The Party of Life versus The Devil's Party

In this manner we enlisted irrevocably in the Devil’s party – the “historical evil” that leads existing conditions to their destruction, the “bad side” that makes history by undermining all established satisfaction.

Guy Debord

 

 

Jean-Marc Mandosio's In the Cauldron of the Negative (2003) reflects on the tensions in the Situationist International between Raoul Vaneigem, as representative of the "party of life" (Nietzsche), and Guy Debord as representative of the "devil's party." Mandosio critiques Vangeim's "affirmative" vision, which runs from an over-heated embrace of the potentials of technology to a mystical-vitalist inverted Schopenhaurism. Read through the prism of alchemy Mandosio traces the "impossible" dream of qualitative transformation that founders on the rocks of actuality.

 

The text usefullly signals again the SI's embrace of some of the most extreme forms of capitalist technology as sites that can be detourned to communist ends. These include the technologies of conditioning, even brain-washing, that have been turned to maintaining the spectacle. Asger Jorn writes of the "race between free artists and the police to experiment with and develop the use of new techniques of conditioning." (which recalls Brecht and the Soviet avant-garde).

 

 

Mandosio quotes a text by Eduardo Rothe, from issue 12 of the SI's journal, which claims that although space travel is the expression, par excellence, of capitalist alienation, in the future: "We will not enter into space as employees of an astronautic administration or as “volunteers” of a state project, but as masters without slaves reviewing their domains: the entire universe pillaged for the workers councils."

 

This is the "accelerationist" tendency of the SI. It maintains the split of productive forces from relations of production and claims the capacity to reuse them, evincing a faith in the forms of automation leading to the possibility of a Fourierist utopia. Nature can be "pillaged" as long as it's by workers councils.

 

In Mandosio's account, which seems convincing, this tendency splits into two. In the case of Vaneigem it leads to a displacement of these technological powers onto mysticism and the "will to life." In the case of Debord, partly under the impact of ecological thinking, into a deepening consideration of the negative. The present taste for Vaneigem, as in Howard Caygill's On Resistance (2013), indicates the generalised desire for a power of will to break the forms of domination that characterise the present moment.

 

The path of Debord is less taken, except perhaps by me, but is also not immune from a detachment from the present and an inscription of the will in the negative. Debord's desire to go by the bad side does not simply lead to pessimism, in the usual characterisation, but also detachment.

 

That Mandosio ends on a salutary Leopardian pessimism is a sign of the difficulty, although at least honest. What interests me is how the "adventure" of the SI maps a series of possibilities that remain the coordinates for the present moment, even if this is in a largely "occult" fashion. Rather than remain mired in debates about recuperation, academic or otherwise, it might be worth considering this "framing" as a means to inquire into our present moment.

Ursine Accelerationism

In Andre's Platonov's The Foundation Pit the 'unknown last proletarian' (107) and last instance of 'residual exploited labour' (107) on the collective farm is a bear who hammers at the forge. In fact the forge is a 'shock' workshop and the bear is not only the last proletarian but also the first shock worker (udarniki). After been taken around the collective farm to denounce kulaks - in actuality, those who have mistreated him - the bear sees a banner 'For the Party, for Party loyalty, for the Shock Labor Forcing Open for the Proletariat the Doors into the Future!' (128).

 

 

 

Taking this injunction absolutely the bear begins to hammer out iron at a frantic rate, distressing the villagers as his labour threatens to ruin the iron (and therefore figuring the excess of 'shock work' that stormed to destructive attempts at production). The bear wants to force the door for a proletarian future 'expending all this furious, speechless joy into the zeal of labor' (128).

