the labor process by the capitalist; it is the source of the accumulation of capital. In Volume I, Marx is writing on a very high level of abstraction, describing the structure of capitalist society as a whole. In Volume III of Capital, however, Marx is trying to write about individual capitalist enterprises, and about the actual mechanism of prices, and the actual distribution of profit. How does one get from the abstraction of “value” to the actual prices of individual commodities, and from the abstraction of “surplus value” to actual profits? It’s well known that Marx’s mathematical model for making this “transformation” is flawed; and that indeed the problem is mathematically intractable — the equations can only be solved under very special, limited, and unrealistic conditions — which is why Marx, like Ricardo before him, was unable to solve them. Many critics have seen this impasse as a fatal contradiction within Marx’s own thought; neoclassical economists argue that, in light of the impossibility of any transformation, “value,” “surplus value,” and “exploitation” are irrelevant concepts altogether, and that the economy can be best understood by looking only at prices and profits.
Now, I’m not competent to discuss the whole history of the transformation problem, and the various attempts Marxist political economists have made to move between value/surplus value and price/profit, rather than throwing out the former and only retaining the latter. (There’s also the neo-Ricardianism of Piero Sraffa, which I don’t understand very well, but which at the very least reinstates the project of looking at the entire national or world economy as a system, as against the atomism of microeconomic, marginalist approaches). The basic point is not to correct Marx’s mathematics — which cannot be done, given the presuppositions of the problem — but to question those presuppositions themselves. The whole problem of transforming values into prices itself seems to depend on the idea of capitalism as a closed, synchronic system in a state of equilibrium — which is what most economists, classical and neoclassical alike, in fact presuppose — but elsewhere in Capital Marx argues that such a view is entirely inadequate, since capitalism is a process that necessarily unfolds in time, and that it is never in a state of equilibrium. Crises, Marx argues, are endemic to capitalism. They are not (as neoclassical economists assume even today) mere aberrations or temporary departures from the norm of equilibrium. Rather, crises are intrinsic to the movement of capital, they are even what pushes it forward. Crises are unavoidable because of the temporal factor. If anything, crises and business cycles are the norm; equilibrium is a fictive idealization, an abstraction: and not even a very useful one. There is no good reason to prefer the mathematical abstractions of neoclassical economics (which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, arise really from misunderstandings of 19th century, pre-quantum and pre-relativity physics) to the “transcendental” abstractions worked out by Marx.
When you consider the process of capitalist production and circulation temporally — when you look at capitalism diachronically instead of synchronically — then the transformation problem simply becomes irrelevant instead of insoluble. With an open future and its contingencies, goods can go unsold, equilibrium can no longer be presupposed, and what Karatani, following Marxist tradition, calls “trade cycles” — the boom-and-bust patterns we are so familiar with today — are always present as tendencies (that is to say, they are what Marx calls “tendential” processes: they are not predictable or inevitable, and countervailing factors can always dampen or even reverse them, but the tendency for them to happen is immanent to the whole capitalist process). Karatani therefore argues that value and surplus value, as posited in volume 1 of Capital, are the transcendental conditions of possibility of capitalism. Value and surplus value are the preconditions that make it possible, empirically, for capitalists to extract profit. But value and surplus value are themselves never encountered empirically. Empirically, we only encounter prices and profits. “Thus,” Karatani writes, “the insistence of neoclassical economists that the concepts of value and surplus value are false is in total accord with the everyday consciousness of the agents” (242). (This doesn’t mean that capitalist subjects suffer from “false consciousness”; but rather, that — as Zizek might say — the “ideology” of prices and profits is itself an objective part of social reality: as I discuss below).
Karatani suggests, therefore, that the often-alleged “discrepancy” between Volumes 1 and 3 of Capital is actually quite similar to what happens in Kant, “whose first critique tackles the issue of subject in general, but whose third critique engages in the issue of plural subjects” (243). Similarly, Marx deals with capital in general in Volume 1, and with the perspectives and actions of individual capitals in Volume 3. Volume 1, like the First Critique, is about universal structure: the transcendental conditions of possibility for all experience. Volume 3, like the Third Critique, is about singular experiences, and how you get from these multiple singularities to the transcendental conditions that they both generate and presuppose. In Volume 3, “Marx deals with plural capitals, while at the same time transcendentally asking how it is empirically possible that they realize profit or the rate of profit” (243).
Just as the Third Critique involves an Antinomy between 1)the universal nature of aesthetic judgment (the fact that it demands to be accepted universally) and 2)the ungrounded singularity of any individual aesthetic judgment (the fact that it cannot appeal to any preexisting concepts for justification), so Marx’s Volume 3 involves an Antinomy between 1)the grounding of price in value, and of profit in surplus value (Thesis: Ricardo); and 2)the independence of price from value and of profit from surplus value (Antithesis: Bailey). In this Antithesis, price is determined relationally, and independently of any notion of value, by supply and demand; while profit, from the point of view of the individual consciousness, is simply “price of production minus cost price” (241), and labor-power (sometimes today renamed, in neoclassical theory, “human capital”: quite a wonderful catachresis, since — by a mere shift of terminology — it simply spirits away the entire difference between capitalist investment, and workers selling their labor-power as a commodity) is just another input into production costs. Anybody who has read Capital knows how much time Marx spends criticizing the latter set of assumptions. But the criticism is necessary, precisely because these “ideological” assumptions do necessarily exist as “objective illusions”: for they constitute the actual manner in which individuals confront the market as buyers and sellers, consumers and owners. As for the other side of the Antinomy, the Thesis: the Ricardian labor theory of value is also an objective illusion, insofar as it is understood as an empirical actuality (something we encounter within experience) rather than as a transcendental condition of experience. We only encounter “surplus value” in and for itself in the way that we encounter time, space, and causality in and for themselves. They are conditions of experience, rather than things that we encounter within experience.This is why, Karatani says, “Marx’s labor theory of value and Ricardo’s are fundamentally different”; for Marx, “it is not that input labor time determines the value, but conversely that the value form (system) determines the social[ly necessary] labor time” (244). And, “while for the classical economists, labor value is just a replacement of the equilibrium price that is established within a unitary system, Marx began his whole analysis from manifold systems, and hence came to need the concepts of social and abstract labor value” (227-228).
These considerations lead Karatani to emphasize the importance of circulation, and of money, within Marx’s analysis of capitalism. There’s long been controversy as to why Marx begins Capital Volume 1 with a discussion of the commodity form and of money (and of commodity fetishism), before he gets to the theory of surplus value. Louis Althusser even advises readers to skip these chapters when reading Capital; Althusser sees them as a Hegelian throwback, and as a distraction from Marx’s main argument. Karatani, to the contrary, argues for the centrality of these chapters to Marx’s entire project. Indeed, for Karatani these chapters are the site of a rupture (what Althusser calls an epistemological break) with Marx’s earlier, more tentative theories: because they are the place where Marx develops the crucial notion of the value-form: “all the enigmas of capital’s drive are inscribed in the theory of value form… Value form is a kind of form that people are not aware of when they are placed within the monetary economy; this is the form that is discovered only transcendentally” (9).
The theory of value-form turns on the dual nature of commodities: that they are at once both use-value and exchange-value. This sundering is only possible because of the role of money. Money is a universal equivalent, a special commodity that stands in for all other commodities. As a result, there is a radical “asymmetricity… inherent in the form of value” (200) between money and all other commodities. The use-value of money, unlike the use-value of all other commodities, has nothing to do with its sensuous properties. Marx contrasts money as a transcendental form with “the substantial aspect of money such as gold or silver. To take it substantially is, to Marx, fetishism” (196). SInce its use-value is purely formal or transcendental, money doesn’t have to take the form of precious metals; it can be made of paper, or even (as is generally the case in transnational finance today) be entirely virtual. “Anything — anything — that is exculsively placed in the general equivalent form becomes money; that is, it achieves the right to attain anything in exchange” (7). Nonetheless, the fetishism of money — the confusion of the transcendental with the empirical — is impossible to get rid of, since such a reification or fetishization of money is intrinsic to the functioning of the capitalist economy as such. Money, Karatani says, “is like a Kantian transcendental apperception X, as it were… money as substance is an illusion, but more correctly, it is a transcendental illusion, in the sense that it is hardly possible to discard it” (6).
The core problem in Marx’s Antinomy of value is that both sides ignore the actuality of money as universal equivalent. For Ricardo and the classical political economists on one side, and for Bailey and the neoclassical school, down to the present day, on the other, money itself is considered to be of no importance. For Ricardo, money simply measures the labor inscribed in commodities as their value; for Bailey, value is relational, but he pays no attention to money as the medium in which these relations are expressed and worked out. “Bailey overlooked a simple fact — that commodities cannot be exchanged directly” (194). Both Ricardo and Bailey see money as transparent, in the same way that traditional metaphysics sees language as transparent. Even today, as Doug Henwood puts it in his fine book Wall Street, “in (neo)classical economics, money is held to be neutral – a mere lubricant to trade, but not a force in itself”; economics builds “paradigms that often ignore money and finance completely, or treat it as an afterthought.” Marx, to the contrary, insists on the opacity of money and finance. As a universal equivalent or transcendental form, money does not merely put external terms (objects sold as commodities) into relation; it molds and alters those terms by the very fact of equating them (money as universal equivalent is what transforms things into commodities in the first place). Similarly, financial speculation — such as is overwhelmingly present in global markets today — is not just an illusion distracting us from the “real” economic activity that takes place in production. Or better, financial speculation is an illusion, but a transcendental one: its illusoriness is itself an objective force, one that drives the entire process of production and circulation. It is not Marxist political economy, but neoclassical economics, that reduces everything to production and to utility, and thereby ignores the structural and material importance of the delirious, ungrounded flows of finance capital that constitute the largest part of economic activity today.
Karatani even sees the central role of money in the capitalist world economy as a kind of return of the repressed. The classical economics of Smith and Ricardo was a reaction against the mercantilists, who “naively” imagined that money itself, in the form of of gold and silver bullion, was the source of national prosperity. But Marx, in his transcritique, plays off the mercantilists against the classicists. Karatani notes that Marx begins his discussion of money with the figure of the miser, who hoards monetary wealth instead of spending or investing it. The miser is the equivalent on an individual level of mercantilism on a national level. But the opposition between mercantilism and classicism returns at the heart of capitalism itself, in the difference between Marx’s two formulas of circulation: C-M-C (commodities are sold for money, which in turn is expended to acquire other commodities) and M-C-M’ (money is expended for commodities, which in turn are used to acquire more money). The first formula corresponds to the experience of individuals as workers, selling their labor-power as a commodity in order to obtain (through the mediation of money) those commodities that they need to survive, subsist, and reproduce. The second formula corresponds to what Marx calls the “self-valorization of capital,” its reproduction on an expanded scale, i.e. capital accumulation. Capitalism at its most “advanced” actually returns to a sublated (as Hegel would say) version of miserliness/mercantilism, in that its ultimate goal is money itself, rather than the things that can be acquired through the medium of money. This is why “capital’s movement has to continue endlessly. Indeed this is interminable and without telos” (209). This endless accumulation for its own sake is the return of the repressed, the re-emergence of (mercantilist) money (money as fetish) after the classical economists, and the neoclassical ones as well, have denied its significance.
Paying attention to money also means paying attention to circulation. Karatani points out that, even if surplus value is extracted in production, it needs to be realized in circulation, i.e. the commodities have to be sold. This has several consequences. For one thing, the success of circulation is contingent; it is always possible that given commodities will not be sold, and that surplus value therefore will not be realized, and capital will not be accumulated. Second, circulation takes time; the “turnover” of capital is never instantaneous, though there is continual pressure to make it happen faster and faster. Third, surplus value itself, as a transcendental form, is predicated on a discontinuity, or incommensurability, between heterogeneous registers of value. In Marx’s most direct formulation of the theory, there is a discontinuity in the realm of production between the value of the worker’s labot-power as a commodity, and the value of the commodities produced by that labor power. But when surplus value is realized in the realm of circulation, the incommensurability is one between the two circuits C-M-C and M-C-M’. These registers are discontinuous with one another, because the first is about simple self-reproduction (I sell my labor power in order to be able to buy the commodities that allow me to survive and sell my labor-power again tomorrow), while the second is about expansion and accumulation, a process that is free from day-to-day urgency. Karatani might well have quoted Deleuze and Guattari here, who note that “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” (Anti-Oedipus 228).
