Tracing the Invisible Time of the Present

In Reading Capital (1968) Althusser argues that we cannot rest content with the insight that there exist different forms or rhythms of time to undermine the linear time of historicism and capital. He argues that, in addition to different forms of visible time, there are invisible times. In particular we cannot read capitalist time ‘in the flow of any given process’, because this is an invisible time that is ‘essentially illegible, as invisible and as opaque as the reality of the total capitalist production process itself.’ (RC 112) Such a time is only accessible in its concept, and this is a concept which must be constructed’ (RC 113).

            This would seem to leave the ‘lived time’ of capital, its relation to the biological, as only ideological – a receding moment that we cannot grasp outside of a discourse of science. If we return to For Marx, and in particular the essay ‘The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht’ (FM 129-151), then we can consider this a phenomenology, even in the Hegelian sense,[1] of our access to ‘invisible time’ (so, Reading Capital would then be equivalent to Hegel’s Logic). Althusser’s essay explores three modes of time that are staged in the play. He begins from ‘the co-existence of a long, slowly-passing, empty time and a lightning-short, full time’ (FM 134) in the play: between scenes of mass characters going about everyday life – the time of the chronicle – and the sudden intrusion at the end of each act of the three central characters (Nina, her father, and her lover) – the time of tragedy. This would seem to instantiate also a Benjaminian contrast between ‘empty, homogeneous time’ and ‘now-time’ (Jetztzeit), especially as this second form of full time, according to Althusser, ‘is a dialectical time par excellence.’ (FM 137)

            The essay, however, disputes this identification. The tragic time of encounter, dialectical time, is, in fact, the melodramatic time of the father of the central character. We have not passed from ideological time to non-ideological time, but to another form of ideology. While dialectical time is pushed to the margins, this dialectical time is a time dictated by the father, who wishes to save his daughter’s honour from her lover-cum-pimp. It is melodramatic. ‘Sheltered from the world, it unleashes all the fantastic form of a breathless conflict which can only ever find peace in the catastrophe of someone else’s fall: it takes this hullabaloo for destiny and its breathlessness for the dialectic.’ (FM 140) This is still the dialectic of consciousness and ‘And that is why its destruction is the precondition for any real dialectic.’ (FM 138)

            The third form of time is only indicated when Nina abandons her father – who has murdered her lover – to embrace the life of (presumably) a prostitute. ‘Father, consciousness, dialectic, she throws them all overboard and crosses the threshold of the other world’ (FM 140) This rejection of the false dialectic of consciousness is parallel to Marx’s gesture in Capital and to Brecht’s theatre. It is the emergence of a true knowledge. It requires the rejection of consciousness to pass into an ‘experience’ of time, which is to say capitalist time, as it is – in its naked dominance.

 

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I now want to turn to contemporary reflections or endorsements of accelerationism as a site that replicates this tension of the attempt to trace a phenomenology of capitalist time. What we could call ‘classical accelerationism’, associated with the work of Nick Land, involved the endorsement of capitalist time as a time of acceleration, in the form of expanding value and the absorption of all elements of life under an ‘inhuman’ marketization (Land 2013). It is the acceleration of this vector that will, it is claimed, pierce the wall of capitalism itself an usher in a radically new future that has, in Land’s reading, already occurred. We are infiltrated from the future, by guerrillas of this technological and cybernetic mobilization of flows.

            Contemporary accelerationism modulates this schema (I will be referring to the work of Alex Williams, Nick Srnicek and Mark Fisher). It concludes that we have been robbed of our future by an inertial and crisis-ridden neoliberalism that has rescinded the dynamism of capitalism for the opaque mechanisms of speculative finance. The phenomenology of this experience of capitalist time is provided by dance music. Once, in this story, dance music provided an inventive form of musical accelerationism. In Mark Fisher’s characterization, ‘While 20^th Century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21^st Century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion.’ Whereas once, in the 1990s, there was a ‘hardcore continuum’ that had guaranteed an experimental acceleration (from rave to jungle to early grime), today, adopting Simon Reynolds diagnosis of ‘Retromania’, that future has stalled in bad pastiche (Williams 2013). Our moment is a nostalgia for a future that was once promised (‘Today is the Tomorrow you were Promised Yesterday’, in Victor Burgin’s phrase). Retromania is, in Alex Williams’s formulation, the ‘pop-cultural logic of late neoliberalism’.

