Hype (written before the Ohio/Texas primaries)

There seems to be this weird disconnect in the media picture of the election campaign. On the one hand, Obama seems already to have been enshrined by the media as the Democratic nominee. All the reporting stresses how he is surging, how enthusiastic his supporters are, how overwhemling his support is, etc. All the reporting on Clinton implies that her campaign is floundering, that she has lost direction, that her candidacy is all over, etc.

And yet, on the other hand: the polls in both Ohio and Texas show a very close race, not a blowout for Obama at all. These primaries could still go either way. I suppose this means Obama is surging relative to two months ago, when he was way behind in both states. But still, a close race in two large states, with Obama only holding a slight edge in already-chosen delegates, does not translate into a juggernaut for Obama and ignoble oblivion for Clinton. If Obama wins Texas and Ohio on Tuesday, then, yes, he is clearly in command and will be the nominee. But if Clinton takes one of these states, or even both — which is very much within the bounds of plausibility — will the media then start to hype Clinton’s “comeback”, and present Obama’s campaign as suddenly deflated (as they did after New Hampshire)?

What stinks here is how the media create drama, by falsely turning slight differences into grandiose all-or-nothing situations. This will ultimately exacerbate those slight distinctions, stoke the fires of bitterness, and as a result undermine the Democratic campaign in the fall no matter which is the nominee.

This ties in also to the overall worry I have about Obama. Considering how charismatic he is, and how much enthusiasm he arouses in his followers, why is it that (contrary to the media picture) he is not in fact leading by a blowout? Since Hillary has absolutely no appeal whatsoever to anybody aside from Gloria Steinem and a few old-line party hacks, how is it that her campaign is still (for the moment at the least, and despite the negative media hype) viable? It can only be by default — that people support her not for any positive reasons, but simply because they reject Obama: either because they are racist, or because they hate young people, or because they are afraid of “change” (however vague) and find politics-as-usual reassuring, or simply because they haven’t bought into the Obama hype machine (which is, unavoidably, creating its own backlash, via the snarky comments popping up recently about how it is like a cult, etc.).

So what worries me is that there are such definite limits to how far Obamamania can go. I am immune to it, but I support him anyway. On the other hand, nearly everyone I know (immediate family excepted) has been infected by the Obama meme to some extent at least. But my friends and acquaintances are hardly a representative sample of American voters. I strongly suspect that Obamamania doesn’t extend far enough: that all those affluent suburban white people who moved to the ‘burbs to get away from black people, and voted for Bush twice, will never accept Obama; that most of the so-called “Reagan Democrats” will end up supporting the “patriotism” (warmongering) of McCain over Obama’s mantra of “change”; that among white people, it is only the bourgie liberals and the Oprah-loving soccer moms who will vote for Obama, while the vast majority of white people in the “heartland” will reject him. (While white Obama supporters congratulate themselves on being “beyond race,” lots of other white voters will reject Obama on grounds of “inexperience” or “naivete,” all the while swearing that of course their voting against him has nothing to do with his being black). Obama’s current lead in the polls against McCain is meaningless so long before the general election.

By the way, if Clinton thinks that the media favor Obama over her, she ain’t seen nothing yet — just wait until the media’s dramatization and amplification of Republican slanders against either Obama or Clinton overwhelms everything else in the fall. By election day, the only issues having any presence will be the ’08 version of swiftboating. The campaign will turn into either a desperate attempt by Clinton to convince voters that she is not a lesbian, or a desperate attempt by Obama to convince voters that he is not a Muslim.

In other words, we are probably doomed to another four years of nightmare, with President McCain sending more and more troops abroad, and appointing judges to the Supreme Court who will repeal Roe v. Wade. My hunch at this point is that, come Election Day, it won’t even be close. (Of course, I admit that I have always held to Jerry Lewis’ maxim: “expect the worst, and then you will never be disappointed.”)

Daniel Plainview

Stephanie Zacharek complains that Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is an enormous misfire:

Day-Lewis doesn’t so much give a performance as offer a character design, an all-American totem painstakingly whittled from a twisted piece of wood… I recently received an e-mail letter from a professional actor who was dismayed both by Day-Lewis’ performance and by audiences’ response to it: “Weird how so many people confuse ‘acting that you can see’ with great acting,” he wrote — as concise and honest a summation of the way we want to be impressed by craft as I’ve ever read…. Day-Lewis plays emotions, not objectives — that is, he decides on the emotion, or the effect, instead of allowing the emotion to emerge from the situation. We may know what Plainview is feeling (or not feeling) by the look on his face, but Day-Lewis, hampered by his heavy brocade cloak of technique, is less effective at navigating the fine gradations of action necessary to define a supposedly complex character. Why does Plainview feel and act the way he does? We never know… His performance in “There Will Be Blood” is wrought, not felt: It shows the grit of discipline and forethought but lacks spontaneity, fire, life… Day-Lewis portrays Daniel Plainview as if he were playing to a mirror, not an audience. The character’s self-loathing comes off, paradoxically and unintentionally, as a manifestation of an actor’s self-love…. Caught in the trappings of supposed greatness, [Day-Lewis] is just an actor, a puppeteer pulling a series of color-coded strings to make us think and feel.

(via Green Cine)

I quote this remarkable critique at length because I think it is a brilliant description of Day-Lewis’s performance. Except for one thing. Everything that Zacharek deplores about the performance is precisely what, to my mind, makes it so great. Day-Lewis’ performance “lacks spontaneity, fire, life,” because Daniel Plainview as a character is entirely devoid of these attributes. He’s an empty shell, a hollow man, a mask without a face, a collection of annoying tics and raging drives with no interiority behind it.

Or — to cite yet another blog — as American Stranger rightly put it, “Plainview is not really a character, not a psychological or biographical portrait of a human being, but a mask. There is more than a void behind it (no existentialism here) but far less than a man. ‘He’ is simply capital embodied in the shape of a familiar archetype…”

Day-Lewis’ mannerism is perfectly suited to this sort of (non)character. I think of the moment when the preacher boy Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) comes to Plainview to ask to bless the opening of the well. Plainview pauses (discomfited), then says (in a slightly stilted manner) words to the effect of how kind of you, yes, I will be glad for you to do that. And then, in the very next scene, Plainview ignores Eli entirely when he is opening the well, bringing forth Eli’s sister instead, keeping his face blank so as to offer no response to Eli’s own first imploring, and then angry looks.

At the end of the film, in Plainview’s final confrontation with Eli, Day-Lewis plays the part no differently; there is therefore a weirdly discomfiting disconnect between affective expression and action. And this is true of everything he does in the film. No matter how crazed, raging, and over-the-top Plainview’s words and actions are, the acting is not over-the-top at all; it remains bizarrely, overly mannered, and therefore disconcertingly flat and distanced.

