Kettle Logic and Circuits of Protest

Reading the Institute's comments on the G20 protests (in reply to Owen and Mark) and the question of the right to the city versus the struggle at the immediate point of production I was thinking perhaps this need not be cast as an antinomy. In particular Beverly Silver-type arguments point out how the new spatial dispersion of capital creates new points of struggle in terms of circuits of circulation - transport, docks, etc. - and of course the right of circulation through the city-space itself. It is these circuits that provide the admittedly attenuated linkages between labour and finance capital - not least containerisation (cf. season 2 of The Wire) - in the 'circuit' between China and the US. This would allow us to make the connection between labour and finance capital that Harvey regards as detached. This is partly Blackburn's point that this is a crisis of poverty (both among the US working class, i.e. the sub-prime mortgage crisis, and the Chinese working class, in terms of low wages), and Badiou's point that this is a crisis of housing. Focus on the circuits as points of struggle would also allow us to avoid the displacement of struggle onto the Chinese working class (although it may be the obviously mixed memories of struggle do allow for resurgence in the face of proletarianisation - the breaking of the iron rice bowl).

The issue here would be one of making figurative / imaginative connections between the subsumption of labour qua commodity and the futural (detached) commodities of financialisation. Here I think Harvey and Blackburn offer models that might appear reformist but actually offer the means to 'appropriate the appropriators'. The appropriators being now not so much literal subjects of capital (the firm, the individual capitalist), but the bearers of capital as real abstractions (the financialisation of the life-course, the futural nature of the form of value). To appropriate them requires not only the right to the city but the right to financialised capital. Instead of being 'monetary subjects without money', in light of the strategies of autonomia with regard to the reappropriation of the wage, we might speak of becoming monetary subjects with socialised money.

‘- work and + money’ to quote the slogan of a leaflet distributed at Fiat in 1969.

Plus see the photos of the protests by IT. On IT's comment on the necessity for a sublation of the opposition between a totalising anti-spectacular concept of revolution coupled to a totalising concept of the spectacle I'd certainly agree (and on the query about the 'elsewhere' it might come from). I think here a re-reading (and critique) of the situs is necessary, especially the examination of such concepts as detournement and the construction of situations. Of course Debord's pessimism circa Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988) seems to break this dialectic into a Baudrillardian-style pessimism (although Baudrillard is more interesting to me than the cliche).

All protest (I think) has a theatrical element, including successful protests / revolutions. Rather than risk blanket dismissal on these grounds - "the burning-with-the-pure-flame-of-negativity thesis" (Clark & Nicholson-Smith) - it might be more a matter of thinking types and forms of theatricality.

Financial dual power

There is an excellent debate between Geoff Mann and Robin Blackburn in the latest New Left Review on the political opportunities offered by the financial crisis - excellent because I agree with both positions. Mann makes the argument for the necessity of rupturing with the value form and the essential concept of real abstraction, while Blackburn notes what might seem his minimalist position in fact supposes 'financial dual power', through implementing something like a new Meidner plan. Blackburn also has an amusing anecdote about populist attempts to get all derivative and futures trading banned as inherently deceptive... The 1905 judgement by Oliver Wendell Holmes agreeing futures could be traded took arguments from Holmes's friend William James - with the pragmatic concept of truth involding credit / agreement on value (the anecdote is discussed in this fascinating article, which actually explains what futures are - they are as weird as I thought).

The relation of metaphysics to value (again).

Real Abstraction

In his text on Kafka's Odradek Slavoj Žižek states that: ‘Reading Kafka demands a great effort of abstraction – an effort, not of learning more (the proper interpretive horizon to understand his works), but of unlearning the stand interpretive references, so that one becomes able to open up to the raw force of Kafka’s writing.’ (136)

What interests me is that it requires a greater effort of abstraction to unlearn the abstract framings that already surround and penetrate Kafka's text, so that one can then approach that text as concrete. It strikes me that this is one way in which to understand a procedure for grasping the 'real abstractions' of capitalism: the abstraction of labour under real subsumption and the abstracting effects of the commodity-form (of course these can be linked together under the aegis of the commodity-form, as labour itself is the commodity). Rather than a humanist or anthropological short-cut to the concrete (something like the risk partially run in The German Ideology), we have the passage through abstraction as a procedure.