            The stasis of neo-liberalism, which concludes the only way into the future is more of the same, is mimicked by a plundering of the past to grab images and forms of acceleration that reappear as merely static moments. We live, in Alex Williams’s Ballardian coinage, a chronosickness (2013). Unable to accede to the future, or even a faith or belief in the future, we instead can only live out the blockage of our present moment.

            This is evident in Mark Fisher’s recent discussion of juke / footwork – a form of Chicago ‘ghetto house’ at 155-165 bpm, with repetitive and often aggressive sampling (‘Fuck Dat’). It would seem that footwork continues the hardcore continuum and instantiates another acceleration, which would dispute the accelerationist characterization of the present moment as a moment of stasis. To rescue this diagnosis, Fisher argues that while jungle ‘was dark, but also wet, viscous, and enveloping’, footwork is ‘strangely desiccated’. This illiquid form traces its resistance ‘in the bad infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a time-trap.’ If jungle was predictive of accelerative temporalities the footwork, according to Fisher, only captures the impasses of the present moment.

 

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The answer of ‘classical accelerationism’ to this dilemma is more acceleration through celebration of the speed of capitalism. When jungle embodied the ‘Landian imaginary’ of ‘apocalyptic paranoid euphoria’ this made possible a future (Williams 2013). The present moment rescinds that promise and so contemporary accelerationism no longer works on the ‘speed’ of capitalism, which is not present, but seeks another form of time. Lacking this ‘alienating temporality’ (Williams 2013), speed only replicates capitalist parameters. To push beyond them we need to play off acceleration against speed, against ‘a simple brain-dead onrush’ (Williams 2013), we are called to a new ‘universal field’ of accelerative possibilities. This future is predicated, for Alex Williams (2013), in the engagement with ‘the forward-propelling energies embodied in the best of UK race music, its posthuman ingenuity, alien sonic vocabulary, and its manipulation of affect and impersonal desire.’

            I leave to one side the nationalism of this agenda (seemingly an endemic feature of music writing in the UK, usually in regard to an inferiority complex in relation to US-music). The example of footwork I’ve just discussed points to a problem with this agenda: the lack of any instantiation of ‘acceleration’ in the present moment. The ‘possibilities’ that contemporary accelerationism promises to trace in a universal field slip, unpleasantly, into another form of retromania. This is another form of nostalgia, but a retooled nostalgia that castigates the present in the name of encrypted possibilities that remain largely invisible.

            In the Althusserian terms I sketched I would argue that this figuration of capitalist temporality is melodramatic. It implies that at the edge of the present – dominated by the empty time of the chronicle – is the occasional flash of melodramatic dialectical time. These flashes are, however, largely sent from the past. For all its proclamations of a knowledge of the present and future, accelerationism does not accede to the abandonment of this ‘full’ time of the clash. What are lacking, ironically, are precisely the new aesthetic forms, the new modes of knowledge, which accelerationism is premised upon.

            Contemporary accelerationism remains perched precariously in the present moment, between a valorized past and a receding future. This is disjunction without synthesis. Again, it registers our broken relation to capitalist time, but only in the mystification we can reconnect to a superior force. Althusser insisted that it was the absence of relations that marked the temporal experience of capitalism for consciousness. My objection to accelerationism is not on the ground of absence, but on the promise of reconnection.

 

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Even discussing accelerationism might be considered a waste of (your) time. This is especially true of a critical discussion. What interests me, however, is accessing the question of the knowledge of capitalist time.  Accelerationism promises the kind of exposure of capitalist time that marks Althusser’s real dialectic. It premises itself on the stripping away of consciousness, which is not now the result of capitalism’s practical anti-humanism, but rather of epistemic expansion and extended ‘rationality’. What I am suggesting is that it falls back from this into mere melodrama, and that it positions such a real dialectic as a melodramatic form.

            Of course it could be said, in line with Althusser, that knowledge of capitalist time is simply a matter for a critique of political economy and a reconstruction of the logic of capitalism, beyond human consciousness. What interests me is the registration and shaping of these experiences on and for consciousness, which does not simply disappear – except in Althusserian science or the accelerationist dream of inhuman knowledge. This implies, to me, a necessity to think the disconnection and impasse of the present moment as a figure, at least potentially, of consciousness. In this case our choice, or decision, of aesthetic figuration becomes a crucial mode of knowledge.

