Life's What You Make It: Vitalism and Critique

Presented at‘The Politics of Critique’, University of Brighton (July 18^th – 19^th 2012)

In a 2009 pamphlet issued out of the student occupations in New York we find what we might call the standard rejection of critique: ‘This activity of producing novel recommendations for the submission of the population is called critique.’ (2009, III) The activity of critique is treated as one that is indissolubly bound to what it rejects, and hence always constrained and always available for recuperation: ‘Critique illuminates all the errors of a society that its managers have overlooked.’ (2009, III) What we find is the rejection of critique founded on a rather unstable amalgam of an immanent thought of affirmation – which would charge critique with always being secondary, dependent, and a symptom of ressentiment – coupled to a post-Situationist model of perpetual recuperation – in which critical activity is a mere corrective or, as the pamphlet puts it, ‘[a] release valve for intellectual dissonance.’ (2009, III) The ‘solution’ to this impasse is one of radical separation, which aims to sever the relation to power: ‘Critique must be abandoned in favour of something that has no relation whatsoever to its enemy, something whose development and trajectory is completely indifferent to the nonlife of governance and capital.’ (2009, III)

The reference to ‘nonlife’ gives a clue perhaps to the nature of what has no relation to the enemy, what has a different development and trajectory: Life. It is the power of Life that will substitute for the impotence of critique. This is made explicit in the appeal to ‘a form of life which no reason can govern’ (2009, IX), and the closing assertion: ‘Our task, impossible, is to seize time itself and liquefy its contents, emptying its emptiness and refilling it with the life that is banned from appearing.’ (2009, XI) Of course, what justifies and supports this discourse is the work of Giorgio Agamben. It’s initially somewhat surprising that the supremely po-faced and hyper-refined thought of Agamben, in which the paradigm of modernity is the concentration camp, should be so prevalent in licensing radical discourse. No doubt, the work of Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee has been influential in encouraging this take-up through the redemptive reversal of the transformation of ‘bare life’ – life everywhere subject to sovereign power – into a transfigured life of glory. I will say more about this ‘transfiguration’ later, for the moment I want to pause for a while on the vitalism subtending this take-up.

Comedy and Critique

I want to turn to what might perhaps appear an unlikely topic – the comic (don’t worry this won’t be funny). It is the comic that will allow us to explore the continuing vitality of vitalism and, in particular, how vitalism attempts to replace critique. Henri Bergson’s work Laughter (1900) contains a famous definition of the comic as ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’. One key example of this repetitious mechanism deployed by Bergson is the jack-in-the-box:

As children we have all played with the little man who springs out of his box. You squeeze him flat, he jumps up again. Push him lower, and he shoots up still higher. Crush him down beneath the lid, and often he will send everything flying. It is hard to tell whether or no the toy itself is very ancient, but the kind of amusement it affords belongs to all time. It is a struggle between two stubborn elements, one of which, being simply mechanical, generally ends by giving in to the other, which treats it as a plaything. A cat playing with a mouse, which from time to time she releases like a spring, only to pull it up short with a stroke of her paw, indulges in the same kind of amusement.

This example indicates the two tendencies that Bergson traces: the elasticity of life, represented by the act of playing, and the inelasticity of the comic, represented by the jack-in-the-box’s mechanical and thing-like repetition. The function of laughter is to free us from this inelastic ‘machine-like’ existence and return us to the social normality of elastic life – to prevent us from merely being jack-in-the-boxes, we might say.

This is, of course, equivocal because the return to social normality can itself seem like a return to something ‘machine-like’ and repetitive – the routines of social life being hardly more elastic than the comic. Therefore, Bergson himself notes how laughter can free us from the machine-like, but also risks returning us to the limited forms of social life:

Laughter comes into being in the self-same fashion. It indicates a slight revolt on the surface of social life. It instantly adopts the changing forms of the disturbance. It, also, is afroth with a saline base. Like froth, it sparkles. It is gaiety itself. But the philosopher who gathers a handful to taste may find that the substance is scanty, and the after-taste bitter.

The bitter taste of laughter is this limited ‘critical’ function and the difficulty of finding a true elasticity of Life. In finding the elasticity of Life we aim to replace the merely ‘negative’ function of critique by affirming that elasticity. Yet, the result is still equivocal, seemingly as bound to the social as critique is supposed to be. On the one hand, laughter threatens to return us to the rote routines of social life, to what Federico Luisetti calls the ‘founding mechanisms … of late capitalism’s violent entertainment compulsion’ (2012). On the other hand, laughter also incarnates a possible detachment or interruption of these mechanisms, and the possibility of a new construction.

We can find this latter kind of political (or anti-political) vitalism figured in the comic turns of activism that aims to mock the inertial repetitions of the 1% or capitalist capture. Laughter at those in power is the affirmative replacement for critique, indicating both how we can collapse into the social repetitions and machine-like roles of our capitalist personas and how we can break with these routines. The difficulty is that the very act of the comic, the very attempt to break social norms, can itself become another mechanical norm. The valorisation of the elasticity of Life – incarnated in lines of flight, exodus, and ‘movement’ – threatens to become another rote routine of affirmation, if not to fall back into replicating the ethical and social forms of a ‘mutational’ capitalism. The result is a perpetual conflict, a divine comedy, which serves to enforce the perpetual power of Life. Life as affirmative operator must also be returned to again and again to free it from any becoming inelastic, including in the inelasticity of opposition. The dread fear of recuperation, displaced onto critique, returns to haunt Life that always falls short of the excess it is supposed to figure.

