Without Criteria

MIT Press informs me that my new book, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, has now been published and will shortly be available (I am supposed to receive my own copies in the next week or so). (Amazon.com still lists the book as not being published until May 29, but you may be able to order it well before then elsewhere).

Of course, given the way academic publishing works, this means that it has been slightly more than a year since I sent the final copy of the manuscript to the Press. The time lag between submission and publication doesn’t seem to have changed at all in the almost twenty years since my first book was published, even though the technologies of publication have been completely revolutionized in the interim. (It will probably take the rise of new publishing operations, like the wonderful, open-source publisher re.press, to extend the benefits of new technologies to the sclerotic world of academic publishing).

I don’t have a pdf of the book as published, I’m afraid, but near-final drafts of all the chapters are available here.

For the most part, I am happy with how Without Criteria came out. I managed to work through, to my own satisfaction (and hopefully other people’s as well), some of Whitehead’s weirder notions, like “eternal objects” and (especially) “God.” I developed Whitehead’s ideas about what he calls “feeling” in relation both to contemporary affect theory, and to contemporary biology. And I showed how strongly and deeply Whitehead’s metaphysics resonates with that of Deleuze. This is not a matter of saying that Deleuze was “influenced” by Whitehead, nor of reading Whitehead entirely through a Deleuzian lens. Rather, I looked at how the concerns of the two thinkers seem to intersect — the problems they look at are closely related, even when their answers to these problems differ. Whitehead’s eternal objects and Deleuze’s virtual are both given as answers to the same metaphysical problems; likewise Whitehead’s God and Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs.

The one thing that I feel is lacking in the book — and that I have been increasingly concerned with in the year since I handed in the final copy — is a (re)consideration of Whitehead in the light of the issues raised by the (so-called) Speculative Realists. In particular, I finished Without Criteria before I had a chance to read Graham Harman’s Guerrilla Metaphysics, or Iain Grant’s Philosophies of Nature After Schelling. (I also didn’t read Alberto Toscano’s Theatre of Production carefully enough). All these books put my claims about the relation of Kant to Whitehead and to Deleuze in a different light.

Basically, I am arguing that both Whitehead and Deleuze are “neo-Kantians” of a particular sort. Deleuze himself argues, in his early book on Nietzsche, that Nietzsche put Kant on his feet in a manner analogous to how Marx claimed to have put Hegel on his feet; and that, in so doing, Nietzsche radicalized Kant in the way that the official “neo-Kantians” had tried and failed to do. In my book, I extend this claim to both Deleuze himself and to Whitehead. I try to show how Whitehead and Deleuze take certain ambiguous moments in Kant and push them in new directions — thus opening up areas of thought that Kant pointed towards but ultimately withdrew from. Most notably, I argue that Whitehead and Deleuze work with certain problems that are broached in the Third Critique. In the first part of this volume, The Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Kant explores the possibility of judgments that are singular and noncognitive, not adjudicable by objective criteria, norms or rules. In the second part, The Critique of Teleological Judgment, Kant tackles the problem of living organisms, or of what today we would more broadly call self-organizing systems (which include, but are not restricted to, living organisms), and argues for a kind of double causality, or for a “freedom” (or perhaps undecidability) that supervenes upon traditional linear and mechanistic causality, not being reducible to it, but also not contradicting it.

In Without Criteria, I argue that these two moments in Kant’s thought have the potential to lead us away from the normative and legislative burden of Kant’s thought overall; but also without lapsing into either eliminativist reductionism, or Hegelian dialectics. I see both Whitehead and Deleuze as returning to these strange and “aberrant” moments in Kant, and using them to forge a new direction in metaphysics. One consequence of this new direction is to fulfill the demands of the Speculative Realists for a rejection of what Meillassoux calls correlationism, or the privileging of the human or rational subject, and of the relation between thought and being. My claim is that Whitehead explicitly, and Deleuze implicitly, create an object-oriented philosophy, precisely by arguing that something like Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, in which the “forms of sensibility” govern how we respond to objects that we encounter, in fact applies to all interactions whatsoever between objects, and not just to the case of “minds” encountering “external objects.” Rather than either rejecting the very notion of “things in themselves,” as most neo-Kantians have done, or making the correlationist move of dismissing these “things in themselves” as irrelevant to any philosophical discourse, Whitehead transforms the Kantian notion into a recognition (of the sort Graham Harman, in particular, calls for) of the independence of objects from the conditions of our particualar perceptions of them. (I have previously discussed this point here).

