Category: Theory

Paolo Virno’s newly-translated book, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, is somewhat misleadingly titled, since it has very little to say about the concept of the multitude as featured in Virno’s previously-translated book, as well as in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Rather, it is a text composed of three essays, a longish one about jokes and the logic of innovation, flanked by two much shorter ones that deal with the ambivalent legacy of humanity’s linguistic powers.

The first essay argues against the notion, crystallized by Carl Schmitt but held more generally in the “common sense” of political philosophy and conceptual thought (from Hobbes, we might say, through Freud, right down to Steven Pinker), that any democratic or liberatory political theory is founded in the naive view that human nature is innately harmonious and good, whereas the more “realistic” view of the human capacity for “evil” mandates belief in a strong and repressive State. Virno argues, to the contrary, that if we are to worry about the “evil” in human nature — which is really our “openness to the world,” or our underdetermination by our biology, which is what makes it possible for us to have “a virtually unlimited species-specific ambivalence” — then we have all the more reason to worry about what happens when the power to act (to do evil as well as to mitigate it) is concentrated in something like the State’s “monopoly of violence.”

Theorists of the State, from Hobbes to Schmitt, posit the transition from a state of nature to a civil state, involving the rule of a sovereign (in the conservative version), or the rule of law (in the liberal version), as a defense against this innate aggressiveness that would be endemic to the state of nature. But Virno says that this transition is never complete; even a sovereignty based on laws still has to declare a “state of exception” in order to maintain its rule; and this state of exception is, in effect, a return to the never-surpassed “state of nature.” The state of exception is a state in which rules are never firm, but are themselves subject to change and reinvention. We move back from the fixed rules to the human situation that gave rise to them in the first place. Though the “state of exception” has often been described as the totalitarian danger of our current situation, it is also a state in which the multitude can itself elaborate new practices and new forms of invention.

The third essay in the book makes a similar argument, in a somewhat simpler form. Sympathy with others of our kind is an innate biological endowment of our species — here Virno makes reference to recent discoveries involving mirror neurons. But language frees us, for both good and ill, from this state of sympathy. Language gives us the power of negation, which is the ability to deny the humanity of the other (the Jew, the “Musselman,” the non-white) and hence to torture and kill them mercilessly. Since there is no possibility of returning to a prelinguistic state, the only solution to this potentiality for evil is to potentialize language to a further level, make it go meta-, have it reflect back on itself, in a “negation of the negation.” The power to objectify and kill is also the power to heal, to establish “reciprocal recognition.” Just as the state of exception is the ambivalent locus both of tyrannical imposition and of democratic redemption, so the potentiality of language is the ambivalent locus both of murderous destruction and of the elaboration of community, or of the multitude.

But both these essays are little more than footnotes to the long central essay, “Jokes and Innovative Action,” that is most of the book. Virno rather curiously takes Freud’s book on jokes as his primary text, despite disclaiming any interest in the Freudian theory of the unconscious. All his examples of jokes come from Freud; but he reclassifies these jokes in terms of their status as public acts of expression (“performative utterances” in a way, though precisely they do not positively refer back to institutions in the way that a performative utterance like “I sentence you to a year in prison” does), as gestures that disrupt the “normal” functioning of a rule, and as “paralogisms” (logical fallacies, or defective syllogisms).

The point behind all these classifications is a Wittgensteinian one. Most of the time, in “normal” situations, we apply rules to concrete situations unproblematically. But in fact a rule is never sufficient to dictate how it is to be applied in any situation whatsoever — any attempt to do so involves making a second rule to explain how to apply the first rule, then a third rule to explain how to apply the second rule, and so on in any infinite regress. There is always an incommensurability between abstract rules and pragmatic acts of applying those rules. We have to appeal, as Wittgenstein says, to actual practices in a given “form of life.” But these forms of life are themselves subject to change. A joke is a disruptive intervention in this process; it introduces an “aberrant” application of a rule, thus exposing to view the inherent incommensurability between rule and application. It throws us back upon the “form of life” in which the language game of which the rule is a part is embedded. It exposes the contingency of the form of life, the way it could be otherwise. It returns us to what Wittgenstein calls “the common behavior of humankind.”

Virno interprets this “common behavior” to be our species-specific biological endowment (basic “human nature”) — or with the “regularities” of human behavior that ultimately underlie all rules, but which explicit rules cannot fully encompass. The gap between an explicit rule and the way we can apply it refers back to this prior gap between rules and the regularities upon which they are based, but which they are never able to encompass. This is in turn the case because Virno — as we have seen –defines basic human, species-specific and biological regularities not as a fixed “nature” but precisely as an underdetermination, a reservoir of potentiality — something whose incompleteness can only be given fixed form by the still-more-indeterminate, and still-more-open-to-potentiality, power of language. Language is what fixes our biological potentiality into specific forms, but it is also (as jokes witness) what allows us to rupture any given fixity, and reconfigure things otherwise. Wittgenstein’s return to the “regularity” of empirically-observed human nature as the court of last appeal for what cannot be guaranteed or grounded by rational argument is also a kind of return to the state-of-exception-as-state-of-nature, or to the moment of emergece when language first emerges out of our innate drives, both reshaping and giving form to these drives, and opening them up to a still more radical indeterminacy.