What I am tracing is a strange mimicry and replication of the operation of critique, and its fate, by this political vitalism. The very stridency by which critique is condemned in the name of Life is suggestive of the parallel by which vitalism comes to replace, or try to replace, critique. The ‘empowering’ effect of vitalism, and also its comedy, makes it the signature gesture of the moment. It traces a biopolitical populism that poses Life against a vampiric Capital. This is an ethical discourse in which are actions are assessed by their ability to live up to the elasticity of Life and condemned by laughter at their failure to do so. We are perpetually comic subjects, laughing at our own enchainment to the mechanical, while repeatedly trying to conform to the vibrancy of Life. I want to unpack now a little more just why the interchangeability of vitalism and critique should take place and suggest a little more why this should be problematic.

A Renegade Discourse

Donna V. Jones has noted the popularity of vitalism in the contemporary moment as a replacement for the usual discourse of critique:

As a radical or renegade discourse, vitalism represents protest, disillusion, and hope. Life often grounds opposition today, after the political disappearance of a subject/object of history and scepticism about the philosophy of the subject in general. … A third way, Life disallows bourgeois stasis as certainly as it makes impossible the achievement of rational controls. In fine, Life conjures up experience, irrationality, and revolt. (2012: 17)

Obviously the slightly coy reference to the ‘subject/object of history’ indexes the absent proletariat, and so we might say Life indexes a new populist subject that, true to its object, overflows any class canalisation. Also, the reference to exceeding rationality is the trope of anti-planning and anti-rationality that is driven also by the claimed immeasurability and excess of Life over all control.

What Jones crucially indicates is that despite vitalism claiming the status of an affirmative and primary force it in fact always functions as a ‘reactive banner’, and should be ‘defined less affirmatively than as the negation of its own negation – the mechanical, machinic, and the mechanistic.’ (2012: 28) Life does not come first, but (as we saw with the comic and laughter) can only be recovered through and against the mechanical. It is for this reason, I want to suggest, that the hostility of vitalism to critique is a sign of what Freud would call the ‘narcissism of small differences’. Vitalism constantly makes a claim on Life as primary and castigates critique as reactive because it remains within the same matrix.

Now, of course, one response to this could be to suggest the complexity of vitalism as a ‘critical’ discourse – noting that it does not involve a simple opposition between Life and mechanism, but rather a complex and dynamic topology (as does Federico Luisetti). The path I wish to explore is rather the strange interchangeability this analysis sets up between vitalism and critique. Where we saw how vitalism starts to look like critique, I now want to briefly explore where critique starts to look like vitalism.

This is interchangeability is posed by Jones. She turns to Bergson’s essay on laughter to track how Bergson’s suggestion that ‘laughter is social therapy for action that has become mechanical’ (Jones 2012: 52) can be used to understand the work of Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu as forms of Bergsonian comedy. In the case of Butler’s theory of drag as parody the act of parody frees us from the laughable mechanical repetitions of gender roles, while Bourdieu’s analysis of the habitus becomes ‘a comedy of class society, a risible provocation.’ (Jones 2012: 55) These works of critique can be seen as vitalist in the ways they encourage us to mock routine and encourage invention and elasticity.

What we see here is how theories we might consider to be anti-vitalist and critical turn back around to vitalism once we recognise the critical function of vitalism. In this ‘comedy’ we find positions exchanged as critics become vitalists and vitalists critics (admittedly this may be a ‘comedy’ only found funny by a few sad souls). In Jones’s reading the addition of Marx’s analysis of reification is that there we laugh at how inanimate things act as living beings – in the ‘dancing’ commodity form. Marx inverts Bergson to demonstrate ‘living activity in inert things’ (Jones 2012: 55).

The effect of the deconstruction of the distinction between the living and the machinic seems to problematise vitalism, but still leaves it as a useful ‘critical’ discourse. In fact, this speaks to the difficulty of discarding vitalism, should we wish too. There is, if we like, a kind of persistence of the ‘living’ as norm secreted within the critical apparatus (as well as a critical apparatus secreted within the ‘living’). This is the ‘vitality of vitalism’ referred to by Georges Canguilhem, in which he stressed its ethical and imperative function (Greco 2005: 17-18).

Critical Life

Despite, or perhaps because, of these parallels and fusions the critique of vitalism seems all the more urgent. The very volatility, promiscuity and dispersion of vitalism (which mimics its own account of Life) threatens to leave no space at all for critique that could not be re-absorbed into Life. Max Horkheimer, in a 1934 essay, accepted the element of protest against reification at work in vitalism, but was critical of its elimination of history, evasion of the material, and irrationalism (Horkheimer 2005). Now, while these criticisms still hold good, I think, we might note the re-tooled anti-critical vitalism of the present tends to embrace these exact points of criticism.

If history is co-extensive with Capital and Empire, the ‘single catastrophe’ to use Benjamin’s oft-quoted phrase, then the elimination of history is the only way to found the novelty of the new. The crisis of capitalism and the exhaustion of left or social democratic forms is taken as a given and as the sign of the release of the repressed force of Life. In similar fashion the material only incarnates the practico-inert slumped into the frozen stasis of the commodity form. The alternative ‘materialities’ of Life – objects, networks, complexity, et al. – are the only hope against the dead matter of the present. This is what Badiou, in Logics of Worlds (2006), calls ‘democratic materialism’. Finally, irrationalism is to be welcomed against the sterile rationalisms of planning and order that are taken to encompass everything from state socialism to neo-liberalism.

This is something of clichéd presentation of the various forms of political vitalism, but I would argue that there is some truth to it, and some truth to it as an account for the attraction of biopolitical populism. In fact, this kind of political vitalism precisely tracks outside of the constraints of the present and presents itself as a discourse without limits. This was Michel Foucault’s point concerning what he described as the ‘savage ontology of life’ in The Order of Things (1966) (1974: 303; trans. mod.). The galvanising force of this ontology lies precisely in its disregard for the discourse of political economy. The difficulty is, however, that the discourse of ‘Life’ remains within the forms of capitalist and state power as its essential support.