And this utterly mannered “inauthenticity” is in fact the most terrifying thing about Plainview: it would be far more comforting if he were to rant and rage, or even just to hint at an inner life (no matter how inaccessible to us) in the way that Orson Welles does as Charles Foster Kane, or that John Huston does as Noah Cross in Chinatown (to name just some of the performances to which Day-Lewis’s has wrongly been compared).

For Plainview has no feelings to hide, let alone to express or to confess; as “capital personified,” he is truly Homo economicus, every move and gesture calibrated according to some calculus of utility maximization. One of the charming paradoxes of capitalist society is precisely that human beings almost never act in the ways that they are supposed to, according to “rational choice” theory or neoclassical economic theory; only Capital itself “behaves” this way. Even Plainview’s rashest and most impulsive acts, like the murders he commits, are crimes of calculation, or at least of mechanism, rather than crimes of passion. (Of course, murder is not “utility maximizing” if you get caught and prosecuted; but we are given little sense that Plainview ever will be).

In this way, Day-Lewis’ performance gives us a precise and powerful sense of just how “inhuman” and “monstrous,” capital-logic, or action according to so-called revealed preference, can be. Marx famously compared Capital to a vampire, dead labor feeding on living labor. There Will Be Blood suggests that the more accurate figure would be a zombie: Capital as undead, as animated from the outside by raging vitalistic forces, and utterly unable to “subjectively assume” these forces. Capitalism as a form of acting that gives (in Zacharek’s words) “a stylized performance rather than a naturalistic one.”

However, I must add that, in its stylization and antirealism, Day-Lewis’ performance precisely is naturalistic — understanding “naturalism” in the sense of Zola’s novels, or of von Stroheim’s Greed (the film of which There Will Be Blood is, as it were, the postmodern version). Naturalism, as Deleuze says in his discussion of von Stroheim, “describes a precise milieu, but … also exhausts it.” We do not get psychological portraits in naturalism, rather, “impulses are extracted from the real modes of behavior current in a determinate milieu, from the passions, feelings, and emotions which real men experience in this milieu” (Cinema 1, page 124). Day-Lewis’s performance is extracted from the milieu of feral-capitalist-early-20th-century-California in the same way that silver, and then oil, are extracted from the ground (hence the overwhelming physicality of Plainview digging underground in the almost wordless first ten minutes of the movie, as well as the visceral violence of the oil rig on fire, which conveys a “phallic” emotional charge in a way that Plainview himself — in Day-Lewis’ rigorous performance — never does). Plainview is a creature of “impulses” that never become “subjectified.” (The absolute equivalence between naturalist “impulse” and capitalist “rational calculation” is not in the least paradoxical, though it is a delicious irony of capitalist society, and one that could never have arisen in any other sort of social formation).

The way that Day-Lewis “inhabits” the (non)character of a soulless man who is entirely a vessel of Capital is even more astonishing than the way that, nearly two decades ago, he was able to inhabit the body and soul of a man ravaged by cerebral palsy, and inwardly triumphant over his outer adversity. In a few days, we will see if the Academy has the wit to award Day-Lewis a second Oscar.

From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain

FOOJ

Minister Faust‘s SF novel, From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, had me laughing from the first page to the last. But the book is also a mind-boggling, multi-leveled allegory of racism and corporate fascism in America today. Dr. Brain is so chock-full of references to pop culture figures and political events alike that it is virtually a roman a clef — except that the people and events it refers to inhabit the Marvel and DC universes as well as the one we actually live in. (There’s an excerpt from the novel here).

From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain presents itself as a psychological self-help-manual-cum-case-history for comic-book superheroes: Unmasked!: When Being A Superhero Can’t Save You From Yourself. The author of this self-help book, and thereby the narrator of the novel, is one Dr. Brain (or, more fully, Dr. Eva Brain-Silverman), a sort of Dr. Phil for the “extraordinary abled.” She has her hands full, dealing with superhero malaise and depression. All the major supervillians have been defeated, leaving thousands of superheroes with nothing much to do. With no target upon which to focus their crime-fighting energy, they are flailing about without any sense of direction, and falling prey to petty bickering, and to various forms of self-destructive behavior. It’s the superhero equivalent of post-Cold War anomie: with no Evil Empire left to fight, there is no sense of purpose, no source of morale. Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” has left all the superheroes feeling worse than useless. Pending the invention of a new enemy (which of course will turn out to be “terrorism”), the superheroes need Dr. Brain’s help in order to attain “self-actualization.”

The superheroes signed up for Dr. Brain’s therapy include such figures as The Flying Squirrel, Omnipotent Man, Power Grrrl, and the X-Man. The Flying Squirrel could best be described as a combination of Batman and Dick Cheney; he’s a quasi-fascist vigilante with all sorts of high-tech wizardry in his “utility belt,” and also the multimillionaire head of a multinational corporation which has a lock on the media, as well as the defense and surveillance industries. Omnipotent Man is a doofus-y, and naively hyperpatriotic, version of Superman (he comes from the planet Argon — instead of Krypton). Power Grrrl is sort of like Britney Spears with superpowers (though it turns out, in the course of the book, that this is mostly an act: Power Grrrl, unlike the real Britney, is pulling her own strings). X-Man, the key figure around whom the narrative turns, is an angry black militant with the super-ability of “logogenesis”: manifesting his words as actual things.

The novel’s brilliance has much to do with its exuberant linguistic and conceptual inventiveness. Faust gleefully rings the changes on all sorts of pop culture sensations and scandals, with superheroes as the celebrity targets of paparazzi and gutter journalists. The lives of the superheroes abound in episodes of drug addiction, hidden sexual fetishes, nervous breakdowns, and bitter family disputes — not to mention miscegenation, still a matter of shock and bewilderment, shame, hysterical confusion, and disavowed fantasies in our supposedly “post-racial” society. Even aside from the main plotlines, the book abounds in throwaway allusions to superheroes run amok, and to crazed scientific experiments and neo-colonialist endeavors that leave catastrophic “collateral damage” in their wake. Faust is brilliant in seeing superhero comics as the key to understanding the construction of social reality in a world dominated by the military-entertainment complex.