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). [FM]

Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital [1968], trans. Ben Brewster (London and New York: Verso, 2009). [RC]

Fisher, Mark. 2013a. “An Extract from Mark Fisher’s Ghostsof My Life.” The Quietus.

Fisher, Mark, ‘Break It Down: Mark Fisher on DJ Rashad’s DoubleCup’, Electronic Beats, 22 October 2013b:

Land, Nick, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, intro. Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2013).

Reynolds, Simon, Retromania (London: Faber & Faber, 2011).

Reynolds, Simon (2013), ‘Introduction to the Hardcore Continuum’, The Wire:

Rose, Gillian, Dialectic of Nihilism:Post-Structuralism and Law (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984).

Williams, Alex, ‘Back to the Future? Technopolitics and the legacy of the CCRU’, Berlin, 1 February 2013.

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[1] In Gillian Rose’s summary: ‘Hegel’s text invites us to witness the education of natural consciousness, presented as a series of confrontations set in more or less recognizable historical settings: between two opposed individual consciousnesses, between opposed forces residing within a single consciousness, and between opposed forces belonging to the same communal consciousness.’ (6)

the art of crisis

trailing through the October questionnaire on 'recessional art' (i.e. art in the wake of the financial crisis) I came across this by Andrew Witt and Nathan Crompton in their reply (Badiousian largely) to October:

'Debt to the situation translates into a sense of "responsibility," like the artist who today finds him/herself in the midst of capitalism in crisis - nothing new there! - and is compelled to make art out of a sense of pathos and guilt rather than affirmation.'

Of course this is, for them, a bad thing. It's not just deliberate perversity, although that may play a part, but what's so wrong about a sense of 'responsibility' (and why the scare quotes?) and making art out of a sense of pathos and guilt? Less in favour of pathos, but guilt would be fine. Also, capitalism in midst of crisis is nothing new, well not in the technical sense but isn't this a slightly larger crisis? (perhaps leave this to Paul Mattick).

Of course I've written at length critically about affirmation, but even if one is affirmative I think the unspoken obviousness that is implied here might need a little more justification. Simply to mention 'responsibility', 'pathos' or, even worse, 'guilt', is supposed to raise post-Nietzschean hackles like an inbuilt-reflex (never made the maudlin pathos of much of Nietzsche and Nietzschean - all heroic strength while complaining about being 'dragged down' by those evil Christian / socialist / anarchist masses...).

Irrational Exuberance: Capitalism and Rationality

One of the 'asides' of the paper 'Measure against Power' that I'll be giving at 'Whose University?' (Goldsmiths 10 June) concerns a tendency to ascribe to capital and the State the powers of 'rationality' and so, by imputation, to ascribe 'irrationality' to resistance (by those promoting resistance).

In a qausi-Weberian or Foucauldian fashion 'measure' / counting etc. is taken as the function of repression, while the 'immeasurable' is the function of resistance. Certainly, this is a broad presentation of the problem, and I wouldn't want to deny a certain function of 'governmental rationality' at work, not least in creating or constituting the conditions of the 'market' - usually considered by the ideologues of the market as an emergent 'blind' rationality operating out of 'irrationality' (from Mandeville on). That said, I think this antinomy, and its posing, needs more interrogation.

This analysis I came across by Marcuse, from A Study on Authority, seems (despite Marcuse's image as prophet of irrationality) to capture rather better the forms of the problem:

As opposed to the rational, 'calculating' character of the Protestant-capitalist 'spirit' which is often all too strongly emphasized, its irrational features must be particularly pointed out. There lies an ultimate lack of order at the very root of this whole way of life, rationalized and calculated down to the last detail as an 'ideal type', this whole 'business' of private life, family and firm: the accounts do not, after all, add up - neither in the particular, nor in the general 'business'. (10)

Marcuse goes on to argue that this irrationality at the base is figured in the theological and philosophical, such as in the function of the terrible 'hidden God' for Calvinism. Our de-theologized version seems to incarnate this kind of function in terms of luck or fate, or in a kind of pseudo-Machieavellian capacity for fortuna. Obviously, today, bourgeois society embraces a 'logic' of chaos, flux and perpetual revolution, rather than a logic of rationalization, but the return to the antinomy of the Protestant ethic as ideology demonstrates, I think, our living in its pseudo-reversal.