My contention, then, is that ‘Life’ with a capital ‘L’ opposed to Power with a capital ‘P’ is obviously a critical discourse, but an inadequate replacement for critique. While it constantly tars critique with the brush of being reactive and trapped by its proximity to what it negates this supposed model of separation and distance replicates the forms and functions of capitalist ideology – which separate off ‘Life’ as the sphere of reproduction from production. In that sense it operates as a replacement for critique and founds its superiority on the affirmation of a productive value on which capitalism depends, and which capitalism posits. It mistakes interiority for exteriority, and also dissolves the difficult questions of class structure into the simplicity of two opposing blocs.

Mediations

I want to suggest that critique here finally turns on the question of mediation. Part of the appeal of this political vitalism is its deliberate dissolution of mediations. Mediations are bad. They stand at the expense of the immediate expression of Life – whether those mediations are the forms of power of state and capital, the mediations of organisation in the forms of party or union, or the mediations that would impose rationality and direction on the forms of Life. Now as I have noted one form of these mediations, those of the organised left, have largely collapsed, or have certainly been hollowed-out and significantly weakened. This, however, does not license the complete removal of the problem of mediation.

Part of the difficulty here is that mediation tends to get understood as the search for the happy median, for mediation as synthesis, as stabilisation, in line with the usual clichés concerning Hegelian or Marxian mediation. In fact, mediation is a work of negativity and negation that does not propose to bring together, but which splits, divides, and exacerbates contradictions. We might say, and I would say, that the irony is that the seeming discourse of separation, of the radical division into Two, that is the discourse of the savage ontology of Life finds itself most subject to mediation in the bad sense it decries. Its very division forces it back into mediation.

My suggestion is then that mediation, in critical terms, traces an impossibility of conjoining and integration. In precise terms the mediation that concerns me is labour, as the very impossibility of labour. So, a thinking of labour does not entail the function of labour as mediator in terms of discipline and generation of either a capitalist or revolutionary identity – Marx’s ‘stern but steeling school of labour’. Rather, a thinking of the mediation of labour suggests that even labour can’t save us, that ‘wageless life’ is a future traced within the forms of labour as well as in abandonment from them. It’s precisely the collapsing of this mediation that feeds the fantasy of Life as norm of excess, but also this impossibility that reveals the form of Life with a Capital ‘L’ as capitalist fantasy of canalisable excess. Hence it is the political vitalisms that produce the antinomy of Life as excess and Capital as vampiric that results in a totalising (in the bad sense) discourse.

If the compactness of the class did not deliver then the compactness of Life will not either. In fact, what is lauded is the dispersion and volatility of Life beyond any positive or negative point of identification – precisely its lack of compactness attests to its always revolutionary potential. I want to suggest that this folds back into bad comedy – in which Life is always about to succeed but some final pratfall, last minute social or political blunder, leaves us laughing at Life reduced to mere lives. Rather than this perpetual comedy, I am suggesting that we look a little more closely at how Life was already mediated by capitalist and state power. This is not to sow a countervailing despair of ‘everything is recuperated’. In fact, it is the discourse of Life as radically separate that oscillates between the poles of Life as everything and Life as completely mediated and recuperated. In contrast, mediation lies in the patient work of insinuation and negation that reveals no affirmative ‘Life lesson’, with its consoling comedy, but rather the divine comedy of the purgatory we are in.

Marx remarked, in the Eighteenth Brumaire, that ‘the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still traveling through purgatory. It does its work methodically.’ I doubt we still have quite the confidence of the teleology of the journey to paradise. That said, Marx also remarked about the complexity of any revolutionary process: while bourgeois revolutions ‘storm more swiftly from success to success’ they leave you with a terrible ‘Katzenjammer’ (hangover – literally cat’s wail); in contrast, proletarian revolutions ‘constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew’. This suggests that making life what we want it to be might be a winding process, more purgatorial, still a divine comedy, but not the storming to immediate transfiguration ‘Life’ would promise.

The Perils of the Research Novel (I)

Joshua Ferris's The Unnamed (2010) has as its central character Tim Farnsworth, a lawyer afflicted with compulsive walking. At several points in the novel is is noted that he is the only person who has ever had this disorder: 'I'm the only one ... No one else on record. That's crazy.'

It is crazy because a characters who has been to Switzerland for clinical treatment might have been thought to have come across Ian Hacking's book Mad Travellers (2002) which is about cases of compulsive walking in late nineteenth century France... particularly Albert Dadas, who is mentioned in the wikipedia entry on dromomania. A disorder also familiar to readers of Virilio's Speed and Politics (1977).

In case we might think this is unreliable narrator, the more reliable daughter Becky notes: 'but who had ever heard of what he had? Not even the Internet.' (94)

1. So we can conclude that despite being in ever other way similar to our world (excepting, perhaps, the extreme weather conditions) the world of the novel lacks 'dromomania'

2. Or, Ferris never encountered Hacking's book or the diagnosis, despite all the consulting of authorities listed in the acknowledgements

3. Or, he expects his readers not to know about it.

'Avant-gardes have only one time': The SI, Communisation and Aesthetics

Presented at 'Situationist Aesthetics: The SI, Now'

University of Sussex

Friday 8th June 2012

The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content – here the content goes beyond the phrase.

Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire

One of the slogans of May ’68 that has been rendered most ironic is: ‘Art is dead, don’t consume its corpse’; constantly reworked, the result is particularly ironic in regards to the ‘corpse’ of the Situationist International (SI). The desire to bury the corpse of the SI – ‘let the dead bury the dead’ – is accompanied by just as many resurrections or, for the more Hegelian amongst us, sublations. Here I want to engage in yet another act of ‘world-historical necromancy’ in relation to the SI. My aim is not to revive the corpse, or to pose the ‘poetry of the future’ that would arrive from some final ‘surpassing’. Rather I aim to consider the historicization and critique of the SI posed by one current of communisation – that of Roland Simon and the group Theorié Communiste (TC).

The reason for this, as we will see, is that it is art and aesthetics that is particularly at stake in this critique. Despite appearances I will not be taking sides for communization and against the Situationists, or vice versa. Instead, I regard the communizing interpretation of the fate of the SI as a means to reflect on the current situation of the reception and resurrection of the SI. To carry this task out I will attempt at least three impossible things after breakfast: first, to sketch the nature of the communization problematic, especially as it is articulated by Roland Simon and TC; second, to explore Simon’s reflections on the SI and how the aesthetic plays a crucial role; third, to consider how these reflections might problematize the dominant ‘aesthetic’ reception of the SI.

Communization, and Its Discontents with the Situationists

The theory of communization articulated by TC rests on what they regard as the crisis of the identity of the worker in contemporary capitalism. In particular, they argue that out of the capitalist crisis of the 1970s and the social struggles of workers in the same period the idea of affirming a proletarian identity against capitalism came to an end. This is what they call the end of ‘programmatism’. Emerging from the general ultra-left scepticism concerning the role of unions, parties, and other worker’s organizations in mediating capitalist social relations, TC take this further – they have little time for worker’s councils and other forms of ‘alternative’ worker’s organizations. Instead, they argue the restructuring of capital makes the identity of the proletariat a barrier or impossibility to be overcome. The penetration of capitalist real subsumption goes through the identity of the worker and the affirmation of work as the antagonistic pole of capitalism. The collapse of this possibility, as capitalism restructures and destroys these forms of mediation by the ‘worker’, and as workers’ themselves refuse them, means that the ‘proletariat’ can now only exist as the negation of work and worker’s identity. Therefore, communization refers to this process of self-abolishment and not to various forms of prefigurative or alternative identities or struggles. If we cease to affirm the proletariat, we cannot affirm some alternative ‘identity’.

The ‘place’ of the SI in this schema is one of being on the cusp of this change. On the one hand, the SI’s analysis of the dominance of the spectacle as form of abstraction and the bankruptcy of worker’s identity indicates the future lines of Communization theory. On the other hand, their faith in worker’s councils or alternative forms of ‘constructed situations’ mark them as remaining at the end of the period of programmatism. In Roland Simon’s formulation this contradiction meant that: ‘I think the SI led programmatism to its point of explosion.’ (2006) What Debord could not tie together, for Simon, was his theorization of the spectacle as reality – as real abstraction – and the possibility of revolution. His failure to grasp the proletariat as an internal negation results in the positing of an outside, or alternative, that escapes representation. This speaks to the ‘vitalism’ of the SI, more marked in Vangeim than Debord, but present nonetheless. ‘Life’ marks this ‘exterior’ – ‘beneath the cobblestones, the beach’ – in Tom Bunyard’s critical analysis: ‘The “real” thus becomes “life”, considered as an abstract and romantic potential, against which stands a “capital” that has become equivalent to all present social existence.’ (2011: 132, cf. 166) In contrast, Communization insists on the interiority of the proletariat to the formation of capitalism, as its antagonist and force of dissolution.

The Realization and Suppression of Art

This, in a nutshell, summarizes the argument of TC and their critique of the SI. This critique can also be put, as Simon (2009) does, in terms of art and aesthetics. The tension here lies in the SI’s claims to the realization and suppression of art. Again, in parallel with the position of the proletariat, we have the thesis of a ‘positive’ possibility of alternative formulations and art practices in tension, or contradiction (‘realization’), with the ‘negative’ possibility of the ‘abolition’ of art pending the revolutionary process that would sublate and rework this category (‘suppression’). In common with many standard histories of the SI this contradiction is given a periodizing position in Simon’s account. We have the ‘early’, ‘artistic’ SI (up to the split of 1962), and then the ‘political SI’ (1963 to the dissolution in 1972); so canonical is such a division it appropriately structures the wikipedia page for the SI.

In terms of the critical reading of the SI in regards to the communization thesis the ‘realization’ model implies the belief in prefigurative possibilities of artistic practice that can be realized within and against capitalism. The ‘constructed situations’ of the early SI presage revolution in the forms of enclaves or moments within the reign of the spectacle on this reading. For Simon, it is the penetration of real subsumption – the dominance of capitalism that reworks the production process to capitalist ends – that signals the end of this possibility, along with the end of an alternative ‘working class’ identity; any such ‘moments’ or artworks cannot be realized under the dominance of capital. In contrast, following through on the rigorous negativity of revolution, Simon argues that the suppression of art and the ‘politicization’ of the SI indicates a recognition that ‘art’ can only take place within the revolutionary process – within communization. Therefore, ‘constructed situations’ might better describe the process of revolution – qua Communization – than the pre-revolutionary and prefigurative process of ‘triggering’ revolution.

