Theriomorphous

Posted on facebook recently, this early 1990s 'Viz.' parody of the red-top / tabloid hatred of benefits recipients during the last Tory recession leads me to make several points. In fact I think that realistically I could write all day and possibly all week about it, but I will limit myself to just three:

Firstly, it's hard to shake off the overwhelming impression that today's newspapers, when seen in the light of this historical context, are nothing if not comics that have become autonomous and unmoored, in the popular consciousness, from their connection with some form of entertainment. Startlingly, it's as if they were originally put there to 'send up' a certain attitude, but became alienated from this function and ended up expressing the very thing they were intended to satirically mimic. Maybe this appearance can tell us something much more general about the level of cultural awareness, and how it has been progressively assaulted, stunned, and traumatised by the mediations and insertions of late capitalism, to the point of developing as a defence a schizophrenic disconnection with discursive level, a severe atonality that does not distinguish between different qualities of information. This atonia is also symptomatic of an always-on digital age, since the internet is most certainly guilty of presenting qualitatively different sources as if they were equally weighted or modally homogeneous. This peculiarity of the online plays into that 'fair world' level playing-field fallacy which supports the emergence of reactionary and counter-revolutionary groups like men's rights activists and the economic-freedom-is-also-freedom market libertarians. The always-already skewed and distorted frame in which social antagonisms are even approached or engaged with is obscured by the frame of the mediating device and the discursive apparatus. The reality of various social asymmetries, inequalities, and axes of oppression is elided in advance of any interaction, yet it is just such realities which were to be discussed.

Secondly, during the Big Benefits Row, Annabel Giles mocking Hopkins' puerility ('shhh, the adults are talking') got the audience clapping vigorously whereas argued refutations based on statistical and empirical information alone generally fell flat. Maybe there's a lesson in that about the cultural mythologies created by ideology, and how, while being resistant to argumentation alone, they are nonetheless susceptible to more 'formalist' tactics of interruption. In such a 'bear pit', as Owen Jones called it, defamiliarizing and foregrounding the level of discourse and the unspoken rules about how to approach and engage with an issue seems more effective than argumentation on the level offered. This apparently worked for Viz in the early 1990s, and to some extent it worked for Annabel Giles last week. The long-term argument of the Left, its economic and political rationalisation, on the other hand, generally falls on deaf ears or is only heard by those who already subscribe to it. Perhaps we need to process this realisation a bit more thoroughly. Can propitious tactical interruptions create the occasions for more weighty strategic interventions?

Thirdly, today's Edwina Curry, Katie Hopkins and a host of yellow press hacks must not have realised they were satirical figures in themselves. They make me want to dig out my old Fast Show and Harry Enfield episodes and view those Tim-nice-but-dim and Loadsamoney caricatures. How is it possible for modern, educated people to so perfectly coincide with the stock figure of the dim, opinionated and bigoted Right-winger without any cognizance of this? The fact that what is said and done today in all (apparent) earnestness by the Right wing has already been done and said thirty years ago as farce should, in any sane world, give us pause for thought. Is there some kind of limit at which stereotype and reality converge in a hyper-real semblance that undermines the distinction? These are very weird times. However, I've said that such commentary originates only in apparent earnestness, irrespective of the sincerity of those who only propagate and reproduce the message — largely those with petite-bourgeois aspirations, anxious about their own position within a social hierarchy. I say this because partly I am of the suspicion that dumbing down to a level that doesn't really exist, in the hope of actually creating that level as the practical and popular standard, is something like a regulative ideal of the Tory. It's not that all right-wingers are anti-intellectual, more that the reproduction of an anti-intellectual political climate is strategically expedient. People must never realise the true value of the abstract labour they collectively generate through intellectual activity or they will compose the dreaded thing: a self-conscious class, an agent with the ability to change history. Instead value must only ever be realised through the channels already expropriated by capital and regulated by state imposition of markets.

So, a brief pause in What I Am Supposed To Be Doing allows me a little time now.

Time I'm using to gather some thoughts together on Underdetermination. The thing to 'get' about this is that underdetermination in the sense of a weak naturalism is the condition for overdetermination in the sense of a particular historical social formation being able to 'set the agenda'. One could well say that the constitutive weakness of any state of nature opens the space for something like a State (as a stratified system of relations, of course). It is precisely because we are 'free' (not fully constituted ontologically) that we are so exposed to historical constitution, to determining forces. History burdens us because there is a hole where 'Nature' forgot to be that providential guarantor of universal consistency that scientific naturalism so often mistakes her for.

Enough.

[image:5:]

Stay on target… stay on target…

My age, my beast, who can
Gaze into your pupils
And with his blood cement
The vertebrae of two centuries?
Blood the Builder gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
The parasite must tremble
On the threshold of new days.
A creature drags its backbone
As long as it's alive,
While a wave toys
With the invisible spine.
The age of infant earth
Is like a child's soft cartilage –
Again the tender skull of life
Is brought to sacrifice like a lamb.
To wrest the age from captivity,
To begin a new world,
We must bind together like a flute
The knees of knobby days.
The age rocks the wave
With human anguish,
And the grass adder breathes
The golden rhythm of the age.
Although the buds will swell,
And a spray of green will sprout
Your spine has been broken,
My fair, pitiful age!
And with a meaningless smile
You look back, cruel and weak,
Like a once-agile beast,
On the track of its own prints.
Blood the Builder gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
And the warm cartilage of the seas,
Splashes to shore like a hot fish.
And from the high bird net,
From the damp azure boulders
Pours, pours indifference
On your mortal wound.

The work of Maurizio Lazzarato on 'the indebted man' is surprising. I've had it lying around for a few weeks and not had to time to dip into it but find myself glad I did so today, as it is helping me piece together more of my wiki page on neoliberalism. The following is a slightly amended version of a section on that page, which I felt was too significant given the current political and media climate not to publish to the blog.

Writing in the wake of the 2008 banking crisis—and its subsequent 'conversion' into a series of sovereign debt crises through governments bailing out failed financial institutions—Lazzarato criticises definitions of neoliberalism which, following Foucault, overplay its historical roots in liberalism at the expense of analysing its contemporary configuration.