In a rather unlikely pairing we can link this to Badiou's operations of subtraction (although it is striking that Badiou nowhere substantially thinks the commodity-form) and the Hegelian procedure as parsed by Fredric Jameson: ‘stupid stereotype, or the “appearance”; ingenious correction, the underlying reality or “essence”; finally, after all, the return to the reality of the appearance, so that it was the appearance that was “true” after all.’

Perhaps we could minimally justify this pairing by noting that the capitalist real abstraction takes the form of the Hegelian subject - positing its presuppositions. In this way Badiou's anti-Hegelian procedure of subtraction would gain purchase, although when applied to these real abstractions. In a more tricksy fashion perhaps Hegel's own procedure offers a pharmakon, a passage back through the process of real abstraction that can impose further abstraction upon it. The irony of real abstraction is, of course, that it is 'lived' as 'concrete' - if in the mode of a spiritualisation of everyday life. To gain purchase on this requires a 'greater effort of abstraction'.

References

Jameson, Fredric, ‘First Impressions’, London Review of Books 28.17 (7 September 2006)

Žižek, Slavoj, ‘Odradek as a Political Category’, Lacanian Ink 24/25 (2005): 136-155

Capital and Agency (Encore)

One way to return to the question of capitalism and agency posed by the work of Deleuze and Guattari is via the work of Chris Arthur, Roberto Finelli, and Moishe Postone. Each argues that Marx analyses the operations of capitalism as instantiations of the Hegelian dialectic. This means that Capital is the (Hegelian) Subject. To summarise Chris Arthur's useful discussion:

1. capital subsumes singulars under the universal of value

2. capital is a self-valorising system of accumulation
3. capital is a concrete universality

Capital qua subject operates through form-determination: inscription of materiality in terms of the value form. Hence we have the operation of capitalism as that of real abstraction; as Finelli puts it Capital is 'spiritualistic' (in the sense of the Hegelian Geist). Finelli analyses this process as one in which capitalism is capable of positing its presuppositions, which is to say re-signifying and subsuming materiality, and especially labour, within itself as its condition. He goes on to argue that Arthur still relies on a 'logic of contradiction', which holds to a certain resistance to abstraction in an 'exterior' or 'anthropological' minimum (labour-power / species being, etc.). His own 'logic of subtraction' proposes that positing the presupposition goes all the way down. Hence his interest in the hollowing out of the concrete in postmodern society, a la Fredric Jameson's work on postmodernity and finance capital.

This has implications for agency: Chris Arthur argues that the proletariat is the 'counter-subject' emerging as capital's repressed other; Finelli argues for a new richness of difference developed through a new need for recognition (here the 'subject' seems to be something like a post-proletarian contestation); and Moishe Postone dismisses the proletariat as agency because it is bound to capitalism through its constitution via labour (I, like Chris Arthur and many others disagree with this contention).

Reading back to Deleuze and Guattari we could say they too accept Capital as subject, true as axiomatic rather than Hegelian, but the effect is largely similar. I would argue that then they turn between the logic of contradiction and the logic of abstraction, and so between different forms of agency. In the first they hold on to a logic of ontological excess, which while not humanist does also vector through the human. This is 'absolute deterritorialisation' as the 'outside' qua excess of forces - a Nieztscho-Bergson line of vitalist exteriority. Obviously this line is developed most tightly by Negri in terms of the excess of potenza / labour-power / constitutive power over potere / capitalist command / constituted power. Here agency is the rupturing outside, the marginal, and so on.

But at the same time they also operate with a logic of abstraction, or of absolute deterritorialisation as accelerationism. In this case, like Finelli, the absolute dominance of capital in its re- and de-signifying power eventually finds its own internal limit and explodes the horizon. This appears to be the anti-humanist 'line' articulated here, for example ("One more effort Deleuzo-Guattarians, to become anti-humanists"). This is, of course, the point of Lyotard's intervention, which is to shore-up this side of Deleuze and Guattari against any humanism of desire. We could say then that as Finelli is to Arthur, so Lyotard is to Deleuze and Guattari.

My own 'position' (should it amount to such) is poised rather uncomfortably between these two. I'm inclined to accept Finelli's analysis and description of capital at the same time as wondering, like Chris Arthur, where this leaves the question of resistance and agency? Contra my earlier statement on Lyotard then, I can accept capitalism as the only Subject (that is Hegelian Subject as universal subsumption and enrichment of difference). The pending question is the re-conceptualisation of agency that would destroy this Subject, and I am inclined to the re-articulation of the 'differences' posited by capital but through the work of the negative the situs analysed as detournement (which I regard as a political and not an aesthetic strategy).