Virno claims that this is what is happening, in miniature, in jokes when they twist intentions and laws, multiply meanings, and turn seemingly fixed principles into their opposites, or into sheer absurdity. He therefore takes the joke as a miniaturized version, or as a paradigm case, of innovation and creativity in general. The way that jokes play with and disrupt previously fixed and accepted meanings, is a small version of the way that any form of social innovation or creativity alters relations that were previously taken for granted or seen as fixed.

Ultimately, Virno says that jokes and all forms of social innovation play on the indeterminacy between grammatical statements and empirical statements — an indeterminacy that is the major focus of Wittgenstein’s last writing, collected in the volume On Certainty. Wittgenstein says, on the one hand, that certain statements are not in themselves either true or false — because they express the presuppositions that we are already taking for granted and pointing back to when we make any judgment of truth or falsity. For Wittgenstein, it is a weird category error to assert the truth of a statement like “I know that I have two hands” — because we do not “know” this, so much as we already presuppose it whenever we learn something, or come to know something. My sense of having two hands is precognitive (which is precisely why I do not have to check all the time to make sure that I really do have two hands, neither more nor less).

On the other hand, however, and at the same time, Wittgenstein says that this pre-knowledge is not absolute. Over time, there can be shifts in which sorts of statements are empirical ones (that can be true or false), and which statements are foundational or grammatical ones (already presupposed in an act of cognition). I might lose one of my hands in a horrible accident, for instance. Or some empirical fact might become so central to my understanding of everything that it would come to take on the form of a pre-assumed (grammatical) statement, rather than a merely empirical one. These things can and do change over the course of time. One language game morphs or mutates into a different one. For Virno, this is where social innovation takes place. Jokes are the simplest example of such a process of change: one in which “an openly ‘fallacious’ conjecture… reveals in a flash a different way of applying the rules of the game” (163), and thereby changes the nature of the game altogether, or allows us to stop playing one game and to play a different one instead. Virno expands this reading, in order to suggest that it really comprises a theory of crisis in Wittgenstein, so that his naturalism is something more than just a passive cataloging of various “forms of life” — something which he says is “stubbornly ignored by all of Wittgenstein’s scholars” (163).

How useful and convincing is all of this? To my mind, the best part of Virno’s argument is the last thing I mentioned: his parsing of Wittgenstein on the shadowy and always-changing boundary between the “grammatical” and the “empirical.” I think that this is a more informal and naturalistic version of what Deleuze calls “transcendental empiricism.” At any given moment there is a transcendental field that determines what is possible and what is not, and that delineates for us the shape of the empirical (which cannot be interpreted without it). At the same time, this “transcendental field” is not only not an absolute (in Kant’s language, as transcendental it is precisely not transcendent), but is itself something that has an empirical genesis within time, and that varies through time. (This is the point that I was trying to make in a previous posting: capitalism arises entirely contingently, but once it has imposed itself it takes on the shape of a transcendental, circumscribing both what we can experience, and how we can experience it).

Now, doubtless this always-open possibility of shifting the boundary between the empirical and the transcendental, or of turning one into the other, is where creativity and innovation are located. The bad, or mainstream, interpretation of Kant is the one that always insists upon the necessity of separating the transcendental (the regulative, the norm) from the empirical — that is how you get Habermas, for instance. A much better Kantianism is the one — it can be found explicitly in Lyotard, for instance; and I argue that it also works implicitly in Whitehead and in Deleuze) — that sees the gap or incommensurability between the transcendental/regulative and the empirical not as a barrier, so much as a space that is sufficiently open as to allow for innovative transformation.

So, to this extent I find Virno’s formulations (including his reading of Wittgenstein) extremely useful. But I also find Virno’s discussion curiously bland and incomplete, and this because of its failure (due to its “naturalistic” orientation?) to say enough either about aesthetics, or about political economy. I think, on the one hand, that the view of creativity and innovation implicit in Virno’s discussion needs to be thought at greater length within the framework of a post-Kantian aesthetics, and that this aesthetics needs to be affirmed precisely against the temptation (all too common in current academic discourse) to render it in “ethical” terms. (I won’t say more about this here, because it is the implicit argument of my entire book on Whitehead and Deleuze). On the other hand, I find Virno’s silence on matters of political economy quite disappointing in someone who explicitly presents himself as a Marxist or post-Marxist philosopher. Rather than deepening a sense of how we might understand the “multitude” in the framework of contemporary global capitalism, Virno opts for a much vaguer, and context-free, understanding of how social and cultural change is possible. He prefers to speak in terms of the State, and of the foundations of law and sovereignty, than in terms of modes and relations of production. I know my position here is an unpopular one, but I am enough of a “vulgar Marxist” to think that these sorts of political-philosophy distinctions are too vague and abstract to have any sort of traction when they are separated from “economic” considerations. (Again, this is an argument that needs to be pursued at greater length than I have the time or the patience to do here).