The governmentality Foucault describes in The Birth of Biopolitics does not seem sufficient for understanding what it implies from the 1990s on, when governmentality began to limit the freedom which Foucault made the condition of 'liberalism'. The freedom in liberalism is always and primarily the freedom of private ownership and owners. When the 'rights of man' are threatened—by a crisis, a revolt, or some other phenomenon—regimes of governmentality other than liberal governmentality are required in order to ensure their durability. In this way, the problem of 'governing as little as possible' first created the conditions for, then gave way to, as has always been the case in the history of capitalism, ever more authoritarian politics. To read The Birth of Biopolitics in light of what is taking place today is to be struck by a certain political naivete, since the parable of 'liberalism' always describes, leads to, the same thing: crisis, limitations on democracy and 'liberal' freedoms, and the institution of more or less authoritarian regimes according to the intensity of the class struggle to wage in order to maintain the 'privileges' of private property.

For Lazzarato, Foucault's socially-pervasive 'techniques of biopower' operating alongside a liberal discourse on rights, freedoms and creative power no longer hold the explanatory merit or epistemologically paradigmatic grasp which they once did, as they fail to explain how post-crisis regimes have responded, i.e. by replacing the means by which the subjugation of bodies is maintained with more direct, centralised and authoritarian power brandishing a deeply moralising discourse.

[T]he current crisis is not only a financial crisis but also a failure of neoliberal governmentality of society. This mode of government founded on business and proprietary individualism has failed. By revealing the nature of power relations, the crisis has led to much more 'repressive' and 'authoritarian' forms of control, which no longer bother with the rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s of greater 'freedom', creativity, and wealth.

Lazzarato notes that under neoliberalism the democratic principle of 'social rights' is transformed into an 'affective environment' of biopolitical life management or 'processes of control and subjectivity production', in which a deeply moralised relation of indebtedness dominates and pervades all transaction between state and beneficiary:

With neoliberalism, the creditor-debtor relationship redefines political power, since the Welfare State not only intervenes in the "biology" of the population (birth, death, illness, risks, etc.), it requires ethico-political work on the self, an individualization involving a mix of responsibility, guilt, hypocrisy, and distrust. When social rights (unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, healthcare, rtc.) are transformed into social debt and private debt, and beneficiaries into debtors whose repayment means adopting prescribed behaviour, subjective relations between "creditor" institutions, which allocate rights, and "debtors", who benefit from assistance or services, begin to function in a radically different way, just as Marx foresaw.

The reference to Marx is to an early manuscript ('Comments on James Mill'). In this work, Marx identifies a series of features of the credit system and of the credit-debt relation, which includes the following characterisations:

Mutual dissimulation, hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness are carried to extreme lengths, so that on the man without credit is pronounced not only the simple judgment that he is poor, but in addition a pejorative moral judgement that he possesses no trust, no recognition, and therefore is a social pariah, a bad man, and in addition to his privation, the poor man undergoes this humiliation and the humiliating necessity of having to ask the rich man for credit.

[…]

Since, owing to this completely nominal existence of money, counterfeiting cannot be undertaken by man in any other material than his own person, he has to make himself into counterfeit coin, obtain credit by stealth, by lying, etc., and this credit relationship ? both on the part of the man who trusts and of the man who needs trust ? becomes an object of commerce, an object of mutual deception and misuse. Here it is also glaringly evident that distrust is the basis of economic trust; distrustful calculation whether credit ought to be given or not; spying into the secrets of the private life, etc., of the one seeking credit; the disclosure of temporary straits in order to overthrow a rival by a sudden shattering of his credit, etc. The whole system of bankruptcy, spurious enterprises, etc…. As regards government loans, the state occupies exactly the same place as the man does in the earlier example…. In the game with government securities it is seen how the state has become the plaything of businessmen, etc.

On the basis that in this document Marx foresaw something of the cynical and invasive bio-morality inherent to neoliberalism already latent in the credit capitalism of his time, and on the basis of his own investigations while engaged with activism on behalf of precarious workers in France, Lazzarato writes of the violence of the 'neoliberal' process by which social rights are transformed into debts:

[The transformation] into debt is part of a long process in which we have witnessed techniques for making a debtor "subject". Indeed, rights are universal and automatic since they are recognised socially and politically, but debt is administered by evaluating "morality" and involves the individual as well as the work on the self which the individual must undertake. The logic of debt now structures and conditions the process of individualization, a constant of social policies. Each individual is a particular case which must be studied carefully, because, as with a loan application, it is the debtor's future plans, his style of life, his "solvency" that guarantees reimbursement of the social debt he owes. As with bank credit, rights are granted on the basis of a personal application, following review, after information on the individual's life, behaviour, and modes of existence has been obtained.

Building critically on the work of Nietzsche and Foucault, Lazzarato identifies the Welfare State under neoliberalism with a form of subjectivation which prompts an individual to produce a certain kind of subjectivity that exists in a state of moral indebtedness and culpability, answerable to the State. These obligations and affects then become entangled in the existential conditions of the individual as they produce and relate to a "self", such that they are difficult to historicise.

The relationship with the institution always comes down to the user's "self". It requires the user/debtor to constantly consider the "self", to negotiate and compete with oneself. As Nietzsche says, the main purpose of debt lies in its construction of a subject and a conscience, a self that believes in its specific individuality and that stands as guarantor of its actions, its way of life (and not only employment) and takes responsibility for them. The techniques used in the individual interviews, which intrude on one's private life, that which is most subjective, push the welfare recipient to examine his life, his plans, and their validity. The State and its institutions act on subjectivities, mobilize the "innermost depths of the human heart" in order to orient behaviour.

Nietzsche and Marx converge on the realisation that, through relations of indebtedness, frequent periodic monitoring and practices of evaluation (including self-evaluations) become widespread techniques for governing people's behaviour. A governmentality of this kind does not control in an absolutely irresistible way, but rather induces in individuals a subjectivity which stands in the shadow of an abstract potential, posited by the State and internalised as its own, which it must always compete with and remain in debt to.

[E]ven in the case where the recipient resists this invasion of privacy, the violence against his person and subjectivity, he is no less troubled by the "work on the self" these institutions oblige him to undertake.

