k-punk writes about the politics of “subjective destitution,” in a response less to my own particular comments on V for Vendetta, than to the entire discussion which ensued in the comments. What I have to say here is not really a counter-response to k-punk, since I find what he says, particularly about the experience of class, to be entirely compelling and convincing. It’s just that here, as so often, k-punk “forces me to think” (to use a phrase from Deleuze), so I am trying here to clarify my own stakes with regard to these political and philosophical issues.
I don’t really disagree with k-punk’s dismissal of the political value of V for Vendetta; though I liked the movie more than he did, I think he does point up its limitations as an “object to think with.” The only part of the movie that k-punk finds valuable is the sequence about Evey’s “subjective destitution.” This is a section I found more troubling than k-punk does. But not because of the starkness of the process itself: I think that the film does a lot to convey how the sort of subjective transformation that is necessary for there to be a political transformation involves a lot of pain and difficulty. It isn’t a mere matter of changing one’s mind the way one chooses items on a restaurant menu, or a computer menu (I use the metaphor of menu deliberately, because it is the ne plus ultra of consumerist logic, a metaphor often favored by the “rational choice” so-called political theorists themselves).
But what bothered me was the way in which V. himself administered the process of incarceration and torture that was the motor of Evey’s subjective destitution. In the rest of the movie, as k-punk notes, V. is a sort of populist fantasy figure, enlightening the masses so that they can revolt, with the hidden assumption, therefore, that they could never do so for themselves. But the scenes of Evey’s imprisonment seem to embody the reverse (and therefore entirely mirroring) situation: that of a Leninist party elite re-educating the masses in order to overcome their “false consciousness.” This is what I meant, in the earlier thread, with my discomfort about V.’s authority to do what he does. We seem to be caught, not only in the dilemma about populism (k-punk’s critique of which, here, here, and here, seems right on target to me), but also in the sterile old argument between anarchist spontaneism (represented today by Hardt and Negri’s multitude) and Leninist conspiratorial organization (represented today, in theoretical argument at least, by Zizek). Neither of these seem at all satisfactory to me; I find Zizek’s Leninism as much of a fantasy as the spontaneous uprising of the multitude.
In other words, when Zizek quotes Brecht’s line about the Party dissolving the people and creating another one — a line that Brecht meant ironically (if not entirely honestly), but that Zizek endorses provocatively, and (beneath the shock factor) quite seriously, it seems to me that Zizek is doing exactly what he accuses his opponents of doing: covering over an unbearable, traumatic antagonism in the Real with an imaginary solution. It’s dubious how well Leninism worked in 1917, if you consider what it led to in the later history of the USSR. And it is more than dubious to see how it would work today, either in terms of challenging the worldwide capitalist system or in terms of leading to a desirable alternative afterwards, considering how thorough the grip of capital is, and how different the class structure is, today in our post-Fordist society from pre-Fordist Russia in 1917. Hardt and Negri at least take account of the changes wrought by “late” or post-Fordist capitalism in their concept of the multitude, even if their vision of rebellion is absurdly optimistic. Zizek, to the contrary, sounds to me a bit too enamored of subjective destitution, a bit too “romantic” in his envisioning of what it means to “traverse the fantasy,” to become bereft of one’s own fantasies and conditioned desires, to emerge reborn (in the religious sense) as a sort of saint of the drive. He invests negativity with a magical power of transformation. Negativity — in the sense of rupture, or what k-punk calls “nihilation” (an active breaking, as opposed to the passive nihilism that ultimately accepts things as they are) — and subjective destitution may well be necessary conditions for radical change, but they are by no means sufficient ones. There is too much of a leap between subjective transformation and social transformation, and too much dissimilarity between individual subjectivity and social subjective formations. (Zizek’s reduction of social processes to ones that can be mapped in the same way that psychoanalysis maps individual subjects seems to me to be the greatest weakness of his theorization altogether; the process of “surplus enjoyment” is far too different from the process of surplus value extraction for any analogy between them to remain meaningful. It seems to me that Deleuze and Guattari are much more on track when they reject this sort of analogizing, and instead argue for an identity of asubjective or presubjective investments on the personal and the social level, together with a radical difference of regimes between the formation of the subject and that of the socius). For all these reasons, Zizek’s vision of the psychoanalytic cure, or the revolutionary subjective transformation, remains itself a kind of fantasy.
What’s most valuable to me in k-punk’s posting has little to do with this particular line of argument, however. It has to do rather with the “ontological dimension” of the experience of class, with the ways in which “class power has always depended on a kind of reflexive impotence,” and with an account — via Dennis Potter’s “Nigel Barton” plays — of “the loneliness and agony experienced by those who have been projected out of the confining, comforting fatalism of the working class community and into the incomprehensible, abhorrently seductive rituals of the privileged world,” and the way that such experiences “produce a distanciation from experience as such; after undergoing them, it is no longer [possible] to conceive of experience as some natural or primitive ontological category.” I can’t really add anything here to k-punk’s account. (I’ve never had to experience this sort of displacement, in academia at least, as a white male whose parents were also PhDs, and with institutional anti-Semitism pretty much relegated to the past in American academia, however much anti-Semitism might survive as an individual prejudice — but that is really a subject for another post. My wife, though, an African American woman whose parents were working class and never went to college, has to deal with this sort of nightmare every day).
But I do want to say one more thing about “subjective destitution.” k-punk notes that I wrote that one cannot will subjective destitution. But he says, to the contrary, “that you can only will it, since it is the existential choice in its purest form.” I now think that we are both right, in certain ways — there is a Kantian antinomy, or a Zizekian parallax, at work here. The “existential choice” of destitution — for example, the one by which Evey refuses to betray V., and thereby opens herself to radical loss — is an entirely negative one, contentless and absolute, in sharp contrast to the “choices between” that we are always making as consumers or constituted subjects. I recognize the difference, without scorning the latter. In subjective destitution, one can willfully submit oneself beforehand, by choosing (in the ordinary way) to put oneself in a situation in which this destitution can occur, i.e. in which the ordinary mechanism of choice is no longer operative; and, afterwards, one can accept or affirm the destitution which, in a certain way, has already occurred. (Evey does the latter, but not the former). The destitution “itself,” however, still seems to me directly unwillable, since it involves precisely an emptying-out of the will. I suspect that k-punk and I are not really in substantial disagreement here, especially when he says that “subjective destitution is not something that happens in any straightforward empirical sense; it is, rather, an Event precisely in the sense of being an incorporeal transformation, an ontological reframing to which you must assent.” The “must assent” is what I meant by calling it something that one cannot actually will.