In terms of the dialectic of rationality it is, perhaps, time to rehabilitate Marcuse's insight that 'society's material process of production has in many instances been rationalized down to the last detail - but as a whole it remains 'irrational'' (11), precisely because it blocks the realization of reason. In fact, as Alberto pointed out to me, we could also take this point through the path of Badiou - in his insistence that representation is not the reduction of some eternally rich prior state but an excess that requires our 'measurement' to bring it under critique.

Therefore, what I am suggesting, is a more critical analysis of the alignments of 'rationality', an unpicking of the 'irrationality' at the basis of the capitalist order, because that's the case, and that to impute 'rationality', emergent or otherwise, to capitalism risks blocking the true realization of rationality - not least in the forms of rationality embedded already through struggle.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

"There are two kinds of people in the world, those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You dig.”

Reading G.M. Tamas's article 'The Truth About Class' (pdf here), for whom there are two kinds of communists: Roussean socialists, who believe in the intrinsic goodness of the people (including in these are the unlikely bedfellows of EP Thompson, Mauss, Bataille, and Polanyi), and actual communists, who believe in the self-abolition of the proletariat as only a class of capitalism. Tamas himself is a rare case of a dissident from neo-liberalism to communism, and brings a robust clarity to his rare apostasy.

Now I should be type 2, but find myself often falling into type 1... (perhaps especially in my (non)-participation in the debate over the right to work slogan.

A few points disputing the clean lines of Tamas's division. First, the idea that type 1 (Roussean) involves a return to 'simpler and transparent' relations wouldn't hold up, for anthropological reasons, in the case of Mauss and Bataille. Gift economies are at least as complex, if not more, than capitalist economies, and perhaps one of the attractions of capitalist economies is that they remove all the 'messy' temporal negotiations of gift economies, gratitude, charity etc. (which often take malignant 'caste' forms of condescension - Maria Edgeworth's remarks on the need for gratitude get caught up in this very unpleasant 'economy', when it comes to servants and slaves - and Edgeworth is by no means the worst example of such problems).

Second I think Tamas lines up too clear a division of piling class malignancy onto 'pre-capitalist' caste relations. While I wouldn't want to defend the intrinsic 'goodness' of the people, nor deny the imbrication of the working class as class of capitalism, I do think he underestimates how capitalism parasites on and generates a new discourse of 'canailles'. To defend equality, to defend the fact that the working class aren't stupid, etc., may not be 'Marxist' per se but it a necessary task.

This leads to the major problem of the assumption of the emergence of a 'pure capitalism' that throws workerism/Roussean socialism into crisis and paves the way for true Marxism. This of course makes sense in terms of the crisis of social democracy, the affirmation of the worker etc. (and chimes with Theorie Communiste's theorisation that such affirmations belong to the stage of formal subsumption / 'programmatism' in the stage of real subsumption, and are now obsolete in true real subsumption). I think the question here lies on the 'purity' of that 'pure capitalism', to repeat/iterate the point above. If social democracy is dead, for example, it doesn't seem to be dead for the banks, and the assumption that the ground is clear for true Marxism doesn't seem to be yielding the results one would suppose, as Tamas, being a clear-sighted and logical thinker, concedes.
Therefore, perhaps especially in the case of crisis, I think a necessary tense and contradictory inhabiting of these two tendencies might be possible: a defence of past gains, without seeing these as Marxist, rather 'true socialism', and a re-tooling of the self-abolition thesis that does not conform to capitalism's current round of devalorisation.

On the ground then, a defence of job security, and work as possibility against devalorisation / attacks / neo-liberal re-organisation, coupled with taking the opportunity, as Nina rightly suggests, to re-think work/value/accumulation.
A fudge then...

Neo-liberalism and the 'society of litigation'

Whereas economic regulation takes place spontaneously, through the formal properties of competition, the social regulation of conflicts, irregularities of behavior, nuisance caused by some to others, and so forth, calls for a judicial interventionism which has to operate as arbitration within the framework of the rules of the game. If you multiply enterprises, you multiply frictions, environmental effects, and consequently, to the extent that you free economic subjects and allow them to play their game, then at the same time the more you detach them from their status as virtual functionaries of a plan, and you inevitably multiply judges. The reduction of the number of functionaries, or rather, the de-functionarization of the economic action of plans, together with the increased dynamic of enterprises, produces the need for an ever-increasing number of judicial instances, or anyway of instances of arbitration.

Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p.175

Big Society - the origin?