The generalisation of the creditor-debtor relation as a paradigm for all relations—something Lazzarato identifies as a fundamental feature of neoliberalism—thus condemns those in receipt of State assistance to an affective context of insurmountable indebtedness, obligation and constitutive unworthiness. The experience is not merely subjective or paranoid, and indeed is further objectivised by the institutionalised attitude of the State itself and its media representation in 'conditions of ubiquitous distrust created by neoliberal policies' furnishing the heart of all social relations with 'hypocrisy and cynicism'.

In the same way as credit turns trust into distrust, the Welfare State suspects all users, and especially the poorest, of being cheats, of living at society's expense by taking advantage of public assistance instead of working… In the same way, according to Marx, as credit encroaches on the private life of the person who applies for it by "spying" on him, the Welfare State invites itself into individuals' private lives in order to control the users' existence… [Spying] is what welfare agents increasingly do, since underlying their work is "distrust" of the poor, the unemployed, precarious workers, all the potential "cheats" and "profiteers".

[end of entry]

So there it is. I find these passages resonate deeply with what Alenka Zupancic has to say on 'bio-morality' in her book Odd One In: On Comedy, although there is nothing particularly amusing about the paranoia and insecurity emanating from a state department that supposedly attends to social security. Even this term is passée now, the 'Department for Work and Pensions' instead de-emphasising the collective nature of the fabric of social cohesion and interdependency in favour of highlighting a depoliticised, individualised labour and the personalised 'account' it generates. Zupancic's claim is that bio-morality fixates or anchors the moralising of the Other in a sort of biological vision of the individual, which she sees as a new from of racism or at least biologist 'racization' of individuals. I'm not married to the idea of 'racization' which she elaborates, especially since it risks conflating and possibly diffusing existing institutional racism in an over-generalised and impressionist picture, and so I would prefer to see the bio-morality she describes as a kind of 'moralising biologism'. However, when taken together what Zupancic and Lazzarato describe—as something at work in contemporary political ideology and at large in the media—goes some way to accounting for the attitude and behaviour of some government employees, such as the Jobcentre adviser who angrily insisted that a 'disgusting' mother leave the premises merely because she was breastfeeding her infant. Rather than being indignantly infuriated with this story, I can only confirm it as being the tip of the iceberg as far as Jobcentre advisers go. When out of work and signing on myself, I've overheard small groups of advisers grouped round a screen in their little cubicles eagerly discussing ways in which such-and-such an 'unworthy' claimant can be penalised, including advice to one another on how to exploit loopholes in the wording of official policies.

One doesn't need 'conspiracy theories' or visions of master puppeteers pulling the strings to see how this affective environment works, or how an otherwise probably quite rational person devolves into a cynical Othello tragically suspicious and jealous of even those who possess much less. It's tempting to simplistically summarise the problem as one of 'projection', whereby those in the grip of neoliberal ideology's valorization of competitiveness as the principle of markets disown their own introjects and characteristics (success through 'gaming' behaviour, venality, the performance of 'reputable' lies as a way of life) and unable to accept the unbearable sense of inauthenticy that confronting them would unleash, project precisely these characteristics upon an intrinsically unknowable Other.

All this is to miss the objective or social dimension to the distrust which Marx identified as the fulcrum of credit-debt relationships. The distrust, the reduction of the other to a shit of a person, a conniving and disgusting way of life too proximate to the animal and to the biological, is not merely a question of psychological selves disavowing their own functioning, but of a social relation which in an important sense precedes the psychological selves which then locate themselves within it. The adviser in the Jobcentre no doubt felt that the woman she was interviewing 'owed' it to her to be something more than a mother, that she 'owed' it to herself too, and 'should have' (the moral or deontic element) found a way to disguise the human neediness of a baby behind some kind of stoical professional veneer. This is the dimension of debt which Lazzarato, after Foucault and Marx, helps to elaborate. If the other is dehumanised then it is because this social relation is an inherently dehumanising one. And you only have to think briefly about debt-credit and its logic of prospective evaluation to reach the same conclusion that the young Marx did: it's a loss of human scale, or human measure. We can go beyond this 'humanist' conclusion though; it's too obvious to say that the debtor is reduced to a status of a pet, an object of enjoyment/disgust. It's not particularly more penetrating to say that the creditor has also lost their humanity. All this was already present in the early Marx's concept of alienation. At some point we have to move, as he did, beyond this also-moralising frame and talk in more systemic or structural terms, about the social form and the struggle of classes within that form for consciousness of their own position and, ultimately, ownership of the means to produce their own lives. This takes us beyond the scope Lazzarato has set for himself in The Making of the Indebted Man—he leans on Marx but never really takes it further—but as far as a richly descriptive investigation into the details and the subjectivity of neoliberalism goes, it remains a surprisingly good work. There is certainly a pleasure, ostensibly the same as in observational humour, in having everyday experiences of asymmetrical power, often humiliating and frustrating, broken down into their constituent moments and thoroughly described. There is a minor rush in being able to articulate exactly how it was done, like discovering the 'trick' behind some illusionist act. I worry however that this kind of critical descriptive work is not enough, far too 'sociological' and far too commonplace; the Freudian platitude that making the unconscious mechanism conscious is in itself the sought-after intervention doesn't really wash here. What we want is an inventive exploration of ways in which we can fight these situations both individually and collectively.

One final note: persistently lurking in the background while reading The Indebted Man was the spectre of Martin Heidegger's own Schuldigkeit, plaguing the reading with the sensation that as human beings (or as dasein, at least) we can't really help feeling indebted, that it's part of our condition to never be able to coincide with what is potential in us. What is interesting is the way Lazzarato addresses this 'existential' dimension obliquely, although in name, and ambiguously. The 'affective environment' created by creditor-debtor relations can fool us into believing that it is 'existential', that it is a given of our condition, just as one of the ways in which the capitalist social relation reproduces itself is through the ideological claim that 'twas ever thus and ever thus shall be'. The question lingers, however, of how we might have the capacity to feel such debt, and thus to become indebted, and this is the nagging thought that a dalliance with Heidegger leaves as a philosophical residue that can't be simply wiped away— the structure of dasein is such that it is always 'worried' about the way in which it is oriented as a trajectory in the world, trailing behind while reaching ahead. If temporality (or 'Time') is the essence of Being then one can say that dasein is always ontologically insecure, and this can damage the claim that a certain historical social relation is to blame for the great unease which we currently feel. If you accept this as a transhistorical fact of human existence, however, you can still argue that the historical creditor-debtor relationship, with its inherently distented, delayed and deferred structure, attempts (perhaps successfully) to 'hijack' this dynamic, and that in doing so it simultaneously gains the appearance of a transhistorical given itself. Lazzarato does not say as much, but there are indications in the text that this is what he is thinking.