(Can I make a ludicrously trivial comparison here? I’ve been trying to lose weight recently, because the doctor tells me this is necessary in order to keep my blood pressure down — in my middle age I have a tendency towards hypertension. The problem is, I can’t resist snacks: I have no willpower in this regard. What I can do, is avoid the kitchen altogether after dinner, so that the opportunity to have a snack doesn’t even arise in the first place. That is the only way in which I can “will” the destitution of my appetite, which I am unable to curb directly. It’s probably unseemly for me to compare my piddling little, oedipalized, and thoroughly petty bourgeois neuroses with the sort of pain that is in question here; but it’s the best way — and the most personally revelatory — I have found to dramatize it).
All this is why I find the most compelling accounts of what Zizek calls “subjective destitution” to be those of Blanchot and Bataille, who don’t use the phrase, but who do indeed explore it. However, they express it largely in aesthetic (or even theological) terms, and are very circumspect about making any claims for its political efficacy. Blanchot seems to equate this state of destitution with what he calls “communism,” but without giving this any pragmatic or strategic specification. For Blanchot, writing is a rehearsal of the writer’s own death, and a rehearsal of communism — and Events like those of May 1968 in Paris are also such rehearsals. But they are only rehearsals or simulacra, and the gap between them an any actual social transformation remains large. It’s a mistake, again, and in any case, to model social transformation on personal transformation (no matter whether the latter is an aesthetic achievement, a psychoanalytic cure, or a religious conversion).
All this leaves me, in my own work, as basically an aesthetician. I’m more interested in the aesthetics of subjective destitution than in its politics, because I am so dubious about its political efficacy or desirability. And politically, I am more interested in tracing how the logic of capital unfolds in “culture” than in working out the subjective conditions of radical change; because I am so skeptical about the adequacy, or even meaningfulness, of the latter. I’m an aesthetician because I am somebody who tries to trace our prison bars as fully as possible, but without offering any hope or means of escape. k-punk writes that “There are very good Spinozist and Althusserian reasons for this [i.e. for recognizing the state of “reflexive impotence” in which we are trapped in late capitalist society] — seeing the network of cause-and-effect in which we are enchained is already freedom.” Perhaps; though this may be, from my perspective, too strong a claim, if not for k-punk’s work, then at least for my own, as it probes the conditions of a resolutely non-redemptive aesthetics. Rather than Spinoza, I think of Whitehead, who suggests a change in perspective that might work (as Isabelle Stengers puts it) “to induce a mode of excitement disclosing the possibility of affirming both what modern habits of thought denied, and what they took for granted” — a far more modest aim than the therapeutic “cure” (in a medical, not a moralistic sense) offered to us by Spinoza, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Freud, and the Marx who said the point was not to interpret the world, but to change it.
k-punk writes about the politics of “subjective destitution,” in a response less to my own particular comments on V for Vendetta, than to the entire discussion which ensued in the comments. What I have to say here is not really a counter-response to k-punk, since I find what he says, particularly about the experience of class, to be entirely compelling and convincing. It’s just that here, as so often, k-punk “forces me to think” (to use a phrase from Deleuze), so I am trying here to clarify my own stakes with regard to these political and philosophical issues.
I don’t really disagree with k-punk’s dismissal of the political value of V for Vendetta; though I liked the movie more than he did, I think he does point up its limitations as an “object to think with.” The only part of the movie that k-punk finds valuable is the sequence about Evey’s “subjective destitution.” This is a section I found more troubling than k-punk does. But not because of the starkness of the process itself: I think that the film does a lot to convey how the sort of subjective transformation that is necessary for there to be a political transformation involves a lot of pain and difficulty. It isn’t a mere matter of changing one’s mind the way one chooses items on a restaurant menu, or a computer menu (I use the metaphor of menu deliberately, because it is the ne plus ultra of consumerist logic, a metaphor often favored by the “rational choice” so-called political theorists themselves).
But what bothered me was the way in which V. himself administered the process of incarceration and torture that was the motor of Evey’s subjective destitution. In the rest of the movie, as k-punk notes, V. is a sort of populist fantasy figure, enlightening the masses so that they can revolt, with the hidden assumption, therefore, that they could never do so for themselves. But the scenes of Evey’s imprisonment seem to embody the reverse (and therefore entirely mirroring) situation: that of a Leninist party elite re-educating the masses in order to overcome their “false consciousness.” This is what I meant, in the earlier thread, with my discomfort about V.’s authority to do what he does. We seem to be caught, not only in the dilemma about populism (k-punk’s critique of which, here, here, and here, seems right on target to me), but also in the sterile old argument between anarchist spontaneism (represented today by Hardt and Negri’s multitude) and Leninist conspiratorial organization (represented today, in theoretical argument at least, by Zizek). Neither of these seem at all satisfactory to me; I find Zizek’s Leninism as much of a fantasy as the spontaneous uprising of the multitude.
In other words, when Zizek quotes Brecht’s line about the Party dissolving the people and creating another one — a line that Brecht meant ironically (if not entirely honestly), but that Zizek endorses provocatively, and (beneath the shock factor) quite seriously, it seems to me that Zizek is doing exactly what he accuses his opponents of doing: covering over an unbearable, traumatic antagonism in the Real with an imaginary solution. It’s dubious how well Leninism worked in 1917, if you consider what it led to in the later history of the USSR. And it is more than dubious to see how it would work today, either in terms of challenging the worldwide capitalist system or in terms of leading to a desirable alternative afterwards, considering how thorough the grip of capital is, and how different the class structure is, today in our post-Fordist society from pre-Fordist Russia in 1917. Hardt and Negri at least take account of the changes wrought by “late” or post-Fordist capitalism in their concept of the multitude, even if their vision of rebellion is absurdly optimistic. Zizek, to the contrary, sounds to me a bit too enamored of subjective destitution, a bit too “romantic” in his envisioning of what it means to “traverse the fantasy,” to become bereft of one’s own fantasies and conditioned desires, to emerge reborn (in the religious sense) as a sort of saint of the drive. He invests negativity with a magical power of transformation. Negativity — in the sense of rupture, or what k-punk calls “nihilation” (an active breaking, as opposed to the passive nihilism that ultimately accepts things as they are) — and subjective destitution may well be necessary conditions for radical change, but they are by no means sufficient ones. There is too much of a leap between subjective transformation and social transformation, and too much dissimilarity between individual subjectivity and social subjective formations. (Zizek’s reduction of social processes to ones that can be mapped in the same way that psychoanalysis maps individual subjects seems to me to be the greatest weakness of his theorization altogether; the process of “surplus enjoyment” is far too different from the process of surplus value extraction for any analogy between them to remain meaningful. It seems to me that Deleuze and Guattari are much more on track when they reject this sort of analogizing, and instead argue for an identity of asubjective or presubjective investments on the personal and the social level, together with a radical difference of regimes between the formation of the subject and that of the socius). For all these reasons, Zizek’s vision of the psychoanalytic cure, or the revolutionary subjective transformation, remains itself a kind of fantasy.