 

This is the interchange of animality and the status of the proletariat - the proletariat as animal and animal as proletariat (see Timofeeva). In Annie Epelboin's analysis, this is acceleration as destructive return to chaos:

'The bear symbolizes a prehistoric future .... He casts doubt on the validity of the creation myth itself. As an "unknown proletarian," representing the people as whole, and as a blacksmith, the bear is remiscent of the "hammerer-bear" of Siberian myth who, by inventing the forge, inaugurates cosmic and social order, presiding over the creation of the world. Platonov's bear, however, does not so much create the world as annihilate it. He is, at least potentially, the agent of ultimate destruction. Wanting to force open the doors of the future, he threatens to return the world to primordial chaos. Wanting to force the pace, to accelerate time, he shows us that time is reversible.'

Annie Epelboin, "Metaphorical Animals and the Proletariat" in Essays in Poetics 27 (Autumn 2002), p.181, qtd. in Andrei Platonov, The Foundation Pit, p.222

The shock acceleration of labour in 'speechless joy' (jouissance?), reverses itself into a chaos that ruins any linearity. In the moment of the revolution, in the revolutionary negativity of the proletariat doubled with the animal, the revolution revolves and reverses.

Negativity as a Practice

"The slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the Luddite wreckers, they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. They knew that as long as these plantations stood, their lot would do labour on them until they dropped. The only thing was to destroy them."

CLR James, The Black Jacobins (thanks to Jessica)

Negativity as a political practice, and thanks also to Jason Read for his excellent comments/review on my book. I have to say on D&G's Anti-Oedipus I'm picking up on a tendency in the book, which certainly doesn't exhaust the text. That said I don't find it personally that engaging, perhaps due to the reason Jason has identified in its 'productivism' versus representation matrix, although more obviously stylistically (for me).

In a general way the critical identifications in the book are noting commonalities and can't be exhaustive, but the chapters are designed at least to ground my arguments in the textual evidence (I can't stand arguments that fail to even read the texts they analyse and simply identify a thinker/writer by their pre-existent image, or create a 'straw-man' (it used to be 'postmodernists')). Part of the point is that each of the thinkers I analyse operates in a point of tension with negativity and, of course, my overall reading doesn't have to accepted but I would say I don't think this tension can be contested.

In some recent presentations of the book I've been a little ruder about the 'negativity of finitude' tendencies, but whether they will or deserve to see print I don't yet know.

Determinate Negation

But when, on the other hand, the result is conceived as it is in truth, namely, as a determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen, and in the negation the transition is made through which the progress through the complete series of forms comes about of itself.

Hegel, Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit

Grand Opportunism

Despite being anti-accelerationist I do have a soft spot for Massimo Cacciari's 'negative accelerationism' - as I've previously posted (now, sign of age, repeating myself...). Unlike the pathos of the Landian tendency to 'love' one's own dismantling at the (metaphoric) hands of capitalism, an embrace of liquid flows and extinction, Cacciari's 'unpolitical' version of completed nihilism encompasses a breathtaking cynicism. Here's a position statement from his essay 'Nietzsche and the Unpolitical' (in the new collection from Fordham The Unpolitical):

'they see their own operations as alienation - not in the banal and servile sense, that this alienation is simply imposed on them, that they are subject to it in messianic expectation of the dialectical synthesis, but in the sense that, within the irrevocable dimension of alienation, they can build their own political interest, can determine their own separateness and division as grand politics... There is no synthesis for workers' alienation.'

As capital nullifies all values far from embracing capitalism own deterritorialised flows we embrace a political intelligence that can organise a counter-plan, manipulating evacuated 'values' for our own 'unpolitical' projects. Of course, that turned out to be the PCI and the historic compromise, so not so 'intelligent'... Fedrico Luisetti has some fascinating work updating Cacciari to the present misery (pdf).

Cacciari's collection Architecture and Nihilism is available here, with a kind plug for my earlier post.

Labour / Time

In something of a palinode, one of the questions not dealt with enough in my book is the question of the origin of negativity in a relational and social process of struggle. Here I want to try to correct that absence, and to try to think the question of class struggle in relation to the horizon of real abstraction and real subsumption.