---

Bibliography

Lazzarato, M., (2012) The Making of the Indebted Man, Semiotext(e), New York
Marx, K., (1823) 'Comments on James Mill?Elements d'economie politique Translated by J. T. Parisot?Paris, 1823' in Marx, K. (2005) Karl Marx, Friederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 3, Marx and Engels: 1843-1844, trans. Jack Cohen, International Publishers, New York

I found the following video lecture (delivered by David Harvey at the recent Dangerous Ideas for Dangerous Times festival) insightful into strategising actions in the city.

Harvey explains how volume one of Marx's Capital deals with production of value, whereas volume two deals with realisation of value. Drawing on this Marxian distinction can bring crucial insights that explain how production and realisation of value can occur in two completely different geographical regions, or in apparently disjointed domains of urban life. For example, an enormous amount of value is produced in Chinese factories, but is not realised in China as such, rather it is realised in places such as Wal-Mart stores in the USA.

In another example Harvey details how the Urban is often the field of value realisation: while a struggle completely limited to the workplace (place of value production) may lead to higher wages for the workers, if when they get home they find that their rents have significantly increased as well then it becomes obvious that the struggle has been too limited to the sphere of value production and needs to also take place in the sphere of value realisation, i.e. the Urban. While Marx and Engels did not spend much time on 'secondary' forms of exploitation such as Merchant Capitalism (which today would mean phone bills, utilities, rent, medical insurance etc.) these forms have proved themselves adept at extracting and 'taking back' what capitalism has conceded in the workplace.

Struggles in the city should not therefore limit themselves to the site of production (workplace), yet unfortunately unions are very much sectorised. In additions, unions cannot organise temporary workers, immigrant and precarious workers, such as domestic workers. Only human rights organisations with workers' charters have been able to, somewhat problematically, stand for the interests of such workers.

Harvey maintains that in strategising political actions questions about what kind of social relations, environmental conditions, transport facilities, education, healthcare, etc. urban life requires should be posed together with specific or sectoral struggles to create a mass agenda. This integration of wider questions about how urban life is produced and reproduced then geographicalises and urbanises the struggle, making it far more likely to succeed.

I also found interesting the discussion of how the upper-middle class is increasingly segregating itself, no longer participating in city life, forming gated communities, etc. This very much conforms to the thesis, held by one of the founding Autonomists, Tronti, that the post-Fordist production and neoliberal phase of capitalism represents an accelerated and heightened attempt of the capitalist class to 'emancipate itself' from the working class—while nonetheless basing its own perpetuation on the extraction of value from labour expropriated from the working class and the capitalisation (often these days financialisation) of all the means by which the working class has to exist. Certainly we see all this in the way that cities are subject to 'social cleansing' in which the poor are evicted and forcibly relocated outside the urban centres which are increasingly the residential preserve of the mega-rich. Then we have the intensified (and militarised) policing of urban public space and the systematic privatisation of public services. Finally there is the withering-away of the social fabric which used to be reproduced by social security. All these factors combine to create a society in which the capitalist class has ring-fenced its own assets in the city and lives off the labour of those with none. The general thrust of all this is that we need to take back our cities, assert strong claims to collectivised ownership of the Urban, and to advance a general demand for 'the kind of cities' we want, which will also be a demand for the kind of lives we want for ourselves and for future dwellers.

Another important phenomenon Harvey casts light on is the skew of the mainstream media away from representing the tribulations of vulnerable groups (which is to say, really, a massive bias in favour of the capitalist class), citing how the foreclosure crisis of 2008 had really already been going on for some time before it hit the headlines. In Colorado whole communities of African-Americans had already been affected adversely, but the crisis only became a properly mediated crisis, reported by the mainstream media, when it began to hit those 'special' representatives the white middle class. This to me sums up a great deal about our current mainstream media—exactly where its 'nerves' lie exposed in the social whole—and brings us back to the 2010 student protests and the summer riots that followed: it was only with the (fairly insignificant, in perspective) damage to petty-bourgeoisie shop-windows (or the Tory HQ window in the case of the Milwall protests) that the press showed any interest or deigned to register events.

Harvey's tactical suggestion is that we should hit the city in its other nerve-centers, transport, delivery, everyday Urban life involving as many local people as possible, when taking specific actions. This seems to me to be an important lesson; rather than just poking at the media's soft-spots and rattling its love story with 'hardworking shopkeepers' the means to involve and get onside urban infrastructure should be considered.

Needless to say I found much of this material so fascinating I've used some of it as the basis for a new wiki entry on realisation of value.

http://cengizerdem.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/alain-badiou-on-the-uprising-in-turkey-and-beyond/

(Reblogged)

A large proportion of the educated youth all across Turkey are currently leading a vast movement against the government?s repressive and reactionary practices. This is a very important moment in what I have called ?the rebirth of History.? In many countries around the world, middle school, high school, and university youth, supported by a part of the intellectuals and the middle class, are giving new life to Mao?s famous dictum: ?It is right to revolt.? They are occupying squares and streets, symbolic places; they are marching, calling for freedom, ?true democracy,? and a new life. They are demanding that the government either change its conservative politics or resign. They are resisting the violent attacks of the state police.

These are the features of what I have called an immediate uprising: one of the potential forces of popular revolutionary political action ? in this case, the educated youth and a part of the salaried petty bourgeoisie ? rises up, in its own name, against the reactionary state. I enthusiastically say: it is right to do so! But in so doing it opens up the problem of the duration and the scope of its uprising. It is right to take action, but what is the real reason for it in terms of thinking, and for the future?