What’s most valuable to me in k-punk’s posting has little to do with this particular line of argument, however. It has to do rather with the “ontological dimension” of the experience of class, with the ways in which “class power has always depended on a kind of reflexive impotence,” and with an account — via Dennis Potter’s “Nigel Barton” plays — of “the loneliness and agony experienced by those who have been projected out of the confining, comforting fatalism of the working class community and into the incomprehensible, abhorrently seductive rituals of the privileged world,” and the way that such experiences “produce a distanciation from experience as such; after undergoing them, it is no longer [possible] to conceive of experience as some natural or primitive ontological category.” I can’t really add anything here to k-punk’s account. (I’ve never had to experience this sort of displacement, in academia at least, as a white male whose parents were also PhDs, and with institutional anti-Semitism pretty much relegated to the past in American academia, however much anti-Semitism might survive as an individual prejudice — but that is really a subject for another post. My wife, though, an African American woman whose parents were working class and never went to college, has to deal with this sort of nightmare every day).
But I do want to say one more thing about “subjective destitution.” k-punk notes that I wrote that one cannot will subjective destitution. But he says, to the contrary, “that you can only will it, since it is the existential choice in its purest form.” I now think that we are both right, in certain ways — there is a Kantian antinomy, or a Zizekian parallax, at work here. The “existential choice” of destitution — for example, the one by which Evey refuses to betray V., and thereby opens herself to radical loss — is an entirely negative one, contentless and absolute, in sharp contrast to the “choices between” that we are always making as consumers or constituted subjects. I recognize the difference, without scorning the latter. In subjective destitution, one can willfully submit oneself beforehand, by choosing (in the ordinary way) to put oneself in a situation in which this destitution can occur, i.e. in which the ordinary mechanism of choice is no longer operative; and, afterwards, one can accept or affirm the destitution which, in a certain way, has already occurred. (Evey does the latter, but not the former). The destitution “itself,” however, still seems to me directly unwillable, since it involves precisely an emptying-out of the will. I suspect that k-punk and I are not really in substantial disagreement here, especially when he says that “subjective destitution is not something that happens in any straightforward empirical sense; it is, rather, an Event precisely in the sense of being an incorporeal transformation, an ontological reframing to which you must assent.” The “must assent” is what I meant by calling it something that one cannot actually will.
(Can I make a ludicrously trivial comparison here? I’ve been trying to lose weight recently, because the doctor tells me this is necessary in order to keep my blood pressure down — in my middle age I have a tendency towards hypertension. The problem is, I can’t resist snacks: I have no willpower in this regard. What I can do, is avoid the kitchen altogether after dinner, so that the opportunity to have a snack doesn’t even arise in the first place. That is the only way in which I can “will” the destitution of my appetite, which I am unable to curb directly. It’s probably unseemly for me to compare my piddling little, oedipalized, and thoroughly petty bourgeois neuroses with the sort of pain that is in question here; but it’s the best way — and the most personally revelatory — I have found to dramatize it).
All this is why I find the most compelling accounts of what Zizek calls “subjective destitution” to be those of Blanchot and Bataille, who don’t use the phrase, but who do indeed explore it. However, they express it largely in aesthetic (or even theological) terms, and are very circumspect about making any claims for its political efficacy. Blanchot seems to equate this state of destitution with what he calls “communism,” but without giving this any pragmatic or strategic specification. For Blanchot, writing is a rehearsal of the writer’s own death, and a rehearsal of communism — and Events like those of May 1968 in Paris are also such rehearsals. But they are only rehearsals or simulacra, and the gap between them an any actual social transformation remains large. It’s a mistake, again, and in any case, to model social transformation on personal transformation (no matter whether the latter is an aesthetic achievement, a psychoanalytic cure, or a religious conversion).
All this leaves me, in my own work, as basically an aesthetician. I’m more interested in the aesthetics of subjective destitution than in its politics, because I am so dubious about its political efficacy or desirability. And politically, I am more interested in tracing how the logic of capital unfolds in “culture” than in working out the subjective conditions of radical change; because I am so skeptical about the adequacy, or even meaningfulness, of the latter. I’m an aesthetician because I am somebody who tries to trace our prison bars as fully as possible, but without offering any hope or means of escape. k-punk writes that “There are very good Spinozist and Althusserian reasons for this [i.e. for recognizing the state of “reflexive impotence” in which we are trapped in late capitalist society] — seeing the network of cause-and-effect in which we are enchained is already freedom.” Perhaps; though this may be, from my perspective, too strong a claim, if not for k-punk’s work, then at least for my own, as it probes the conditions of a resolutely non-redemptive aesthetics. Rather than Spinoza, I think of Whitehead, who suggests a change in perspective that might work (as Isabelle Stengers puts it) “to induce a mode of excitement disclosing the possibility of affirming both what modern habits of thought denied, and what they took for granted” — a far more modest aim than the therapeutic “cure” (in a medical, not a moralistic sense) offered to us by Spinoza, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Freud, and the Marx who said the point was not to interpret the world, but to change it.
Okay, let’s see if I can get this straight. A right-wing Danish newspaper publishes viciously racist anti-Muslim cartoons, hoping thereby to stir up trouble. (I say “racist,” because the cartoons involved stereotypical “ethnic” images that were clearly directed against Arabs, not just against Muslim believers of no matter what race or ethnicity). The newspaper succeeds in its provocation, as violent protests spring up across the Arab and Muslim world. (The protests are often cynically fomented by dictatorial governments, and they focus exclusively on the insult to the Muslim religion, not mentioning at all the element of racism involved). Throughout Europe and North America, there is a great outcry supporting free speech; the cartoons are republished widely, as a statement of support for free speech and of solidarity with the Danish newspaper against the would-be censors of the Arab and Muslim world, who are said not to share, or even understand, the Western values of freedom and tolerance.
Meanwhile, the historian David Irving is sentenced to 3 years of jail in Austria for denying the Holocaust. Irving is a vicious ultra-right-wing provocateur, and basically an apologist for Hitler and the Nazi regime. (I do not know the extent to which Irving has made specifically anti-Jewish statements; but I would argue that his very denial of the factuality of the Holocaust is itself already anti-Semitic). But all the people who denounced various Arab and Muslim governments and peoples for their protests against the Danish cartoons are strangely silent about this quite similar case. I do not see newspapers all over the West reprinting Irving’s speeches and articles in solidarity with his free speech rights. I do not see anyone saying that this conviction indicates that Europeans and Christians are incapable of sharing, or understanding, the values of freedom and tolerance.