One can think here also of the role of credit. Money and finance/credit allow the separation of acts of exchange (purchase and sale) in time and space. “C-M (selling) and M-C (buying) are separate, and precisely for this reason, the sphere of exchange is infinitely expandable in both space and time” (207). But this separation too occurs in different, incompatible ways. Consumer debt has been at the center of the expansion of the American economy in the last severalo decades. But consumer credit is ultimately finite; individuals are enslaved to debt, since they need constant inflows of money just to pay for daily necessities. If I were to quit my job, I wouldn’t be able to pay my mortgage and my credit card balances. Business and financial credit, on the other hand, is for all intents and purposes infinite. Business credit allows for the indefinite deferral of any final reckoning. As Karatani says, “credit enforces capital’s movement endlessly at the same time that it hastens capital’s self-reproduction and eliminates the danger involved in selling” (219).Note that, in America today, bankruptcy laws for individuals have just been made far more rigorous, to the benefit of banks and credit card companies. On the other hand, for corporations, bankruptcy is most often just a formal procedure, allowing the corporations to cut wages and benefits as part of their “reorganization.”
Marx of course frequently attacks the fetishistic illusion that sees money as magically self-valorizing, as if no exploitation were needed to get from M, through C, to the larger quantity of M’. But Karatani notes that capitalist ideology in fact tends to elide what really happens in circulation, as much as it does what really happens in production: “the ideologues of industrial capital avoid the word ‘capitalism,’ preferring ‘market economy,’ which conveniently represents capital’s movement as people’s free exchange of things via money in the marketplace. This veils the fact that market exchange is at the same time the place for capital’s accumulation” (208). The difference between Marxist and neoclassical economics is not that the former emphasizes production and the latter looks instead to circulation; but rather that, in production and circulation alike, Marxist political economy focuses on the centrality of the process of capital accumulation, whereas neoclassical economics sees capital accumulation as merely a side-effect of an aggregate of equal exchanges between separate individuals.
Transcritique is not without flaws. Actually, I find some of the same limitations to the book as Zizek does, even though I resist Zizek’s attempt to turn Karatani’s Kantianism into a Hegelianism. For one thing, Karatani overemphasizes the idea that surplus value can only be realized in circulation; he seems to ignore its role in production altogether, and at times even to assimilate the profits of industrial and finance capital to those of merchant’s capital, which essentially depend upon arbitrage (profiting from the differences in pricing in two markets that are separate from another, a gap that the merchant alone bridges). But as I’ve already suggested, this “strange lacuna” (as Zizek calls it) is not fatal. For Karatani’s argument about the incommensurability between different economic registers applies as well to production as to circulation, even though Karatani only spells it out in the latter. Again, the key to all this is money (including credit) in its role as universal equivalent. Money is that which paradoxically gives a common measure to things that, in all other respects, remain incommensurable. Oppression takes place in other, and indeed often in harsher, forms in non-capitalist economies (feudalism, slavery). But it is only in a regime of money and commodity production that oppression takes the specific form of exploitation. And because of money’s universalizing power, because it works as a transcendental condition, capitalism tends to incorporate all other “modes of production” within its circle: this is what Marx calls the “formal” and “real” subsumption of all social forms under capital.
Karatani is also not very good at explaining how an alternative to capitalism, under present conditions, might arise. He puts his faith almost exclusively in LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems), a form of association in which individuals and groups can exchange goods and services outside of the circuits of capital. While David Harvey, in his most recent book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, does indeed suggest that LETS may be one of the more fruitful forms that contemporary resistance to capitalism can take, I find it scarcely credible that LETS by itself could somehow lead to the replacement of capitalism all by itself. But then, I find the other recent Marxist or quasi-Marxist proposals for overcoming capitalism — Hardt and Negri’s spontaneous uprising of the multitude, and Zizek and Badiou’s hyperromantic fantasy of a Leninist Event of radical rupture — to be just as unconvincing. We just don’t know what to do, and for now I will leave it at that.
What happens when Kojin Karatani reads Marx’s “critique of political economy” through the lens of Kant’s Critiques? This is the big question of the second part of Transcritique. Excuse me for once more dipping into the murky (and not very elegantly written) world of Marxist theory, and moving through the issues somewhat ploddingly, repetitiously, and overly academically, with a lot of Philosophy 101-style paraphrasing of basics. Unfortunately, this is the only way I can make these matters clear to myself.
In Karatani’s account, Marx delineates the “transcendental conditions” of a capitalist economy. But these conditions involve Antinomies, which can only be traversed (since they are never definitively resolved) by a process of continual “parallax,” or shifting of focus between one position and another. A Kantian “transcendental deduction” occurs in the form of what Karatani calls “transcritique,” a shuttling back and forth between the disparities generated by the shifts in perspective. Karatani discusses at great length the various parallax shifts in Marx’s argument; as Marx moved from Germany to France to England, he also moves from the critique of German idealism (Hegel and the young Hegelians), to the critique of French “utopian” socialism and political theory, to the critique of British empiricism and political economy. (I will pass over the interesting way that Karatani reads Marx’s essay on The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as a “critique of national politics” (151), putting forward a theory of the State that, according to Karatani, the later Marxist tradition has failed to take the full measure of).
Marx, in a certain sense, repeats the Kantian Antinomy between idealism and empiricism, by working through the parallax between Hegelian dialectics, on the one hand, and British empiricism and utilitarianism, on the other. But more specifically, Marx examines such an Antinomy within the tradition of British empirical political economy itself. On one side, there’s the political economy of Ricardo, grounded in the labor theory of value: Marx is commonly regarded as the great inheritor of this tradition. But on the other hand, there is the political economy of Samuel Bailey, who criticizes Ricardo (in 1825) on the grounds that there is no intrinsic substance of value, neither “labor time” nor anything else. Bailey argues instead that value is a purely relational (today we would say “structural”) phenomenon: it exists only as a marker of the way that commodities are related to other commodities for which they can be exchanged. Karatani suggests that Bailey is the forgotten precursor of the neoclassical economics that was developed in the later 19th century and still holds sway in “bourgeois economics” today. The neoclassicists, like Bailey, reject the labor theory of value, or any other theory of intrinsic value; they claim that values are only formed “on the margin,” in the process of sale and purchase, as affected by shifts in supply and demand. From the point of view of neoclassical economics, Marx is simply dismissed as irrelevant, on the grounds that he still holds to the essentialism of the labor theory of value. Of course, this serves as a perfect alibi for neoclassical economics to ignore all the issues that Marx brings up: questions of the ownership and distribution of capital, of exploitation, in short, of class. Instead, neoclassical economics only considers questions of “efficiency” and “utility”: it takes the politics out of “political economy,” and becomes just plain “economics” instead.
Karatani claims that Marx’s reading of Bailey shook him out of his previously unquestioned Ricardianism, in the same way that Kant’s reading of Hume shook him out of the “dogmatic slumber” of idealist rationalism. Karatani doesn’t give any evidence for this claim; nor could I discern any special importance given to Bailey when I took a cursory glance at Marx’s discussion of Bailey in Theories of Surplus Value. But whether or not Marx actually got important insights from Bailey, I do find Karatani’s overall account of Marx’s thought plausible and convincing. Some Marxist economists (such as Stephen Resnick and RIchard Wolff) have long argued that Marx rejects Ricardian essentialism. Karatani argues that Marx’s “critique of political economy” operates precisely in the Antinomy, or parallax, between the labor theory of value, on the one hand, and Bailey’s (and the neoclassical economists’) positivistic dismissal of value theory altogether on the other. Karatani notes, first, that even the theory of surplus value was not original to Marx; left-wing Ricardians had already developed it as an explanation for profit and exploitation, in much the same way that the leftist Young Hegelians, like Feuerbach, had already developed a theory of alienation, and a critique of religion, upon which the young Marx originally drew, but which he later rejected as inadequate. As for the other half of the antinomy, Karatani notes that “Bailey’s skepticism [regarding the labor theory of value] is similar to Hume’s criticism that there is nothing like a Cartesian ego cogito” (5). And just as Kant responds to Hume by saying that Hume is right, in the sense that the Cartesian ego does not substantively exist, but also that Hume is wrong, in that the unifying form of the ego must nonetheless be posited as a transcendental condition of apperception — so similarly, according to Karatani, Marx rejects Ricardian essentialism (the labor theory of value in its classical form), but also insists, against Bailey’s (and later, neoclassical) nominalism, that a “transcendental reflection on value” (6) is necessary in order to make sense of capitalism as a system.
In other words: just as what Kant calls “apperception” would break down entirely, if it were truly as atomized as Hume maintains it is, so the capitalist order would cease to function altogether, if it were truly as atomized and relativistic as Bailey and, after him, the neoclassical marginalists, claim. What keeps perceptual experience together, Kant says — what allows it to maintain some sort of identity through time — is indeed an “I”; but this “I” is not substantial as the Cartesian tradition claims, for it is merely an empty form, “a transcendental subject of thoughts = x” (First Critique, A346/B404). (This could bring us to a consideration of Marx in terms of Kant’s Paralogisms as well as his Antinomies. I won’t pursue this here, as Karatani does not mention it; but it is something I want to think about further, and write about at some later point. Deleuze and Guattari describe the “paralogisms” of psychoanalysis in terms that derive from Kant’s critique of the paralogisms of Rational Psychology). In a parallel way to how the empty, transcendental form of the “I” keeps subjectivity together through time, so the transcendental category that Marx calls the “value-form” keeps the capitalist economy together, allowing it to replicate itself through time, impelling and indeed compelling it to expand through time. Marx is making a Kantian “transcendental” argument, when he posits the double value-form of the commodity (use-value and exchange-value) against both Ricardo’s essentialist (substantive) labor theory of value, and against the nominalist, positivist and ultimately neoclassical rejection of the very category of “value.”
This kind of reading leads directly to the so-called “transformation problem,” one of the most vexing questions in Marxist political economy. Basically, in Volume 1 of Capital Marx uncovers the structure of exploitation in terms of “surplus value”: roughly, the incommensurability between the value of labor-power itself as a commodity (i.e. what the workers are paid) and the value of the commodities produced by labor. The excess of the latter over the former is abstracted and extracted from the labor process by the capitalist; it is the source of the accumulation of capital. In Volume I, Marx is writing on a very high level of abstraction, describing the structure of capitalist society as a whole. In Volume III of Capital, however, Marx is trying to write about individual capitalist enterprises, and about the actual mechanism of prices, and the actual distribution of profit. How does one get from the abstraction of “value” to the actual prices of individual commodities, and from the abstraction of “surplus value” to actual profits? It’s well known that Marx’s mathematical model for making this “transformation” is flawed; and that indeed the problem is mathematically intractable — the equations can only be solved under very special, limited, and unrealistic conditions — which is why Marx, like Ricardo before him, was unable to solve them. Many critics have seen this impasse as a fatal contradiction within Marx’s own thought; neoclassical economists argue that, in light of the impossibility of any transformation, “value,” “surplus value,” and “exploitation” are irrelevant concepts altogether, and that the economy can be best understood by looking only at prices and profits.