The whole problem is whether this courageous uprising is capable of opening the way for a genuine historical riot. A riot is historical ? as was the case only in Tunisia and Egypt, where the outcome of the struggle has still not been determined ? when it brings together, under shared slogans, not just one but several potential actors of a new revolutionary politics: for example, in addition to the educated youth and middle class, large sectors of working-class youth, workers, women of the people, low-level employees, and so on. This move beyond the immediate riot toward a mass protest movement creates the possibility for a new type of organized politics, a politics that is durable, that merges the force of the people with the sharing of political ideas, and that thereby becomes capable of changing the overall situation of the country in question.

I know that a number of our Turkish friends are perfectly aware of this problem. They know three things in particular: that there must be no mistake about contradictions; that the movement mustn?t pursue the path of a ?desire for the West;? and that it is above all necessary to join with the popular masses in inventing, with people other than themselves ? with workers, minor employees, women of the people, farmers, unemployed people, foreigners, and so on ? forms of political organization that are currently unknown.

For example, is the main contradiction in Turkey today between the conservative Muslim religion and freedom of thought? We know it is dangerous to think so, even and above all if this is a widespread idea in the countries of capitalist Europe. Of course, the current Turkish government openly claims allegiance to the dominant religion. It is the Muslim religion, but ultimately that?s only a minor issue: even today, Germany is governed by Christian democracy, the President of the United States takes the oath of office on the Bible, President Putin, in Russia, constantly panders to the Orthodox clergy, and the Israeli government constantly exploits the Jewish religion. Reactionaries have always and everywhere used religion to rally a part of the popular masses to their government; there?s nothing particularly ?Muslim? about this. And it should in no way lead to regarding the opposition between religion and freedom of thought as the main contradiction of the current situation inTurkey. What should be made clear is that the exploitation of religion serves precisely to conceal the real political questions, to overshadow the basic conflict between the emancipation of the popular masses and the oligarchical development of Turkish capitalism. Experience shows that religion, as personal, private belief, is by no means incompatible with commitment to a politics of emancipation. It is surely in this tolerant direction, which requires only that religion and state power not be confused and that people distinguish in themselves between religious belief and political conviction, that the uprising currently underway must move in order to acquire the stature of a historical riot and invent a new political path.

Similarly, our friends are perfectly aware that what is currently being created in Turkey cannot be the desire for what already exists in the rich, powerful countries like the United States, Germany and France. The word ?democracy? in this regard is ambiguous. Do people want to invent a new organization of society, headed toward genuine equality? Do they want to overthrow the capitalist oligarchy of which the ?religious? government is the servant but of which anti-religious factions, in Turkey as in France, have been, and can become again, the no less efficient servants? Or do they only want to live the way the middle class lives in the major Western countries? Is the action being guided by the Idea of popular emancipation and equality? Or by a desire to create a solidly established middle class that will be the mainstay of a Western-style ?democracy,? that is, completely subject to the authority of Capital? Do they want a democracy in its genuine political meaning, namely, a real power of the people imposing its rule on landlords and the wealthy, or ?democracy? in its current Western meaning: consensus around the most ruthless capitalism, provided that a middle class can benefit from it and live and speak as it wishes, since the essential mechanism of business, imperialism, and the destruction of the world won?t be tampered with? This choice will determine whether the current uprising is just a modernization of Turkish capitalism and its integration into the world market, or whether it is truly oriented toward a creative politics of emancipation, giving new impetus to the universal history of Communism.

And the ultimate criterion for all this is actually quite simple: the educated youth must take the steps that will bring them closer to the other potential actors of a historical riot. They must spread their movement?s enthusiasm beyond their own social existence. They must create the means of living with the broad popular masses, of sharing the thoughts and practical innovations of the new politics with them. They must give up the temptation to adopt, for their own benefit, the ?Western? conception of democracy, meaning: the simple, self-serving desire for a middle class to exist in Turkey as an electoral and falsely democratic client of an oligarchic power integrated into the world market of capital and commodities. This is called: liaison with the masses. Without it, the admirable current revolt will end in a subtler and more dangerous form of subservience: the kind we are familiar with in our old capitalist countries.

We intellectuals and militants in France and other rich countries of the imperialist West implore our Turkish friends to avoid creating a situation like ours in their country. To you, our dear Turkish friends, we say: the greatest favor you can do for us is to prove that your uprising is taking you to a different place from ours, that it is creating a situation whereby the material and intellectual corruption in which our sick old countries are languishing today will be impossible.

Fortunately, I know that in contemporary Turkey, among all our Turkish friends, the means exist to avoid the erroneous desire to be like us. This great country, with its long, tormented history, can and must surprise us. It is the ideal place for a great historical and political innovation to occur.

Long live the uprising of Turkish youth and their allies! Long live the creation of a new source of future politics!

—Alain Badiou 17/06/2013

Having initiated my most recent and most intense period of study with 'French Theory' (the obvious, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Nancy, Sartre, Kojève, Althusser, Badiou, Ranciere) augmented by the Slovenian school of Lacanian psychoanalysis (most manifest in Zizek but also in Zupančič and Dolar) way back in 2006, I have been drawn further and further Left in political conviction, so that alongside Badiou and Ranciere I found myself happily digesting Robespierre, Lenin, the Frankfurt School, Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, more recent socialist work (Mészáros, Callinicos, Seymour) and even the state theorists (Jessop, Poulantzas). I am entirely comfortable with this Leftwards drift in my library and literary habits, especially when considering the Rightward-lurching social background against which it has happened. However, this intricate intellectual framework in which I pretty much live and move has so far lacked what is fashionably named 'Italian Theory', and this is the avenue down which my current investigations are taking me. True, I've been reading Agamben pretty thoroughly all along, and although inconsistent with much else that occupied me his focus on potentiality and bare life have long fascinated me at the philosophical level. Agamben, however, is something of a renegade with respect to Italian Theory, and is criticised by its more representative authors for having an apolitical approach to one of the most crucial objects of Italian study: biopolitics.