Now, my reading of the Speculative Realists has led me to consider two problems with my overall argument, which I do not address in the book, and which therefore I will need to work on further. One of them has to do with my account of Kant’s Critique of Teleological Judgment. Both Toscano and Grant suggest, in different ways, that I haven’t read this part of Kant carefully enough. In particular, they both argue that what I am calling “double causality” — Kant’s contrast between mechanism and organicism — is much more problematic, and internally contradictory, than I have been willing to consider. They both read double causality as an intractable aporia or deadlock; their readings suggest that I can’t get away with simply adapting Kant’s duality to Whitehead’s dualities as cheerfully and unproblematically as I have done. Instead, Toscano describes how this problematic leaves its marks on a progression of thinkers leading through Nietzsche and Simondon, and on to Deleuze; while Grant sees this deadlock as being crucial to, and being displaced and rejected by, Schelling’s Naturephilosophy (together with post-Schelling philosophies of nature, again including that of Deleuze). At the moment, I am still right at the beginning of grappling with this problem; so I cannot be clearer about it than I have been so far.

The second problem has to do, more specifically, with Graham Harman’s reading of Whitehead. Harman indeed praises Whitehead for being object-oriented; that is to say, for refusing to privilege human consciousness, and for making a philosophy that “can range freely over the whole of the world” rather than “remain[ing] restricted to self-reflexive remarks about human language and cognition” (Guerrilla Metaphysics, p. 42). But Harman also criticizes Whitehead (as I mentioned in my previous post) for seeing reality as being entirely relational, rather than accepting the existence of substances, or of “primary qualities” that are irreducible to relational ones. Whitehead, Harman says, “fails to distinguish between objects and elements” (Guerrilla Metaphysics, p. 194), i.e. he fails to consider the “interiors” of objects that are irreducible to the qualities revealed in their relations with other objects. I wrote in my previous post that Harman fails to consider how what Whitehead calls the “prehension” of one object by another involves, not just passive reception, but “contructive functioning.” I will add, here, that Harman also fails to take into account how, for Whitehead, every act of prehension is selective, involving a “subjective aim” on the part of the prehending entity that is not given in advance, and that is not merely the object’s inheritance from other objects. The subjective aim is responsible for the novelty introduced into the world, in greater or lesser measure, by every new entity; it constutitues the “privacy” of the entity, as opposed to the “publicity” by virtue of which it is accessible to other entities in its own turn. My claim is that Whitehead does provide a sense of how an entity is more and other than the sum of its encounters with other entities, and does so precisely without having to resort, as Harman does, to notions of substance and primary qualities. Harman complains that “no relational theory such as Whitehead’s is able to give a sufficient explanation of change” (Guerrilla Metaphysics, p. 82); but to say this is to ignore, once again, the way that an entity’s prehension of other entities always includes more than was present or apprehensible in the other entities. None of this is addressed in the book; and it all needs to be worked out more fully and coherently than I have done here. I hope to do so soon. Stay tuned.

Tom Gunning

The DeRoy Lecture Series 2009 presents:

Friday March27, 3pm
Wayne State University
English Department Seminar Room
5057 Woodward, room 10302
Detroit, Michigan

Tom Gunning
“Visible/Invisible:The Medium of Vision”

Tom Gunning is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in the Dept. of Art History and the Committee on Cinema and Media at the University of Chicago.  He is the author of D.W. Griffith and the origins of American Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press) and The Films of Fritz Lang; Allegories of Vision and Modernity(British Film Institute), well as over hundred articles on early cinema, film history and theory, avant-garde film, film genre, and cinema and modernism.