But the limitations of Virno’s argument in this respect are most evident when he discusses the forms of social change. Basically, he lists two. One of them is “exodus”: the Israelites, faced with the choice between submitting to the Pharaoh and rebelling against him, instead make the oblique move of leaving Egypt altogether. This for Virno is the exemplary situation of changing the parameters of what is possible, changing the rules of the game instead of just moving within an already-given game or form of life. The obvious reference, beyond the Bible, is to the Italian “autonomist” movement of the 1960s/1970s, which is the point of origin for Virno’s thought just as it is for Negri’s. Now, much as I admire the emphasis on obliqueness rather than dialectical oppositions, I also suspect that the idea of “exouds” is a too easy one — in the sense that, when capitalism subsumes all aspects of contemporary life, outside the factory as well as inside, it is as difficult actually to find a point of exodus as it is easy to make the declaration that one is doing so. “Lateral thinking” is a business buzzword more than an anti-capitalist strategy. Things like “open software” and “creative commons” copyright licenses are not anywhere near as radical as they sound — if anything, they not only coexist easily with a capitalist economy, but presuppose a capitalist economy for their functioning. All too often, what we celebrate as escapes from the capitalist machine in fact work as comfortable niches within it.

But Virno’s other form of change, “innovation,” is even more problematic. It seems to me to be symptomatic that Virno introduces his discussion of what he calls entrepreneurial innovation with the disclaimer that this involves “a meaning of the term ‘entrepreneur’ that is quite distinct from the sickening an odious meaning of the word that is prevalent among the apologists of the capitalist mode of production” (148); and yet, immediately after this caveat, he goes on to explain what he means by “entrepreneurial innovation” by referring to the authority of Joseph Schumpeter, the one theorist of the entire 20th century who is most responsible for the “sickening and odious” meaning that Virno ostensibly rejects. Virno insists that, for Schumpeter, “it would be a mistake to confuse the entrepreneur with the CEO of a capitalistic enterprise, or even worse, with its owner.” This is because, for Schumpeter, entrepreneurism is “a basically human aptitude… a species-specific faculty.” However, this disclaimer will not stand. On the one hand, the entrepreneur is not the same as the CEO or owner, only because the former refers to a moment of “invention,” whereas the latter refers to an already-established enterprise. When the businessman ceases to innovate actively, and instead simply reaps the fruits of his market dominance, then he has become a CEO instead of an entrepreneur. Bill Gates was a Schumpeterian entrepreneur in the 1970s; by the 1990s he had become just another CEO. The owners of Google, whose innovations surpassed those of Microsoft, are now making the same transition. Even if the entrepreneur is not yet a CEO, his actions are only intelligible in the framework of a capitalist economy. If the entrepreneur is successful, then he inevitably becomes a CEO. To say that Schumpeterian entrepreneurship is a basic human aptitude is precisely to say (as Virno doesn’t want to say) that capitalism is intrinsic to, and inevitablely a part of, human nature. (My own commentary on Schumpeter is available here).

I think that Virno’s reference to Schumpeter is symptomatic, because it offers the clearest example of how he fumbles what seems to me to be one of the great issues of our age: which is, precisely, how to disarticulate notions of creativity and innovation and the New from their current hegemony in the business schools and in the ways that actually-existing capitalism actually functions. VIrno fails to work through this disarticulation, precisely because he has already preassumed it. I myself don’t claim by any means to have solved this problem — the fact that we can neither give up on innovation, creativity, and the New, nor accept the way that the relentless demand for them is precisely the motor that drives capitalism and blocks any other form of social and economic organization from being even minimally thinkable — but I feel that Virno fails to acknowledge it sufficiently as a problem. In consequence, for all that his speculation in this book offers a response to the Hobbesian or Schmittian glorification of the State, it doesn’t offer any response to the far more serious problem of our subordination to the relentless machinery, or monstrous body, of capital accumulation.

I’ve been thinking for a long time about the following quote from Warren Ellis:

Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, “if he could plot, we’d all have to get together and kill him.” Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan’s writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded. If all you want is plot, go and read a Tom Clancy novel.

For me, this is a key to understanding genre fiction — or maybe I should just say, fiction in general. Plot is overrated. SF novels and comics and movies and the like where it’s all about the plot, how well it is put together, how if a gun is on the table in Act One, it has to be used in Act Three, and so on, bore the hell out of me. The better and more cleverly it is put together, the more it seems to me to be just a dumb, creaky mechanism which provides neither pleasure nor insight. I know that lots of people (readers/viewers as well as creators) get off on carefully crafted plots; but such things do nothing for me.

Which doesn’t mean that all I want to read is avant-garde novels which have no narrative whatsoever. Fiction entirely devoid of a plot is like movies entirely devoid of sound (i.e., not like “silent films” as they were actually exhibited pre-1928, because they always had musical accompaniment, but silent films shown today without the needed music, or arty silent films that have no soundtrack by choice) — they are extremely difficult to follow, or to keep my attention on, or to have any sort of temporal dimension at all — it is like not having short-term memory, each moment happens and then disappears in a void, never to be recalled or related to anything else. [One of the many brilliant things about Kenneth Anger’s films is how, even if he has no specific soundtrack in mind, he just drops in pop songs almost randomly because that energizes the films somehow, allows us to apprehend the images in their duration better — I love, for instance, the way that silly “things that go bump in the night” song accompanies Pierrot gesturing at the moon (or am I confusing two of his early films?)].