This difference is clearly demarcated by contrasting what Agamben and Virno do with Foucault. Agamben amplifies and sublimates Foucault's essentially historicist version of biopolitics (from his lectures on the birth of Liberalism), raising it to the status of a metaphysical fracture grounded in the birth of Western philosophy. Virno, in contrast, downplays and minimises the impact of Foucaultian biopower, recasting it as a secondary effect of the commoditisation of labour power.

One might say that for Agamben biopolitics is an ontological consideration, in the manner of a Heideggerian destining of Being, which by dividing life from life has thoroughly shaped Western discourse and consciousness, effectively barring the possibility of a genuine politics. For Virno biopolitics is not the cause, remote or near, of the problematicity of contemporary life, but only a necessary consequence, almost what could be called an unavoidable byproduct, of Capitalism. Insofar as labour power, the generic potential or capacity to perform tasks, has been commoditised and sold on a labour market to capitalists who profit from the actual labour of workers, and insofar as this generic potential is indissociable from corporeality, then the management and disciplining of the worker's body by capitalists is an inevitable side-effect of capitalism.

While not completely dismissing Agamben's concern for the ancient philosophical severance of Zoe and Bios, it appears to me now that Virno's version of biopolitics is the more intellectually persuasive account. Agamben is in danger of positing a historical continuity without rupture that overtheatricalises biopolitics at a level of transhistorical narrative, creating of it a great myth, a ponderous ontological drama undercutting all conversation. To be sure, the fracture of 'life' in the incipit of Western philosophy is decisive for every attempt to define or taxonomise life itself, but this problem covers too much with a term, biopolitics, intended as a specific and historicist intervention. Not only was Foucault's term sharper and more defined, but Virno's biopolitics is eminently traceable. No great leaps of transhistorical imagination are needed to read biopolitics as a consequence of Capitalism, and this usage at least participates in Foucault's own paradigm, allowing that the greatest period of Capitalist expansion coincided with the explosion of Liberalism. Indeed a concern for the scope of the term is actually reflected in Agamben's own inconsistency, for in places he appears to return at least partially to the thesis that biopolitics is, if not exclusively a feature of modernity, then concentrated and intensified there.

My own preference would be to suggest that biopolitics is prefigured or made possible in the transcendental, ontological sense which Agamben discovers in Aristotle and then in Roman Law, but this is not biopolitics as such until much later, when this discursive latency is activated by the intense focus on the potentiality of the body brought about by market liberalism. We can still pose questions, find counterexamples (precapitalist slavery, indentured servitude, feudalism) within such a framework since it allows for forces other than Capitalism to be, in limited and historical contexts, the cause of the actualisation of a biopolitical possibility inscribed into the fabric of Western societies. What concerns us today, and appears to concern even Agamben chiefly despite his melancholic search for archaic foreshadowing, is the intensification of biopolitical measures and disciplines concerning the body under Capitalist conditions.

Consequently I have set Agamben to one side, but within reach, of my investigation into Italian Theory. As might be guessed, I begin my involvement proper with Virno. One of the first things to strike me about his work is how it manages to synthesise a great deal of philosophical thought already traversed in other fields. It is illuminating to compare the following two passages, for example.

We made a critique of Marx, critique in quotes, saying that today the general intellect was no longer deposited in machines but rather existed and lived in the cooperation of living labor. We said it with the following formula: general intellect = living labor in place of fixed capital.

[..]

My thesis is that postfordism directly brings to light the background charcteristics of the human species. Postfordism is on the historical and social plane a historical and social repetition of the anthropogenesis. I believe that on the ontological plane or, as it were, in the plane of invariable, constant conditions of our species, of the human species, of homo sapiens, the theory of philosophical anthropology is fitting, at least in part, that says that the human being is, above all, nonspecialized.

We are poorest of the animals in relation to our lack of specialized instincts and lack of a precise, determined environment. In general, culture, society, conceals, hides this condition, creating forms of specialization for the non-specialized animal and creating artificial environments for the animal that has no environment. Then, we say that culture and society hide distinctive aspects of human nature. Postfordism, by contrast, is the first society and the first culture that does not hide those aspects, but rather – on the contrary, valorizes them, places them fully in the light. Think of the universal watchword, as much in Argentina, in Italy and in Korea as in Eastern Europe: flexibility. Flexibility in all the languages of the world means non-specialization. The same occurs with this ugly word globalization, that has, in all forms, as its truth the fact that human beings should live openly, explicitly as those beings that don?t have a well-defined environment. In this sense, postfordism, the contemporary experience, signals perhaps a true novelty because, for the first time, society and culture correspond explicitly to an ontological condition.

(http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno2.htm)

In this first passage, Virno is speaking in an interview about his political biography, his membership of the Italian workerists, the restructuration of Capitalism during the 1970s and the evolution of the concept of 'general intellect', inspired by the Fragment on Machines in Marx's Grundrisse, then developed outside the context of machines (which incarnate fixed capital) to describe a series of human social competencies subject to commoditisation. Under Post-Fordism Virno witnessed Human sociality, virtuosity of praxis, linguistic ability and all that was generically 'potential' about the human (this focus on potentiality being another reason I do not shelve Agamben just yet) become more and more central to the labouring roles of the worker. This thematic is explored in more detail in his work A Grammar of the Multitude where he advances the position that it is precisely the ambiguity of this human potential which holds the key to emancipation from Capitalism.

According to Virno, when the generic capacities of the human constituting the general intellect come to the surface as specific abilities, then there are two things that can happen. Either there is the creation of a non-statal Public Sphere in which human capacities are deployed in the formation of new communities (Virno explicitly points to the internet as a formation in the name of the General Intellect) or there is a foreclosure of such a Public Sphere and the capacities of the human are immediately available only for commercial interests–a dire possibility which he sees presaged not only in the new 'cultural' industries but also in the very industrial workplaces and factories that, undergoing post-Fordist restructuring, had transformed the definition or content of labour so that it was no longer a question of producing (poeisis) end products but that of exercising (praxis) generic capacities such as communicating, adapting, remaining flexible.