I do believe in free speech as a universal value. I do believe that we need to support the right of free speech even for racists, and even for people who make provocative statements with the deliberate intent of stirring up violence and trouble. (Speech is itself an action, of course, and it will always be necessary to draw a line somewhere; but I am in favor of extending things as far as possible in the direction of regulating and limiting speech-acts as little as possible). What I don’t like is the double standard according to which some hateful speech (like that of the Danish cartoons) is more worthy than other hateful speech (like Irving’s). Anybody who says that “however much I am in favor of the right to freely express one’s opinion, one cannot allow the denial of the Holocaust to hide behind overly generous freedom of expression” ought to take a similarly stringent line with the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. And anybody who defends (as I do) that newspaper’s right to publish its scurrilous trash ought similarly to defend David Irving’s right to publish his scurrilous trash. As Warren Ellis put it the other day, “The test of free speech always lays in that which is hardest to defend. It really would be nice if maggots like these didn’t make the rest of us work so hard.”
Okay, let’s see if I can get this straight. A right-wing Danish newspaper publishes viciously racist anti-Muslim cartoons, hoping thereby to stir up trouble. (I say “racist,” because the cartoons involved stereotypical “ethnic” images that were clearly directed against Arabs, not just against Muslim believers of no matter what race or ethnicity). The newspaper succeeds in its provocation, as violent protests spring up across the Arab and Muslim world. (The protests are often cynically fomented by dictatorial governments, and they focus exclusively on the insult to the Muslim religion, not mentioning at all the element of racism involved). Throughout Europe and North America, there is a great outcry supporting free speech; the cartoons are republished widely, as a statement of support for free speech and of solidarity with the Danish newspaper against the would-be censors of the Arab and Muslim world, who are said not to share, or even understand, the Western values of freedom and tolerance.
Meanwhile, the historian David Irving is sentenced to 3 years of jail in Austria for denying the Holocaust. Irving is a vicious ultra-right-wing provocateur, and basically an apologist for Hitler and the Nazi regime. (I do not know the extent to which Irving has made specifically anti-Jewish statements; but I would argue that his very denial of the factuality of the Holocaust is itself already anti-Semitic). But all the people who denounced various Arab and Muslim governments and peoples for their protests against the Danish cartoons are strangely silent about this quite similar case. I do not see newspapers all over the West reprinting Irving’s speeches and articles in solidarity with his free speech rights. I do not see anyone saying that this conviction indicates that Europeans and Christians are incapable of sharing, or understanding, the values of freedom and tolerance.
I do believe in free speech as a universal value. I do believe that we need to support the right of free speech even for racists, and even for people who make provocative statements with the deliberate intent of stirring up violence and trouble. (Speech is itself an action, of course, and it will always be necessary to draw a line somewhere; but I am in favor of extending things as far as possible in the direction of regulating and limiting speech-acts as little as possible). What I don’t like is the double standard according to which some hateful speech (like that of the Danish cartoons) is more worthy than other hateful speech (like Irving’s). Anybody who says that “however much I am in favor of the right to freely express one’s opinion, one cannot allow the denial of the Holocaust to hide behind overly generous freedom of expression” ought to take a similarly stringent line with the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. And anybody who defends (as I do) that newspaper’s right to publish its scurrilous trash ought similarly to defend David Irving’s right to publish his scurrilous trash. As Warren Ellis put it the other day, “The test of free speech always lays in that which is hardest to defend. It really would be nice if maggots like these didn’t make the rest of us work so hard.”
“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth’s atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.”
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 68.
This quotation ought to have been an additional epigraph to my book Connected; but I forgot about it until now. “Forgot about it” means, of course, that I used it and incorporated it without being consciously aware of doing so. Connected is a book about how being connected (as “we” — the affluent portion of humankind — are increasingly being connected on the Internet, and as all human beings today are increasingly being connected by the globalized economic transactions of the “network society”) involves being in thrall to the powers of transnational Capital. I wrote about how this oppression, or enslavement, extends into our very bodies — “eyes and ears and nerves” — literally and physiologically, as well as metaphorically. And among the horrific examples of this enslavement I included vignettes on the privatization of free speech (taken from actual news stories) and even on the privatization of the atmosphere, so that we would have to pay in order to breathe (taken from the musings of a free-market economist, who recommended it as a cost-effective way to cut down on air pollution).
“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth’s atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.”
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 68.
This quotation ought to have been an additional epigraph to my book Connected; but I forgot about it until now. “Forgot about it” means, of course, that I used it and incorporated it without being consciously aware of doing so. Connected is a book about how being connected (as “we” — the affluent portion of humankind — are increasingly being connected on the Internet, and as all human beings today are increasingly being connected by the globalized economic transactions of the “network society”) involves being in thrall to the powers of transnational Capital. I wrote about how this oppression, or enslavement, extends into our very bodies — “eyes and ears and nerves” — literally and physiologically, as well as metaphorically. And among the horrific examples of this enslavement I included vignettes on the privatization of free speech (taken from actual news stories) and even on the privatization of the atmosphere, so that we would have to pay in order to breathe (taken from the musings of a free-market economist, who recommended it as a cost-effective way to cut down on air pollution).
I spent most of the past week in New York City, attending to family matters. (The basic purpose of the trip was so that my parents could spend some time with their grandchildren).
Whenever we were in our hotel room, and the kids were awake, we had the TV on, turned to CNN or MSNBC, watching images of the current catastrophe. I was struck, even more forcefully than usual, by the cognitive dissonance between what was seen, and what was said. Images of horror, covered by the most anodyne commentary conceivable. I remember, during the 1999 Seattle anti-WTO protests, when visuals of cops running amok were accompanied by one local anchorperson whining that her Christmas shopping had been disrupted by all the fuss and hubbub downtown. But this week’s coverage was far worse. Even as the reporters and commentators mentioned, for once, the usually taboo subjects of race and class, their overall tone and demeanor was working to muffle and diminish the impact of what we were seeing, to suggest that human benevolence was going to triumph over merely temporary difficulties. Soledad O’Brien, ‘on the scene’ yet standing firmly on dry land, didn’t break into a sweat, nor lose an ounce of her perkiness, as she reported that help was on the way. Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper reported the flooding, the starvation, the lack of medical care, in the same tone that they would use to describe chatting pleasantly with Donald Rumsfeld at a cocktail party. It wasn’t so much what they said, as how they said it.
Leftist philosophers, theorists, and cultural critics have usually been worried about the seductive power of images: the way that they disarm criticism by making What Is seem self-evident, by reifying particular moments and isolating them from their contexts, by preventing any analysis that would seek to go beneath surface appearances. And indeed, it’s true that images shorn of context have often been used for the most hideous propagandistic purposes. But here, in televisual feed coming from New Orleans this past week, we seem to have the reverse situation: images that ‘speak’ starkly of the ugly facts of race and class in America today, that show how the Powers That Be of government and business have relegated large numbers of human beings to the status of non-persons, that demonstrate eloquently that, however ‘natural’ the disaster, the differential experience of the victims is entirely man-made; while a flood (if I can use that metaphor) of speech and discourse strives to decontextualize and normalize these people’s suffering, and to ‘explain’ how, even in the face of sadness and tragedy, life goes on and the USA continues to be the greatest nation on earth.