So. Warren is right, I think. Plot has to be there, but only as a “framework” allowing for the development of what really matters: “ideas and character.” Plot is like a medium or an atmosphere, “within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded.” Just like you need the atmosphere in order to live, so you need the plot in order to explore those ideas, and to see those personalities and relationships. But you’ve got to look through the plot, just as you look through the air to see somebody or something. Of course, there are times when the air itself is important (like when there is a tornado, or when it is heavily polluted), and there are certain times when the plot in itself is important. But for the most part, this is a realm in which McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” does not work.

Of course, ideas are important especially in SF; maybe not as much in some other genres. But what I am interested in here is the question of characters, or “personalities and relationships.” It seems to me that this is something very hard to talk about, yet it is an incredibly important part of how we react to fictions, and why we like some of them so much. It’s common to talk about “identification” with a protagonist, but I think this notion is so vague and general that it doesn’t get us very far. Indeed, William Flesch’s Comeuppance argues quite cogently against both the “identification” theory and the Aristotelian notion of an intrinsic human delight in mimesis. Our relations to the characters we encounter in fictional narratives (and to some extent in non-fictional narratives as well) is much more indirect and convoluted than an “identification” theory can account for.

But for the moment I want to think about only a certain subset of the question of characters in narrative. I want to think about the ways in which characters in genre fiction tend to be, well, generic. Or rather, I want to think about why the best and most interesting characters we encounter in fiction are generic ones. The greatest, most memorable, and most enjoyable characters in English-language fiction (leaving aside Shakespeare for the time being) are almost certainly those of Charles Dickens. And Dickens has no interest at all in anything like interiority, or psychological depth, or Freudian unconscious complexes. Of course, these terms are all 20th-century (or at least late-19th-century) ones, so that their application to Dickens could only be anachronistic. But that’s not the crucial point. What I mean is that Dickens’ characters are, in a curious way, indexical. By this I mean that they are each defined by a single trait, or at most by a couple of traits. These traits tend to be exaggerated, even caricatural. And the characters flagrantly exhibit these traits each time we see them — it is almost as if they were machines programmed to exhibit the same tic over and over. Or else, as if they were maniacal exhibitionists, except that the exhibitionism is not felt by the characters themselves, it is only orchestrated by the author.

What I am trying to get at is that Dickens’ characters are, in a certain sense, not “psychological” at all — they are all outer display, not inner depth. And that, far from detracting from either their “realism” or how compelling they are to the reader, it is precisely on account of what I am calling their outwardness, and their indexicality, that they are both naturalistically plausible and emotionally compelling to us. In a curious way, this mode of presenting character is “truer to life” than any degree of introspection or stream-of-consciousness detail could ever possibly be.

Why is this? I’m not entirely sure, but I think it is because Dickens’ indexical style of character presentation is very close to the way that we actually encounter, get impressions of, and judge people in the real world. I’d even say that, not only do we (obviously) not know other people through introspection, but also we do not even know ourselves through introspection. Self-knowledge is the hardest type of knowledge to obtain. I lack the disinterest that would be required in order for me to see myself objectively. And when I do introspect, the more I strain to examine myself, the more blurry and confused I appear to myself, and the less I am able to apprehend myself in any well-delineated way at all. I am unable to objectify myself, to caricature myself, let alone to characterize myself. Introspective fiction, similarly, tends not to be about character at all. It blurs and dissolves character into something else: at best, perhaps into Language or Style, or sometimes Time, in the great modernist novels. (Leopold, Stephen, and Molly are functions of Joyce’s stupendous linguistic inventiveness, rather than the reverse; Proust’s narrator is so profoundly introspective, so drawn into the flows of duration and memory that he scarcely exists as a “character” at all).

When characters are indexical, as they are in Dickens — and as they also are, for example, in classical Hollywood movies, i.e. those from approximately 1930-1960) — they have the odd quality of being both generic and singular. Generic, in the sense that they are all recognizable types. Singular, in that each one has some sort of unique inflection, something that is wholly idiosyncratic. What’s left out is everything in between these two poles: the individualizing characteristics that are less than generic, but more than the mere idiosyncrasies or tics that enable instant recognition.

Here, I am thinking in part of Thomas Wall‘s wonderful discussion of “character actors” in old Hollywood movies:

Character actors are absolutely familiar to us but they never possess “star quality”… [They] never work hard to disguise themselves or to dissolve into a role as in “method” acting. To the contrary, they play their various roles in much the same way, film after film, decade after decade. They are actors who become so familiar because their reality is entirely made up of their various roles such that their mannerisms, habits, looks, vocal tonalities, and gestures all become characteristic and as familiar as the actors themselves remain unfamiliar to us… They always play “types” and they are nothing apart from the types they play… We know them only as images and we see them only as images, that is, as allegories of themselves. Each role is another allegory.

These marvelous actors are therefore singularities… [They] are completely absorbed into the celluloid, the stock, the stereotypes they play so perfectly. They are “types” and they have assumed themselves as such. The character actor cannot be identified with any particular role but neither do they evoke nor express anything other than the role. They have a pure relation to cinema.