First, my understanding of class struggle qua negativity is classical, in the sense of finding its origin in an experience of commodification and alienation that bears, primarily, on time. In Marx's classic statement from part 7, in the chapter on 'The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation':

within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. (my emphasis)

The despotism of capital is a despotism of time, which finds it locus on the labour process through the extraction of value. Of course this is not the only form of capitalist alienation or commodification, but time is, I would argue, its privileged vector.

Capitalism, therefore, negates our experience of time, subjects that temporality to 'capture' and deployment within the value form. This capture produces the effect of negativity in this relational 'friction' as a felt need. This is true of even the most anti-humanist forms of Marxism, as we see in this statement from Althusser's Reading Capital:

In the capitalist mode of production, therefore, the time of economic production has absolutely nothing to do with the obviousness of everyday practice's ideological time: of course, it is rooted in certain determinate sites, in biological time certain limits in the alternation of labour and rest for human and animal labour power; certain rhythms for agricultural production) but in essence it is not at all identified with this biological time, and in no sense is it a time that can be read immediately in the flow of any given process. It is an invisible time, essentially illegible, as invisible and as opaque as the reality of the total capitalist production process itself. This time, as a complex 'intersection' of the different times, rhythms, turnovers, etc., that we have just discussed, is only accessible in its concept, which, like every concept is never immediately 'given', never legible in visible reality: like every concept this concept must be produced, constructed.

Capitalist time is rooted in biological time, but not identified with it; it overrides and negates this time, creating a new temporal experience of knotted times, that are never given or legible as such. Hence, at least Althusser implies, the difficulty of transition from the felt need of resistance to an actual knowledge of capitalist time.

Therefore, negativity operates in this 'frictional' relation, generated not only by the capitalist negation of time in the labour process (and more generally in the 'social factory'), but also by the felt and actual political resistance to this, i.e. class struggle, including sabotage, strikes, abstentism, and all other methods of extracting 'free time' from capitalist despotism.

The first difficulty is that why identify this with negativity and not some intrinsic 'creativity' or ontological positivity? Here first I would argue that penetration and shaping of subjectivity under capitalism, in terms of real abstraction and real subsumption, ideological operates through such 'ontological' or 'metaphysical' anthropological determinations. Second, and far more speculatively, I would argue that the 'anthropology' of the human is one of unemployed negativity (Bataille), or a fundamental discordance of lack/excess (Freud / Lacan), that when subjected to capital is subject to the 'employment' of negativity, but does not escape this discordance. Hence the 'festival' of negativity, in terms of lack and excess, that operates as the constant negation of the captured and positivised time of capitalism. There is, if you like, an intrinsic but historically conditioned, negativity.

The second difficulty is that a capitalism of real abstraction and real subsumption seems to absorb any 'anthropology'. As Daniel Bensaid notes: 'the Grundrisse and Capital present themselves as a labour of mourning for ontology, a radical deontologization, after which no space remains for any 'world beyond' whatsoever, any dual content, any dualism of the authentic and the inauthentic, science and ontology.' (116, Marx for Our Times) The 'place' of negativity would therefore seem to be closed, having no where to reside. This is only extended by Value-Form Marxism (VFM), in which the real subsumption of all relations under capitalist production, including through socially mediated abandonment (unemployment, exclusion from the market, etc), and the power of real abstractions to shape subjectivity and existence go 'all the way down'.

As I take on board this analysis it seems to leave no point of resistance or agency available at all, and no point of negativity. The working class is merely adjunct of capital, tamed negativity at the service of capital as a totalising dialectical 'machine'. Class struggle drops out of the equation, it seems, due to this dominance. Here I would stress the 'within and against' position of the proletariat, and, contrary to Hardt and Negri, and many of the VFM theorists, still stress the immanent friction of negativity in the 'immediate process of production' (including in its generalisation across the social factory). This negativity of class struggle takes the immanent forms of memories of past struggles, including traces and remnants of the achievements of such struggles in areas of relatively non-commodified life, or in acts of radical de-commodification. The 'historical anthropology' or 'ontology' of the human also maintains this frictional relation in the labour process, as we are subject to the negation of our time and struggle to negate the despotism of capital.