It is the difficulty that the SI finds in accepting this formulation that lies at the root, for Simon, of the necessity to surpass the SI. We might add that the so-called ‘pessimism’ of the later Debord is a sign of the difficulty of overcoming the desire for a ‘positive’ instantiation of artistic and revolutionary possibility. Also, the much-remarked nostalgia of the Debord and the SI could be indexed as one sign of the difficulty of giving-up on these hopes, or their displacement into the past. In this analysis the tracing of the dominance of capital displaces a sense of ‘internal’ opposition to an aestheticized outside (cf. Bunyard, 2011). The SI, in this argument, remains too attached to the aesthetic and hence can only offer an aesthetic image or representation of revolution. To move beyond this ‘world-historical necromancy’ and to find the ‘poetry of the future’ requires the abandonment of the aesthetic and the abandonment of ‘positive’ visions of revolution, such as the worker’s councils.

Expressive Negation

What interests me is that this periodization and analysis implies the overcoming of the SI, and the overcoming of the artistic and aesthetic as the ‘positive’ prefiguration of the SI’s vision of revolution. The irony is that the analysis of the SI has tended to take another direction, one that is far more in line with the supposedly ‘surpassed’ moment of realization. To use a phrase of Johanna Isaacson (2011), we might say that the legacy of the SI has been thought in terms of ‘lineages of expressive negation’.

An exhaustive account would be beyond the limits of my time and your patience. What I would suggest is that these ‘the lineages of expressive negation’ have dominated many of the receptions of the SI: from Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces (1989), with its lineage of negation from the SI to punk, to McKenzie Wark’s The Beach Beneath the Street (2011), with its recovery of the ‘artistic SI’, the tendency has gone precisely in the other direction to that indicated by TC / Roland Simon.

I think, personally, this indexes a broader problem with the communization thesis, which claims justification in the historical actuality of the exhaustion of worker’s identity and the collapse of prefigurative radical politics, but then has to constantly account for why these ‘errors’ still occur. One absence, at least in the material I have read, is a convincing account for why these ‘errors’ should take place, unless it is regarded as unwarranted nostalgia or the lack of a ‘correct analysis’ of the present situation. This seems inadequate as an account of how these ‘errors’, if they are errors, are generated from social forms of struggle and forms of capitalist power.

In aesthetic terms, it indicates the persistent attraction of ‘expressive negation’ at a moment that is, to say the least, unconducive to such forms. The additional irony is that such ‘negations’ are often justified and retained precisely because of their positive forms. It is the fact that they seem existent possibilities, rather the austere path of the resolutely negative, that lends them a certain heft in the ‘weightless’ experience of capitalism. Without claiming to offer a full account, I would suggest that it is precisely the paradoxical ‘positivity’ of these ‘expressive negations’ that exerts attraction and fascination in the present moment. In this way, and here I have some sympathy with the communizing critique, the risk is of a consolatory function of the aesthetic.

Vaster Terrains

We can also find elements of this critique by TC anticipated by Debord, particularly in In girum imus nocte et consimimur igni (1978). The script and the use of the détourned images of The Charge of the Light Brigade, indicate that:

Avant-gardes have only one time; and the best thing that can happen to them is to have enlivened their time without outliving it. After them, operations move onto a vaster terrain. Too often have we seen such elite troops, after they have accomplished some valiant exploit, remain on hand to parade with their medals and then turn against the cause they previously supported. Nothing of this sort need be feared from those whose attack has carried them to the point of dissolution.

In this sense it is precisely the radicalized negativity of the ‘expressive negations’ of the avant-garde that indicate a recognition of their own finitude. This effect of dissolution, captured in the thematic of fire doused in the waters of time, relies on a dialectic of transformation in which we ‘move onto a vaster terrain’. Of course, the difficulty is that this dialectic appears broken.

In that sense the Communization critique tries to re-establish this dialectic through the argument that the collapse of workers’ identity is not simply the sign of defeat but precisely the sign of transformation and movement onto this new terrain. The cultural and aesthetic negations of the avant-garde are couched by the SI as the prefigurative ‘charge’ that is expended into a new proletarian movement and, if we like, Communization shifts the form and the timescale. I’d suggest, however, that the lingering sense of nostalgia and pessimism in the later Debord (despite worthwhile attempts to re-read this moment in more strategic direction (Cf. Tom Bunyard, 2011)) indicate an impasse or impatience that this transformation has not been delivered.

Again, then, we could say that the aesthetic reading of the SI is not simply false but registers this uneasy position – one I would say that is as uneasy for communization as it is for the SI. What if we don’t move onto a ‘vaster terrain’ but a terrain that is constricted? Or, if we move onto a vaster terrain how is that to translate to the precise contestations required to rupture the real abstractions of capital? It is here, to adapt a phrase I’m fond of, we could speak of a ‘persistence of the aesthetic’. The turn to the aesthetic reading is not merely consolatory, although it can be that, but also a desire to provide some kind of more precise sense of negation in the present. Unsatisfactorily, I suppose, I can only sketch this as a problem. We live then in the moment of what Debord called a ‘splendid dispersal’.

Neuro-Horror-Novel: Kathe Koja's Bad Brains

Predating the emergence of the neuronovel by about 5 years Kathe Koja's Bad Brains (1992) could be regarded as a prefigurative critique of that particular micro-genre. Replacing the spectacular and rare disorders so beloved of literary fiction Koja settles for a fall off a curb and resulting brain damage and repeating seizures for her central character - failed artist Austen Bandy. The banality of the initial incident coupled to the lengthy exploration of largely ineffective treatment, combined with rapidly dwindling health insurance, puts paid to some of the irritating troping of neurological 'insight' and 'difference' in the neuronovel.

Of course, we might say that the rise of the neuronovel is not so much a sign of the turn to the brain and bodies, although it is that, but a particularly literalised version of the postmodern condition as the fragmentation of the psyche (Jameson). Where once we were content with figurative mental illness now the only Real deal is the trauma in the Real, which (as Zizek has often noted) neglects the Real of appearance for an ideological version of the 'concrete' qua hardwired brain (hard being the operative signifier).