Wall describes these character actors as being at the same time “types,” or purely generic, and “singularities” — by which Wall means something like individual instances that can serve as “examples” of some generic quality, but that have no content to them aside from being, in this way, exemplary. A certain character actor cannot be equated with Cowardice or Drunkenness overall — for he is only an individual instance (or instantiation) of one of these generic qualities. He is certainly not the quality in general. This is what makes him singular. But at the same time he is nothing other than a coward or a drunkard — this entirely defines his being. Walter Brennan is never anything more than the Western hero’s old geezer sidekick. Donald Meek is never anything more than the “timid, worrisome, reticent, cowering” figure he plays so often.

Wall is describing Hollywood character actors in explicit contrast to movie stars. Yet I would claim that, in classic Hollywood at least, the stars can also be characterized by this strange combination of the wholly generic and the wholly singular, with nothing in between. Of course, as Wall points out, we recognize the big stars by name, which is not the case with the character actors. But “John Wayne,” “Cary Grant,” and “Katherine Hepburn” are in fact as much generic figures as the character actors are. It is just that the “types” they embody are themselves. You can’t imagine John Wayne playing Hamlet, because whatever role he plays, he is always John Wayne. In each of his roles, Wayne is a singular instance of John-Wayne-ness, nothing more and nothing less. In some of his roles, he is unabashedly heroic, while in others he may even deconstruct his own heroicness (e.g. The Searchers). But even though he is the only instance of the generic type that he embodies, he still appears always, and only, as a singular example of that type.

The telling contrast, I think, is not between character actors and stars, but between the actors of classical Hollywood (significantly, Wall names Thelma Ritter, Elisha Cook Jr., and Thelma Ritter) and those who belong to more recent times, from the “New Hollywood” of the 1970s to today. Today, for the most part, characters are supposed to be specified — they are all supposed to have “plausible” backstories and motivations. This is partly due to the ubiquity of Method Acting (Wall emphasizes how the generic/singular nature of character actors is incompatible with anything like the Method), and partly due to the way screenwriting conventions have changed, or screenwriting has become “rationalized” (this is due in part to screenwriting classes). The idea is that everything in the narrative — every detail, everything about a character — has to be “motivated,” assigned a plausible rationale. The generic is scorned as being cliche — which leads, in fact, to the much worse cliche that everything has its own particular reason for being, incomparable with anything else. In America today, each of us has his or her own “individuality” — and this is precisely the way in which we are all exactly alike, all atomized consumers with our own bundle of “preferences.” The generic and the singular are both repressed, in favor of the in-between ground of busy particularity.

The result of imposing motivation and backstories on everything is that the film’s characters lose their generic quality — and by that fact, they lose their singularity as well. Today’s character actors are completely interchangeable, in a way that Walter Brennan, Donald Meek, Thelma Ritter, etc., were not. They are interchangeable precisely because they are not typecast, but are rather each crafted as an “individual.” The trouble with such “individuals” is that they are not singular; the fact that each of them has his or her individual differences is precisely the characteristic by which they are all the same. And I think this is true of stars as well. Daniel Day-Lewis and Robert Downey Jr. are both totally brilliant actors whose performances I greatly admire. But they aren’t iconic in the way that John Wayne, James Stewart, and Cary Grant were; and this is because they are somehow too immersed in their particular roles, which vary from film to film.

[There are some exceptions to this, of course. The two Toms — Hanks and Cruise — are much more in the tradition of old-style Hollywood iconicity; but I can’t help it, they both seem to me to be completely lame when compared to Stewart or Grant. It may also be that the generic/singular formation can be revived, if not by individual contemporary actors, then by the pairing of such actors, as with the Ed Norton/Brad Pitt doublet of Fight Club. — Also, my old friend Philip Wohlstetter once suggested to me, rightly I think, that part of the brilliance of Titanic was precisely that it had dispensed with post-Method motivation, and gone back to the old Hollywood style of generic typecasting.]

To turn to another type of narrative — science fiction novels — you can see the same sort of contrast if you compare a novel by Philip K Dick to one by a contemporary hard-SF writer like Greg Bear. Nobody praises Dick for his delineation of character; yet part of what makes Dick’s novels so poignant is precisely that his metaphysical and socio-commodified predicaments, and paranoid dislocations, are always experienced by everyman, ordinary-Joe-who-just-wants-to-get-by characters. Joe Chip in Ubik is entirely generic/singular in the ways I have been describing; he has no “depth”. But isn’t this precisely why we feel so drawn in by his struggles, whether he is being shaken down by his refrigerator for a ten cent payment, or struggling for his life-after-death against a spirit of entropy and decay?

On the other hand, I just finished reading Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio, which is very interesting from an ideas point of view (it imagines a form of directed evolution, in which an endogenous retrovirus emerges from its thousands of years of sleep as “junk DNA” in the human genome, in order to orchestrate a new speciation, or at least subspeciation, of humanity). But I am really irritated by the way Bear introduces characters. Each one is givien a specification when first introduced. For example, chosen entirely at random: “A middle-aged Republic Security officer with the formidable name of Vakhtang Chikurishvili, handsome in a burly way, with heavy shoulders and a thick, often-broken nose, stepped forward.” No matter that we only meet this character for an instant on page 20, and never again in the course of a 524-page novel; we have to be given some “hook” that will de-genericize him, that will give him a certain “plausibility” as a character. The result is that all the characters of Darwin’s Radio get muddled, precisely because of the way that we have been given details to distinguish them. We know a lot more about the novel’s protagonists, Kaye Lang and Mitch Rafelson, than we ever do about Joe Chip; but we never care about them anywhere near as much as we do about Dick’s hero. And this is precisely because, like contemporary Hollywood actors and characters, they lack the generic dimension, and lack singularity as well, falling in between, so that their very plausibility turns them into stick figures without any deeper resonance.