Faust also mixes and matches styles and languages, with everything from groaner puns (we meet supervillains like Zee-Rox, who can imitate anything, and Sara Bellum, who has terrifying mental powers), to ridiculous dialect-speech (Omnipotent Man’s gee-gosh-Norman-Rockwellesque-cornball-middle-American lingo; or the Germanic accent of Wonder-Woman-like superhero Iron Lass, originally a goddess from the Norse pantheon), to hyperbolic racial invective, to tabloid-style excited overstatement, to hilariously convoluted psychobabble and grotesque mixed metaphors. On one page, X-Man disses another superhero of color as “a slack, slick, loose-dicked, willingly no-self-control, no-zipper tan-man who maks out his mind to convince himself he isn’t a senseless, thoughtless, shiftless, aimless, brainless, oversized pants-wearing, forty-ounce-loving, penis-fixated, self-underrated supreme champeen of galactic niggativity” (page 148, quoted again on page 331). On another, Dr. Brain confides to her readers that “unraveling the bandages covering Kareem’s and Syndi’s psychemotional wounds was exhaustive work, since their bloodied psychic linens were so crusted together they’d congealed into experiential gore” (page 298). At still another point, Dr. Brain asks her patients to consider “how many of the psychemotional barnacles attached to the ship of my consciousness am I willing to burn off in order to sail freely across the ocean of well-adjustedness?” (page 225).

And so on.

But beneath all this exuberant postmodern linguistic play, From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain is a serious socio-political novel, focusing on the continuing impact of race and racism in America today. (Predominantly in USA/America, although Minister Faust himself is Canadian). X-Man’s “neurosis,” for which Dr. Brain endeavors to treat him, is in fact grounded in his experience of what W.E.B. DuBois famously called double consciousness:

this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,– an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

X-Man is divided — and therefore unable to attain what psychobabble would call an integrated selfhood, or in Dr. Brain’s terms “self-actualization” — by the fact that, on the one hand, he cannot escape or transcend the perspective of general American culture; yet, on the other hand, he can only feel alienated, excluded, and condemned by that culture. As he bitterly says at one point, he’s expected to stand for Truth, Justice, and the American Way; but this is a double bind, because the American Way is in fact incompatible with Truth or Justice.

What this means is that X-Man’s “psychemotional” (a favorite Dr. Brain word) torment and dysfunction — amply dramatized throughout the novel’s lurid, often ludicrous pulp plot twists — cannot be understood in entirely personalistic terms. Such torment and such dysfunction have a crucial (and crucially determining) social dimension. This is arguably true of all forms of so-called “neurosis” (indeed, I would make such an argument), but it is particularly evident in the case of racialized American double consciousness.

Throughout From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, X-Man’s double consciousness is narrated to us from a point of view that is absolutely unable to discern it. Dr. Brain, with her forcedly-cheerful self-help philosophy, is an unreliable narrator — X-Man even accuses her explicitly at several points of being an unreliable narrator — to the extent that she continually misunderstands and misframes everything that X-Man says to her. She contextualizes all of X-Man’s complaints as being pathological and neurotic, a result of “insubordination and racial antagonism” (page 27) — even when they are pretty clearly rational. Above all, Dr. Brain diagonses X-Man as suffering from RNPN (Racialized Narcissistic Projection Neurosis), whereby people of color (and superheroes of color) have a chip on their shoulder about past racism that supposedly no longer exists. According to Dr. Brain, X-Man has a pathological need to see himself as a victim, so that he can blame his own failures upon others. Unable to deal with the fact that white people accept him without racism, he has a compulsive need to act out in order to arouse their hostility towards him, so that he “prove” that racism still exists, allowing him then to act aggrieved and to play the victim.

So the narrating voice of From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain reproduces what has become the dominant ideology of our day: the claim that “we” are “beyond racism,” and that (as Dr. Brain herself puts it) “legislation and social progress have ensured that what was only a dream on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial a few decades ago has become a reality for all” (page 149). This claim allows white people to say, in all “good conscience,” that they are not racist (look! I watch Oprah! Look! I voted for Obama!), and that they only care about the content of someone’s character, not the color of their skin. To say this is to ignore all the ways that racism is institutional and socially embedded — it is to reduce the question of race to a matter of individual behavior, responsibility, belief, and “preference.” (This is, of course, the way that neoliberalism treats everything; since, as Margaret Thatcher said, “there is no such thing as society. There are only individuals, and families”). And the corollary of this ideology is to say that anybody who does worry about racism is simply hung up about it. In other words, black people are accused of themselves being racist (for the very reason that they perceive racism as existing), while white people get to congratulate themselves on being prejudice-free.

From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain effectively links the dominant American culture’s denial of its own racism, and self-congratulatory “multiculturalism,” with its therapeutic cult of self-help and self-responsibility. These moves are both aspects of the relentless personalization of everything that is a feature both of today’s global neoliberalism, and of a long American tradition of uplift and self-reliance. (This strain of American sensibility was already satirized by Herman Melville in his 1857 novel The Confidence Man). Dr. Brain’s advice to X-Man is to “begin by recognizing that you are an individual, not a social abstraction. Your destiny belongs to you, not to history, and whatever successes or failures you experience are of your own making. Take responsibility for your own happiness…” and so on and so forth (pages 150-151).

The novelistic brilliance of From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain has much to do with the irony by means of which this sort of psychobabbling drivel becomes the dominant voice of the novel — much as it is the dominant voice in American public discourse generally. As the novel moves towards its action-packed, slam-bang conclusion — as any tale of superheroes must — double consciousness is raised to a vertiginous pitch, as we simultaneously get X-Man’s account of political crisis and turmoil, and Dr. Brain’s dismissal of this account as mere paranoid projection. By the final pages, X-Man is dead, and the creepy Flying Squirrel is firmly in charge. We have witnessed what is basically a fascist coup d’etat combined with a racist mass lynching or pogrom; and the establishment of a new social order in which surveillance is ubiquitous, civil liberties are nonexistent, behavior is severely restricted and normalized, and multinational corporate profits are protected unconditionally. Yet this new world order is presented to the reader by the always upbeat Dr. Brain as a triumph of personal “self-actualization” and “psychemotional wellness,” as well as a set of unparalleled new marketing opportunities. In its offhanded and slyly ironic way, From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain both delivers a hilarious roller-coaster ride filled with comic book thrills and chills, and reminds us about what is really scary.

Cognitive capitalism?

I just finished reading Yann Moulier Boutang’s Le capitalisme cognitif (Cognitive Capitalism). Boutang is the editor of Multitudes, a French journal closely associated with Toni Negri. The basic thesis of his book — in accord with what Hardt and Negri say in Empire and Multitude — is that we are entering into a new phase of capitalism, the “cognitive” phase, which is as different from classical industrial capitalism as that capitalism was from the mercantile and slavery-based capitalism that preceded it. This is a thesis that, in general, I am sympathetic to. On the one hand, it recognizes the ways in which 19th-century formulations of the categories of class and property are increasingly out of date in our highly virtualized “network society”; while on the other hand, it recognizes that, for all these changes, we are still involved in what has to be called “capitalism”: a regime in which socially produced surpluses are coded financially, expropriated from the actual producers, and accumulated as capital.