Now, I’m not competent to discuss the whole history of the transformation problem, and the various attempts Marxist political economists have made to move between value/surplus value and price/profit, rather than throwing out the former and only retaining the latter. (There’s also the neo-Ricardianism of Piero Sraffa, which I don’t understand very well, but which at the very least reinstates the project of looking at the entire national or world economy as a system, as against the atomism of microeconomic, marginalist approaches). The basic point is not to correct Marx’s mathematics — which cannot be done, given the presuppositions of the problem — but to question those presuppositions themselves. The whole problem of transforming values into prices itself seems to depend on the idea of capitalism as a closed, synchronic system in a state of equilibrium — which is what most economists, classical and neoclassical alike, in fact presuppose — but elsewhere in Capital Marx argues that such a view is entirely inadequate, since capitalism is a process that necessarily unfolds in time, and that it is never in a state of equilibrium. Crises, Marx argues, are endemic to capitalism. They are not (as neoclassical economists assume even today) mere aberrations or temporary departures from the norm of equilibrium. Rather, crises are intrinsic to the movement of capital, they are even what pushes it forward. Crises are unavoidable because of the temporal factor. If anything, crises and business cycles are the norm; equilibrium is a fictive idealization, an abstraction: and not even a very useful one. There is no good reason to prefer the mathematical abstractions of neoclassical economics (which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, arise really from misunderstandings of 19th century, pre-quantum and pre-relativity physics) to the “transcendental” abstractions worked out by Marx.
When you consider the process of capitalist production and circulation temporally — when you look at capitalism diachronically instead of synchronically — then the transformation problem simply becomes irrelevant instead of insoluble. With an open future and its contingencies, goods can go unsold, equilibrium can no longer be presupposed, and what Karatani, following Marxist tradition, calls “trade cycles” — the boom-and-bust patterns we are so familiar with today — are always present as tendencies (that is to say, they are what Marx calls “tendential” processes: they are not predictable or inevitable, and countervailing factors can always dampen or even reverse them, but the tendency for them to happen is immanent to the whole capitalist process). Karatani therefore argues that value and surplus value, as posited in volume 1 of Capital, are the transcendental conditions of possibility of capitalism. Value and surplus value are the preconditions that make it possible, empirically, for capitalists to extract profit. But value and surplus value are themselves never encountered empirically. Empirically, we only encounter prices and profits. “Thus,” Karatani writes, “the insistence of neoclassical economists that the concepts of value and surplus value are false is in total accord with the everyday consciousness of the agents” (242). (This doesn’t mean that capitalist subjects suffer from “false consciousness”; but rather, that — as Zizek might say — the “ideology” of prices and profits is itself an objective part of social reality: as I discuss below).
Karatani suggests, therefore, that the often-alleged “discrepancy” between Volumes 1 and 3 of Capital is actually quite similar to what happens in Kant, “whose first critique tackles the issue of subject in general, but whose third critique engages in the issue of plural subjects” (243). Similarly, Marx deals with capital in general in Volume 1, and with the perspectives and actions of individual capitals in Volume 3. Volume 1, like the First Critique, is about universal structure: the transcendental conditions of possibility for all experience. Volume 3, like the Third Critique, is about singular experiences, and how you get from these multiple singularities to the transcendental conditions that they both generate and presuppose. In Volume 3, “Marx deals with plural capitals, while at the same time transcendentally asking how it is empirically possible that they realize profit or the rate of profit” (243).
Just as the Third Critique involves an Antinomy between 1)the universal nature of aesthetic judgment (the fact that it demands to be accepted universally) and 2)the ungrounded singularity of any individual aesthetic judgment (the fact that it cannot appeal to any preexisting concepts for justification), so Marx’s Volume 3 involves an Antinomy between 1)the grounding of price in value, and of profit in surplus value (Thesis: Ricardo); and 2)the independence of price from value and of profit from surplus value (Antithesis: Bailey). In this Antithesis, price is determined relationally, and independently of any notion of value, by supply and demand; while profit, from the point of view of the individual consciousness, is simply “price of production minus cost price” (241), and labor-power (sometimes today renamed, in neoclassical theory, “human capital”: quite a wonderful catachresis, since — by a mere shift of terminology — it simply spirits away the entire difference between capitalist investment, and workers selling their labor-power as a commodity) is just another input into production costs. Anybody who has read Capital knows how much time Marx spends criticizing the latter set of assumptions. But the criticism is necessary, precisely because these “ideological” assumptions do necessarily exist as “objective illusions”: for they constitute the actual manner in which individuals confront the market as buyers and sellers, consumers and owners. As for the other side of the Antinomy, the Thesis: the Ricardian labor theory of value is also an objective illusion, insofar as it is understood as an empirical actuality (something we encounter within experience) rather than as a transcendental condition of experience. We only encounter “surplus value” in and for itself in the way that we encounter time, space, and causality in and for themselves. They are conditions of experience, rather than things that we encounter within experience.This is why, Karatani says, “Marx’s labor theory of value and Ricardo’s are fundamentally different”; for Marx, “it is not that input labor time determines the value, but conversely that the value form (system) determines the social[ly necessary] labor time” (244). And, “while for the classical economists, labor value is just a replacement of the equilibrium price that is established within a unitary system, Marx began his whole analysis from manifold systems, and hence came to need the concepts of social and abstract labor value” (227-228).
These considerations lead Karatani to emphasize the importance of circulation, and of money, within Marx’s analysis of capitalism. There’s long been controversy as to why Marx begins Capital Volume 1 with a discussion of the commodity form and of money (and of commodity fetishism), before he gets to the theory of surplus value. Louis Althusser even advises readers to skip these chapters when reading Capital; Althusser sees them as a Hegelian throwback, and as a distraction from Marx’s main argument. Karatani, to the contrary, argues for the centrality of these chapters to Marx’s entire project. Indeed, for Karatani these chapters are the site of a rupture (what Althusser calls an epistemological break) with Marx’s earlier, more tentative theories: because they are the place where Marx develops the crucial notion of the value-form: “all the enigmas of capital’s drive are inscribed in the theory of value form… Value form is a kind of form that people are not aware of when they are placed within the monetary economy; this is the form that is discovered only transcendentally” (9).
The theory of value-form turns on the dual nature of commodities: that they are at once both use-value and exchange-value. This sundering is only possible because of the role of money. Money is a universal equivalent, a special commodity that stands in for all other commodities. As a result, there is a radical “asymmetricity… inherent in the form of value” (200) between money and all other commodities. The use-value of money, unlike the use-value of all other commodities, has nothing to do with its sensuous properties. Marx contrasts money as a transcendental form with “the substantial aspect of money such as gold or silver. To take it substantially is, to Marx, fetishism” (196). SInce its use-value is purely formal or transcendental, money doesn’t have to take the form of precious metals; it can be made of paper, or even (as is generally the case in transnational finance today) be entirely virtual. “Anything — anything — that is exculsively placed in the general equivalent form becomes money; that is, it achieves the right to attain anything in exchange” (7). Nonetheless, the fetishism of money — the confusion of the transcendental with the empirical — is impossible to get rid of, since such a reification or fetishization of money is intrinsic to the functioning of the capitalist economy as such. Money, Karatani says, “is like a Kantian transcendental apperception X, as it were… money as substance is an illusion, but more correctly, it is a transcendental illusion, in the sense that it is hardly possible to discard it” (6).
The core problem in Marx’s Antinomy of value is that both sides ignore the actuality of money as universal equivalent. For Ricardo and the classical political economists on one side, and for Bailey and the neoclassical school, down to the present day, on the other, money itself is considered to be of no importance. For Ricardo, money simply measures the labor inscribed in commodities as their value; for Bailey, value is relational, but he pays no attention to money as the medium in which these relations are expressed and worked out. “Bailey overlooked a simple fact — that commodities cannot be exchanged directly” (194). Both Ricardo and Bailey see money as transparent, in the same way that traditional metaphysics sees language as transparent. Even today, as Doug Henwood puts it in his fine book Wall Street, “in (neo)classical economics, money is held to be neutral – a mere lubricant to trade, but not a force in itself”; economics builds “paradigms that often ignore money and finance completely, or treat it as an afterthought.” Marx, to the contrary, insists on the opacity of money and finance. As a universal equivalent or transcendental form, money does not merely put external terms (objects sold as commodities) into relation; it molds and alters those terms by the very fact of equating them (money as universal equivalent is what transforms things into commodities in the first place). Similarly, financial speculation — such as is overwhelmingly present in global markets today — is not just an illusion distracting us from the “real” economic activity that takes place in production. Or better, financial speculation is an illusion, but a transcendental one: its illusoriness is itself an objective force, one that drives the entire process of production and circulation. It is not Marxist political economy, but neoclassical economics, that reduces everything to production and to utility, and thereby ignores the structural and material importance of the delirious, ungrounded flows of finance capital that constitute the largest part of economic activity today.
Karatani even sees the central role of money in the capitalist world economy as a kind of return of the repressed. The classical economics of Smith and Ricardo was a reaction against the mercantilists, who “naively” imagined that money itself, in the form of of gold and silver bullion, was the source of national prosperity. But Marx, in his transcritique, plays off the mercantilists against the classicists. Karatani notes that Marx begins his discussion of money with the figure of the miser, who hoards monetary wealth instead of spending or investing it. The miser is the equivalent on an individual level of mercantilism on a national level. But the opposition between mercantilism and classicism returns at the heart of capitalism itself, in the difference between Marx’s two formulas of circulation: C-M-C (commodities are sold for money, which in turn is expended to acquire other commodities) and M-C-M’ (money is expended for commodities, which in turn are used to acquire more money). The first formula corresponds to the experience of individuals as workers, selling their labor-power as a commodity in order to obtain (through the mediation of money) those commodities that they need to survive, subsist, and reproduce. The second formula corresponds to what Marx calls the “self-valorization of capital,” its reproduction on an expanded scale, i.e. capital accumulation. Capitalism at its most “advanced” actually returns to a sublated (as Hegel would say) version of miserliness/mercantilism, in that its ultimate goal is money itself, rather than the things that can be acquired through the medium of money. This is why “capital’s movement has to continue endlessly. Indeed this is interminable and without telos” (209). This endless accumulation for its own sake is the return of the repressed, the re-emergence of (mercantilist) money (money as fetish) after the classical economists, and the neoclassical ones as well, have denied its significance.
Paying attention to money also means paying attention to circulation. Karatani points out that, even if surplus value is extracted in production, it needs to be realized in circulation, i.e. the commodities have to be sold. This has several consequences. For one thing, the success of circulation is contingent; it is always possible that given commodities will not be sold, and that surplus value therefore will not be realized, and capital will not be accumulated. Second, circulation takes time; the “turnover” of capital is never instantaneous, though there is continual pressure to make it happen faster and faster. Third, surplus value itself, as a transcendental form, is predicated on a discontinuity, or incommensurability, between heterogeneous registers of value. In Marx’s most direct formulation of the theory, there is a discontinuity in the realm of production between the value of the worker’s labot-power as a commodity, and the value of the commodities produced by that labor power. But when surplus value is realized in the realm of circulation, the incommensurability is one between the two circuits C-M-C and M-C-M’. These registers are discontinuous with one another, because the first is about simple self-reproduction (I sell my labor power in order to be able to buy the commodities that allow me to survive and sell my labor-power again tomorrow), while the second is about expansion and accumulation, a process that is free from day-to-day urgency. Karatani might well have quoted Deleuze and Guattari here, who note that “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” (Anti-Oedipus 228).
One can think here also of the role of credit. Money and finance/credit allow the separation of acts of exchange (purchase and sale) in time and space. “C-M (selling) and M-C (buying) are separate, and precisely for this reason, the sphere of exchange is infinitely expandable in both space and time” (207). But this separation too occurs in different, incompatible ways. Consumer debt has been at the center of the expansion of the American economy in the last severalo decades. But consumer credit is ultimately finite; individuals are enslaved to debt, since they need constant inflows of money just to pay for daily necessities. If I were to quit my job, I wouldn’t be able to pay my mortgage and my credit card balances. Business and financial credit, on the other hand, is for all intents and purposes infinite. Business credit allows for the indefinite deferral of any final reckoning. As Karatani says, “credit enforces capital’s movement endlessly at the same time that it hastens capital’s self-reproduction and eliminates the danger involved in selling” (219).Note that, in America today, bankruptcy laws for individuals have just been made far more rigorous, to the benefit of banks and credit card companies. On the other hand, for corporations, bankruptcy is most often just a formal procedure, allowing the corporations to cut wages and benefits as part of their “reorganization.”