I spent most of the past week in New York City, attending to family matters. (The basic purpose of the trip was so that my parents could spend some time with their grandchildren).
Whenever we were in our hotel room, and the kids were awake, we had the TV on, turned to CNN or MSNBC, watching images of the current catastrophe. I was struck, even more forcefully than usual, by the cognitive dissonance between what was seen, and what was said. Images of horror, covered by the most anodyne commentary conceivable. I remember, during the 1999 Seattle anti-WTO protests, when visuals of cops running amok were accompanied by one local anchorperson whining that her Christmas shopping had been disrupted by all the fuss and hubbub downtown. But this week’s coverage was far worse. Even as the reporters and commentators mentioned, for once, the usually taboo subjects of race and class, their overall tone and demeanor was working to muffle and diminish the impact of what we were seeing, to suggest that human benevolence was going to triumph over merely temporary difficulties. Soledad O’Brien, ‘on the scene’ yet standing firmly on dry land, didn’t break into a sweat, nor lose an ounce of her perkiness, as she reported that help was on the way. Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper reported the flooding, the starvation, the lack of medical care, in the same tone that they would use to describe chatting pleasantly with Donald Rumsfeld at a cocktail party. It wasn’t so much what they said, as how they said it.
Leftist philosophers, theorists, and cultural critics have usually been worried about the seductive power of images: the way that they disarm criticism by making What Is seem self-evident, by reifying particular moments and isolating them from their contexts, by preventing any analysis that would seek to go beneath surface appearances. And indeed, it’s true that images shorn of context have often been used for the most hideous propagandistic purposes. But here, in televisual feed coming from New Orleans this past week, we seem to have the reverse situation: images that ‘speak’ starkly of the ugly facts of race and class in America today, that show how the Powers That Be of government and business have relegated large numbers of human beings to the status of non-persons, that demonstrate eloquently that, however ‘natural’ the disaster, the differential experience of the victims is entirely man-made; while a flood (if I can use that metaphor) of speech and discourse strives to decontextualize and normalize these people’s suffering, and to ‘explain’ how, even in the face of sadness and tragedy, life goes on and the USA continues to be the greatest nation on earth.
In the wake of Bush’s statement endorsing the teaching of “intelligent design” theory alongside Darwinian evolutionary theory in the schools, I saw a debate on CNN between somebody from the Discovery Institute (the foundation behind the recent push for “intelligent design”) and Michael Shermer of Skeptic magazine. I was appalled. The Discovery Institute guy sounded open-minded and reasonable, with all his talk about new research and intellectual flexibility — though of course everything he said was pure garbage. On the other hand, Shermer was pompous and overbearing, the condescending voice of Authority, lecturing the public about the importance of peer-reviewed articles in prestigious journals, and actually saying at one point that only allowing the expression of ideas that have been properly peer-reviewed is “how we do things in a free society.” (He also kept on referring to “the marketplace of ideas,” evidently not realizing that the “marketplace of ideas,” like any other marketplace, has no concern for the truth or rationality he was otherwise trumpeting).
If you didn’t know anything about the subject, whom would you believe? Shermer’s performance justified everything Isabelle Stengers has said about the imperialist arrogance of official spokespeople for Big Science. Though ostensibly he was talking about the importance of rationality and of the objective gathering and weighing of empirical evidence, his affect was one of argument from authority, as if to say: “how dare you contest what we, the enlightened elite, have determined to be the case!” (Not to mention that, as an academic myself, I have ample experience with “peer review,” and I know how corrupt and dishonest it is). With supporters like this, Darwin doesn’t need enemies. Shermer, just like the Democratic Party, almost seems to go out of his way to justify all the sterotypes the Republicans and fundamentalists have been promulgating for years now about “liberal elitism” and liberals’ contempt for the common person. After hearing advocates for Science like Shermer, most Americans will find Bush to be speaking plausibly when he says that “intelligent design” ought to be taught alongside evolution because “part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought.”
In reality, of course, teaching “intelligent design” is an historical falsification. It is equivalent to teaching the theories of people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened, and of people who say that blacks were treated kindly and humanely under slavery. I doubt that even Bush would endorse Holocaust denial as a benevolent example of exposing people to different schools of thought. But the argument is never made along these lines, not in the courts, and not in the statements of any of the scientists who oppose creationism.
Of course, giving any legitimacy at all to “intelligent design” is actually a form of religio-political indoctrination; but recognizing this forces us, too, to recognize the unpleasant fact that no form of education is entirely devoid of indoctrination. (I am referring not only to formal education in the schools, but also to things like teaching my 3-year-old daughter to use the potty and to be polite and show consideration for other people). There’s no easy way out of this dilemma; it brings us to the limits of secular humanism/liberalism, which is the dogma I prefer over all others, except for the fact that it refuses to admit that it is one dogma among others, and which (like all dogmas) can only establish itself by vanquishing others.
I have no conclusions here, no suggestions as to how we can better defend historical truth against imposture (to give the whole question a more 18th century turn of phrase than perhaps it merits in these postmodern times). Currently science is losing the battle to religious fanaticism, and to a large extent this is science’s own fault (just as all the recent Republican victories are the Democrats’ own fault). Which probably just means that we are doomed (as I already said after Bush’s re-election).
In the wake of Bush’s statement endorsing the teaching of “intelligent design” theory alongside Darwinian evolutionary theory in the schools, I saw a debate on CNN between somebody from the Discovery Institute (the foundation behind the recent push for “intelligent design”) and Michael Shermer of Skeptic magazine. I was appalled. The Discovery Institute guy sounded open-minded and reasonable, with all his talk about new research and intellectual flexibility — though of course everything he said was pure garbage. On the other hand, Shermer was pompous and overbearing, the condescending voice of Authority, lecturing the public about the importance of peer-reviewed articles in prestigious journals, and actually saying at one point that only allowing the expression of ideas that have been properly peer-reviewed is “how we do things in a free society.” (He also kept on referring to “the marketplace of ideas,” evidently not realizing that the “marketplace of ideas,” like any other marketplace, has no concern for the truth or rationality he was otherwise trumpeting).