Koja's novel certainly does return to the troping of creation - what makes this a horror novel is Austen's deepening vision of 'a dustdevil of fluid, liquid, mucus; silver, almost scalelike, delicate as fish skin and stretching out, elongating'. If we can rely on this most unreliable of narrators then it's reported that this 'silver mucus' is spreading into Austen's own work, hence its appearance in the 'Real'. It is also coordinated with his previous divorce and his desire for his ex-wife Emily.

As the novel unfolds (slowly), we are in the territory of the activity of artistic creation. This is made explicit in the closing section of the novel with 'Dr Quiet', a Cronenbergian psychiatrist, who links this 'vision' to limbic excess and the act of creation, with the 'silver' as daemon of creation. The 'era of blood' is coded as absolute sacrifice, or the malign greediness and egocentrism of 'the heedless bodiless passion of creation itself where nothing matters, nothing exists but the work.'

Something, however, remains of the banality of this stepping over. Austen, headed out on an ill-advised road trip to visit his mother, encounters a punk band in the usual shock style. He wryly remarks: 'they were young and earnest and so unaware of edges, the real edges on which we teeter, every day'.

The real edges, or for a flip Lacanian reversal, the edges of the real are as much divorce, falling off curbs, running out of health insurance, and failed mothers as they are edged silver smears that may, or may not, be the sign of 'creativity' - or perhaps, both at once.

'The Hectoring of Limits': Kathe Koja's Skin

For Steven Shaviro

Kathe Koja's 1993 novel Skin is a novel of transgression and its usual destination: death. It concerns two symmetrical artists: Tess Bajac (the narrative voice), who works with metal to make it live, and Bibi Bloss, a dancer who makes to transform the flesh through integration with metal. These symmetries, as Tess and Bibi, pass from comrades to friends to lovers to enemies to final collapse, trace a narrative of 'transgressive/alternative' culture. Tess's work in the novel is obviously modelled on Survival Research Laboratories (referenced in the text), and in her later departure from public art her 'boxes' are obviously Joseph Cornell's (a favourite model, it seems, for fictional artists). Bibi, on the other hand, is the 'modern primitive' of Re/Search fame, with her extreme body modification and, implied in the novel, quasi-Facist tendencies.

While the account of the art created is, typically in a novel, not every convincing in terms of the effects it is supposed to be producing, the account of the 'hectoring of limits' engaged in by the transgressive artist, especially Bibi is - as critique. What's also interesting is he emergent narrative in the book of the function of the manipulative character Michael Hispard who, in a sense, runs the whole show by playing off Tess and Bibi against each other to produce or force the 'spiral' of transgression.

In particular Tess's account of Bibi, and her scepticism, offer a questioning (quite literally) of this 'dynamic':

Do you modify to improve, or empower, or simply to feed the greedy black scorn of the human boundaries that succor flesh to blood to the pulse and contraction of the emperor mind within?

In a key formulation Tess remarks of Bibi 'her body was the vanguard'. This captures, I'd argue, a contention we can derive from Badiou that the collective 'passion for the real' of the avant-gardes has become saturated. This does not mean it is simply exhausted, but rather dispersed into the body itself - hence Badiou's scepticism concerning 'postmodern' art as the art of bodies/languages in their implosive and inert 'presence'.

The novel, however, seems to terminate all options - public performance, collectivity, individual involution - in a final pairing of death, inert madness, and inertial passivity. The novel explicitly formulates the problem of change as its core - transformation, transfiguration, becoming, all seemed to twist finally into forms of failure. While this can be seen as a 'local' pathology, either of this 'scene' or the characters in the narrative, the book also points to the winding down of the 'dynamic' of transgression. Of course, the novel itself is the 'creative' allegory of these 'failures', and it is fitting that it is not entirely successful - or perhaps successful in its own strangely drawn-out inertia. We might say it is the prefigurative novel of 'democratic materialism' and its pathologies, the indicator of the impasse of Bergsonian 'mechanical' vitalism as 'creative'; in this way, it is the dead-end of transgression.

The Melancholy of Resistance

The invocation of melancholia to characterise the mood of the present, to characterise something of our ‘condition’, is a veritable cliché. Certainly, the concomitant attempt to make a politics out of that melancholia can often seem like the attempt to pile one cliché on top of another. In his usual pugnacious style Slavoj Žižek (2000) has noted how melancholia is to the taste of our times – indicating the preference for an attentive narcissism that ‘preserves’ the dead object and a reluctance to embrace the step to mourning that would imply internalisation and action. Typically, however, of this style of opening I am going to avoid that good advice and indulge in the very vice that I have just anatomised – trying to grasp a politics of melancholia, or better the limits of a particular instance of a politics of melancholia. Even more typically, for an academic, I am going to indulge that vice at one remove by considering one contemporary invocation and endorsement of the politics of melancholia: Andrew Gibson’s Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Recent French Philosophy (2012). My aim is to suggest, in this case, how an appeal to affect can block politics.

Rebecca Comay (2011) remarks on ‘the ideological versatility of melancholia: an uncompromising rejection of the existent (nothing short of total transformation is tolerable) coupled with an easy accommodation to whatever happens to be the case (everything is equally terrible, so why bother…).’ It is useful, I think, to analyse Gibson’s work because he hyperbolises this versatility, and so also speaks to and reveals the disavowed ideological underpinnings of much contemporary theory. In his work, as we will see, the ‘uncompromising rejection of the existent’ finally becomes indistinguishable from ‘an easy accommodation’. At the root of the ‘uncompromising’ is a ‘compromise’ that is all the more problematic for being concealed. What also becomes evident in Gibson’s explicit anti-Marxism is a more general tone of contemporary theory that rejects negation and dialectics as inevitably ‘compromised’. This is a book of the enemy; hence deserving of critique.