Marx of course frequently attacks the fetishistic illusion that sees money as magically self-valorizing, as if no exploitation were needed to get from M, through C, to the larger quantity of M’. But Karatani notes that capitalist ideology in fact tends to elide what really happens in circulation, as much as it does what really happens in production: “the ideologues of industrial capital avoid the word ‘capitalism,’ preferring ‘market economy,’ which conveniently represents capital’s movement as people’s free exchange of things via money in the marketplace. This veils the fact that market exchange is at the same time the place for capital’s accumulation” (208). The difference between Marxist and neoclassical economics is not that the former emphasizes production and the latter looks instead to circulation; but rather that, in production and circulation alike, Marxist political economy focuses on the centrality of the process of capital accumulation, whereas neoclassical economics sees capital accumulation as merely a side-effect of an aggregate of equal exchanges between separate individuals.
Transcritique is not without flaws. Actually, I find some of the same limitations to the book as Zizek does, even though I resist Zizek’s attempt to turn Karatani’s Kantianism into a Hegelianism. For one thing, Karatani overemphasizes the idea that surplus value can only be realized in circulation; he seems to ignore its role in production altogether, and at times even to assimilate the profits of industrial and finance capital to those of merchant’s capital, which essentially depend upon arbitrage (profiting from the differences in pricing in two markets that are separate from another, a gap that the merchant alone bridges). But as I’ve already suggested, this “strange lacuna” (as Zizek calls it) is not fatal. For Karatani’s argument about the incommensurability between different economic registers applies as well to production as to circulation, even though Karatani only spells it out in the latter. Again, the key to all this is money (including credit) in its role as universal equivalent. Money is that which paradoxically gives a common measure to things that, in all other respects, remain incommensurable. Oppression takes place in other, and indeed often in harsher, forms in non-capitalist economies (feudalism, slavery). But it is only in a regime of money and commodity production that oppression takes the specific form of exploitation. And because of money’s universalizing power, because it works as a transcendental condition, capitalism tends to incorporate all other “modes of production” within its circle: this is what Marx calls the “formal” and “real” subsumption of all social forms under capital.
Karatani is also not very good at explaining how an alternative to capitalism, under present conditions, might arise. He puts his faith almost exclusively in LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems), a form of association in which individuals and groups can exchange goods and services outside of the circuits of capital. While David Harvey, in his most recent book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, does indeed suggest that LETS may be one of the more fruitful forms that contemporary resistance to capitalism can take, I find it scarcely credible that LETS by itself could somehow lead to the replacement of capitalism all by itself. But then, I find the other recent Marxist or quasi-Marxist proposals for overcoming capitalism — Hardt and Negri’s spontaneous uprising of the multitude, and Zizek and Badiou’s hyperromantic fantasy of a Leninist Event of radical rupture — to be just as unconvincing. We just don’t know what to do, and for now I will leave it at that.
Kojin Karatani‘s Transcritique is the most useful and important book of philosophy/theory that I have read in some time. (Thanks, Jodi, for pointing me to the book, and to Zizek’s review of it). I mean useful and important to me; it might be too narrow and specialized in focus for people who don’t share my particular preoccupations. For years I have been struggling to find ways to articulate Marx together with Kant: and that is precisely what Karatani accomplishes here. Karatani’s rereading of Marx’s Capital for the twenty-first century is not as sweeping as that of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri; nor does it have the vivacity and seductive wit of Zizek’s recent Marxist speculations. But perhaps it offers a more lucid account than either of what it really means to be encompassed on all sides, as we are today, by the flows of Capital, and by the supposed “rationality” of the Market.
In what follows, in order to explain Karatani I am going to move very slowly, and throw in a bit of Philosophy 101, just so that I can pin things down, and clarify them for myself, as carefully as possible. So please be patient, and bear with me.
Karatani’s basic move is to read Marx’s “critique of political economy” (the subtitle of Capital) as a “critique” in precisely the sense of Kant’s three Critiques. But what does Kant himself mean by critique — in contrast to the multifarious meanings the word has taken on in the two-hundred-odd years since? Most obviously, Kant asks the “transcendental” question: “what are the conditions of our experience?” For Kant, “all cognition begins with experience”; there are no supernatural or transcendent sources of knowledge. But experience (sensory data, perception, etc) does not itself come to us raw: it is always already structured in some way. Sense perceptions and other experiences already have a certain framework or structure. And this framework is (not transcendent, but) transcendental, which means that it does not “transcend” or go beyond experience, but it is also not itself given to us in experience (since it is always already presupposed by whatever experience we do have). Put this way, it might sound like we are stuck in a vicious circle: if all knowledge comes from experience, then how can we know about something that cannot itself be experienced, because it precedes and conditions any experience? Kant’s answer is to make a self-reflexive move (one that, after him, becomes characteristic of nearly all modern, or modernist, philosophy/theory): to have thought reflect back upon itself, to question itself, to scrutinize its own powers and limits. This is what he means by “critique.”
So far so good. But the particular way in which Kant does critique is not necessarily followed by his successors. Michel Foucault (in “A Preface to Transgression,” one of his best and most underrated articles) refers to “that opening made by Kant in Western philosophy when he articulated, in a manner that is still enigmatic, metaphysical discourse and reflection on the limits of our reason.” But Foucault goes on to say that Kant failed to sustain this “opening”; and that the two opposed lines of thought that followed Kant — “anthropology” (by which I think Foucault means positivistic scientific examination of Man as just another empirical object: which goes from 19th century positivism to so-called “evolutionary psychology” today) and “dialectics” (by which Foucault means Hegel and all the speculative thought that follows in his wake, thought that is overly subject-centered, that replaces Man, or his Reason, as the foundational point of speculation, and that concentrates on “the play of contradiction and totality” instead of upon Kant’s enigmatic self-questioning) — both repressed Kant’s “opening” and thereby returned to the overweening rationalism that Kant had rejected. The double bind of these two kinds of thought constructs “Man” as what Foucault, in The Order of Things, calls an “empirico-transcendental doublet.” In Foucault’s account, Kant is responsible for instituting this double bind — it is his solution to the conflicting claims of rationalism and empiricism — but Kant also offers a way out of it, a step back from it, a practice of “contestation” that avoids the dogmatisms of both positivism and dialectics.
This is where Karatani comes in and takes a fresh look at Kant. Karatani reads Kant’s “transcendental deduction” (his establishment of space, time, and causality as the transcendental preconditions of experience, in the first half of the First Critique) in the light of two other sections of the Critiques that are usually considered entirely separately: 1)the “Transcendental Dialectic” that forms the second half of the First Critique, and particularly Kant’s discussion of the Antinomies of Reason, cosmological ideas that come in contradictory pairs, which ultimately have to be judged as either both true (in different senses) or both false; and 2)Kant’s discussion of the problem of aesthetic taste, in his “Analytic of the Beautiful” in the Third Critique. (These are in fact the two sections of Kant’s works that I have been trying to work with, and work through, for over a decade; which in part explains why I found Karatani’s book such a revelation).
Kant’s Preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason begins with a discussion of the “peculiar fate” of human reason, “troubled by questions that it cannot dismiss… but also cannot answer.” This already suggests that the concerns of the “Transcendental Dialectic” are crucial to Kant from the beginning; and Karatani thereby reads the first half of the First Critique in the light of the second half. That is to say, you can’t separate Kant’s establishment of the actual conditions of our understanding from his concern to elucidate our unavoidable drive to always push beyond these conditions. One common way to read Kant is to say that he is a legislator, dictatorially setting forth the boundaries beyond which we must not push. But Karatani reverses this, suggesting that Kant’s experience of the discordances that come from pushing too far (in the second half of the First Critique) are themselves the positive basis of the limits that he sets up in the first half. The Antinomies of Reason are contradictory propositions (“the world is bounded in time and in space” vs. “the world is infinite as regards both time and space”) both of which seem valid from their own perspectives, but which cannot be true simultaneously. Kant’s “resolution” of these Antinomies is emphatically NOT to play them off each other as mutual negations, and thereby to “sublate” them into a higher formulation that self-reflexively incorporates both (which is the “dialectical” procedure later adopted by Hegel); rather, Kant shuttles back and forth between the perspectives of the two contradictory arguments, and establishes what he calls a “parallax” between them. That is to say, it is the unresolvable disjunction between the two perspectives, their otherness with regard to one another, so that they cannot be reconciled or made adequate to one another — it is this disjunction that opens up Kant’s “transcendental” reflection, and that provides the positive basis for the conditions presupposed by all experience.
Another way to put this is that the “resolution” to the Antinomies never happens all at once; each perspective can be addressed by “bracketing” the other one; but then we need to invert the procedure, and bracket what we previously privileged. This shunting back and forth is what Karatani means by “parallax.” And there is no higher synthesis of these contrasting bracketings, which is why, for Karatani, Kant’s critique is always a “transcritique,” a transversal movement from one perspective, or realm of experience, to another, without ever coming to a definitive fixity, or even a meta-level, a higher point of self-reflection. This lack of any fixity is why Kant’s transcendental conditions are always purely formal, rather than having any positive content (this holds true, of course, for Kant’s elucidation of morality in the Second Critique, as well as his elucidation of empirical understanding in the First); and it is why Kant insists that the Ideas of Reason can only have a “regulative” rather than a “constitutive” role — that is to say, why they can be used heuristically as a guide to our investigations, but not substantively as the actual inner principle of what we discover.
Now, Zizek actually gives a pretty good account of Karatani’s logic of the parallax, in his review of the book that Jodi cites (and provides a pdf for). And, after quoting Zizek’s paraphrase at length, Jodi is acute enough to remark: “Everybody is probably freaking out at this point, jumping up and down and screaming, BUT HOW DOES THIS WORK WITH HEGEL?” — My answer would be, precisely, that it doesn’t work with Hegel. Kant refuses to turn the Antinomies into negations; his reciprocal “bracketings” of the opposed perspectives do not interact with one another in the way that negations do in Hegel; there is no “labor of the negative” here. Rather, the basis of parallax is the stubborn positivity of both of its terms. This is precisely where Kant refuses (in Foucault’s term) to transform the “limit” into negativity, or into “the play of contradiction and totality.” This parallax is thereby the point at which Kant absolutely resists being subsumed into Hegel’s system, in the way that Hegel and Zizek want him to. Jodi answers her own question by saying, along with Zizek, that “the movement of negativity through Hegel is a kind of parallax, an account of the way ‘reality’ itself is caught in the movement of our knowing of it (and vice versa).” But this seems to me to be exactly wrong. To say that ‘reality’ itself is caught in the movement of our knowing of it is equivalent to saying that the Ideas of Reason can be used constitutively, and not just regulatively. Kant’s and Karatani’s parallax refuses such a move, and thus operates according to an entirely different logic than that of negativity. (Another way to put this: parallax doesn’t equate with negativity, but it also doesn’t negate negativity either — which would be a way of reinserting it into the Hegelian dialectic after all. Rather, it is radically other — oblique or orthogonal — to the movement of negativity).
(I should also note, given Zizek’s interest in Karatani, that although I think Kant/Karatani cannot be recuperated in Hegelian terms, it can be brought into a useful connection with Lacan. The trick is to read Lacan in a more Kantian way, instead of a Hegelian one. Karatani himself suggests that Freud and Lacan offer a kind of “transcendental psychology,” and that their criticisms of other sorts of psychology, like Lacan’s denunciation of “ego psychology,” is very much akin to Kant’s deconsruction of rationalist psychology in the Transcendental Dialectic. Karatani even equates “Kantian illusion/Lacanian Imaginary; the form/the Symbolic; the thing-in-itself/the Real” (34). This seems to me to be right, especially seeing Kant’s noumenon or thing-in-itself as equivalent to the unattainable Real in Lacan. But Karatani goes on to say, and I concur, that he finds it more useful to read Freud and Lacan through Kant, than Kant through Freud and Lacan).