It is the immediacy of the relational extraction of value in labour that provokes resistance, which is vectored through 'lived experience' (historically conditioned of course), and through the necessary strategic knowledge of this extraction. This is why I would suggest the impossibility of retreating into some 'reserve' of negativity, but only its articulation 'within and against' the capitalist despotism of time, which is to say its strictly relational form.

Of course, the further difficulty is the fragmentation and destruction of the worker's movement, which did play a role in the development of capitalism through the valorisation of labour, but which did also, often despite itself or against itself, carry the utopian traces of the critique of labour itself. While we have individual negativity if you like, often in the truly negative forms of psychic or physical distress and suffering, what is truly missing is a collective articulation of this negativity. Here the labour process still, negatively, offers points of collective articulation in terms of collective resistance to the imposition of the value form, as would also consumption.

Peasant Negativity

At the prompting of the Institute I've been reading Ranajit Guha's Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983), founding book of the subaltern studies school, for its discussion of negation. Now Guha's project is explicitly to dispute Hobsbawn's contention in Primitive Rebels that such insurgencies are only 'pre-political', mere way-stations to true class consciousness and proletarian revolt. Rescuing peasant insurgency from such condescensions Guha reconstructs its essential thematics, but doesn't fully resolve the telelogical dilemma, tending to oscillate between valorising insurgencies on their own terms and forcing them back into a teleology.

In the case of negation this plays itself out around his adoption of Gramsci's idea that 'negative consciousness' is the first glimmering of class consciousness: ‘His identity amounted to the sum of his subalternity. In other words, he learnt to recognize himself not by the properties of his own social being but by a diminuition, if not negation, of those of his superiors.’ (18) Negation is an inversion of the social power of these superiors - the world turned upside down, but as the Gramscian formulation suggests still preliminary.

What is interesting is how Guha tries to develop and give the social phenomenology of this negation on its own terms. He identifies is as taking two forms:

1. Discrimination - violence directed at particular social targets (landlords, debt collectors, the British).

2. Appropriation - ‘The other modality of negation characteristic of insurgency consists of the peasants’ attempt to destroy or appropriate for themselves the signs of the authority of those who dominate them.’ (28)

Against rituals of inversion (i.e. carnival-type forms), which legitimate and reinforce a continuity of power, the peasant insurgency tries to achieve ‘a permanent subversion’ (36), the introduction of a discontinuity in power. It makes a ‘semiotic break’ (36) through the inversion of the signs of deference. Here then we see the positive reconstruction of this form of negation, but this invocation of permanent subversion is still constrained by negation: ‘the subaltern’s urge to assert his identity not in terms of his own culture but his enemy’s – a characteristic index of negative consciousness’ (71).

Instead of seeing this assertion of identity based on the enemy as a (reactive) sign of weakness and dependency, could we not see it as a transversal and appropriation of the signs of the masters (a kind of detournement)? In this way it would not be mere ‘self-alienation’ (Guha), but a mode of seizure.

Pessimism of the Intellect

The use of negation: this new value, or, better, this new operating technique, has a constant function in the transformation of the capitalist-bourgeois crisis into models of development. From 1920 to about 1935, architecture was in the forefront in the battles of the dialectical conversion from Negative to Positive. Its crisis only comes at the precise moment in which, facing the reality of the Plan, the role of foreseeing or ideologically mediating the Plan ceases to exist.

Manfredo Tafuri

For a minor example of the 'use of negation', consider this on the value of 'defensive pessimism', if you should wish to harness your negativity to achieve your goals...