The core concept of Gibson’s book, derived from Christian Jambet, is an ‘anti-schematics of historical reason’. What this in fact means is that history is split into two: the history of law and the history of grace, with history divided between long stretches of ‘dead time’ (Gibson 2012: 223) and sudden irruptions of justice or the good through punctual and intermittent events. Therefore, ‘historical reason’ has a temporary and fragile existence and what we confront most of the time, and certainly for the last 30-odd years, are the ‘deserts stretches of dead time’, a ‘dead time [which] breeds melancholy.’ (Gibson 2012: 223) Gibson ratifies an experience of historical defeat, especially the ‘polar night’ of the 1980s, which is then translated into the metaphysical register of historical experience itself.

The ‘enemy’ for Gibson is any ‘progressive’ conception of historical reason as unfolding in and through history, and more specifically the usual melange of Hegel/Kojève. To characterise this ‘progressive’ conception Gibson indulges in the familiar commonplaces: ‘immanence; plenitude; the active principle; freedom; dialectical reason, negative and positive together; culmination; overcoming; the project; completion in the State; mediation; finitude; the schema.’ (2012: 6) The antonyms, vectored through the critique of Christian Jambet, are fairly, although not entirely, predictable: Metahistory interrupting immanence; intermittency; passivity; openness to being mastered; negative reason; sporadic truth; discrete singularities; irregular events; resistance to the State; immediacy; the infinite; and anti-schematics. This unabashed metaphysical dualism is the Gnostic principle of Gibson’s analysis.

Gibson’s alternative to the ‘progressive’, bewitched by the unfolding of historical reason, is a thinking that suggests that ‘historical reason’ only ever irrupts intermittently, and we live a ‘melancholic-ecstatic conception of history’ (Gibson 2012: 10) as we lurch from the melancholy of dead time to the ecstasy of the event. He characterises the philosophical element of the rare and intermittent event through readings of Alain Badiou, Françoise Proust, Christian Jambet, Guy Lardreau and Jacques Rancière, which are all ‘paired’ with literary examples that characterise the limits of melancholia the philosopher can never fully grasp. Gibson institutes a division of labour, with philosophy dealing with the moment of the event and literature dealing with the ‘remainder’ of melancholy. In fact, to add an example he does not mention, this anti-schematics seems allegorised most for me in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1978). In that film we have the traversal of the ‘wasteland’ of the zone, and the witnessing of the sudden moment of the irruption of grace (quite literally).

It is in the lengthy conclusion of the book that Gibson articulates his ‘own’ anti-schematics constituted through this traversal of contemporary thought. Here he particularly engages with ‘speculative realism’ – that odd non-movement, in which realism and speculative metaphysics are coupled together (Bryant et al (eds.) 2011) – to insist on history as ruled by absolute contingency. Fully-embracing that ‘randomization of history’ that Perry Anderson regarded as one of the signal vices of post-structuralism (Anderson 1983: 48), Gibson insists on the rarity of events, the irruption of contingency, and the persistence of the negative situation of the absence of events and the petty compromises and disgust of everyday life.

Melancholia, for Gibson, has a polemical and political (or anti-political) purpose. Embracing the melancholia breed by the dead times (á la T. S. Eliot) immunises us against false hopes and the embrace of ‘progress’. As he puts it:

Melancholy functions both as a scrupulous refusal of the contemporary will to contentment, its disregard for the contemporary ‘state of emergency’, and a cautionary brake on a century and more of a fruitless and finally bankrupt ‘left positivity’. (2012: 242)

In a rather typical ideological manoeuvre Gibson runs together the ‘affirmative’ culture of late capitalism, and the teleological positivity of neo-liberalism, with the supposed teleologies of ‘traditional’ Marxism (a ‘point’ also made by Jacques Rancière and Bruno Latour ). Lumped into one camp, ‘progressives’ now encompass a promiscuous set running from Newt Gingrich to any remaining Marxists, taking in reformist prophets of a re-created ‘caring’ capitalism and the marketeers of the new.

Christopher Nealon has noted the ironic violence of the identification of Marx and Marxism with its ‘object’ of critique, a trope with a long Cold War history. We find, in Nealon’s words, ‘the punishing, all-too-familiar reversal by which critics of capital, not its agents, are imagined as the bringers of violence into the world.’ (2011: 8) This practice involves turning the features of capital – teleology, economic determinism, and totality – onto its critics, ‘as though it were the critic who tried to name the totalizing work of capital, rather than capital, who was failing to do justice to particulars, or to aesthetic experience.’ (Nealon 2011: 10)

For Gibson the aim is to extract an ethics from this melancholia to allow us to ‘cope’ with the long periods of reaction, as the horizon of the event seems to take care of itself (if such an event should come along, Gibson notes it may well not). This is ‘an ethics of perseverance – the perseverance of the traces of subjectivity and truth, of the subject itself – through dead times, times in which truths appear to have failed.’ (Gibson 2012: 273) To ensure this possibility Gibson is explicit about the necessity of religion or theology against what he calls ‘the simple registers of Marxism.’ (2012: 276) In another contemporary ideological common-place Gibson regards religion as the place-holder of a density and depth of experience and thought that cannot be understood or matched by an ‘optimistic’ thought. Marxism is Brechtian plumpes-denken writ large, which may not sound that bad compared to the inflationary Augustianianism of ‘original sin’ and the ‘fallen state’ which dominates Gibson’s thinking.