This shift from poeisis to praxis—from producing to performing—coincides with the intensification of the politicisation of work, so that labour becomes inherently political; one is concerned in one's being with what can and must be done to earn a wage and the question of finding or losing a job is no longer a concern with a specific portion of one's life but a properly existential anxiety involving one's entire field of potentiality, the shaping of one's social body and the articulation of all of its latencies. Like Virno, I would argue that it is only here, in this historical event of the generalisation of labour power, that Agamben's darkest ruminations on biopolitics take on their full significance. I have still-developing thoughts on this which will be posted at a later date.

However, at this stage the comparison I wish to draw is not with Agamben but a figure fairly distant from this milieu, and much closer to the ambit of my earlier theoretical compass, Adrian Johnston (reading Badiou).

In Manifesto for Philosophy, Badiou confesses that the situation-specific socio-economic processes of contemporary capitalism form an immanent condition of possibility (as a "historic medium") for his ontology of the pure multiple-without-One, of the infinite infinities of being qua being (l'être-en-tant-qu'être). The frenetic Heraclitian flows of perpetually mobile virtual capital, flows eroding any fixed and stable solidity, reveal something fundamental about being as such. In other words, the historical particularity of today's late-capitalism, with its various desacrilizing effects, simultaneously discloses an essential aspect of the more-than-historical ontological domain.[..]

[T]he dynamics of capital present the opportunity for apprehending and appreciating intrinsic facets of the skeletal structure of subjectivity itself.

(http://www.lacan.com/symptom8_articles/johnston8.html)

Badiou and Johnston are not particularly interested in Labour Power of course, but they are concerned with ontology and the overcoming of Capitalist conditions. What interests me primarily in this document (which constitutes the final chapter of Johnston's Zizek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, and is worth reading in full) is the way in which it is again conceded that contemporary Capitalism ('late' Capitalism, Post-Fordist Capitalism) lays bare the 'skeletal structure' of subjectivity. Which is to say, reading on, that the inbuilt capacities of the human being to become involved with and entwined with 'Imaginary-Symbolic' structures. For a Lacanian, such structures mean society, discourses, communication, shared feelings, communal memory and so on. So once again it is proposed that our time, this time in which we live, happens to be the time when the generic makeup of the human comes to the fore.

This is also emphasised in Zizek's work when in reworking the Marxian concept of proletarianization as the desubstantiating of the subject he cites Marx's 'Hegelian' concept of substanzlose subjektivitaet (in Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology, Duke Press 1993, pgs.10 & 25). The modern subject is stripped of social 'substance', of all the regional and idiosyncratic specificities of its embedded-ness in symbolic networks which would have provided (albeit inconsistent and incomplete) meaning to its existence, emerging as a Cartesian-like and kulturlos place-holder, its capacity to be this-or-that being its specific feature. Zizek likens this proletarianization to post-traumatic subjectivity, and indeed likens the meta-capacity of the substanceless subject to an a radical incapacity. It is of course part of Zizek's most fundamental philosophical belief that the most penetrating insights into the makeup of the universe reveal its basic structure to be pathological, that existence itself is as it were a flaw. Yet this radical pessimism is to be found in inverted form in other Continental philosophies, such as Quentin Meillassoux, for whom the sheer pathological contingency of existence, the facticity of there being anything at all, is also reason for hope in the contingent arrival of universal Justice–it is not all 'bad news' to think this way.

I do worry that something is lacking in both the Autonomist and Johnston's Zizekian idea that 'late Capitalism' uncovers something basic and transhistorical about human nature. The historicist in me, which I know is not always wrong, wants to shout about how this is a fine coincidence and just a little bit too convenient: that a renewed interest in delineating some kind of basic human structurality overlaps with a phenomenology of contemporary conditions. It is not particularly that we then owe something to Capitalism, indeed ever since Marx's sometimes deeply appreciative insights we have seen that Capitalism's 'unbinding' power was doubled-edged and that it would give rise to its own grave-diggers. What troubles me more deeply is the idea that 'now' is so important, and it makes me wonder how many other 'nows' there have been, giving rise to the ridiculous image of a series of thinkers arrayed throughout many disparate and heterogeneous histories each declaiming his or her own as the time in which the truth about the human being finally came to light. There is something here that, on the one hand, smacks of a kind of colonial abridgement of history as contained in the present moment as its ultimate form, and on the other hand, sounds like a Fukuyama-like End-of-History attitude. Within the Zizekian-Hegelian framework this is not necessarily a problem. Since reality is incomplete, there is no actual universally-valid 'survey' possible, nothing like what Merleau-Ponty called a 'Kosmotheoros' or Hegel called an abstract universality. The only real universalities are therefore concrete universalities, universalities which are first of all grounded in a particularity but which then do apply outside of their own particular domain in a universal manner. In a similar way, maybe my initial timidity over the idea of ascribing some kind of universally applicable foundational truth status to the human being as uncovered by the desubstantialising effects of post-Fordist capitalism is misplaced. Why not, after all?

The other thing about Zizek's reading of the proletarianized modern subject is that his description of it may be one-sided, inasmuch as there is a tendency in his work to side with the position of the 'objective social field'. And of course, from the vantage point of the social field, with its normative prescriptions of what a person is and what personhood involves (liberal idiosyncracy, be it the result of consumerist choice and individuality or genetic predisposition), the capacity of the proletarianized (or precariatized) worker naturally appears as incapacity. This is obvious enough when considering how a prominent left-wing philosopher (Merleau-Ponty, again) characterised proletarian capacity as the 'potency of the impotent' (le pouvoir des sans-pouvoir ). The fact it is 'sans-pouvior' from the point of view of the state (in the Badiouan sense of state, as the set of all constructible subsets of society) is precisely the point: the labouring flesh and brain, tongue and feelings of the worker belong to society without belonging to any determinate subset of society because their belonging is effectuated only by what they potentiate. Their potency appears not in a powerset, but only as extreme singularity, as a Badiouan 'evental site'. All elements of the proletariat have no designated 'place' as such, only a generic, potentialized immediate-belonging-to-society. It is this peculiar topological quality, the immediation of the potential of the speaking body, belonging only to society itself but not to any of its subsets, which gives to the proletariat the ability to stand for the whole of society as did for example the tiers etat in the case of the French Revolution. Under Jacobin direction, it was the sans-culottes, lacking both the fashionable signifier of bourgeois membership (the culottes) and any (then) lawful claim to the social product, who became representative of the whole, able to speak for society itself. However, this was in a period in which the image of nationhood could also be mobilised in order to conceptualise society; the tiers etat declared itself identical to the nation, France, and it is 'France' who authorises the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Today the precarious proletarianized worker has to reckon with a fundamentally different kind of society, belonging to it through generic human capacities but not in any idealizable, romantic or easily 'spiritualizable' sense.