I certainly accept the exhilaration of accelerationist anti-humanism (cf. SBA) and the point made by Schoolboy Errors that it is preferable to the endless 'quasi-humanist' cultural Deleuze/Guattari (I happen to like the irony that my book will be coming out from the home of such studies - Edinburgh University Press - fly in the ointment again). What concerns me is that we are left not so much with anti-humanist 'agency', but no agency at all. The point of tension then appears to be a slide into a passivity of 'agency without agency'. The risk then is that this is all too congruent with 'invisible hand' / 'cunning of reason' arguments, that are the province of Hayek and Von Mises, et al.

Accelerationism II.2

Two excellent posts by Owen and Mark, which demonstrate the 'general intellect' at work.

1. Owen makes the important point that 'accelerationism' doesn't have to be an ultra-leftist catastrophism but can involve the rational re-use of capitalist developments in constant capital to reduce variable capital, if we destroy the capitalist relation of accumulation (which is of course the proverbial big 'if'). This would, of course, be different from the capitalist reduction of variable capital through 'social exposure' (ie dumping workers into the reserve army of labour or out of the monetary relation altogether). Interestingly, I was reading this exact point being made by Richard Brenner in his essay on "Karl Marx's Theory of Crisis".

If we were to hypothetically leave out of the account real social relations of production today (capitalism), then improved technology and increased labour productivity would tend naturally towards the reduction of working time. Mechanisation would help convert the worker from semi-slave of constrained by a rigid division of labour into a supervisor of production, someone able through the progressive and sustained reduction of the lenght of the compulsory working day to participate in supervision and planning of ever wider spheres of production, distribution and consumption (socialism).
(p.53)

2. On Mark's post, just to say almost complete agreement... It was Landianism I had in mind with 'Deleuzian Thatcherism'; as for my choice of Lyotard as the text of accelerationism this was due to his outbidding of Deleuze & Guattari and his almost complete embrace of the consequences (I particularly like his sarcasm directed at Baudrillard concerning the lack of the 'good hippies' of symbolic exchange...).

It's slightly uncanny but Mark's three points were floating around in the cesspool that is my 'mind' and on the fantasmatic of capital permit me to refer to Mark's article in Film-Philosophy (a pdf).
In light of Mark's work I was thinking of the hyperstitional as a means of probing the 'real abstractions' of capital; especially as sketched by Roberto Finelli and Alberto Toscano.

3. One issue here (raised implicitly by Mark) is that of reterritorialisation as essential co-dynamic of capitalist deterritorialisation; [correction follows] Eric Alliez argues that the problem of Badiou's reading of Deleuze is that inscribes a constant and necessary relation between reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation. In doing so Alliez argues that he produces 'Capitalism and Paranoia', not 'Capitalism and Schizophrenia' - in which every deterritorialisation is immediately recuperated by reterritorialisation. For Alliez, we have to always fold capitalist deterritorialisation onto absolute deterritorialisation - hence, to quote Deleuze on Bergson - 'Dualism is therefore only a moment, which must lead to the re-formation of a monism.' This then is the sticking-point between Mark's formulation that 'it is was Deleuze and Guattari who proved to have the better handle on capitalism, precisely because they insisted on reterritorialization as the necessary counterpart of capitalist deterritorialization.' (which correspond to Badiou's position - and my own inclination) and SBA's position, which is more classically Deleuzian.

4. This is where the problem of agency comes in (again). I chose Lyotard as the exemplar because he seems pretty explicit that capital is the subject (of revolution): "[Capital] is the unbinding of the most insane pulsions" (138). If we want an alternative then we have to find some 'good hippies', or otherwise get into that various sub-Baudrillardian gestures of embracing the market that seemed to have a mercifully brief flowering in the 1980s/90s. Mark has made further comments on Lyotard here. In a sense this re-makes my point - Lyotard is the examplar because of this disappearance of the critical. This is exactly the point on which he departs from Deleuze and Guattari. Of course Lyotard's later political evolution - traced by Perry Anderson (see my comments here) - doesn't exactly make one convinced by this position of capital as absolute subject (subject as substance and subject?).