If you didn’t know anything about the subject, whom would you believe? Shermer’s performance justified everything Isabelle Stengers has said about the imperialist arrogance of official spokespeople for Big Science. Though ostensibly he was talking about the importance of rationality and of the objective gathering and weighing of empirical evidence, his affect was one of argument from authority, as if to say: “how dare you contest what we, the enlightened elite, have determined to be the case!” (Not to mention that, as an academic myself, I have ample experience with “peer review,” and I know how corrupt and dishonest it is). With supporters like this, Darwin doesn’t need enemies. Shermer, just like the Democratic Party, almost seems to go out of his way to justify all the sterotypes the Republicans and fundamentalists have been promulgating for years now about “liberal elitism” and liberals’ contempt for the common person. After hearing advocates for Science like Shermer, most Americans will find Bush to be speaking plausibly when he says that “intelligent design” ought to be taught alongside evolution because “part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought.”
In reality, of course, teaching “intelligent design” is an historical falsification. It is equivalent to teaching the theories of people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened, and of people who say that blacks were treated kindly and humanely under slavery. I doubt that even Bush would endorse Holocaust denial as a benevolent example of exposing people to different schools of thought. But the argument is never made along these lines, not in the courts, and not in the statements of any of the scientists who oppose creationism.
Of course, giving any legitimacy at all to “intelligent design” is actually a form of religio-political indoctrination; but recognizing this forces us, too, to recognize the unpleasant fact that no form of education is entirely devoid of indoctrination. (I am referring not only to formal education in the schools, but also to things like teaching my 3-year-old daughter to use the potty and to be polite and show consideration for other people). There’s no easy way out of this dilemma; it brings us to the limits of secular humanism/liberalism, which is the dogma I prefer over all others, except for the fact that it refuses to admit that it is one dogma among others, and which (like all dogmas) can only establish itself by vanquishing others.
I have no conclusions here, no suggestions as to how we can better defend historical truth against imposture (to give the whole question a more 18th century turn of phrase than perhaps it merits in these postmodern times). Currently science is losing the battle to religious fanaticism, and to a large extent this is science’s own fault (just as all the recent Republican victories are the Democrats’ own fault). Which probably just means that we are doomed (as I already said after Bush’s re-election).
It just struck me: when Nietzsche (in the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 11) evokes his fantasmatic master race, writing of “triumphant monsters who perhaps emerge from a disgusting procession of murder, arson, rape, and torture, exhilarated and undisturbed of soul, as if it were no more than a students’ prank,” he is in fact giving a perfect, precisely literal description of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. Though I can’t help thinking that Nietzsche would have been sorely disappointed and disillusioned if he had actually encountered such men, and realized that they were the living embodiments of his ideal.
It just struck me: when Nietzsche (in the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 11) evokes his fantasmatic master race, writing of “triumphant monsters who perhaps emerge from a disgusting procession of murder, arson, rape, and torture, exhilarated and undisturbed of soul, as if it were no more than a students’ prank,” he is in fact giving a perfect, precisely literal description of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. Though I can’t help thinking that Nietzsche would have been sorely disappointed and disillusioned if he had actually encountered such men, and realized that they were the living embodiments of his ideal.
More from The Age of Aesthetics.
The basic premise of capitalism has always been scarcity. Economists see deprivation, or “opportunity cost,” or the necessity of giving up something one wants in order to have something else instead, as the primordial – and necessary – condition of humankind. Even when we do not suffer from absolute want, we are still menaced with the fate of Buridan’s ass, which starved to death because it could not decide between two equally desirable sources of food. Such is the underlying premise of all neoclassical economics, including Virginia Postrel’s fantasy of consumer plenitude. Life is a matter of making difficult “choices,” as we measure costs and benefits “at the margin.” Aesthetic style, Postrel warns us, “is still one of many different possible goods. Choosing more aesthetic value means forgoing some alternative. The age of look and feel, like every other era, demands trade-offs.” Even in the Age of Aesthetics, we are still compelled to economize, to prioritize, and to sacrifice.
The classical justification for capitalism is precisely that it generates maximal returns from its presupposed initial conditions of scarcity. Scarcity is equivalent, in theological terms, to original sin. We can never know abundance, because we have been expelled from the Garden of Eden. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” No matter how affluent we become, we are still condemned to a form of life in which every decision we make, and every action we take, involves a concomitant sacrifice. This is the way in which Weber’s “Protestant Ethic” – that old Calvinist/Puritan asceticism, with its valuation of toil and rejection of waste and expenditure – still persists in the frenzied consumer capitalism of today. Even for F. A. Hayek, the intellectual godfather of postmodern free-market ideology, with his vision of the market as a marvelous information-processing, self-organizing, and evolving system, the bottom line is still that the market is good and right because it sub jects “man” to “the bitter necessity of submitting himself to rules he does not like in order to maintain himself against competing groups.” Producers must always battle over limited resources, and consumers must always decide how to allocate limited means. The Malthusian/Darwinian struggle of market competition is supposed to ensure that these resources are used, and these means expended, as efficiently as possible. Abundance would cause market rationality to fail, just as it would put a stop to the process of natural selection. It is only insofar as scarcity continues to work as a goad and a spur, so that “the discipline of the market” remains in full force, that production and innovation are able to continue.
Even Marx and Engels are far from despising this logic. In the Communist Manifesto, they note how toil driven by scarcity has created unprecedented accumulations of wealth. They celebrate how “modern industry has established the world market,” and how the capitalist mode of production has brought into being “more massive and more colossal productive forces” than ever before in history. Marx and Engels evince no nostalgia for pre-capitalist modes of production. Nor do they condemn capitalism, as many later critics have done, for multiplying artificial needs. The impact of capitalism, Marx and Engels say, is revolutionary; and to this extent the system is something to be praised and admired, rather than scorned. For “the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”
The irony behind Marx’s praise of revolutionary capitalism is really the “objective irony” of the capitalist system itself. For capitalism’s dirty little secret is that it cannot endure its own abundance. This is the key to Marx’s theory of crisis. Again and again, Marx and Engels say, “there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production.” The wealth that capitalism actually produces undermines the scarcity that remains its raison d’etre. For once scarcity has been overcome, there’s nothing left to drive competition. The imperative to expand and intensify production simply becomes absurd. In the face of abundance, therefore, capitalism needs to generate an imposed scarcity, in order to keep the system going. Capitalism refutes Malthus, but finds it necessary to reinvent him. We can see the fruits of this dilemma today when, even amidst unparalleled worldwide prosperity, and unprecedented accumulations of wealth, the Western welfare state is driven into bankruptcy, and Third World debt is made to mount to unsustainable levels.