Despite initial worries, I continue to synthesise from my reading a theoretical direction which can continue to animate my ever-Leftward reading. Virno is full of surprises so far, and there are some very interesting moments where his work even reinvites Agamben back into the fold, with many qualifications of course. But it is in comparison with Badiou that I mostly want to proceed with reading Italian theory, Badiou being above all my bedrock point of reference in (post-postmodern, political) Continental thinking. The major point of comparison as opposed to contrast is the disinterest in the state, and the idea that we can confront or face the state without being somehow involved in it. This question always troubles me, and it probably shows through in my own inconsistency on the matter.

There is a certain persistence of arguments, just as there is the persistence of a symptom¹. While ceaselessly making the argument for what our opponents sneer at as a 'planned economy', and despite it being planned for equality, universality and justice, we are just as ceaselessly bombarded with the market-liberal claim that we should 'just let human nature take its course': that deregulation is the key to a fair and equitable society. Like me, you will have been deeply suspicious of 'deregulation', and probably doubly so at the invocation of 'human nature'. You will have found a means to argue that deregulation is precisely an organised process in which society is actively mobilised in multiple compositions, varying forms and functions to bring about consensus.

You may have turned to Nicos Poulantzas' or Bob Jessop's State Theory in elaborating how the overzealous libertarian position (that 'the State is the enemy of freedom'), and the instrumentalist-Marxist position (that 'the State is the tool of the Capitalist class'), are both of them dead wrong. You might have pointed out that while the State in its overall function indeed smooths the operation of Capitalist society, Capitalism in itself is far too divisive to ensure any kind of permanent social stabilisation, and therefore it is only with a significant degree of autonomy from the short-term goals of Capitalism that the State manages to mediate with some degree of regularity.

You will have argued, with your usual critical acumen, that the State is not a power bloc but a differentiated series of relations. And finally, if you were up to the job, you would have nailed the argument with what might be called the factum civili, the fact that whatever form a socio-economic order takes, it takes this form because it is this form which is organised, propagated, and reproduced by the relational complex we call 'the State'. Our lives are already regularised, legislated, educated, disciplined, oriented, shaped, coerced and deliberately normativised in particular forms, through manifold means, before we even consider the State as something standing 'over there'. We are permeated by it.

Naturally, our adversaries (and even many of our friends and allies) consider the State in far narrower and impoverished terms deeply coloured by the disconnect between parliamentary politics and contemporary life, a deep fracture which it is the perpetual preoccupation of the media to confront us with. This is the picture they like to paint: We, the people, immersed in our daily lives, and on the other side of the insular moat, Westminster, with its many bureaucratic tributaries and tendrils encroaching on our lives with a creeping insidiousness. There is a certain terror in this image, a certain traumatic truth. But this image is not the State, and we must not reduce the meaning of the State to this. The fact that our lives are already organised, taking certain forms within historically defined choices, our selectivity, a certain degree of moral independence within a certain series of acceptations—the fact that our lives have, collectively, a certain disposition in advance of being 'encroached upon' by any particular governmentality—is due to the existence of the State proper. The State as a relation is society in relation to itself, it is in fact the whole of civil society in all its differentiated complexity and historical depth.

So now you've made this argument, this argument that there is, effectively, no escape from State, no elaboration of the modern society into a form that would exist without this broader sense of State as State-relation, and that the idea of 'the withering' or disparition of the State can therefore at best only mean the end of the Capitalism-smoothing State, that is to say, the end of the existing social order insofar as it serves to reproduce the Capitalist relation. You've taken your cues from state relational theory, which you see as an advance on a vulgarly instrumentalist form of Marxism, and in that respect you're a Thoroughly Modern Millie. Well done. But as is often the case, the argument has been going on longer than you have. Antonio Gramsci, for example, was already honing a position on this in his prison notebooks:

The approach of the free trade movement is based on a theoretical error whose practical origin is not hard to identify: namely the distinction between political society and civil society, which is made into and presented as an organic one, whereas in fact it is merely methodological. Thus it is asserted that economic activity belongs to civil society, and that the state must not intervene to regulate it. But since in actual reality civil society and state are one and the same, it must be made clear that laissez-faire too is a form of state 'regulation', introduced and maintained by legislative and coercive means. It is a deliberate policy, conscious of its own ends, and not the spontaneous, automatic expression of economic facts. Consequently, laissez-faire liberalism is a political program, designed to change—in so far as it is victorious–a state's ruling personnel, and to change the economic program of the state itself, in other words the distribution of the national income.²

Basically, you're in good company with this argument. It's not that 'we on the left' favour a planned economy as against an economy that 'just happens', as if it somehow spontaneously emerges as an evolutionary best-fit to the human profile. The point to be made, in fact, is that there is no such thing as an unplanned economy—the very term oikonomia, 'rule of the household', attests to that—just as there is no unplanned life. Major advances in many fields of our knowledge about ourselves in recent history have discovered that our lives are deeply regulated and codified on every level, especially including those moments in which we believed we were at our most spontaneous. This is not to say that outcomes are always planned, far from it. Neither is it to say that we always know what we are doing, or even that if we do know, that we always know that we know it. But it does mean that any dream of leaving things alone and letting nature take its course are the worst kinds of bad faith imaginable.

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[1] The accompanying images are taken from the film Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, based on a play by Tennessee Williams.

[2] Antonio Gramsci in Forgacs, D. (ed.) VI Hegemony, Relations of Force, Historical Bloc: Some Theoretical and Practical Aspects of Economism, Part Two: Prison Writings 1929-1935, An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935, Schocken Books, New York