I've been reading Foucault's fascinating The Birth of Biopolitics, at the recommendation of Jess, which is an excellent genealogy of neo-liberalism. As I will be liberally ripping it off when I talk at the Accelerationism event I will save substantial comments until then, however as I was reading I came across this:

in 1950 Ropke wrote a text entitled The Orientation of German Economic Policy, which was published with a preface by Adenauer. What does Ropke identify in this text, this charter, as the object, the final aim, the ultimate objective of governmental action? I will list the objectives he fixes: first, to enable as far as possible everyone to have access to private property; second, the reduction of huge urban sprawls and the replacement oflarge suburbs with a policy of medium-sized towns, the replacement of the policy and economics of large housing blocks with a policy and economics of private houses, the encouragement of small farms in the countryside, and the development of what he calls non-proletarian industries, that is to say, craft industries and small businesses; third, decentralization of places of residence, production, and management, correction of the effects of specialization·and the: division of labor; and the organic reconstruction of society on the basis of natural communities, families, and neighborhoods; finally, generally organizing, developing, and controlling possible effects of the environment arising either from people living together or through the development of enterprises and centers of production.

You will recognize this text; it has been repeated 25,000 times for the last 25 years.

As Foucault goes on to remark 'I think this multiplication of the "enterprise" form within the social body is what is at stake in neo-liberal policy. It is a matter of making the market, competition, and so the enterprise, into what could be called the formative power of society.'

So perhaps not Chesterton/Belloc, but a re-tooled neo-liberalism German style? Frankly the whole 'big society' fills me with horror so I can't check how closely the proposals match the above, confirmation / refutation appreciated (let's move into a Popperian / Lakatos space).

The Anthropology of Capitalism

Perhaps we have been too quick to celebrate the “disenchantment of the world” ushered in by the retreat of religion and the growth of naturalism since the seventeenth century. Rather, what actually happened was the enchantment of Western society by the world, by the imagined cultural values of the material rather than the spiritual. We live in a world enchanted by symbolically constituted, culturally relative “utilities” such as gold, oil, diamonds, Pinot Noir grapes, Mercedes cars, heirloom tomatoes, silk clothing, hamburgers from McDonald’s, and purses from Gucci. Here is a large construction of nature by particular cultural values whose symbolic qualities, however, are understood as purely material qualities, whose social sources are attributed rather to individual desires, and whose arbitrary satisfactions are mystified as universally rational choices.
Marshall Sahlins

Maussian-Messianic Salvage Punk

In lieu of what I had planned to do, which was actually post on Peter Worsley's The Trumpet Shall Sound (a reference gleaned from Alberto's book, and well worth tracking down, especially the 1970 Paladin edition with psychedelic cover I found in Hay-on-Wye), here is just a great quote and some scattered remarks:

For a long time, the Europeans were not regarded as all-powerful, but as rather pathetic, ignorant people who could be easily cheated or stolen from. Their ignorance of sorcery was lamentable. ‘These are not men, they are merely gods’ said the natives, judging the Whites to be beings whose lives were inferior to those of living men. Again, they spoke the indigenous tongues very badly; why should one bother trying to make out their uncouth speech? And if one did associate with them, was it not likely to provoke the wrath of the ancestral spirits? Surely the country of the White man must be a very bad place, or why would they leave it? Or were these, perhaps, refugees who had fled their country to escape some punishment? (218)

Worsley's book is concerned with cargo cults, and more particularly with seeing this messianic movements as actually pretty rational responses to the irrationality of capital, especially in colonial 'contact zones'. After all, if you work more and earn less, or if the colonialists seem to do no work and live pretty well, why not engage in some Maussian-messianic salvage punk by destroying all your goods and waiting for deliverance by the ships or planes of the whites? Kill all your pigs, the primary source of wealth in New Guinea, and await the great Pig. Worsley's point that 'rationality' in anthropology and sociology is often judged from the 'rationality' of the market is particularly astute, as are the colonised's remarks about how useless whites are because they keep having to send broken down vehicles back to the ancestors for repair. More disturbing, although perhaps accessible via Fanon, are the claims of the colonised to be the real ancestors, and really white. A great scene as well when one potential rebel leader is sent on a 'orientation'/ training course and finds out that the whites don't really believe in their God but instead claim descent from apes - well, as he notes, that was always our theory...

In fact bearing in mind the inexplicability of the financial crisis and its effects of 'creative destruction' / non-reproduction Worsley's book starts to look like a guide for strategy for the colonised of capitalism. Why not liquidate your property and await your rescue package? (Probably better to try this if you run a bank...)