Ah, but, as always, the devil is in the details. And I didn’t find the details of Boutang’s exposition particularly satisfying or convincing. To be snide about it, it would seem that Boutang, like all too many French intellectuals, has become a bit too enamored of California. He takes those Silicon Valley/libertarian ideas — about the value of continual innovation, the worthiness of the free software movement, and the possibilities of unlimited digital dissemination — more seriously, or at least to a much greater extent, than they merit. The result is a sort of yuppie view of the new capitalism, one that ignores much that is cruel and repressive about the current regime of financial accumulation.

There, I’ve said it. But let me go through Boutang’s argument a bit more carefully. His starting point, like that of Hardt and Negri, and of Paolo Virno as well, is what Marx calls “General Intellect” — a concept that only comes up briefly in Marx, in the “Fragment on Machines” which is part of that vast notebook (never published by Marx) known today as the Grundrisse; but that has become a central term for (post-)Marxist theorists trying to come to grips with the current “post-Fordist” economy. (Here’s Paolo Virno’s discussion of general intellect). Basically, “general intellect” refers to the set of knowledges, competencies, linguistic uses, and ways-of-doing-things that are embedded in society in general, and that are therefore more or less available to “everybody.” According to the argument of Virno, Mauricio Lazzarato, Hardt and Negri, Boutang, and others, Post-Fordist capitalism has moved beyond just the exploitation of workers’ (ultimately physical) labor-power, and is now also involved in the appropriation, or the extraction of a surplus from, all this embodied and embedded social no-how. Rather than just drawing on the labor-power that the worker expends in the eight hours he or she spends each day in the workplace, “cognitive capitalism” also draws on the workers’ expertise and “virtuosity” (Virno) and ability to conceptualize and to make decisions: capacities that extend beyond the hours of formal labor, since they involve the entire lifespan of the workers. My verbal ability, my skill at networking, my gleanings of general knowledge which can be applied in unexpected situations in order to innovate and transform: these have been built up over my entire life; and they become, more than labor-power per se, the sources of economic value. Corporations can only profit if, in addition to raw labor power, they also appropriate this background of general intellect as well. General intellect necessarily involves collaboration and cooperation; it arises, through, and is cultivated within, the networks that have become so important, and of such wide extent, in the years since the invention of the Internet. In this way, general intellect can be thought of as a “commons” (as Lawrence Lessig and other cybertheorists say), or as the overall framework of what defines us now as a “multitude” (rather than as a particular social class, or as a “people” confined to a single nation, as was the case in the age of industrial capitalism and the hegemony of print media).

All this is well and good, as far as it goes. While I would note that the phenomena described under the term “general intellect” have not just been invented since 1975, but have existed for a much longer time — and have been exploited by capitalism for a much longer time — I don’t doubt that they have been so expanded in recent years as to constitute (as the dialecticians would put it) “a transformation of quantity into quality.” (See my past discussion of McLuhanite Marxism). Let’s provisionally accept, then, Boutang’s assertion that enough has changed in the last 30 years or so that we are moving into a new regime of capitalist accumulation. The question is, how do we describe this new regime?

It’s the form of Boutang’s description of this transformation that I find problematic. He says that the new cognitive capitalism is concerned, not so much with the transformations of material energy (labor-power) into physical goods, as with the reproduction of affects and subjectivities, of knowledges and competencies, of everything mental (or spiritual?) that cannot be reduced to mere binarized “information.” I don’t really disagree with this, to the extent that it is a question of “in addition” rather than “instead.” But Boutang leans a little too far to the opinion that “cognitive” or virtual production (what Hardt and Negri call “affective labor,” and what Robert Reich calls “symbolic analysis”) has displaced, rather than supplemented, the production and distribution of physical goods and services. The source of wealth is no longer labor-power, he says, nor even that dead labor-power congealed into things that constitutes “capital” in the traditionally Marxist sense, but rather the “intellectual capital” that is possessed less by individuals than by networks of individuals, and that is expressed in things like capacity for innovation, institutional know-how, etc.

Boutang claims that this “intellectual capital” [a phrase I hate, because an individual’s skills, knowledge, etc. is precisely not “capital”] is not depleted daily (so that it needs to be replenished) in the way that physical labor-power is under industrial capitalism; rather, it is something that increases with use (as you do more of these things, you become better at them), so that the process of replenishment (learning more, gaining skills, improving these skills or virtuosities through practice) is itself what adds value. Also, this “intellectual capital” is an intrinsically common or social good, rather than a private or individualized one. It can only be realized through network-wide (ultimately world-wide) collaboration and cooperation. For both these reasons, the appropriation of this “general intellect” is a vastly different process from that of appropriating individual workers’ labor-power. All this is exemplified for Boutang in phenomena like online peer to peer file trading, and in the open source software movement — he sees collaborative production in the manner of Linux as the new economic paradigm.

Now, I am in favor, as much as anybody is, of violating copyright, and of open source (for things like academic publications as well as for software); but I do not believe that these can constitute a new economic paradigm — they still exist very much as marginal practices within a regime that is still based largely on private property “rights” and the extortion of a surplus on the basis of those “rights.” [I should say, as I have said many times before, that I am happy for my words to be disseminated in any form, without payment, as long as the attribution of the words to my authorship — to use a dubious but unavoidable word or concept — is retained]. Boutang is so excited by the “communist” aspects of networked collaboration, or general intellect, that he forgets to say anything about how all this “cognitive” power gets expropriated and transformed into (privately owned) capital — which is precisely what “cognitive capitalism” does. He optimistically asserts that the attempts of corporations to control “intellectual property,” or extract it from the commons, will necessarily fail — something that I am far less sure of. “Intellectual property” is an oxymoron, but this doesn’t mean that “intellectual property rights” cannot be successfully enforced. You can point to things like the record companies’ gradual (and only partial) retreat from insisting upon DRM for all music files; but this retreat coincides with, and is unthinkable without, a general commodification of things like ideas, songs, genetic traits, and mental abilities in the first place.

Boutang gives no real account of just how corporations, or the owners of capital, expropriate general intellect (or, as he puts it in neoliberal economistic jargon, how they capture “positive externalities”). He seems to think that the switch from mere “labor-power” to “general intellect” as the source of surplus value is basically a liberating change. I would argue precisely the opposite: that now capital is not just expropriating from us the product of the particular hours that we put in at the workplace; but that it is expropriating, or extracting surplus value from, our entire lives: our leisure time, our time when we go to the movies or watch TV, and even when we sleep. The switch to general intellect as a source of value is strictly correlative with the commodification of all aspects of human activity, far beyond the confines of the workplace. Just as the capitalist cannot exploit the worker’s labor per se, but must extract it in the form of labor power, so the capitalist cannot exploit general intellect without transforming it into something like “cognition-power” — and this is extracted from individuals just as labor-power is. When the division between physical and mental labor is made less pronounced than it was in the Fordist factory, this only means that the “mental” no less than the “physical” is transformed into a commodified “capacity” that the employer can purchase from the employee in a way that is lesser than, and incommensurate with, the “use” the employer gets from that power or capacity. Boutang makes much of the fact that cognition is not “used up” in the way that the physical expenditure of energy is; but I don’t think this contrast is as telling as he claims. The fatigue of expending cognitive power in an actual work situation is strictly comparable to the fatigue of expending physical power in a factory. And the stocking-up of physical power and cognitive ability over the lifetime of the workers entirely go together, rather than being subject to opposite principles.