I don’t mean to single out Bear for special censure; he is, in fact, one of the more interesting SF writers at work today. But, although I value SF very largely for its ideas, for the ways it tries to think through the hints of futurity that have already arrived in our present, and to negotiate the tricky shoals of the meeting between technology and socio-political actuality — I also like it because (in contrast to Bear’s technique, which is closer to mainstream fiction) it is one of the places where the generic-singular mode of character presentation is still viable. The same is true, and perhaps even more so, for comics — the medium of comics, with its tendency towards iconic images rather than fully naturalistic ones (as Scott McCloud notes), and with its linguistic compression (for reasons of space alone, text has to be brief and pointed, resonant and charged, rather than over-specific), almost requires the kind of iconic, generic/singular approach to character that I have been discussing.

Which is why, for instance, I am so looking forward to Matt Fraction’s forthcoming run with Invincible Iron Man, in which we are promised an epic battle between Tony Stark’s corporate fascism and the “post-national…open source ideological terrorism” of “bad guy” Zeke Stane.

William Flesch‘s Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction is, I think (by which I mean, to the best of my knowledge) the best work of Darwinian literary criticism since the writings of Morse Peckham. That may sound like faint praise, considering how lame most recent lit crit based on “evolutionary psychology” has been; but Comeuppance is a brilliant and startlingly original book, making connections that have heretofore passed unnoticed, but that seem almost self-evident once Flesch has pointed them out.

Comeuppance combines attention to cutting-edge biological theory with a set of aesthetic concerns that are, in a certain sense, so “old-fashioned” that most contemporary theorists and critics have completely forgotten even to think about them. Flesch is concerned with the question of vicarious experience: that is to say, he wants to know why we have so much interest in, and emotional attachment to, fictional characters, narratives, and worlds. He tries to account for why we are so inclined to the “suspension of disbelief” when we encounter a fiction; why we root for the good guys and hiss at the bad guys in novels and movies; why we find it so satisfying when Sherlock Holmes solves a case, or when Spiderman defeats the Green Goblin, or when Hamlet finally avenges his father’s death, or when we imagine a torrid romance between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

When such pleasures are thought about at all, they are usually attributed either to our delight in mimesis, or imitation (which was Aristotle’s theory) or to our identification with the protagonist of the fiction (which was Freud’s). But Flesch suggests that both these accounts are wrong, or at least inadequate. Far from identifying with Sherlock Holmes, Spiderman, Hamlet, or Captain Kirk, we admire and love them from a spectatorial distance, and with an intense awareness of that distance. And while our engagement with narratives requires a certain degree of “verisimilitude,” neither resemblance nor plausibility is enough in itself to generate the sort of engagement and attachment with which we encounter fictions.

Flesch proposes a very different explanation for this engagement and attachment from either the Aristotelian or the Freudian one. He bases it on recent developments in evolutionary biology, and particularly 1)the use of game-theoretical simulations to explain the development of intraspecies (and even inter-species) cooperation, ever since Robert Axelrod, in the 1980s, first used the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” game to model how competition could give rise to altruism; and 2)the studies by Amotz and Avishag Zahavi of “costly signaling” and the “handicap principle.” I will not try to reproduce here the details of these studies, nor the elegant logic that Flesch uses in order to put them together, and to bring them to bear on the problematics of fiction; I only wish to summarize them briefly, in order to move on to the consequences of Flesch’s arguments.

In brief, Flesch maintains: that evolution can lead, and evidently has led, to the development (in human beings, and evidently other organisms as well) of “true altruism,” or the impulse to help others, or the group in general, even at considerable cost to oneself; that this altruism requires that we continually monitor one another for signs or selfishness or cheating (because otherwise, selfish cheaters would always prosper at the expense of those who were honestly altruistic); that, as a result of this monitoring, we get vicarious pleasure from the punishment of cheaters and (to a lesser extent) from the reward of those who enforce this by actively ferreting out and punishing the cheaters; that altruism cannot just be enforced by the punishment of individual cheaters, but needs to be signaled, and made evident to everybody (including the cheater) as well; that — given the way that everyone is continually monitoring everyone else — the best way to make evident that one is indeed an altruist rather than a cheater is to engage in “costly signaling,” or altruistic behavior that is sufficiently costly (draining of wealth or energy, involving risks) to the one engaging in it that it has to be authentic rather than a sham; and that our constant monitoring and reading of these signals, our constant emotional reaction to vicarious experience, is what gives us the predisposition to be absorbed in, or at least emotionally affected by, fictions, so that we respond to fictional characters in narratives in much the same way that we do to real people whom we do not necessarily know, but continually observe and monitor. (There’s not that great a difference, really, between my reaction to Captain Kirk, and my reaction to Bill Clinton).