More generously, there certainly is something (or very little), even if it is ‘through a glass darkly’, in Gibson’s remark on the necessity for perseverance amidst and against the ‘affirmative’ positivity of contemporary culture that resists negation. Like so many others, however, Gibson reifies negation into the grand event of rupture that may, or may not, arrive, on the one hand, and reifies it into the melancholia of an ‘atonal’ or ‘eventless’ everyday, on the other. Developing the speculative realist critique of correlationism – the tendency to posit the world and reality as always in relation to a human subject – Gibson remarks that: ‘A correlationist culture is characterized by the ubiquity and pure meaninglessness of positivity.’ (2012: 278) And yet, the melancholia of negativity, in Gibson’s hands, seems to give use little reason to persevere at all, except perhaps to await an event that will only flash briefly on the horizon. Here ‘perseverance’ and negativity take on the cynical cast of damming all attempts at historical change, and justify an attentisme which has lost even the minimal faith in the event.

This is not the melancholy of thinking defeat, or registering the difficulty of radical change, but the melancholy of consolation that justifies our own exceptional place as the ‘less deceived’. The vanity of the theorist is flattered by placing themselves as the lucid non-dupe who can, at least in thought, evade the crushing weight of the practico-inert:

To think intermittency is to run counter to the contemporary culture of plenitude, of which positivity is a crucial feature, and to persist with a Sartrean principle of austerity. This constitutes an emphatic, properly philosophical refusal to buy into the contemporary will to be swiftly controlled. (Gibson 2012: 279)

Of course, swiftly or slowly controlled doesn’t seem to make that much difference, especially as no action seems to be able to take place between those two states. In this case ‘lucidity’ becomes cynicism, disguised as tough-minded thinking.

To analyse this problem further I want to consider the crucial ‘ideologeme’ that justifies Gibson’s de-politicising political melancholy: this is the distinction and valorisation of revolt at the expense of revolution. Gibson implicitly favours revolt over revolution, re-articulating what Badiou diagnosed as the ‘speculative leftism’ of Lardreau and Jambet (Badiou 2005: 210-211) – in which the ‘pleb’ or resistant is always opposed to a finally triumphant power – but without the ‘leftism’. In doing so, Gibson not only ignores Badiou’s general diagnosis of this ‘infantile disorder’, but also Badiou’s specific criticisms of Lardreau and Jambet, whom he had dismissed as ‘Linbiaoists’ – i.e. as incarnating an ultra-left purity predicated on an absolute break that reproduced the ‘excesses’ of Lin Biao’s thought (Bosteels 2011: 148). The metaphysical One is replaced by the Manichean Two. The purpose served by Gibson’s gesture is the not uncommon one today of avoiding any imputation of ‘dirty hands’, even if this is now displaced firmly into the ideological past. The ‘purity’ of revolt is recoded as an interruptive moment that never solidifies into the bad attempt to impose ‘purity’ in the process of revolution, as ‘purity’ is the bad signifier of our times (‘purity’, inevitably ‘fatal’, we might say, to write a new entry in Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas). Of course, this involves ignoring the violent experience of revolt, which speaks to one’s doubts in the depth of Gibson’s endorsement. Lacking any sense of the reality of revolt, any meaningful political content is evacuated from what was already an attenuated politics – a ‘revolt without revolt’, or a decaffeinated revolt.

We can dispute this valorisation of revolt through a resort to the analysis Furio Jesi offers of the Spartacist Insurrection of 1919 (Jesi 2012). Jesi gives a classical statement of the distinction between revolt – which ‘suspends historical time’ – and revolution – which is ‘wholly and deliberately immersed in historical time’. Of course, this is why ‘revolt’, reworked at the ‘event’, has value for Gibson, while the revolution does not. Now, while Fusi displays sympathy to the function of ‘revolt’ what he also does is indicate its historical and political limits. In particular he notes how revolt can serve the very forms of power it attacks. In the case of the Spartacist uprising the suspension of historical time it engaged in allowed the restoration of ‘normal’ capitalist time after the disruption of the time of war. Also, the action of revolt – punctual and immanent – can function as a release of energies that would otherwise coalesce into the more sustained historical process of revolution. In this more nuanced analysis we can see, at least, the necessity for a more careful historical analysis rather than the transfer of the problem into the metaphysical or spiritual register.

Gibson’s ‘solution’ can then be regarded as a ‘political melancholia’, in the symptomal sense, which fails to properly register the melancholia that belongs to the structure of revolt, and occludes the risks and dangers of revolt by passing these over to the revolution. In this way we can turn, with ‘clean hands’, to reactionary or dubious literary forms as justifications for our experience of the ‘remainder’ of dead time detached from any political content. The result is a deliberate consolation that, in effect, blocks any politics through the deployment of affect.

Bibliography

Anderson, Perry (1983) In the Tracks of Historical Materialism. London: Verso.



Badiou, Alain (2005) Being and Event, trans. Oliver Fletham. London: Continuum.



Bosteels, Bruno (2011) Badiou and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.



Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds.) (2011) The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press.



Comay, Rebecca (2011) Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.



Gibson, Andrew (2012) Intermittency: the Concept of Historical Reason in Recent French Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.



Jesi, Furio (2012) ‘The Suspension of Historical Time’, trans. Alberto Toscano. Chapter 1 of Spartakus. Simbologia della rivolta (2000), ed. Andrea Cavaletti. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri.



Latour, Bruno (2004) ‘Never Too Late to Read Tarde’. Domus 874.



Nealon, Christopher (2011) . The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.



Rancière, Jacques (2010) Chronicles of Consensual Times. London: Continuum.



Žižek, Slavoj (2000) ‘Melancholy and the Act,’ Critical Inquiry 26.4: 657-681.



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