The other section of Kant that is especially important to Karatani is the “Analytic of the Beautiful” in the Third Critique. I find this especially important because critical fashion, for the last thirty years at least, has emphasized the Sublime as the crucial moment in Kant’s aesthetics, and has seen his discussion of the Beautiful as uninteresting, old-fashioned, and even as a kind of throwback to pre-critical and pre-Enlightenment thought, as opposed to the supposedly radical concerns of the Sublime. As far as I know (and my reading isn’t deep enough here, so I may well be missing some important recent work) Karatani is the only recent commentator, aside from Melissa McMahon and myself to find critical importance in Kant’s discussion of the Beautiful (for both Melissa’s article and mine, see the volume A Shock To Thought, edited by Brian Massumi). Basically, the Analytic of the Beautiful poses the question of singularity and universality. A judgment that something is beautiful is, according to Kant, completely ungrounded. It cannot be verified or falsified in the way that an empirical judgment of fact can be; nor can it claim absolute, “categorical” validity in the way that moral commandments do. Yet despite being ungrounded, an aesthetic judgment makes an implicit demand for universal assent. This is what separates aesthetic judgments from mere personal preferences. I love coffee ice cream, but that doesn’t mean that I expect (or want) coffee to be everybody else’s favorite flavor. But when I say that Proust is the greatest writer of all time, I am doing a lot more than just expressing a personal preference. Even if I say that this is just my own personal taste, and even if I know very well that Proust is not everybody’s favorite author, the very act of stating that “A la recherche du temps perdu is the greatest novel ever written” implies a claim going beyond the statement that it things are this way “for me.” Aesthetic judgments have no objective basis, but neither are they merely subjective. They are entirely singular — each case of judgment is unique, there are no broader rules under which aesthetic judgments can be subsumed, in the way that both empirical judgments and moral commands get subsumed under rules. And yet these aesthetic judgments claim universality, if only by the very way in which they are uttered.
Aesthetic judgment is crucial for Kant, Karatani argues, because it is the very place where the question of the “transcendental” first becomes problematic. In aesthetic judgment, singularity communicates with universality without any intermediate terms. There are no hierarchies of particulars and generalities, of species and genus; there is also no process of dialectical “mediation.” An aesthetic judgment can neither be generalized, nor mediated. Instead, each aesthetic judgment is a uniuqe; each one makes a claim upon others, upon the Other, without being able to appeal to any prior justification in order to back up or enforce this claim.
The problem of aesthetic taste in the Third Critique thus leads to an Antinomy, formally parallel to the Antinomies of the First Critique. Karatani suggests that these Antinomies, in their perpetual tension, are in fact the ungrounded “grounds” of the positive transcendental conditions derived in the first half of the First Critique. Though epistemology, the problem of cognition, comes first in the overt development of Kant’s system, and aesthetics comes in only much later, Karatani argues in effect that aesthetics is logically and ontologically prior to epistemology and cognition. For aesthetics is the place where questions of singularity and universality, and of the Other, are initially posed; and these are all necessary to the development of positive “transcendental” arguments.
In the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” as well, Kant distinguishes the claimed universality of singular aesthetic judgments from the general agreement that is the result of what he calls a sensus communis, that is to say of “common sense.” For Kant, the existence of the sensus communis is important in that it makes processes of communication and recognition possible. But the important thing about aesthetic judgment is that, although it relies upon the sensus communis, it cannot be reduced to sensus communis. “Common sense” is entirely empirical; it denotes something like the commonly accepted presuppositions, the consensus, of a given society or community. That is to say, it is something like “ideology.” But transcendental conditions can never be reduced to merely empirical ones, therefore they cannot come in the form of consensus. Transcendental reflection, as “transcritique,” must to the contrary move between incompatible and irreconcilable positions or “common senses.” Which is why all judgment, or all transcendental reflection, ultimately refers back to the paradoxes of aesthetic judgment.
I will stop here, and reserve the second half of my summary, Karatani’s reading of Marx, for another post.
Kojin Karatani‘s Transcritique is the most useful and important book of philosophy/theory that I have read in some time. (Thanks, Jodi, for pointing me to the book, and to Zizek’s review of it). I mean useful and important to me; it might be too narrow and specialized in focus for people who don’t share my particular preoccupations. For years I have been struggling to find ways to articulate Marx together with Kant: and that is precisely what Karatani accomplishes here. Karatani’s rereading of Marx’s Capital for the twenty-first century is not as sweeping as that of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri; nor does it have the vivacity and seductive wit of Zizek’s recent Marxist speculations. But perhaps it offers a more lucid account than either of what it really means to be encompassed on all sides, as we are today, by the flows of Capital, and by the supposed “rationality” of the Market.
In what follows, in order to explain Karatani I am going to move very slowly, and throw in a bit of Philosophy 101, just so that I can pin things down, and clarify them for myself, as carefully as possible. So please be patient, and bear with me.
Karatani’s basic move is to read Marx’s “critique of political economy” (the subtitle of Capital) as a “critique” in precisely the sense of Kant’s three Critiques. But what does Kant himself mean by critique — in contrast to the multifarious meanings the word has taken on in the two-hundred-odd years since? Most obviously, Kant asks the “transcendental” question: “what are the conditions of our experience?” For Kant, “all cognition begins with experience”; there are no supernatural or transcendent sources of knowledge. But experience (sensory data, perception, etc) does not itself come to us raw: it is always already structured in some way. Sense perceptions and other experiences already have a certain framework or structure. And this framework is (not transcendent, but) transcendental, which means that it does not “transcend” or go beyond experience, but it is also not itself given to us in experience (since it is always already presupposed by whatever experience we do have). Put this way, it might sound like we are stuck in a vicious circle: if all knowledge comes from experience, then how can we know about something that cannot itself be experienced, because it precedes and conditions any experience? Kant’s answer is to make a self-reflexive move (one that, after him, becomes characteristic of nearly all modern, or modernist, philosophy/theory): to have thought reflect back upon itself, to question itself, to scrutinize its own powers and limits. This is what he means by “critique.”
So far so good. But the particular way in which Kant does critique is not necessarily followed by his successors. Michel Foucault (in “A Preface to Transgression,” one of his best and most underrated articles) refers to “that opening made by Kant in Western philosophy when he articulated, in a manner that is still enigmatic, metaphysical discourse and reflection on the limits of our reason.” But Foucault goes on to say that Kant failed to sustain this “opening”; and that the two opposed lines of thought that followed Kant — “anthropology” (by which I think Foucault means positivistic scientific examination of Man as just another empirical object: which goes from 19th century positivism to so-called “evolutionary psychology” today) and “dialectics” (by which Foucault means Hegel and all the speculative thought that follows in his wake, thought that is overly subject-centered, that replaces Man, or his Reason, as the foundational point of speculation, and that concentrates on “the play of contradiction and totality” instead of upon Kant’s enigmatic self-questioning) — both repressed Kant’s “opening” and thereby returned to the overweening rationalism that Kant had rejected. The double bind of these two kinds of thought constructs “Man” as what Foucault, in The Order of Things, calls an “empirico-transcendental doublet.” In Foucault’s account, Kant is responsible for instituting this double bind — it is his solution to the conflicting claims of rationalism and empiricism — but Kant also offers a way out of it, a step back from it, a practice of “contestation” that avoids the dogmatisms of both positivism and dialectics.
This is where Karatani comes in and takes a fresh look at Kant. Karatani reads Kant’s “transcendental deduction” (his establishment of space, time, and causality as the transcendental preconditions of experience, in the first half of the First Critique) in the light of two other sections of the Critiques that are usually considered entirely separately: 1)the “Transcendental Dialectic” that forms the second half of the First Critique, and particularly Kant’s discussion of the Antinomies of Reason, cosmological ideas that come in contradictory pairs, which ultimately have to be judged as either both true (in different senses) or both false; and 2)Kant’s discussion of the problem of aesthetic taste, in his “Analytic of the Beautiful” in the Third Critique. (These are in fact the two sections of Kant’s works that I have been trying to work with, and work through, for over a decade; which in part explains why I found Karatani’s book such a revelation).
Kant’s Preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason begins with a discussion of the “peculiar fate” of human reason, “troubled by questions that it cannot dismiss… but also cannot answer.” This already suggests that the concerns of the “Transcendental Dialectic” are crucial to Kant from the beginning; and Karatani thereby reads the first half of the First Critique in the light of the second half. That is to say, you can’t separate Kant’s establishment of the actual conditions of our understanding from his concern to elucidate our unavoidable drive to always push beyond these conditions. One common way to read Kant is to say that he is a legislator, dictatorially setting forth the boundaries beyond which we must not push. But Karatani reverses this, suggesting that Kant’s experience of the discordances that come from pushing too far (in the second half of the First Critique) are themselves the positive basis of the limits that he sets up in the first half. The Antinomies of Reason are contradictory propositions (“the world is bounded in time and in space” vs. “the world is infinite as regards both time and space”) both of which seem valid from their own perspectives, but which cannot be true simultaneously. Kant’s “resolution” of these Antinomies is emphatically NOT to play them off each other as mutual negations, and thereby to “sublate” them into a higher formulation that self-reflexively incorporates both (which is the “dialectical” procedure later adopted by Hegel); rather, Kant shuttles back and forth between the perspectives of the two contradictory arguments, and establishes what he calls a “parallax” between them. That is to say, it is the unresolvable disjunction between the two perspectives, their otherness with regard to one another, so that they cannot be reconciled or made adequate to one another — it is this disjunction that opens up Kant’s “transcendental” reflection, and that provides the positive basis for the conditions presupposed by all experience.
Another way to put this is that the “resolution” to the Antinomies never happens all at once; each perspective can be addressed by “bracketing” the other one; but then we need to invert the procedure, and bracket what we previously privileged. This shunting back and forth is what Karatani means by “parallax.” And there is no higher synthesis of these contrasting bracketings, which is why, for Karatani, Kant’s critique is always a “transcritique,” a transversal movement from one perspective, or realm of experience, to another, without ever coming to a definitive fixity, or even a meta-level, a higher point of self-reflection. This lack of any fixity is why Kant’s transcendental conditions are always purely formal, rather than having any positive content (this holds true, of course, for Kant’s elucidation of morality in the Second Critique, as well as his elucidation of empirical understanding in the First); and it is why Kant insists that the Ideas of Reason can only have a “regulative” rather than a “constitutive” role — that is to say, why they can be used heuristically as a guide to our investigations, but not substantively as the actual inner principle of what we discover.
Now, Zizek actually gives a pretty good account of Karatani’s logic of the parallax, in his review of the book that Jodi cites (and provides a pdf for). And, after quoting Zizek’s paraphrase at length, Jodi is acute enough to remark: “Everybody is probably freaking out at this point, jumping up and down and screaming, BUT HOW DOES THIS WORK WITH HEGEL?” — My answer would be, precisely, that it doesn’t work with Hegel. Kant refuses to turn the Antinomies into negations; his reciprocal “bracketings” of the opposed perspectives do not interact with one another in the way that negations do in Hegel; there is no “labor of the negative” here. Rather, the basis of parallax is the stubborn positivity of both of its terms. This is precisely where Kant refuses (in Foucault’s term) to transform the “limit” into negativity, or into “the play of contradiction and totality.” This parallax is thereby the point at which Kant absolutely resists being subsumed into Hegel’s system, in the way that Hegel and Zizek want him to. Jodi answers her own question by saying, along with Zizek, that “the movement of negativity through Hegel is a kind of parallax, an account of the way ‘reality’ itself is caught in the movement of our knowing of it (and vice versa).” But this seems to me to be exactly wrong. To say that ‘reality’ itself is caught in the movement of our knowing of it is equivalent to saying that the Ideas of Reason can be used constitutively, and not just regulatively. Kant’s and Karatani’s parallax refuses such a move, and thus operates according to an entirely different logic than that of negativity. (Another way to put this: parallax doesn’t equate with negativity, but it also doesn’t negate negativity either — which would be a way of reinserting it into the Hegelian dialectic after all. Rather, it is radically other — oblique or orthogonal — to the movement of negativity).