Boutang seems to ignore the fact that the regime of “intellectual property” leads to grotesque consequences such as the fact that an idea that a Microsoft employee might have when she is taking a bath, or even when she is asleep (consider all the stories of innovative ideas that come to people in dreams, like Kekule’s discovery of the “ring” structure of benzene) “belong” to the corporation, and must be left behind if and when she moves on to another job. (Let me add that it is just as absurd to assert that an idea that I come up with from a dream “belongs” to me as it is to assert that the idea belongs to my employer. All ideas come out of other ideas; nothing I do is independent of all the store of “general intellect” that I draw upon).

Boutang also seems to buy into many other of the myths of cognitive capitalism. He endorses the idea that the “flexibilization” of employment (or what in Europe is often called “precarization”) is on the whole a good and progressive thing: it “liberates” workers from the oppression of the “salariat” (I am not sure how to translate this word into English — the “regime of salary,” perhaps?). Boutang goes so far as to point to the way “new economy” corporations in the late 1990s gave out stock options in lieu of higher salary as a harbinger of the way things are being rearranged under cognitive capitalism. This seems entirely wrong to me, because it is only a subset of highly skilled programmers, and executives, who get these options. As far as I know, the people who wash the windows or sweep the floors at Microsoft or Google do not get stock options. (I don’t think the people who sit at the phones to answer consumer complaints do either).

Not to mention that you’d never know from Boutang’s discussion that over a billion people in the world currently live in what Mike Davis calls “global slums”. William Gibson is right to say that “the street finds its own uses for things”; and there are certainly a lot of interesting and inventive and innovative things going on in the ways that people in these slums are using mobile phones and other “trickle-down” digital technology. (See Ian Macdonald’s SF novel Brasyl for a good speculative account, or extrapolation, of this). But all this goes on in an overall situation of extreme oppression and deprivation, and it can only be understood in the context of the “hegemonic” uses of these technologies in the richer parts of the world (or richer segments of the societies in which these slums are located).

Also, Boutang needs to account for the fact that WalMart, rather than Microsoft or Google, is the quintessential example of a corporation operating under the conditions of cognitive capitalism. Walmart could not exist in its present form without the new technologies of information and communication — it draws upon the resources of “general intellect” and the force of continual, collectively-improvised innovation for everything that it does. Also, and quite significantly, it focuses entirely upon circulation and distribution, rather than upon old-style manufacturing — showing that the sphere of circulation now (in contrast to Marx’s own time) plays a major role in the actual extraction of surplus value. Yet WalMart shows no signs of unleashing the “creativity of the multitude” in its workings, nor of replacing the “salariat” with things like stock options for its workers. On that front, its largest innovation consists in getting rid of the central Fordist principle of paying the workers enough so that they can afford to buy what they manufacture. Instead, WalMart has pioneered the inverse principle: paying the workers so little that they cannot afford to shop anywhere other than at WalMart. It might even be said, not too hyperbolically, that WalMart has singlehandedly preserved the American economy from total collapse, in that their lowered prices are the only thing that has allowed millions of the “working poor” to retain the status of consumers at all, rather than falling into the “black hole” of total immiseration. WalMart is part and parcel of how the “new economy” has largely been founded upon transferring wealth from the less wealthy to the already-extremely-rich. But this is a process that Boutang altogether ignores; he writes as if “neoliberalism” were some sort of rear-guard action by those who simply “don’t get” the new cognitive economy. In fact, though, neoliberalism is no mere ideology: it is the actual “cognitive” motor of cognitive capitalism’s development.

Boutang even buys into the neoliberal program, to the extent that he maintains that the role of financial speculation in the current postfordist regime is largely a benevolent one, having to do with the management of the newly impalpable sources of value in the “cognitive” economy. He denies that financial speculation increasingly drives economic processes, rather than merely reflecting them or being of use to them. He needs to think more about the functioning of derivatives in “actually existing capitalism.”

All in all, Le capitalisme cognitif buys into the current capitalist mythology of “innovation” and “creativity” way too uncritically — without thinking through what it might mean to detach these notions from their association with startups and marketing plans and advertising campaigns (and how this might be done). (As a philosophical question, this is what my work with Whitehead and Deleuze leads me to).

The book ends, however, with an excellent proposal. Boutang argues for an unconditional “social wage”: to be given to everyone, without exception, and without any of the current requirements that welfare and unemployment programs impose on their recipients (requirements like behaving properly, or having to look for work, or whatever). This social wage — he gives a provisional figure of 700 euros per month, or about $1000/month at today’s exchange rates) would be paid in recompense for the fact that “general intellect,” from which corporations extract profit, is in fact the work of everyone — even and especially outside of formal work situations. Boutang spends a lot of energy showing how this proposal is fiscally feasible in Europe today, how it would rejuvenate the economy (and thus lead, in the long run, to enhanced profits for the corporations whose tax payments would finance it). What he doesn’t say, however — and perhaps does not recognize — is that, even though this proposal is perfectly feasible in terms of the overall wealth of the world economy), if it were really adopted universally — that is to say, worldwide, to all human beings on the face of the planet — it would severly disrupt the regime of appropriation that he calls “cognitive capitalism.” This is yet another example of bat020’s and k-punk’s maxim that (reversing a slogan from May 1968) we must “be unrealistic, demand the possible.” The unconditional social wage is entirely possible in terms of what the world can economically afford, but it is “unrealistic” in terms of the way that “cognitive capitalism” is structured. Demanding it pushes the system to a point of paradox, a critical point — at least notionally.

Whitehead’s God

It took me much longer than I had hoped, but I have finally finished a first draft of my chapter on Whitehead’s notion of God. It’s longer than it should be, and a bit all over the place (digressive) — and yet touches too briefly on a number of things that it would be good to flesh out in greater detail. And I didn’t quite manage to explain how and why Whitehead’s God might be preferable even to Spinoza’s God (its only competitor) for the role of the philosophers’ God, or the atheists’ God. In any case, the God I discern in Whitehead is (as far as I can tell) rather different from the one found in process theology.

For what it’s worth, the article is here (pdf).