Communism at Birkbeck

I don’t have the presence of mind to summarize all of the presentations at the Birkbeck Communism conference, the way I did with Michael Hardt’s talk in my last post. But I can make some generalizations. Part of the appeal of events such as these is simply to see the academic superstars in action. From this point of view, the conference did not disappoint. Slavoj Zizek was in fine form, manic and excited, and so full of a kind of outward-directed energy that I didn’t really mind his overbearingness. Gianni Vattimo, whom I had never seen before (and of whose works I have only read a little) was quite a charmer, in a humorously self-deprecating way. Terry Eagleton reveled in the role of the British common-sense empiricist in a room otherwise full of dialecticians. Toni Negri was warm and animated, jacques Ranciere admirably meditative. Alain Badiou was… well, Badiou (more of which later).

The conference’s title was “On the Idea of Communism.” The idea, it was emphasized, as opposed to the harsh realities of day-by-day social and political struggle. I’m enough of an armchair communist (or petit-bourgeois intellectual, as they used to say in the bad old days) that I had no objection to such an emphasis. I agree with Zizek that we need to show a certain patience, to take a deep breath, to try to understand the contours of the situation we are in (or the conjuncture, in more traditional marxistspeak). But what does it mean to explore the mere idea of communism, as opposed to the actuality of capitalism? The idea of communism is to a large extent a negative one, in that we don’t really know what it would be like, only that it would mean the emancipation of people, and the establishment of forms of life that are repressed, oppressed, and denied an opportunity to flourish today. It’s utopian; or at least “communism” is the name for the only sort of utopianism that makes sense to me today — it makes sense precisely because it is not a religious or new-agey idea of perfectibility and salvation, but something much more down-to-earth. Communism has to do with “the common,” as Michael Hardt said, and this is a far different thing from, say, the “public” in its binary opposition to and dependence upon the “private.” It doesn’t mean giving up on our inner lives, but creating an environment in which such lives might flourish. And I don’t think that “communism” is really about politics — though politics is inevitably a large part of what is needed to get there,

There is also, of course, the question of the crimes committed by Communist parties, or in the name of “communism,” throughout the twentieth century. Zizek opened the conference by saying that the time for guilt was over, that in the 21st century we needed to reclaim the name of “communism” from the ill repute into which it has sunk. And I think this is entirely right — all the more so in that capitalism, too, is guilty of many crimes, but of ones which it still refuses to acknowledge, and for which it shows no repentance; not to mention the increasingly untenable situation in which we live today, exacerbated by the current financial disaster.

The conference showcased the major strains of Euro-communism (in which I also include North American leftist thought) today — though the rest of the world was noticeable by its absence. All the speakers were white Europeans or North Americans; 11 of the 12 speakers were men. The audience was more gender-balanced than the panels, but it was overwhelmingly white. This is quite disturbing (not because of any multicultural pieties of the sort that Zizek always criticizes, but precisely because it bespeaks a parochialism that “we” in the “West” have still only done a very poor job of breaking away from). Bruno Bosteels talked a bit about Latin American (specifically Bolivian) experiences and theorizations of getting beyond capitalism; and a number of speakers kept on coming back to the (very ambiguous) history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution; but all in all, the conference was far less internationalist than it ought to have been.

In any case, by “major strains” of Euro-communism I basically mean those represented by Zizek and Badiou, on the one hand, and by Hardt and Negri on the other. Since in fact it was Zizek’s and Badiou’s conference, I kind of got the slight sense that Negri and Hardt were only there on sufferance, as it were; they were noticeably absent during the summing-up on the final day. Now, I’ve had my criticisms of both of these camps (as can be seen in many earlier entries on this blog); but “at the end of the day,” I am much more in Negri and Hardt’s camp than in that of the others. This was confirmed for me by the fact that both Hardt and Negri focused on political economy in their talks; whereas none of the other speakers (with the exception of Zizek, whom I will discuss later) so much as mentioned it.

Now, this might be justified to some extent by the argument that the whole point of “communism” is to imagine a society in which the current constraints of a capitalist political economy no longer apply; but this isn’t much of an alibi, when you consider that so many of the talks were, indeed, about how to get there  from here — Terry Eagleton’s talk filled with literary allusions was really the only one that was actually about imagining communism as a state of being, rather than just as the negation of what we have today (and his talk precisely showed, in a symptomatic way, the limitations of trying to imagine such a utopian situation — I must confess that his literariness made me cringe a bit, as it reminded m all too much of the atmosphere of graduate school in English at Yale in the 1970s (it isn’t that I don’t like Shakespeare; I do; but I don’t really find helpful an approach which acts as if movies and TV and the Internet didn’t exist; one can talk about Shakespeare just as one talks about Spinoza — but in either case it should be from our actual present situartion).