(I should also note, given Zizek’s interest in Karatani, that although I think Kant/Karatani cannot be recuperated in Hegelian terms, it can be brought into a useful connection with Lacan. The trick is to read Lacan in a more Kantian way, instead of a Hegelian one. Karatani himself suggests that Freud and Lacan offer a kind of “transcendental psychology,” and that their criticisms of other sorts of psychology, like Lacan’s denunciation of “ego psychology,” is very much akin to Kant’s deconsruction of rationalist psychology in the Transcendental Dialectic. Karatani even equates “Kantian illusion/Lacanian Imaginary; the form/the Symbolic; the thing-in-itself/the Real” (34). This seems to me to be right, especially seeing Kant’s noumenon or thing-in-itself as equivalent to the unattainable Real in Lacan. But Karatani goes on to say, and I concur, that he finds it more useful to read Freud and Lacan through Kant, than Kant through Freud and Lacan).
The other section of Kant that is especially important to Karatani is the “Analytic of the Beautiful” in the Third Critique. I find this especially important because critical fashion, for the last thirty years at least, has emphasized the Sublime as the crucial moment in Kant’s aesthetics, and has seen his discussion of the Beautiful as uninteresting, old-fashioned, and even as a kind of throwback to pre-critical and pre-Enlightenment thought, as opposed to the supposedly radical concerns of the Sublime. As far as I know (and my reading isn’t deep enough here, so I may well be missing some important recent work) Karatani is the only recent commentator, aside from Melissa McMahon and myself to find critical importance in Kant’s discussion of the Beautiful (for both Melissa’s article and mine, see the volume A Shock To Thought, edited by Brian Massumi). Basically, the Analytic of the Beautiful poses the question of singularity and universality. A judgment that something is beautiful is, according to Kant, completely ungrounded. It cannot be verified or falsified in the way that an empirical judgment of fact can be; nor can it claim absolute, “categorical” validity in the way that moral commandments do. Yet despite being ungrounded, an aesthetic judgment makes an implicit demand for universal assent. This is what separates aesthetic judgments from mere personal preferences. I love coffee ice cream, but that doesn’t mean that I expect (or want) coffee to be everybody else’s favorite flavor. But when I say that Proust is the greatest writer of all time, I am doing a lot more than just expressing a personal preference. Even if I say that this is just my own personal taste, and even if I know very well that Proust is not everybody’s favorite author, the very act of stating that “A la recherche du temps perdu is the greatest novel ever written” implies a claim going beyond the statement that it things are this way “for me.” Aesthetic judgments have no objective basis, but neither are they merely subjective. They are entirely singular — each case of judgment is unique, there are no broader rules under which aesthetic judgments can be subsumed, in the way that both empirical judgments and moral commands get subsumed under rules. And yet these aesthetic judgments claim universality, if only by the very way in which they are uttered.
Aesthetic judgment is crucial for Kant, Karatani argues, because it is the very place where the question of the “transcendental” first becomes problematic. In aesthetic judgment, singularity communicates with universality without any intermediate terms. There are no hierarchies of particulars and generalities, of species and genus; there is also no process of dialectical “mediation.” An aesthetic judgment can neither be generalized, nor mediated. Instead, each aesthetic judgment is a uniuqe; each one makes a claim upon others, upon the Other, without being able to appeal to any prior justification in order to back up or enforce this claim.
The problem of aesthetic taste in the Third Critique thus leads to an Antinomy, formally parallel to the Antinomies of the First Critique. Karatani suggests that these Antinomies, in their perpetual tension, are in fact the ungrounded “grounds” of the positive transcendental conditions derived in the first half of the First Critique. Though epistemology, the problem of cognition, comes first in the overt development of Kant’s system, and aesthetics comes in only much later, Karatani argues in effect that aesthetics is logically and ontologically prior to epistemology and cognition. For aesthetics is the place where questions of singularity and universality, and of the Other, are initially posed; and these are all necessary to the development of positive “transcendental” arguments.
In the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” as well, Kant distinguishes the claimed universality of singular aesthetic judgments from the general agreement that is the result of what he calls a sensus communis, that is to say of “common sense.” For Kant, the existence of the sensus communis is important in that it makes processes of communication and recognition possible. But the important thing about aesthetic judgment is that, although it relies upon the sensus communis, it cannot be reduced to sensus communis. “Common sense” is entirely empirical; it denotes something like the commonly accepted presuppositions, the consensus, of a given society or community. That is to say, it is something like “ideology.” But transcendental conditions can never be reduced to merely empirical ones, therefore they cannot come in the form of consensus. Transcendental reflection, as “transcritique,” must to the contrary move between incompatible and irreconcilable positions or “common senses.” Which is why all judgment, or all transcendental reflection, ultimately refers back to the paradoxes of aesthetic judgment.
I will stop here, and reserve the second half of my summary, Karatani’s reading of Marx, for another post.
Charles Stross‘ Accelerando (available for free download here) is a science fiction novel about the Singularity, the hypothesized point when radical increases in computing power — expressed both in neurological enhancements to our brains, and in the development of autonomous artificial intelligences — lead to an absolute discontinuity in history (the word was first used in this sense, as far as I know, by Vernor Vinge). Stross bases his novel on the “strong AI” hypothesis, and the arguments of such enthusiasts as Hans Moravec (who sees the human race as shortly to be surpassed and rendered defunct by artificial intelligences) and Ray Kurzweil (who similarly contends that “within 25 years, we’ll reverse-engineer the brain and go on to develop superintelligence”). Stross doesn’t question these dubious premises, but runs with them in the best SF manner, pushing them to their most delirious consequences. The book is an experiment in thinking through what it might mean to be human in a posthuman world; and beyond that, what it might mean to be (merely) posthuman in a world (or, I should say, solar system or galaxy) in which the development of computation on a massive scale has left anything ‘human’ far behind.
I think that Ken Macleod was the first SF writer to describe the Singularity as “the Rapture, for nerds”; but Stross uses the phrase on several occasions. And indeed there is much of adolescent-boy wish-fulfillment fantasy in the ideas of Moravec and Kurzweil. Getting rid of those pesky bodies, eliminating all of the resistance of materiality to the immediate fulfillment of our desires, guaranteeing us omnipotence and immortality… Stross concedes all of this, in a charmingly offhanded manner. All of information space is wired directly into people’s brains; you can always run subprocesses to consider alternate possibilities (should I have sex with this person? I’ll just run a simulation and see what it will be like); thanks to “programmable matter” and nanomachines, any object you want (food, clothing, shelter, furniture) can be instantaneously produced with just a snap of your fingers. Yet much of the humor of his book comes from the fact that, even with all of this, people are still hopelessly neurotic and confused. As Accelerando traces the history of three (or four, depending on how you evaluate the existence of clones furnished with the memories, as well as the phenotype, of their ancestors) generations of a single family, it keeps on looping back through the same manias, tics, and obsessions, from masochistic abasement to puritanical fear of sexuality to an almost hysterical lust for novelty. Perhaps this is only a longwinded way of saying that, no matter how outrageously manic the plot gets, with sentient lobsters running spaceships in the Oort Belt, and characters who are older than their own mothers, and people who decide to shed their human form and download their intelligence into a flock of pigeons (which gives a whole new meaning to the computer-science idea of “distributed intelligence”), everything seems to fit quite sensibly and ‘naturally’ into the course of things. Stross maintains the idea that human beings are so culturally flexible, so able to adapt to new circumstances, and to imagine alternatives, that almost anything is possible; while at the same time also proposing a vision of human-all-too-human nature stubbornly refusing to give up its primordial instincts, no matter how altered the circumstances and no matter how self-defeating the refusal. His narrative gains its flexibility and fun by walking the tightrope between these contradictory cliches, and refusing the Nietzschean pathos that might come by embracing either.
Accelerando also stands at an odd angle to the ‘utopian’ strain that so many critics (like Fredric Jameson) have seen as central to science fiction. The novel envisions a society of abundance rather than scarcity: but this seems to be the inevitable result of new, powerful technologies, more than it comes from any determined political vision. The only political issue that really seems to trouble the novel’s characters (at least in the earlier stages of the story) is in what circumstances artificial intelligences should be given the right to vote (and relatedly, whether multiple copies of the same personality should be allowed one-instantiation-one-vote). In Stross’s post-Singularity world, everybody is provided free with the basic necessities (which include neural implants and information access, as well as a reasonably comfortable supplies of food, clothing, and shelter). This would seem to be all gain and no pain: poverty is eliminated (as are wars and ethnic and religious conflict) with no need for a corresponding change in our fundamental capitalistic ethos. Relative scarcity, and money, still seem to exist when it comes to luxuries over and above the basic needs; people continue to scheme and plan and compete and act all “entrepreneurial,” even though there doesn’t seem to be much of anything for them to compete about. Actually, this shifts towards the end of the book — since “progress” and ease continue to be projected exponentially onward, eventually we find ourselves in a ‘world’ without State or commerce, and where “life is rich… endlessly varied and sometimes confusing,” but still recognizably grounded in communities of human beings “living in small family groups within larger tribal networks” (359-360). Again, Stross is playing with the paradox of everything changing and yet, fundamentally, nothing changing: a sort-of utopia achieved on the basis of abundance alone, confounding both those conservatives who believe that the fixed nastiness of “human nature” makes any hope of amelioration illusive and even dangerous, and those progressives who pin their hopes of improvement on the need, as well as the capacity, for human beings to fundamentally alter who they are. One of the most brilliant strokes of the book is that, though the Singularity undoubtedly occurs sometime during the course of the narrative (which extends from the year 2010 to what would be, in old Earth terms, the 23rd century), we never ‘see’ it happening, and cannot pin down precisely when it took place. Continuity and radical discontinuity are thus, like these other paradoxes, affirmed simultaneously.
But for me, the best parts of Accelerando have to do, not with its florid imaginings, but with its presentation of what really cannot be imagined. That is to say: its representation of posthuman artificial intelligences, those whose computing power is not limited by our carbon-based biology. These superhuman entities force the remaining enhanced human beings further and further away from the sun, to Jupiter, then to Saturn, then to the Oort Belt, then finally out of the solar system altogether. There isn’t room for both them and us; once they have simulated and assimilated us, they have no further use for us. It isn’t just that we don’t know what they want; beyond this, it is literally impossible for us to imagine what they might want. The scientific and philosophical reason for this is that these entities possess a higher-order consciousness than we do: “a posthuman can build an internal model of a human-level intelligence that is, well, as cognitively strong as the original. You or I may think we know what makes other people tick, but we’re quite often wrong, whereas real posthumans can actually simulate us, inner states and all, and get it right” (376-377). (So much for “the problem of other minds”).
But in terms of the narrative, these posthuman intelligences are like nothing so much as transnational corporations. . Remember that, already today, corporations are “persons” according to the law, even though they are not themselves conscious. Accelerando simply takes this legal fiction to the next level. The posthumans are “slyly self-aware financial instruments” (168) that have freed themselves from merely human parameters. No wonder that, in the course of the novel, they dismantle the solar system, pulverizing the planets and asteroids in order to convert them to computronium. For they strive to extract the maximum value (in the form of computational power) from all matter; their focus is on efficiency, and on the endless expansion and accumulation of computation, with no goal external to this accumulation itself. Money to them is “quantized originality — that which allows one sentient entity to outmaneuver another” (295). No measure of abundance can squelch their drive for competition. They are continually crunching data; for instance, they use all available historical traces to simulate as many as possible of all the human beings who have ever lived; after they’ve extracted what surplus-information they can by running the simulations, they download the “resimulated” (313) human beings back into flesh, where it seems they function as “cognitive antibodies” (340) programmed to keep the remaining augmented humans in line.