I’m Not There

As I have written before, I am pretty ambivalent about the whole Dylan mythology thing. Nonetheless, I found Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There very affecting, for the way it probes that mythology and makes it resonate. Haynes has six different actors playing six characters, all with different names and biographies, but all lightly fictionalized aspects of Dylan; and the movie as a whole tells their stories by blending together a motley assortment of film stocks (both color and black and white), genre markers, settings, and styles of editing and cinematography. In the abstract, this might sound like a dry intellectual conceit; but in practice it works fabulously, due both to the brilliance of all of the performers, and to the fluidity with which Haynes mixes and matches all those performances and styles. Everything is mediated and staged, and yet it all has a dreamlike suppleness and conviction. The move, for instance, from “Dylan” as an 11-year-old black kid (Marcus Carl Franklin) riding the rails to “Dylan” as an older man (Richard Gere), identified as a version of Billy the Kid who escaped Pat Garrett’s bullets, and his jail, and is now riding the rails to an unknown future destination — this shift seems “natural” and almost seamless, in the way that dream transformations always do as long as you remain inside the dream.

[I’m not going to try to track down the film’s ten million allusions, but I do feel compelled to mention that, in the sections with Gere, Haynes is referencing — among other things — Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, in which Dylan had a small role and for which, of course, he wrote the soundtrack. I only point this out because I think that Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is the most beautiful Western ever made. Some of Peckinpah’s gorgeous melancholy passes over into Haynes’ re-creation of a belated Western/cowboy/outlaw “Dylan.” In some “postmodern” works, all the citations of other “texts” tend to work like a jigsaw puzzle; it’s really just a matter of being clever enough, or nerdily obsessive enough, to “get” them all. But in I’m Not There, the flotsam and jetsam of alluded-to culture generally manages — if you know the allusion, and even when you don’t — to drag its affective associations along with it, so that you actually feel the way that the movie, like its subject, is a heterogeneous patchwork of things pulling you in all directions at once. I say this in the awareness that, as I am not a professional Dylanologist, there are certainly loads of allusions that completely passed me by.]

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is this. Although the film is certainly a neo-Brechtian exercise in critical distanciation, for the way it makes us realize how all of Dylan’s personae are fictional constructions, drawing both on “archetypes” of Americana, and on the media, and their ubiquity in the “present moment” of Dylan’s greatest prominence as an artist (the film mostly deals with the “Dylans” of the 1960s and 1970s, though there are dramatizations of later moments — like his 80s conversion to fundamentalist Christianity — as well) — although the film is that, it is also much more than that. Which is a way of saying that I’m Not There is affective as well as intellectual, and that it feels “intimate” even though it is all clearly distanced — or, better (to risk a Blanchotian formulation) that it makes us feel the intimacy of that very distance. All six “Dylans” are self-consciously performative; each one individually — to say nothing of their cross-references and resonances — displays the “self” as something manufactured, as something that can only present itself “in quotation marks” (i.e., by performing and by self-consciously calling attention to the fact that it is “merely” performing). And yet these six performances are all utterly compelling, by the very fact that — although they are not “authentic,” and in fact trash the very notion of authenticity (much as Dylan himself did when he played an electronic set at the all-acoustic folkie festival — an event that Haynes reproduces, not as it actually happenend, but in its full-blown mythical shock and splendor) there evidently is nothing “behind” them, no face behind the mask(s).

Bob Dylan is fascinating, of course, precisely because he is “not there”; and Haynes’ accomplishment is to put us in immediate contact with this not-thereness, and with the frenetic performativeness that at once covers over this absence, and expresses it: expresses it in the sense that all six personae in the film (six characters in search of an author?) are not trying to project a seeming “selfness” to cover over the void, so much as they are projecting this void itself, in order precisely to tell other people to go away and just leave him the fuck alone. (“Him”? this itself is not any real essence of “Dylan,” but rather a facade that each of the six “Dylans” expresses in his own way).

This is most evident in Cate Blanchett’s bravura transvestite turn as “Jude Quinn”: the pop-star “Dylan” visiting and performing in London, utterly seductive because utterly cold, a perfect narcissist, eyes hidden behind shades, continually dosed or overdosed on uppers, mean and belligerent to everyone, and always heaping scorn on any idea of authenticity, sincerity,self-revelation, political or personal committment, belief, or having anything to say. (The Blanchett sequences are supposedly based on D. A. Pennebaker’s Dylan documentary, Don’t Look Back, which I have never seen).

Dylan might seem as far removed from Andy Warhol as any two pop figures from the same decade could ever be; but I’m Not There explores, and refers back to Dylan himself, Warhol’s great question: “When a mirror looks at its reflection, what does it see?” Haynes’ six “Dylans” reflect everything and nothing. Their careers coincide with the upheavals of the 1960s, and with the consolidation of the consequences of those upheavals that was the 1970s. But they mirror these decades mostly by their refusal to express, to serve as a spokesman for anyone or anything: renouncing a “folkie” past, the various “Dylans” deny political intent (because songs don’t make anything happen, as several of them say), or even personal, self-expressive intent. (This may be why “Jack Rollins,” the “Dylan” played by Christian Bale, is the one who — after withdrawing from the scene in the early 1960s as a disillusioned folkie — re-emerges in the 1980s as a Jesus fundamentalist). (Though even this apoliticism is denied in an odd scene where Huey Newton tries to explain to Bobby Seale how “Ballad of a Thin Man” is really a radical song in support of the black liberation struggle — though this is an interpretation that Jude Quinn scornfully rejects).

Dylan’s songs are up for grabs, open for interpretation, precisely because they refuse to wear their meanings on their sleeves. But behind all the disjunctions and surreal metaphors,and even behind the invocations of a mythical “weird old America,” which are the one concrete (if bullshit) meaning that they still possess, they have an affective pull that can only be felt, in modes from hostile sarcasm to world-weary melancholy. And yet even these affects — which are the thing that really powers I’m Not There, filled as it is with Dylan’s music, performed both by Dylan himself and by many other artists — are finally expressions of a void, or of a desire that is too diffuse and disorganized and at second (or third, or fourth…) remove ever to speak its name, or of a mirror that is only able to mirror the act of mirroring itself.

Indeed, I think that this is the secret affinity between I’m Not There and Haynes’ previous film, Far From Heaven. Speaking of the 1950s melodramas by Douglas Sirk and others, that were his models for Far From Heaven, Haynes says:

“There’s something really direct about emotional themes in these films. They’re sort of pre-psychological. The characters in the Sirk films, their realizations are very much on the surface. They’re very much dealing with the quite apparent constraints of their society, and making quite apparent and overt decisions that usually mean depriving themselves of something that would make them very happy.”