No, the problem for me with much of the conference is that political economy (by which I include what Marx called “the critique of political economy”) was pretty much elided by most of the speakers. For instance, Peter Hallward, with his usual lucidity, developed a rather alarming call for Jacobin rigor and discipline in the defense of virtue and the Rousseauean principle of the “general will”; but he failed to explain how such a state, analgous to that of the Jacobin clubs in 1790s France, could arise in the first place. A number of speakers went on at great length about the necessity of struggles against the “State”; but they seemed to do this with little sense of how State apparatuses work to support and reinforce capital and finance. The dirty little secret of neoliberalism is that the “free market” could not actually function if the government were actually to observe laissez faire, and to leave “the market” alone. For it is only by rigid State control over things like the money supply, together with rigid enforcement of “property” laws (based on the absurd fiction that, say, the genetic makeup of genetically modified crops somehow had the same inviolable status as my personal effects in my bedroom). It’s disheartening to hear people on the left denounce “the State” in the very same terms that the neoliberals hypocritically and misleadingly do. Not to mention that, as Bruno Bosteels put it in a question that none of the anti-State panelists were able convincingly to answer, this sort of analysis is distinctly unhelpful when we have a situation such as that in Bolivia, where President Morales is specifically using the power of “the State” — the fact of his election to office by a large minority — in order to improve economic conditions for the vast masses, even at the expense of the wealthy and privileged. [One might add that, in Bolivia as recently in Thailand and several other places, it is precisely the privileged bourgeoisie who have used the tactics of “people power”, with mass protests etc., in order to bring down democratically elected majority governments who threatened their privileges).

In particular, not only did Badiou leave out political economy from his descriptions of how the revolutionary event might challenge the capitalist status quo; but also, when questioned on this score, he explicitly denounced any attention to political economy as being the sin of “economism”. All this is caaptured in the video here. Badiou claims that economics can only be part of “the situation” which it is the business of a new “truth,” produced in an event and by fidelity to that event, to disrupt. Badiou shows his Maoist pedigree (as Ken Wark remarked to me) in this insistence on politics as the ultimate ruling instance. Instead of engaging in the critique of political economy, and seeing the political as so intimately intertwined with the economic as to makie any separation of them impossible, Badiou relegates economy, in a nearly Gnostic sort of way, to the realm of the irretrievably fallen. His notion of a pure politics (and a pure philosophy) unsullied by any contact with, or ‘contamination’ by, the economic, is really the mirror image of today’s neoclassical economics which imagines itself to be value-neutral and apolitical. What this comes down to is that Badiou is a Maoist without the Marxism — a stance that I find rather terrifying.

At his best, Badiou is a kind of no-Kantian — this is an appelation that he would reject, of course, and one that most contemporary philosophers would find damning (though I mean it as a sort of praise). What I mean by Badiou’s neo-Kantianism is that his whole notion of the event, and of the ethics of remaining loyal to the event, is something like a late-modernist version of the categorical imperative. The event is singular, and yet of absolutely universal import — it commands our obedience, regardless of our merely personal, “pathological” implications. Badiou even defines the event, and the way we are called to be faithful to it, in entirely “formalist” terms — we are commanded by the very form of the event, rather than by anything having to do with its specific content. This is an utterly Kantian way of thinking — and, unlike so many “hegelian” commentators, I find this empty formalism to be a strength, rather than a weakness, of Kantian ethics. But I shudder when Badiou goes on to denature this Kantian impersonal universalism by turning it into a Pauline or Leninist or Maoist form of what Kant would have called “fanaticism.” Again, I am no Leninist or Maoist to begin with; but to take Leninism and Maoism, and remove the Marxism from them, as Badiou does, really leaves us with nothing but a delusional hypervoluntarism and a romanticized reveling in “terror.”