I haven’t done justice to the full subtlety and range of Flesch’s argument; nor have I conveyed an adequate sense of how plausible and convincing it is, in the detail with which he works it through. But the argument is as careful and nuanced as it is ambitious. It’s true that Flesch places his argument under the mantle of “evolutionary psychology,” something about which I remain deeply dubious. The proponents of evolutionary psychology tend to make global or universalist claims which radically underestimate the extent of human diversity and of historical and cultural differences. I am willing to accept, until shown otherwise, that in all human cultures people sing songs, and experience the physiological reactions that we know as “fear”, and have certain rituals of hospitality. But even if these are biological givens, “human nature” is radically underdetermined by them. For instance, there are enormous differences among cultures and histories as to which vocal performances count as songs, and why and when we sing, and what it means to sing, and when it is appropriate to sing and when not, and what emotions are aroused by singing, and who knows the songs and is expected to sing them, and what technologies are associated with singing, and so on almost ad infinitum.

But even as Flesch adopts the mantle of evolutionary psychology, and makes some general claims about “universal” human attributes, he is careful to avoid — and indeed, he severely criticizes — the reductiveness that often comes with such claims. For his evolutionist arguments have nothing to do with the usual twaddle about how women are supposedly genetically hardwired to prefer older, high-status men, and so on and so forth. Rather, Flesch’s arguments are directed mostly at showing how altruism and cooperation could have emerged despite the Hobbesian nature of conflict among Dawkinsian “selfish genes”; and, more broadly, at demonstrating how “biology has brought humans to a place where genetic essence does not necessarily ‘precede human existence’ ” (219 — Flesch says this after wryly noting that he is probably the first to have cited Sartre and evolutionary theorists together). Since altruism and cooperation — and for that matter cultural variability — evidently do exist among human beings, the potential for these things must have itself arisen in the course of evolution. So Flesch’s real argument is with those sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists — like Edward O. Wilson, and especially Steven Pinker, to cite the most famous names — who argue, basically, that all these things are a sham, and that underneath appearances we “really” are still only engaged in a Hobbesian war of all against all, and a situation of Malthusian triage.

That said, the real importance of the evolutionary categories that Flesch bases his argument upon — especially game-theoretically-defined altruism and Zahavian costly signaling — resides less in how adequate an explanation they provide of human origins, than in how useful they prove to be to help us think about our own investments in narrative, and the particular (Western) tradition of narrative that is most familiar to us. (Evolutionary categories are nor more nor less “universal” than, say, psychoanalytic categories; and both sorts of formulations work in many contexts, in the sense they provide insights, and allow us to generate further insights — whether or not they are actually valid “universally”). I have also long felt that one of the problems with evolutionary accounts of complex phenomena like human culture is that they commit the elementary logical fallacy of thinking that how a certain feature or trait originated historically determines the use and meaning of that feature today. But as Gould and Lewontin’s arguments about “spandrels” pointed out long ago, this need not be the case, and probably most often is not — many traits are non-adaptive byproducts of adaptations that occurred for entirely different reasons; and even directly adaptive traits are always being hijacked or “exapted” for different uses than those on account of which they originally evolved.

Flesch, unlike most of those who have tried to apply evolutionary arguments to human cultural contexts, takes full account of these complications and multiplications. The real justification of his use of ideas about costly signaling and “strong reciprocity” (or altruism that extends to the monitoring of the altruism of others), is that, in understanding the sorts of narratives that Flesch is interested in, they prove to be very useful indeed. The concepts that Flesch draws from evolutionary theory both elucidate, and are themselves in turn elucidated by, a wide range of familiar narratives, from Shakespeare to Hitchcock, and of characters in narratives, from Achilles to Superman. Even as Flesch provides a series of dazzling close readings, he uses these readings pretty much in the same way that he uses citations of biological research, so that Prince Hal and King Lear stand alongside peacocks and cichlids as exemplars of things like costly signaling and altrustic extravagance, and as subjects of our concern and fascination.

Flesch’s argument thus reflexively provides an account of both why the content of narrative moves us as it does, and of why the narrative form, as such, should be especially suited as a focus for meaningful emotional reactions. (I should note that, although Harold Bloom, in a blurb on the book’s back cover, praises Flesch for “giving a surprisingly fresh account of the workings of high literature,” and although the great majority of Flesch’s own readings and citations do in fact come from “high literature,” one of the great virtues of Flesch’s argument is that it applies equally well to “low” narrative forms (and that he also does cite these forms). The things that interest us in reading Shakespeare’s plays, or novels by Henry James and James Joyce and Marcel Proust, are pretty much the same things that interest us in reading stories about Superman, or Conan the Barbarian).

Beyond this, Flesch’s argument is noteworthy, and important, because of how it uses the tools of (usually reductive) science for determinedly nonreductive ends. Usually, the language of game-theory payoffs and cost-benefit calculations drives me crazy, because it is a hyperbolic example of what the Frankfurt School critics denounced as “instrumental reason.” The “rational choice” theory so prevalent these days among economists and political scientists idiotically assumes, against nearly all concrete experience, that human beings (and other organisms as well) make cognitive, calculated decisions (even if not consciously) on the basis of maximizing their own utility. More recently, some social scientists have sought to incorporate into their mathematica models the empirical evidence that people in fact respond emotionally, and non-rationally, to many situations. But most of this research has remained reductive, in that the calculus of probabilities and payoffs has remained at the center — the assumptions are still essentially cognitive, and calculative, even if emotions are admitted as factors that skew the calculations. Flesch is really the only author I have read who pushes these models to the point where they flip around, so that cognition is effectively subordinated to affect, rather than the other way around (“Reason is, and ought to be, only the slave of the passions,” as Hume — one of Flesch’s favorite theoretical sources — once wrote).