What Marx and Engels call “over-production,” William Greider describes as the “supply problem” of global capitalism today. You can increase productivity and efficiency by paying workers less, and by hiring less of them. This is the point of capitalism’s continual “revolutionising [of ] the instruments of production.” In the last thirty years, new information and communications technologies, together with improvements in shipping and transportation, have made such a “revolution” possible. But every transformation has its price. Lowering wages and intensifying the exploitation of labor leads to losses in consumer purchasing power, even as there is more and more stuff for consumers to buy. In theory, lower prices based on lower production costs are supposed to compensate for the imbalance. In practice, however, the compensation is never enough. On a worldwide level, too many goods still remain unsold. Today, as Greider shows, we’re stuck with a”permanent oversupply.” It is not the case that there are too many people who want to drive, compared to the number of automobiles available (or even environmentally sustainable). It is rather the reverse: far more cars are being produced – even without using existing factories to capacity – than there are people who can afford to buy them. The system is stifled by its very success.
Scarcity is never a problem for capitalism; only abundance is. In the mid-twentieth-century, there were two great efforts to resolve the difficulties of oversupply. Both of them worked by stimulating demand. Fordism involved paying workers more, so that they could afford to buy the cars they made. Keynesianism increased demand directly, through government deficit spending. But in the 1970s, with the switch to flexible accumulation, these policies were largely abandoned, because they impeded the smooth flow of capital. Today, although the Bush Adminstration runs huge budget deficits, these do not serve to stimulate demand, since their main effect is to transfer wealth from the ma jority of the population to the extremely rich, who do not correspondingly raise their level of consumption. On the other hand, military Keynesianism – the United States government’s extravagant spending on its armed forces, – is the one “demand-side” policy still in effect. America’s weapons of mass destruction are perhaps the most spectacular examples of Bataillean unproductive expenditure that the world has ever seen. But aside from this, the social stimulation of demand is condemned as “waste”; all that is supposed to be left to the private sector. Even the basic “social safety net” – that last-ditch guarantees of subsistence that is all that remains of the welfare state – is denounced as paternalistic and intrusive. Institutions like the Federal Reserve Bank and the International Monetary Fund insist on deregulation, and only permit market-based, “supply-side” adjustments. Abundance is reigned in, in the name of market stability. In consequence, the more that productivity is unleashed, the more the “supply problem” returns with a vengeance.
More from The Age of Aesthetics.
The basic premise of capitalism has always been scarcity. Economists see deprivation, or “opportunity cost,” or the necessity of giving up something one wants in order to have something else instead, as the primordial – and necessary – condition of humankind. Even when we do not suffer from absolute want, we are still menaced with the fate of Buridan’s ass, which starved to death because it could not decide between two equally desirable sources of food. Such is the underlying premise of all neoclassical economics, including Virginia Postrel’s fantasy of consumer plenitude. Life is a matter of making difficult “choices,” as we measure costs and benefits “at the margin.” Aesthetic style, Postrel warns us, “is still one of many different possible goods. Choosing more aesthetic value means forgoing some alternative. The age of look and feel, like every other era, demands trade-offs.” Even in the Age of Aesthetics, we are still compelled to economize, to prioritize, and to sacrifice.
The classical justification for capitalism is precisely that it generates maximal returns from its presupposed initial conditions of scarcity. Scarcity is equivalent, in theological terms, to original sin. We can never know abundance, because we have been expelled from the Garden of Eden. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” No matter how affluent we become, we are still condemned to a form of life in which every decision we make, and every action we take, involves a concomitant sacrifice. This is the way in which Weber’s “Protestant Ethic” – that old Calvinist/Puritan asceticism, with its valuation of toil and rejection of waste and expenditure – still persists in the frenzied consumer capitalism of today. Even for F. A. Hayek, the intellectual godfather of postmodern free-market ideology, with his vision of the market as a marvelous information-processing, self-organizing, and evolving system, the bottom line is still that the market is good and right because it subjects “man” to “the bitter necessity of submitting himself to rules he does not like in order to maintain himself against competing groups.” Producers must always battle over limited resources, and consumers must always decide how to allocate limited means. The Malthusian/Darwinian struggle of market competition is supposed to ensure that these resources are used, and these means expended, as efficiently as possible. Abundance would cause market rationality to fail, just as it would put a stop to the process of natural selection. It is only insofar as scarcity continues to work as a goad and a spur, so that “the discipline of the market” remains in full force, that production and innovation are able to continue.
Even Marx and Engels are far from despising this logic. In the Communist Manifesto, they note how toil driven by scarcity has created unprecedented accumulations of wealth. They celebrate how “modern industry has established the world market,” and how the capitalist mode of production has brought into being “more massive and more colossal productive forces” than ever before in history. Marx and Engels evince no nostalgia for pre-capitalist modes of production. Nor do they condemn capitalism, as many later critics have done, for multiplying artificial needs. The impact of capitalism, Marx and Engels say, is revolutionary; and to this extent the system is something to be praised and admired, rather than scorned. For “the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”
The irony behind Marx’s praise of revolutionary capitalism is really the “objective irony” of the capitalist system itself. For capitalism’s dirty little secret is that it cannot endure its own abundance. This is the key to Marx’s theory of crisis. Again and again, Marx and Engels say, “there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production.” The wealth that capitalism actually produces undermines the scarcity that remains its raison d’etre. For once scarcity has been overcome, there’s nothing left to drive competition. The imperative to expand and intensify production simply becomes absurd. In the face of abundance, therefore, capitalism needs to generate an imposed scarcity, in order to keep the system going. Capitalism refutes Malthus, but finds it necessary to reinvent him. We can see the fruits of this dilemma today when, even amidst unparalleled worldwide prosperity, and unprecedented accumulations of wealth, the Western welfare state is driven into bankruptcy, and Third World debt is made to mount to unsustainable levels.
What Marx and Engels call “over-production,” William Greider describes as the “supply problem” of global capitalism today. You can increase productivity and efficiency by paying workers less, and by hiring less of them. This is the point of capitalism’s continual “revolutionising [of ] the instruments of production.” In the last thirty years, new information and communications technologies, together with improvements in shipping and transportation, have made such a “revolution” possible. But every transformation has its price. Lowering wages and intensifying the exploitation of labor leads to losses in consumer purchasing power, even as there is more and more stuff for consumers to buy. In theory, lower prices based on lower production costs are supposed to compensate for the imbalance. In practice, however, the compensation is never enough. On a worldwide level, too many goods still remain unsold. Today, as Greider shows, we’re stuck with a”permanent oversupply.” It is not the case that there are too many people who want to drive, compared to the number of automobiles available (or even environmentally sustainable). It is rather the reverse: far more cars are being produced – even without using existing factories to capacity – than there are people who can afford to buy them. The system is stifled by its very success.