The posthumans have upgraded the old-fashioned “free market” to “Economics 2.0,” a system that is “more efficient than any human-designed resource allocation schema” (303). Economics 2.0 “replaces the single-indirection layer of conventional money, and the multiple-indirection mappings of options trades, with some kind of insanely baroque object-relational framework based on the parametrized desires and subjective experiential values of the players” (321). Human intelligence is incapable of participating in Economics 2.0 “without dehumanizing cognitive surgery” (315). In the framework of Economics 2.0, we can only function as “sapient currency units,” stockpiled for trade in “species futures” options (210). And all this seems to be the case, not only in our own solar system, but throughout the galaxy, which is littered with the ruins of superintelligent civilizations that have pushed the mania for accumulation to the point of implosion and extinction. Indeed, when the human protagonists of Accelerando finally meet an alien entity, not only does it take on the material form of a gigantic slug, but it turns out to be, rather hilariously, a “parasitic organism… the Economics 2.0 equivalent of a pyramid scheme crossed with a 419 scam” (295). Never has the classic SF scenario of First Contact with alien life been so deflated. Accelerando suggests (though perhaps not fully intentionally) that, not only is the Singularity near, as Ray Kurzweil maintains, but in fact it has already happened: less through the exponential increase in computing power and telecommunications networking (though that has certainly played a role) than through the neoliberal transformation — the deregulation of corporate activity, and the dismantling of the welfare state — of the last thirty years or so.
Charles Stross‘ Accelerando (available for free download here) is a science fiction novel about the Singularity, the hypothesized point when radical increases in computing power — expressed both in neurological enhancements to our brains, and in the development of autonomous artificial intelligences — lead to an absolute discontinuity in history (the word was first used in this sense, as far as I know, by Vernor Vinge). Stross bases his novel on the “strong AI” hypothesis, and the arguments of such enthusiasts as Hans Moravec (who sees the human race as shortly to be surpassed and rendered defunct by artificial intelligences) and Ray Kurzweil (who similarly contends that “within 25 years, we’ll reverse-engineer the brain and go on to develop superintelligence”). Stross doesn’t question these dubious premises, but runs with them in the best SF manner, pushing them to their most delirious consequences. The book is an experiment in thinking through what it might mean to be human in a posthuman world; and beyond that, what it might mean to be (merely) posthuman in a world (or, I should say, solar system or galaxy) in which the development of computation on a massive scale has left anything ‘human’ far behind.
I think that Ken Macleod was the first SF writer to describe the Singularity as “the Rapture, for nerds”; but Stross uses the phrase on several occasions. And indeed there is much of adolescent-boy wish-fulfillment fantasy in the ideas of Moravec and Kurzweil. Getting rid of those pesky bodies, eliminating all of the resistance of materiality to the immediate fulfillment of our desires, guaranteeing us omnipotence and immortality… Stross concedes all of this, in a charmingly offhanded manner. All of information space is wired directly into people’s brains; you can always run subprocesses to consider alternate possibilities (should I have sex with this person? I’ll just run a simulation and see what it will be like); thanks to “programmable matter” and nanomachines, any object you want (food, clothing, shelter, furniture) can be instantaneously produced with just a snap of your fingers. Yet much of the humor of his book comes from the fact that, even with all of this, people are still hopelessly neurotic and confused. As Accelerando traces the history of three (or four, depending on how you evaluate the existence of clones furnished with the memories, as well as the phenotype, of their ancestors) generations of a single family, it keeps on looping back through the same manias, tics, and obsessions, from masochistic abasement to puritanical fear of sexuality to an almost hysterical lust for novelty. Perhaps this is only a longwinded way of saying that, no matter how outrageously manic the plot gets, with sentient lobsters running spaceships in the Oort Belt, and characters who are older than their own mothers, and people who decide to shed their human form and download their intelligence into a flock of pigeons (which gives a whole new meaning to the computer-science idea of “distributed intelligence”), everything seems to fit quite sensibly and ‘naturally’ into the course of things. Stross maintains the idea that human beings are so culturally flexible, so able to adapt to new circumstances, and to imagine alternatives, that almost anything is possible; while at the same time also proposing a vision of human-all-too-human nature stubbornly refusing to give up its primordial instincts, no matter how altered the circumstances and no matter how self-defeating the refusal. His narrative gains its flexibility and fun by walking the tightrope between these contradictory cliches, and refusing the Nietzschean pathos that might come by embracing either.
Accelerando also stands at an odd angle to the ‘utopian’ strain that so many critics (like Fredric Jameson) have seen as central to science fiction. The novel envisions a society of abundance rather than scarcity: but this seems to be the inevitable result of new, powerful technologies, more than it comes from any determined political vision. The only political issue that really seems to trouble the novel’s characters (at least in the earlier stages of the story) is in what circumstances artificial intelligences should be given the right to vote (and relatedly, whether multiple copies of the same personality should be allowed one-instantiation-one-vote). In Stross’s post-Singularity world, everybody is provided free with the basic necessities (which include neural implants and information access, as well as a reasonably comfortable supplies of food, clothing, and shelter). This would seem to be all gain and no pain: poverty is eliminated (as are wars and ethnic and religious conflict) with no need for a corresponding change in our fundamental capitalistic ethos. Relative scarcity, and money, still seem to exist when it comes to luxuries over and above the basic needs; people continue to scheme and plan and compete and act all “entrepreneurial,” even though there doesn’t seem to be much of anything for them to compete about. Actually, this shifts towards the end of the book — since “progress” and ease continue to be projected exponentially onward, eventually we find ourselves in a ‘world’ without State or commerce, and where “life is rich… endlessly varied and sometimes confusing,” but still recognizably grounded in communities of human beings “living in small family groups within larger tribal networks” (359-360). Again, Stross is playing with the paradox of everything changing and yet, fundamentally, nothing changing: a sort-of utopia achieved on the basis of abundance alone, confounding both those conservatives who believe that the fixed nastiness of “human nature” makes any hope of amelioration illusive and even dangerous, and those progressives who pin their hopes of improvement on the need, as well as the capacity, for human beings to fundamentally alter who they are. One of the most brilliant strokes of the book is that, though the Singularity undoubtedly occurs sometime during the course of the narrative (which extends from the year 2010 to what would be, in old Earth terms, the 23rd century), we never ‘see’ it happening, and cannot pin down precisely when it took place. Continuity and radical discontinuity are thus, like these other paradoxes, affirmed simultaneously.
But for me, the best parts of Accelerando have to do, not with its florid imaginings, but with its presentation of what really cannot be imagined. That is to say: its representation of posthuman artificial intelligences, those whose computing power is not limited by our carbon-based biology. These superhuman entities force the remaining enhanced human beings further and further away from the sun, to Jupiter, then to Saturn, then to the Oort Belt, then finally out of the solar system altogether. There isn’t room for both them and us; once they have simulated and assimilated us, they have no further use for us. It isn’t just that we don’t know what they want; beyond this, it is literally impossible for us to imagine what they might want. The scientific and philosophical reason for this is that these entities possess a higher-order consciousness than we do: “a posthuman can build an internal model of a human-level intelligence that is, well, as cognitively strong as the original. You or I may think we know what makes other people tick, but we’re quite often wrong, whereas real posthumans can actually simulate us, inner states and all, and get it right” (376-377). (So much for “the problem of other minds”).
But in terms of the narrative, these posthuman intelligences are like nothing so much as transnational corporations. . Remember that, already today, corporations are “persons” according to the law, even though they are not themselves conscious. Accelerando simply takes this legal fiction to the next level. The posthumans are “slyly self-aware financial instruments” (168) that have freed themselves from merely human parameters. No wonder that, in the course of the novel, they dismantle the solar system, pulverizing the planets and asteroids in order to convert them to computronium. For they strive to extract the maximum value (in the form of computational power) from all matter; their focus is on efficiency, and on the endless expansion and accumulation of computation, with no goal external to this accumulation itself. Money to them is “quantized originality — that which allows one sentient entity to outmaneuver another” (295). No measure of abundance can squelch their drive for competition. They are continually crunching data; for instance, they use all available historical traces to simulate as many as possible of all the human beings who have ever lived; after they’ve extracted what surplus-information they can by running the simulations, they download the “resimulated” (313) human beings back into flesh, where it seems they function as “cognitive antibodies” (340) programmed to keep the remaining augmented humans in line.
The posthumans have upgraded the old-fashioned “free market” to “Economics 2.0,” a system that is “more efficient than any human-designed resource allocation schema” (303). Economics 2.0 “replaces the single-indirection layer of conventional money, and the multiple-indirection mappings of options trades, with some kind of insanely baroque object-relational framework based on the parametrized desires and subjective experiential values of the players” (321). Human intelligence is incapable of participating in Economics 2.0 “without dehumanizing cognitive surgery” (315). In the framework of Economics 2.0, we can only function as “sapient currency units,” stockpiled for trade in “species futures” options (210). And all this seems to be the case, not only in our own solar system, but throughout the galaxy, which is littered with the ruins of superintelligent civilizations that have pushed the mania for accumulation to the point of implosion and extinction. Indeed, when the human protagonists of Accelerando finally meet an alien entity, not only does it take on the material form of a gigantic slug, but it turns out to be, rather hilariously, a “parasitic organism… the Economics 2.0 equivalent of a pyramid scheme crossed with a 419 scam” (295). Never has the classic SF scenario of First Contact with alien life been so deflated. Accelerando suggests (though perhaps not fully intentionally) that, not only is the Singularity near, as Ray Kurzweil maintains, but in fact it has already happened: less through the exponential increase in computing power and telecommunications networking (though that has certainly played a role) than through the neoliberal transformation — the deregulation of corporate activity, and the dismantling of the welfare state — of the last thirty years or so.
Woken Furies is Richard Morgan‘s fourth novel, and the third in his “Takeshi Kovacs” series (following Altered Carbon and Broken Angels). (I wrote about Altered Carbon here, Broken Angels here, and about Morgan’s one non-Takeshi Kovacs novel, Market Forces, here).
Like its predecessors, Woken Furies is a combination of high-octane action/violence/thriller and science fiction. Morgan is so good at the former — machinating action with loads of unexpected twists and turns, and delivering really intense and visceral scenes of violence (“the grip on my fingers ripped the eyelid from the brow downward, scraped the eyeball and tugged it out on the optic nerve… He lost his hold on me and reeled backward, features maimed, eye hanging out and still pumping tiny spurts of blood…”) — that he’d probably be a lot more famous if he set his books, Robert Ludlum- or Tom Clancy-like, in the present. But of course it’s the science fiction aspect that really makes these novels so interesting and disturbing.
In Woken Furies, we have the staples of the earlier Kovacs novels — the technology of “sleeves,” new bodies in which your consciousness can be inserted, provided that you have preserved a physical backup of that consciousness (the “cortical stack”); the enhancement of those sleeves by all sorts of neurochemical enhancements and digital prostheses; and the special training Takeshi Kovacs has received as an Envoy (a former member of the elite UN corps that brutally suppresses rebellion and revolution anywhere in the sphere of human-inhabited planets), which makes him both superhuman and somewhat inhuman. In this volume, Kovacs returns to his home planet, Harlan’s World, and finds himself having to deal with yakuza, religious fundamentalists, out-of-control military AI killing systems, a brutal ruling class, and especially the legacy of Quellcrist Falconer, the legendary socialist-revolutionary theorist/activist whose words Kovacs had often quoted in the previous novels, but who now seems to have returned from the dead.