This is largely because of the way that Flesch defines his central concept of “altruism.” Drawing both on Hume and Adam Smith (his “moral philosophy” rather than The Wealth of Nations), as well as on contemporary biological game theorists and on the Zahavis, Flesch defines “altruism,” basically, as any other-directed action that is not driven by “maximizing one’s own utility,” and that indeed is pursued in spite of the fact that it decreases one’s own utility.” This means that things like vengefulness and vindictiveness, not to mention Achilles valuing glory more than his own life, or Bill Gates dispensing his fortune in order that he may congratulate himself for being a great philanthropist, are also examples of altruism, in that they are other-directed even at a cost to oneself, and therefore they absolutely contradict the “utility-maximization” assumptions of orthodox economics and “rational choice” theory. As Flesch puts it epigrammatically, “the satisfactions of altruism,” like Gates’ self-congratulation, “don’t undercut the altruism itself. Satisfaction in a losing act or disposition to act is itself a sign of altruism… Pleasure in altruism doesn’t mean that you’re not an altruist. It almost certainly means that you are” (35).

This is useful for the way that it undercuts both the model of Homo economicus that is the default understanding of humankind in the current neoliberal consensus, and the cynicism that sneers at the very possibility of altruism, generosity, cooperation, and collectivity on the grounds that these are “really” just expressions of egotism. Of course, egotism is involved; how could it be otherwise? But as Flesch insists, this doesn’t prevent the altruism, or concern for others at one’s own expense, from being genuine.

Altruism is by no means an unconditional good, of course; in Flesch’s account, it allows for, and can lead, not just to an insane vengefulness, but also to the kind of surveillance of people by one another that enforces social conformity and involves the persecution of anybody who acts innovatively, or merely differently. Nonetheless, the important point remains that we all act and feel in a social matrix, rather than as atomized individuals, and that people’s actions are not merely determined by the considerations of personal well-being (or at most, those of one’s genetic kin), but by a much broader range of social concerns and relationships and emotions (including vicarious emotional relationships with, or feelings about, strangers).

For this reason, even though Flesch states in his introduction that his aim is “to give an account… [of] why [narrative] should be as strange, complex and intellectual — as cognitive — as it is” (6), his arguments really contribute more to an affective approach to narrative than to a cognitive one. The tricky evolutionary arguments that Flesch works his way through are used in order to show how evolutionary processes — which in a certain sense, because they are based upon a competitive weeding-out of alternate possibilities under conditions of scarcity and stress, are necessarily “rational,” even though no actual rationality is involved in their workings — can nonetheless produce an outcome that is not itself “rational,” but instead involves extravagance, waste and “expenditure” (in the sense Bataille gives to this word), and that necessitates cooperation of some sort, rather than a continual war of all against all. And once the affects that drive us in these non-rational ways have evolved, they continue to have a life of their own (they may well be reinforced even when they are counter-productive; but they also may, in evolutionary terms, aid the survival of groups that adopt them or are driven by them, in contrast to groups that don’t: here Flesch draws upon the recent attempt by Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson to rehabilitate the notion of “group selection”).

This brings Flesch’s arguments in line with, and makes them an important contribution to, any attempt to think about social relations (and aesthetics as well) in terms that owe more to Marcel Mauss (with his complex notions of how gift-giving involves both gain and loss, both economic calculation and an openness to loss, both power/prestige and generosity) than to the currently hegemonic assumptions of neoclassical and neoliberal economics. Rather than Derridean musings on how an absolute gift is “impossible,” because there is always some sort of return, we get something more in line with Mauss’s (and Bataille’s) sense of how expenditure and potlatch, and other forms of gift-giving (including what might be called the “gift” of narrative, though Flesch conceives this much more complexly than Lewis Hyde, for instance, does) involve the intertwining of self-aggrandizing and altruistic motives, and allow a place in practice for the openings and ambivalences that both a rational-economic calculus, and a deconstructionist negatively absolutized logic would forbid us.

I’ll conclude with one small additional comment, which is that Comeuppance is not really a book about “narrative theory,” even though it sometimes presents itself as such. Though it tries to delineate the “conditions of possibility” for us to enjoy, crave, and develop an emotional investment in fictional narratives, it is (quite properly) much more concerned with these affects and investments than it is in the structure of narrative per se. And this turns out to involve our relation to characters much more than our relation to narrative as such (even when Flesch considers the latter, he does it in the framework of the relation between the audience and the fiction’s narrator, including both the fictive narrator and the author-as narrator). This seems to me to be in line both with Orson Welles’ insistence on the enigma of character as the center of our interest in film and other arts, and with Warren Ellis’ insistence that what he is really concerned with in the fictions he writes is the characters and the ideas; the plot is just a contrivance to convey those characters and ideas.