5. SBA has commented further on agency here, and re-iterating a strong accelerationist position rather than the previously canvassed Badiouian alternative. The action particularly takes place at the end of the post:

Outside either a vitalist ethology of ‘natural’ auto-self-maximisation, or some kind of Marxist-Hegelian dialectical drive towards the elimination of contradiction in the same, how might we be able to ground the very need for an inhumanising desubjectivation at all? Though we might wish to create a system which has had done with judgement, to ground the praxis (and here we return to the “sticky” issue of agency) necessary to arrive at this state requires the illegitimate use of the very devices the praxis seeks to erase.

This seems to imply a kind of reverse Munchausen effect - instead of the subject pulling itself up by its hair it destroys itself by a 'self'-erasure. This may be formulated along the lines Reza suggests as an exposure to being 'butchered open' (see Reza on hauntology in relation to SBA's posts here). The difficulty is the passivity implied in this sense of agency - to be butchered by the processes of capital do we have to do anything more than just live and await our demise? How could we acclerate this process (and if so why)? Then, also, which particular humans would perform this self-destruction of the human?

6. Finally to try and clear up the Achcar matter (on which I was perhaps rather unclear), I'm in agreement with this point by Owen:

"Mind you, for that I don't subscribe either to the Gilbert Achcar view - it's always relative privation which causes revolt. The starving might not start revolutions, but the only insurrection during a boom I can think of is the abortive May."

A couple of things to add, first this can involve psychic immiseration, which I'm sure Owen includes in relative privation. This was the situ point about the misery of everday life qua accumulation.

Second, I posted the Achcar comment more for a reflection on the 'accumulation of struggles' as precondition for agency, hence I was going back to the 60s/70s. Mark and Owen, and everyone else who said, is perfectly right that (a) booms don't necessarily need to revolution (I have no 'one size fits all model of revolution', anything would be nice), and (b) the recent 'boom' hasn't. Of course that's because that 'boom' involved the massive decomposition of working-class power in a waning cycle of struggle. What concerned me was the mechanisms to translate disenchantment and privation into struggle, and whether (as Mark points out) the crisis is more likely to lead to barbarism than socialism in the absence of such accumulated struggles.

It seems appropriate that I should have to write a couple of lectures on Dickens, as he is a writer of catastrophism, and has his own version of accelerationism in 'free circulation' (he hated blockages of all kinds). Mercifully for the students this won't be much discussed by me.

Krisis

IT / ICR with Badiou on the crisis, ICR with Tronti, and via What in the Hell... this site, which has some excellent analysis.

This point by Mike Davis is interesting in terms of questions of agency:

"On the contrary, the social contract for the post-1935 Second New Deal was a complex, adaptive response to the greatest working-class movement in our history, in a period when powerful third parties still roamed the political landscape and Marxism exercised extraordinary influence on American intellectual life.

Even with the greatest optimism of the will, it is difficult to imagine the American labor movement recovering from defeat as dramatically as it did in 1934-1937. The decisive difference is structural rather than ideological. (Indeed, today's union movement is much more progressive than the decrepit, nativist American Federation of Labor in 1930.) The power of labor within a Walmart-ized service economy is simply more dispersed and difficult to mobilize than in the era of giant urban-industrial concentrations and ubiquitous factory neighborhoods."

(my italics)

Negative Capability

[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

It seems to appropriate to quote the writer of the "great smash up", at once existential and financial; as Fitzgerald wrote "‘All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them - the lovely young creatures in my novels went to ruin, my millionaires were as beautiful and damned as Thomas Hardy's peasants". Of course we can reflect on the question of "class ontology" that runs through Fitzgerald ("her voice was full of money"). Hemingway objected to the romanticism of this ontology of difference, writing in his short-story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro":

The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The rich are different from you and me.’ And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

John Updike nicely analyses this little contretemps, and notes that Hemingway neglects the next line of the story: "‘They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand." We might remember the books on brokerage Nick Carroway carefully shelves in The Great Gatsby, and note that it is Fitzgerald rather than Kafka who has the true appreciation for the "mysticism of money".

All this is merely a long-winded introduction to a series of comments on katechons and Crises, which you have probably already noted, here, here, and (of course) here. I've also has some comments off list raising the work of Rudolf Meidner as a temporary (but unlikely) best case katechon / lesser evil. Of course we now have the word from a certain contemporary theorist.