— cited from here

Though Dylan is a figure of the “freewheeling” Sixties, rather than of the hyper-repressed Fifties, I think that his personae, as presented by Haynes, are in fact similarly “pre-psychological,” in the sense that their decisions and actions seem unmotivated, unconnected to any sort of “interiority.” We even get a glimpse of a Far From Heaven-like world, early in the film when the version of “Dylan” as an 11-year-old black kid who calls himself “Woody Guthrie” is invited to play in a well-to-do, white Southern liberal home (the year is 1959). It may be that, in terms of subjectivity, the (supposedly) unrepressed Sixties is not as far from the ultra-conformist and severely repressed Fifties as our standard mythologies would have it. This is a (seeming) paradox that Foucault might well have relished. It also has something to do, I think, with the fact that, for all that Haynes is celebrating continual transformation and self-reinvention (as opposed to the old mythology of a fixed, essential self) he nonetheless is doing this entirely mythologically — I mean with a mythology that (contrary to his practice in all his other films) he gives no hint of criticizing or deconstructing. Haynes’ Dylan is a hero of postmodernity, in much the same way that I made Dean Martin out to be such a hero, in a book that I published over a decade ago.

I didn’t blog a “top 10” list this past year, because I simply didn’t see enough films (or hear enough music) to be able to creditably put together such a list. I missed way too much. But of the American films released in 2007 that I did manage to see (and especially noting that Inland Empire doesn’t count here, because it was released in 2006, and that I still haven’t seenThere Will Be Blood), I’m Not There is right up there with Zodiac and Southland Tales. Nothing else I saw in the past year came close to any of these three.

I think, in a way, that I’m Not There and Southland Tales are complementary opposites. They both deal with the form of subjectivity (decentered, multiple, and not characterizable in terms of “authenticity” or its absence) that is correlated with, or that answers to, our age of media saturation and ubiquitous capital flows. And they both present this form of subjectivity without apologies, and without opposing it to (and also, without expressing nostalgia for) some sort of supposed lost, unified, and more authentic form of selfhood. But they do this in quite different ways, reflecting how Bob Dylan is different from, say, Justin Timberlake. Dylan is still a creature of myth, even though it is a sort of myth that could only exist in our contemporary mediascape. But “myth is gossip grown old,” as Stanislaw Lec is reputed to have said, and Timberlake is young enough, and lives in an age cynical enough, that his media presence still exists in the form of gossip, and resists congealing into myth. This is why Haynes’ film is retrospective, and deeply cinematic; it’s really about (both personal and cultural) memory. Whereas Richard Kelly’s film is prospective (forward-looking) and formally post-cinematic (it’s still a movie, not a tv show or video; but it’s a movie permeated with the effects of CNN and youtube): it’s about short attention spans and the continual effacement of long-term memory. I’m Not There is very much a film, in the cinephilic sense; Southland Tales is a real movie, but it isn’t in the least a film. Of course, it is not a question of choosing between these two movies, or these two modes. They offer vastly different perspectives on celebrity, on the mediascape, and on the strange detours of desire; but both of these perspectives are necessary ones. In 2006, Justin Timberlake offered the world a far better album than Bob Dylan did; but in 2007, they both, equally, embodied aspects of the media-drenched dreamworld from which we are unable to awaken, even if we wanted to (which, as I write this, in 2008, we evidently don’t).

Written and Posted Before the Polls Closed in New Hampshire

I think that Lenin is right to suggest that John Edwards “is pure Hollywood.” And I very much fear that Julianne is right to say that “the way [Obama] poses his populist ‘you did this, I am a conduit’ stance has YouTube generation written all over it – he makes everyone feel like a star.” It’s new media versus old media: that’s why Edwards’ campaign is floundering, while Obama’s is surging. (And the less said about Clinton the better: her husband is pure television, which positions him media-wise in between Edwards and Obama; but no media are capable of putting her across).

In other words: class struggle, which Edwards at least rhetorically appeals to, is an old-fashioned Hollywood “grand narrative”; it’s corny and old-fashioned, and nobody younger than a graying Boomer like myself could possibly believe in it any longer. Mr. Edwards Goes to Washington, indeed. Obama, on the other hand, makes everybody (or at least everybody who is young, or young at heart) feel good; he gives his fans “hope”, i.e. the possibility of feeling empowered, or “a star”; and he exalts “change,” all the while making sure that nothing actually will be changed. (If you are white and you vote for Obama, not only have you demonstrated that you yourself aren’t racist, you have made racism itself magically disappear).

My only consolation for this is that, of course, if Edwards were somehow elected, in the sort of thrilling turnaround that Hollywood hasn’t been able to pull off convincingly for years, he would prove to be thoroughly disappointing, since he wouldn’t really fight the power the way he claims, on the campaign trail, to want to.

The Head Trip; consciousness and affect

I’ve been reading Jeff Warren’s The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness, basically on the recommendation of Erik Davis. It’s a good pop-science-cum-therapy book, which explores basic modes of conscious experience, both nocturnal and diurnal, and combines accounts of what scientific researchers and therapists are actually doing with a narrative of Warren’s own subjective experiences with such modes of consciousness-alteration as lucid dreaming, hypnotic trances, meditation, neurofeedback, and so on. Warren maps out a whole series of conscious states (including ones during sleep), and suggests that consciousness in general (to the extent that there is such a thing “in general”) is really a continuum, a mixture of different sorts of mental activity, and different degrees of attentiveness, including those at work during sleep. These various sorts of conscious experience can be correlated with (but not necessarily reduced to) various types of brain activity (both the electric activity monitored by EEGs and the chemical activity of various neurotransmitters; all this involves both particular “modules” or areas of the brain, and systematic patterns running through the entire brain and nervous system).

The Head Trip is both an amiable and an illuminating book, and I really can’t better Erik Davis’ account of it, which I encourage you to read. Erik calls Jeff Warren “an experiential pragmatist in the William Jamesian mode,” which is both high praise and a fairly accurate description. Warren follows James in that he insists upon conscious self-observation, and looks basically at what James was the first to call the “stream of consciousness.” Like James, Warren insists upon the pragmatic aspect of such self-observation (what our minds can do, both observing and being observed, in all its messy complexity), rather than trying to isolate supposedly “pure” states of attention and intention the way that the phenomenologists do.

At one point, Warren cites Rodolfo Llinas and D. Pare, who argue that consciousness is not, as James claimed, “basically a by-product of sensory input, a tumbling ‘stream’ of point-to-point representations,” because it is ultimately more about “the generation of internal states” than about responding to stimuli (p. 138). But this revised understanding of the brain and mind does not really contradict James’ overall pragmatic style, nor his doctrine of “radical empiricism.” James’ most crucial point is to insist that everything within “experience” has its own proper reality (as opposed to the persistent dualism that distinguishes between “things” and “representations” of those things). Not the least of Warren’s accomplishments is that he is able to situate recent develops in neurobiological research within an overall Jamesian framework, as opposed to the reductive dogmas of cognitivism and neural reductionism.