Kodwo Eshun has remarked on how Morgan’s novels seem to take a sort of morbid, macho pleasure — what used to be called a morose delectation — in reveling in the horrific excesses of capitalism at its most brutal and barbaric. The absolute cynicism of power, and the delight in exercising it as sadistically as possible, are constants in these novels, which simultaneously present them as inescapable and inevitable, regardless of the social arrangement, and rage against the politico-economic privilege that makes them possible. Not only Kovacs-as-narrator, but Morgan himself as well, seem to combine an utterly Hobbesian view of human nature with a Marx-like level of outrage at exploitation and oppression.
Woken Furies pushes this to almost schizophrenic levels. While the action here is not quite as all-out brutal as that of the military/corporate interventions in the hellish Broken Angels, here the drive to see the worst, and almost revel in it, is more deeply than ever before embedded in Kovacs’ character. Kovacs is consumed with loathing and self-loathing, though (as narrator) he never entirely ‘fesses up to it. Kovacs is offended beyond endurance by the exploitation, torture, and murder that are continually being inflicted on Harlan’s World (and all the other human-inhabited planets) for reasons of economic gain, or self-righteous religious dogma.Yet he clearly gets off on his own frequent opportunities to torture and kill, and scorns the politically idealistic values of the revolutionaries among whom he finds himself as either self-delusion or self-interested hypocrisy.
Woken Furies is an action-packed book, yet the action is often enough suspended for Kovacs’ rants against religious fundamentalists (one of the chief religions in the novel, the New Revelation, seems to combine all the most patriarchal and misogynistic aspects of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), as well as for dialogues/debates between Kovacs and other characters on the nature of power and the prospects for meaningful political change. Nihilistic cynicism and revolutionary “optimism of the will” dance cautiously around each other, trading insults while at the same time measuring possibilities, in a world in which bio- and informational technologies have at once extended human prospects to an almost utopian extent (the “sleeves” allow for enhanced physical well-being, enhanced mental abilities, and a life indefinitely extended in multiple bodies), and given new footholds for power (new opportunities for surveillance and control, for the extraction of surplus value, and for the opportunity to torture as well as kill).
In his new book Archaeologies of the Future (which I am currently reading, and will write about when I am done), Fredric Jameson explores the utopian impulse as it manifests itself in science fiction, working through this impulse’s multiple contradictions and impediments, and suggesting how the thrust toward radical otherness in science fiction is a way to keep the possibility of alternatives to capitalism open, precisely when we are being told endlessly that the market is everything, and that there is no alternative to the current reign of global capital. Morgan is scarcely utopian, in any sense of the word, but the very way that cynicism and rage work in Woken Furies lead to something of the same effect that Jameson finds in utopian SF texts by LeGuin and others. (And this is so precisely because Morgan is about as un-LeGuin-like an SF writer as could possibly be imagined). Though cynicism is often an alibi for acquiescence in the existing order (‘I know it sucks, but there’s no hope of anything better, so we might as well shrug our shoulders and get on with it’), the nihilist vehemence of Kovacs’ cynicism (and Morgan’s staging of it) prohibits any such resignation. And the technology of the novel’s world is just “estranging” enough (that is to say, strange in the very way it amplifies and extends what we recognize of ourselves today, so that that recognition is twisted as in a funhouse mirror) that a displacement of the deadlock of cynical power we find ourselves in today becomes just barely visible.
The novel ends, not just with Kovacs’ survival against vast odds (as was also contrived in the previous two volumes), but even with a muted sense of political and personal hope — one that also deliberately and creatively elides the traditional binary opposition between reform and revolution, between gradual change and radical rupture. (This latter seems to me to be crucially important: we need to get away both from the tepid reformism that in fact leaves structures of oppression unchanged, and the revolutionist gestures that romantically fantasize about starting over with a clean slate: both of these alternatives have proved themselves to be calamitous in the world we live in today. Neither of these all-too-familiar alternatives works to grasp the “seeds of futurity” — Deleuzian “lines of flight” or Whiteheadian “creative advance” — that exist as unactualized potentialities in the real world).
The price Morgan pays for this conclusion, however, is an almost literal deus ex machina. All three Kovacs novels are framed with the relics of the Martians, a now-extinct inhuman race (they are more like giant, intelligent, bats or raptors) whose abandoned technologies have been scavenged by human beings, and have indeed provided human beings with those very technological advances which have made the world of the novel (colonization of multiple planets, faster-than-light information transfer, cortical stacks and sleeves) possible in the first place. In all three novels, the Martian relics imply a sort of limit to capitalism, because they embody a degree of invention and creativity of which humanity — or capitalism — itself is incapable, and which it can only secondarily scavenge and appropriate. (Though the extinction of the Martians implies that their own society was far from being utopian or unproblematic either). But at the end of Woken Furies, the Martian technology is something more: its intervention from the depths of a dead and distant past, and at the same time from an incomprehensibly advanced future, provides the very sense of possibility that Morgan and his novels cannot imagine in the present: neither in the writerly present of the early 21st century, nor in the fictional present of the 25th. What are we to make of this intervention of otherness? How balance radical otherness (which cannot help seeming almost theological) and the potential, within capitalism, of altering and abolishing it from within?
Woken Furies is Richard Morgan‘s fourth novel, and the third in his “Takeshi Kovacs” series (following Altered Carbon and Broken Angels). (I wrote about Altered Carbon here, Broken Angels here, and about Morgan’s one non-Takeshi Kovacs novel, Market Forces, here).
Like its predecessors, Woken Furies is a combination of high-octane action/violence/thriller and science fiction. Morgan is so good at the former — machinating action with loads of unexpected twists and turns, and delivering really intense and visceral scenes of violence (“the grip on my fingers ripped the eyelid from the brow downward, scraped the eyeball and tugged it out on the optic nerve… He lost his hold on me and reeled backward, features maimed, eye hanging out and still pumping tiny spurts of blood…”) — that he’d probably be a lot more famous if he set his books, Robert Ludlum- or Tom Clancy-like, in the present. But of course it’s the science fiction aspect that really makes these novels so interesting and disturbing.
In Woken Furies, we have the staples of the earlier Kovacs novels — the technology of “sleeves,” new bodies in which your consciousness can be inserted, provided that you have preserved a physical backup of that consciousness (the “cortical stack”); the enhancement of those sleeves by all sorts of neurochemical enhancements and digital prostheses; and the special training Takeshi Kovacs has received as an Envoy (a former member of the elite UN corps that brutally suppresses rebellion and revolution anywhere in the sphere of human-inhabited planets), which makes him both superhuman and somewhat inhuman. In this volume, Kovacs returns to his home planet, Harlan’s World, and finds himself having to deal with yakuza, religious fundamentalists, out-of-control military AI killing systems, a brutal ruling class, and especially the legacy of Quellcrist Falconer, the legendary socialist-revolutionary theorist/activist whose words Kovacs had often quoted in the previous novels, but who now seems to have returned from the dead.
Kodwo Eshun has remarked on how Morgan’s novels seem to take a sort of morbid, macho pleasure — what used to be called a morose delectation — in reveling in the horrific excesses of capitalism at its most brutal and barbaric. The absolute cynicism of power, and the delight in exercising it as sadistically as possible, are constants in these novels, which simultaneously present them as inescapable and inevitable, regardless of the social arrangement, and rage against the politico-economic privilege that makes them possible. Not only Kovacs-as-narrator, but Morgan himself as well, seem to combine an utterly Hobbesian view of human nature with a Marx-like level of outrage at exploitation and oppression.
Woken Furies pushes this to almost schizophrenic levels. While the action here is not quite as all-out brutal as that of the military/corporate interventions in the hellish Broken Angels, here the drive to see the worst, and almost revel in it, is more deeply than ever before embedded in Kovacs’ character. Kovacs is consumed with loathing and self-loathing, though (as narrator) he never entirely ‘fesses up to it. Kovacs is offended beyond endurance by the exploitation, torture, and murder that are continually being inflicted on Harlan’s World (and all the other human-inhabited planets) for reasons of economic gain, or self-righteous religious dogma.Yet he clearly gets off on his own frequent opportunities to torture and kill, and scorns the politically idealistic values of the revolutionaries among whom he finds himself as either self-delusion or self-interested hypocrisy.
Woken Furies is an action-packed book, yet the action is often enough suspended for Kovacs’ rants against religious fundamentalists (one of the chief religions in the novel, the New Revelation, seems to combine all the most patriarchal and misogynistic aspects of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), as well as for dialogues/debates between Kovacs and other characters on the nature of power and the prospects for meaningful political change. Nihilistic cynicism and revolutionary “optimism of the will” dance cautiously around each other, trading insults while at the same time measuring possibilities, in a world in which bio- and informational technologies have at once extended human prospects to an almost utopian extent (the “sleeves” allow for enhanced physical well-being, enhanced mental abilities, and a life indefinitely extended in multiple bodies), and given new footholds for power (new opportunities for surveillance and control, for the extraction of surplus value, and for the opportunity to torture as well as kill).
In his new book Archaeologies of the Future (which I am currently reading, and will write about when I am done), Fredric Jameson explores the utopian impulse as it manifests itself in science fiction, working through this impulse’s multiple contradictions and impediments, and suggesting how the thrust toward radical otherness in science fiction is a way to keep the possibility of alternatives to capitalism open, precisely when we are being told endlessly that the market is everything, and that there is no alternative to the current reign of global capital. Morgan is scarcely utopian, in any sense of the word, but the very way that cynicism and rage work in Woken Furies lead to something of the same effect that Jameson finds in utopian SF texts by LeGuin and others. (And this is so precisely because Morgan is about as un-LeGuin-like an SF writer as could possibly be imagined). Though cynicism is often an alibi for acquiescence in the existing order (‘I know it sucks, but there’s no hope of anything better, so we might as well shrug our shoulders and get on with it’), the nihilist vehemence of Kovacs’ cynicism (and Morgan’s staging of it) prohibits any such resignation. And the technology of the novel’s world is just “estranging” enough (that is to say, strange in the very way it amplifies and extends what we recognize of ourselves today, so that that recognition is twisted as in a funhouse mirror) that a displacement of the deadlock of cynical power we find ourselves in today becomes just barely visible.
The novel ends, not just with Kovacs’ survival against vast odds (as was also contrived in the previous two volumes), but even with a muted sense of political and personal hope — one that also deliberately and creatively elides the traditional binary opposition between reform and revolution, between gradual change and radical rupture. (This latter seems to me to be crucially important: we need to get away both from the tepid reformism that in fact leaves structures of oppression unchanged, and the revolutionist gestures that romantically fantasize about starting over with a clean slate: both of these alternatives have proved themselves to be calamitous in the world we live in today. Neither of these all-too-familiar alternatives works to grasp the “seeds of futurity” — Deleuzian “lines of flight” or Whiteheadian “creative advance” — that exist as unactualized potentialities in the real world).
The price Morgan pays for this conclusion, however, is an almost literal deus ex machina. All three Kovacs novels are framed with the relics of the Martians, a now-extinct inhuman race (they are more like giant, intelligent, bats or raptors) whose abandoned technologies have been scavenged by human beings, and have indeed provided human beings with those very technological advances which have made the world of the novel (colonization of multiple planets, faster-than-light information transfer, cortical stacks and sleeves) possible in the first place. In all three novels, the Martian relics imply a sort of limit to capitalism, because they embody a degree of invention and creativity of which humanity — or capitalism — itself is incapable, and which it can only secondarily scavenge and appropriate. (Though the extinction of the Martians implies that their own society was far from being utopian or unproblematic either). But at the end of Woken Furies, the Martian technology is something more: its intervention from the depths of a dead and distant past, and at the same time from an incomprehensibly advanced future, provides the very sense of possibility that Morgan and his novels cannot imagine in the present: neither in the writerly present of the early 21st century, nor in the fictional present of the 25th. What are we to make of this intervention of otherness? How balance radical otherness (which cannot help seeming almost theological) and the potential, within capitalism, of altering and abolishing it from within?