Nothing

I came across Edgar Morin's 'Approaches to Nothingness' (1989) fortuitously. It pursues the relation to non-dialectical negativity, and echoes in some respects the recent work of Ray Brassier and Reza Negarestani (although in a less technical and metaphysical vein). In particular Morin explores the implications of our binding to a non-correlational negativity, or, in his usefully straightforward terms, the relation of anthropological nothingness (death) to the "incursion of Nothingness" into the cosmological. At the level of the cosmos we have the nothingness of the big-bang, the nothingness of the universe ending in annihilation, and a resulting ontological nothingness (which to me echoes Reza's concept of the "littered universe"). This is Morin, in Thomas Ligotti mode:

Such a universe is based on no foundation, has no center, knows no genetic God, does not exist in all eternity. It is an acentric and polycentric universe, a world without aprioristic laws since our known laws of the universe develop with the world contemporally and coextensively. Clearly, it is a world without a program, without divine Providence, without becoming. This world, which knows no foundation and no creator, which creates itself, engenders itself, generates itself, unfolds in the context of myriad autocreative and self-producing processes: the stars and atoms, of which there are billions.
(85)

As you might guess from the language Morin is interested in complexity theory and negentropy. What is interesting, however, is that he insists on how these processes of self-organisation always take place "at the phenomenal fringe of things that theoretically defies formulation, that bears no name, and whose presence we surmise." (88)

Morin insists on an effect of "emptiness", a fundamental binding to the necessity of destruction: "Nothingness is everywhere in the interior of the universe." (92) What's also interesting is that he links this back to our experience of this Nothingness. Of course you could regard this as a reactive (re-)turn to correlationism, but surely some of the fascination of non-correlational theories (whether "negative" (Ray Brassier), of "twisted affirmation" (Reza), or more "positive" (Graham Harman)) is their relation to us? In a way part of the point of these theories is to shock us out of a Kantian narcissim that "we are giving the orders". [1] What do we do with this shock?

I'm not simply trying to restore correlationism, in fact such a restoration is, in a way, premised on my missing of the metaphysical level of these arguments. [2] I want to consider, however, Morin's arguments which also sketch a political effect of the "embrace" of nothingness. Here is a (unfortunately) long quotation:

Apart from a self-defensive reaction by which human beings ignore negative feedback or deliberately forget and simply persist, there is an attitude of acknowledging that for the first time we are facing Nothingness in all its desolation, in all its necessity, in all its mystery. [3] The increasing enervation of the myths, which are by no means ineffectual or dead yet, bring us for the first time to the insight that there is no messiah or also that every possible messiah is ill, not just the Messiah of the religious but also that of politics. Every Messiah - including that of science, including that of progress - must be told: no! (94)

In political terms this function of the anti-messiah means the refusal of "brotherhood" as consolation and myth in the face of the negative. Rather, we can elaborate fraternity, or I would even say communism, "on our shared condition of being condemned to Nothingness." (95)

Although Morin argues this in terms of an "ethics of agony" and ethics is a word I am suspicious of (despite my own failure of using it in a piece that perhaps should be pruned from my CV), his point concerning the anti-messiah may still hold as one possible starting-point for thinking the politics of the non-correlational.

Notes

[1] I am by no means knowledgeable enough to grasp the accuracy of this as a reading of Kant, my suspicion is not but I await the next issue of Collapse eagerly.

[2] I seem to lack the "metaphysics gene", and in my rare conversations with philosophers I can easily be chided for my tendency to completely miss this level of argument. Hence I am without-philosophy in perhaps the most boring sense.

[3] Reza's work indicates this awareness is not as "new" as Morin suggests.

References

Morin, Edgar (1989) ‘Approaches to Nothingness’, in Looking Back on the End of the World, ed. Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf, trans. David Antal. New York: Semiotext(e), pp.81-95.

Negarestani, Reza (2008) "The Corpse Bride:Thinking with Nigredo", Collapse IV.