Scarcity is never a problem for capitalism; only abundance is. In the mid-twentieth-century, there were two great efforts to resolve the difficulties of oversupply. Both of them worked by stimulating demand. Fordism involved paying workers more, so that they could afford to buy the cars they made. Keynesianism increased demand directly, through government deficit spending. But in the 1970s, with the switch to flexible accumulation, these policies were largely abandoned, because they impeded the smooth flow of capital. Today, although the Bush Adminstration runs huge budget deficits, these do not serve to stimulate demand, since their main effect is to transfer wealth from the ma jority of the population to the extremely rich, who do not correspondingly raise their level of consumption. On the other hand, military Keynesianism – the United States government’s extravagant spending on its armed forces, – is the one “demand-side” policy still in effect. America’s weapons of mass destruction are perhaps the most spectacular examples of Bataillean unproductive expenditure that the world has ever seen. But aside from this, the social stimulation of demand is condemned as “waste”; all that is supposed to be left to the private sector. Even the basic “social safety net” – that last-ditch guarantees of subsistence that is all that remains of the welfare state – is denounced as paternalistic and intrusive. Institutions like the Federal Reserve Bank and the International Monetary Fund insist on deregulation, and only permit market-based, “supply-side” adjustments. Abundance is reigned in, in the name of market stability. In consequence, the more that productivity is unleashed, the more the “supply problem” returns with a vengeance.
It’s been three weeks since I turned in my final grades; I don’t have to teach again until September. Which means I have been able to start writing again. I’m working on a new book, tentatively titled The Age of Aesthetics. (This, like almost everything about it, is subject to change). Now, I can’t see doing the book on the blog: writing, for me, is far too much of a slow process involving multiple revisions for that to be at all practical. (In fact, it’s more the reverse: things I right initially on the blog often turn out, after much excruciating revision, to be raw material for the book). But, since writing something long like this inevitably means blogging less, I thought I could at least put up some fragments, excerpts, and outtakes from the book as occasional blog entries. I hope it won’t end up sounding too much more pedantic than the stuff I usually post here.
So here goes.
Marx defines the fetishism of commodities as a “definite social relation between men which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” In the marketplace, as in “the misty realm of religion. . . the
products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race.” Traditionally, this is interpreted as a theory of alienation and illusion. According to the conventional reading, commodities are really just inert ob jects, things; but we pro ject our own human relationships onto these objects, so that they seem to us, fantastically and falsely, to be alive. Zizek, however, argues for a subtle inversion of this logic. It’s not that we literally believe in the magical properties of things, so much as that, while we remain “rational utilitarians, guided only by [our] selfish interests. . . the things (commodities) themselves believe in [our] place. . . [We] no longer believe, but the things themselves believe for [us].”
However, isn’t this a case where Zizek (for once) doesn’t go far enough? Zizek seeks to overturn the common assumption “that a belief is something interior and knowledge something exterior (in the sense that it can be verified
through an external procedure).” He argues, instead, that “it is belief which is radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people.” And this becomes the basis for his materialist theory of ideology. So
far, so good. But why does Zizek, in this turn to material practice, still characterize what he finds there in terms of “belief,” which is to say cognition? Following Zizek’s own logic, we should say that commodity fetishism is not a matter of belief or ideology. It doesn’t belong to the category of mystification, or intellectual (mis)apprehension, at all. Rather, fetishism or animism is a set of ritual practices, stances, and attunements to the world, constituting the way we participate in capitalist existence. Commodities actually are alive: more alive, perhaps, than we ourselves are. They “appear,” or stand forth, or “shine” (the word Marx uses is scheinen) as autonomous beings. Commodities don’t just “believe” for us; much more, they usurp our day-to-day lives, and act pragmatically in our place. The “naive” consumer, who sees commodities as animate beings, endowed with magical properties, is therefore not mystified or deluded. He or she is accurately perceiving the way that capitalism works, how it endows material things with an inner life. Under the reign of commodities, we live – as William Burroughs said we did
– in a “magical universe.”
And so, our encounter with commodities and brands is an affective experience, before it is a cognitive one. It’s not belief that is at stake here, but attraction and revulsion, euphoria and disgust, a warm sense of belonging, nostalgia, panic, and loss….
It’s been three weeks since I turned in my final grades; I don’t have to teach again until September. Which means I have been able to start writing again. I’m working on a new book, tentatively titled The Age of Aesthetics. (This, like almost everything about it, is subject to change). Now, I can’t see doing the book on the blog: writing, for me, is far too much of a slow process involving multiple revisions for that to be at all practical. (In fact, it’s more the reverse: things I right initially on the blog often turn out, after much excruciating revision, to be raw material for the book). But, since writing something long like this inevitably means blogging less, I thought I could at least put up some fragments, excerpts, and outtakes from the book as occasional blog entries. I hope it won’t end up sounding too much more pedantic than the stuff I usually post here.
So here goes.
Marx defines the fetishism of commodities as a “definite social relation between men which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” In the marketplace, as in”the misty realm of religion. . . the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race.” Traditionally, this is interpreted as a theory of alienation and illusion. According to the conventional reading, commodities are really just inert objects, things; but we project our own human relationships onto these objects, so that they seem to us, fantastically and falsely, to be alive. Zizek, however, argues for a subtle inversion of this logic. It’s not that we literally believe in the magical properties of things, so much as that, while we remain “rational utilitarians, guided only by [our] selfish interests. . .the things (commodities) themselves believe in [our] place. . . [We] no longer believe, but the things themselves believe for [us].”
However, isn’t this a case where Zizek (for once) doesn’t go far enough? Zizek seeks to overturn the common assumption “that a belief is something interior and knowledge something exterior (in the sense that it can be verified through an external procedure).” He argues, instead, that “it is belief which is radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people.” And this becomes the basis for his materialist theory of ideology. So far, so good. But why does Zizek, in this turn to material practice, still characterize what he finds there in terms of “belief,” which is to say cognition? Following Zizek’s own logic, we should say that commodity fetishism is not a matter of belief or ideology. It doesn’t belong to the category of mystification, or intellectual (mis)apprehension, at all. Rather, fetishism or animism is a set of ritual practices, stances, and attunements to the world, constituting the way we participate in capitalist existence. Commodities actually are alive: more alive, perhaps, than we ourselves are. They “appear,” or stand forth, or “shine” (the word Marx uses is scheinen) as autonomous beings. Commodities don’t just “believe” for us; much more, they usurp our day-to-day lives, and act pragmatically in our place. The “naive” consumer, who sees commodities as animate beings, endowed with magical properties, is therefore not mystified or deluded. He or she is accurately perceiving the way that capitalism works, how it endows material things with an inner life. Under the reign of commodities, we live — as William Burroughs said we did — in a “magical universe.”
And so, our encounter with commodities and brands is an affective experience, before it is a cognitive one. It’s not belief that is at stake here, but attraction and revulsion, euphoria and disgust, a warm sense of belonging, nostalgia, panic, and loss….