Nonetheless, what I want to do here is not talk about Warren’s book, but rather speculate about what isn’t in the book: which is any account of emotion or of affect. Shouldn’t we find it surprising that in a book dedicated to consciousness in all its richness and variety, there is almost nothing about fear, or anger, or joy, or shame, or pride? (There’s also nothing about desire or passion or lust or erotic obsession: I am not sure that these can rightly be called “emotions,” but they also aren’t encompassed within what Warren calls “the wheel of consciousness”). There are some mentions of a sense of relaxation, in certain mental states; and of feeling a sort of heightened intensity, and even triumph, when Warren has a sort of breakthrough (as when he finally succeeds in having a lucid dream, or when his neurofeedback sessions are going well). Correlatively, there are also mentions of frustration (as when these practices don’t go well — when he cannot get the neurofeedback to work right, for instance). But that’s about it, as far as the emotions are concerned.

The one passage where Warren even mentions the emotions (and where he briefly cites the recent work on emotions by neurobiologists like Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux) is in the middle of a discussion of meditation (pp. 309ff.). The point of this passage is basically to discuss the difference between how Western rationalism has just tried to repress (in a Freudian sense) the emotions, whereas the Buddhist tradition has instead tried to “cultivate” them (by which he seems to mean something like what Freud called “sublimation”). Warren oddly equates any assertion of the power of the emotions with evolutionary psychiatry’s doctrine that we are driven (or “hardwired”) by instincts that evolved during the Pleistocene. The existence of neuroplasticity (as recognized by contemporary neurobiologists) effectively refutes the claims of the evolutionary psychologists — this is something that I am entirely agree with Warren about. But Warren seems thereby to assert, as a corollary, that emotions basically do not matter to the mind (or to consciousness) at all — and this claim I find exceedingly bizarre. Warren seems to be saying that Buddhist meditation (and perhaps other technologies, like neurofeedback, as well) can indeed, as it claims, dispose of any problems with the emotions, because it effectively does “rewire” our brains and nervous systems.

What is going on here? I have said that I welcome the way that Warren rejects cognitivism, taking in its place a Jamesian stance that refuses to reject any aspect of experience. I find it salubrious, as well, that Warren gives full scope to neurobiological explanations in terms of chemical and electronic processes in the brain, without thereby accepting a Churchland-style reductionism that rejects mentalism or any other sort of explanatory language. Warren thus rightly resists what Whitehead called the “bifurcation of nature.” Nonetheless, when it comes to affect or emotion, some sort of limit is reached. The language that would describe consciousness from the “inside” is admitted, but the language that would express affective experience is not. I think that this is less a particular failing or blind spot on Warren’s part, than it is a (socially) symptomatic omission. Simply by omitting what does not seem to him to be important, Warren inadvertently testifies to how little a role affect or emotion plays in the accounts we give of ourselves today, accounts both of how our minds work (the scientific dimension) and of how we conceive ourselves to be conscious (the subjective-pragmatic dimension).

Some modes of consciousness are more expansive (or, to the contrary, more sharply focused) than others; some are more clear and distinct than others; some are more bound up with logical precision, while others give freer reign to imaginative leaps and to insights that break away from our ingrained habits of association. But in Warren’s account, none of these modes seem to be modulated by different affective tones, and none of them seem to be pushed by any sort of desire, passion, or obsession. Affects and desires would seem to be, for Warren, nothing more than genetically determined programs inherited from our reptilian ancestors (and exaggerated in importance by the likes of Steven Pinker) which our consciousness largely allows us to transcend.

Another way to put this is to say that Warren writes as if we could separate the states (or formal structures) of attentiveness, awareness, relaxation, concern, focus, self-reflection, and so on, from the contents that inhabit these states or structures. This is more or less equivalent to the idea — common in old-style AI research — that we can separate syntactics from semantics, and simply ignore the latter. Such a separation has never worked out in practice: it has entirely failed in AI research and elsewhere. And we may well say that this separation is absurd and impossible in principle. Yet we make this kind of separation implicitly, and nearly all the time; it strikes us as almost axiomatic. We may well be conscious of “having” certain emotions; but we cannot help conceiving how we have these emotions as something entirely separate from the emotions themselves.

It may be that consciousness studies and affect studies are too different as approaches to the mind (or, as I’d rather say, to experience) to be integrated at all easily). Indeed, in this discussion I have simply elided the difference between “affect” and “emotion”: the terms are sometimes used more or less interchangeably, but I think any sort of coherent explanation requires a distinction between the two. Brian Massumi uses “affect” to refer to the pre-personal aspects (both physical and mental) of feelings, the ways that these forces form and impel us; he reserves “emotion” to designate feelings to the extent that we experience them as already-constituted conscious selves or subjects. By this account, affects are the grounds of conscious experience, even though they may not themselves be conscious. Crucial here is James’ sense of how what he calls “emotions” are visceral before they are mental: my stomach doesn’t start churning because I feel afraid; rather, I feel afraid because my stomach has started churning (as a pre-conscious reaction to some encounter with the outside world, or to some internally generated apprehension). The affect is an overall neurological and bodily experience; the emotion is secondary, a result of my becoming-conscious of the affect, or focusing on it self-reflexively. This means that my affective or mental life is not centered upon consciousness; although it gives a different account of non-conscious mental life than either psychoanalysis (which sees it in terms of basic sexual drives) or cognitive theory (which sees non-conscious activity only as “computation”).

There’s more to the affect/emotion distinction than James’ account; one would want to bring in, as well, Sylvan Tompkins’ post-Freudian theory of affect, Deleuze’s Spinozian theory of affect, and especially Whitehead’s “doctrine of feelings.” Rather than go through all of that here, I will conclude by saying that, different as the field of consciousness studies (as described by Jeff Warren) is from cognitivism, they both ultimately share a sense of the individual as a sort of calculating (or better, computational) entity that uses the information available to it in order to maximize its own utility, or success, or something like that. Such an account — which is also, as it happens, the basic assumption of our current neoliberal moment — updates the 18th century idea of the human being as Homo economicus into an idea of the human being as something like Homo cyberneticus or Homo computationalis. For Warren, this is all embedded in the idea that, on the one hand, our minds are self-organizing systems, and parts of larger self-organizing systems; and on the other hand, that “we can learn to direct our own states of consciousness” (p. 326). Metaphysically speaking, we are directed by the feedback processes of an Invisible Hand; instrumentally speaking, however, we can intervene in these feedback processes, and manipulate the Hand that is manipulating us. The grounds for our decision to do this — to intervene in our own behalf — are themselves recursively generated in the course of the very processes in which we determine to intervene. The argument is circular; but, as with cybernetics, the circularity is not vicious so long as we find ourselves always-already within it. This is in many ways an enticing picture: if only because it is the default assumption that we cannot help starting out with. And Jeff Warren gives an admirably humane and expansive version of it. Still, I think we need to spend more time asking what such a picture leaves out. And for me, affect theory is a way to begin this process.