Zizek, speaking on the last day, gave what I am sure he would be happy for us to think of as a Hegelian synthesis of everything that went on during the conference. Unlike most of his colleagues, and in what might be thought of as a nod to Hardt and Negri, his analysis did include political economy. He listed four threats or challenges that we face today in our world of capitalism gone mad; and three of them, he acknowledged, fit under the rubric of Hardt/Negri’s “affective” or “immaterial” production. These were 1)the threat of environmental disaster; 2)questions of so-called “intellectual property,” of copyright, patents, etc., and of the privatization of the common (understanding this in the broadest sense, as Hardt argued); 3)quesions of bioengineering, genetics, and the ability to manipulate our own genes, and thus change “human nature” on a biological and physiological level. Zizek then added a fourth challenge, which he said underlay all the others: 4)the question of inclusion and exclusion on a global level — as reflected in border controls, nationalisms, and the question of immigration (the countries of the North excluding people from the global South, except insofar as their hyperexploitation was facilitated on the basis of admitting them with only a semi-legal or illegal status. This ties in also with the whole question of “global slums,” as raised by Mike Davis. It articulates the demands of capital that lie behind what Deleuze calls the control society, and it gives a way of acknowledging the issues raised by post-colonial theory without falling into the multiculturalism that Zizek is not altogether without justification in criticizing.

Zizek argued that these questions could only be resolved, in an anticapitalist direction, by maintaining principles of egalitarianism and universalism. His example of this was the Haitian Revolution as the radicalization, and Hegelian “completion”, of the French Revolution. The French tried to repress the Haitians, which means that the French were not able to live up to their own universalism — they wouldn’t apply this to black people. But the Haitians took the principles of the French Revolution more seriously than the French themselves did; they demanded and won independence, against the French, on the basis of the very principles that the French had enunciated. This is Zizek’s way of splitting the difference between his inherent Eurocentrism, and the fact that by his own principles of universality he needs to get away from Eurocentrism. In effect, he is privileging Europe on the grounds that Europe invented the very universalism that commands us to stop privileging Europe. As so often, I remain highly dubious of how this kind of Hegelian maneuver can be invoked any time Zizek needs to get out of a tight spot. It ends up being a little too easy, and a little too self-congratulatory a method of resolving the problem. That is to say, Zizek still really is Eurocentric, and we need to continue to call him on this. But it is not entirely devoid of merit that the guy is trying, at least…

In any case, after laying all this out, Zizek went on to talk about some of the difficulties that we face in trying to deal with these questions. He was emphatic in arguing that the radicality of “communism” needs to be upheld, against the sort of reforms that — now that some of the excesses of finance are being at least slightly reined  in — could come under the name of “socialism” (as in Newsweek’s recent assertion that “‘we are all socialists now”). Such “socialist” reforms (including the nationalization of institutions like banks, or the de facto ownership of the majority of stock in troubled financial corporations by the US government) would give an illusion of reform, while really leaving the massive inequalities (between wealthy financiers and everyone else, and even more between the citizens of Western nations and the overwhelming majority everywhere else in the world) largely untouched. I think that Zizek is right about this — the current crisis situation at least in principle makes radical alternatives more thinkable than they were during the internet and real estate bubbles — even though the recuperative efforts of Western governments today are almost entirely oriented towards keeping alive the sense that “there is no alternative,” even as that system to which there is supposedly no alternative has entirely collapsed and discredited itself.

In this light, ZIzek talked of the difficulty of making any transgressive or oppositional gestures today, because of the way that such gestures almost immediately get commodified and recuperated, and because the very ideas of transgression and radical innovation have themselves become capitalist resources, the mantras of every business school and every CEO. Zizek even quoted Brian Massumi to this effect, much to my surprise (since Massumi, like Hardt and Negri, is very much on Deleuzian side, rather than the Lacanian one, of recent debates).

Awareness of these issues, I think, prevents Zizek from articulating groundless fantasies of revolutionary agency in the way that certain other speakers did. Yet the only solution Zizek had to offer, in his talk, was an appeal to Badiou’s transcendental formulation of politics as fidelity to an event of radical rupture, and of “communism” as the name of this event or rupture. In the course of his talk, Zizek called several times for a “radical voluntarism” — though, when called on this formulation in the Q&A, he backpedaled (at least rhetorically) and said that all he meant by such a phrase was that, unlike the old Marxists  of the earlier part of the past century, we could no longer believe today that the “logic of history” was on our side, or that we could trust to the objective course of events to displace capitalism and create the necessary and sufficient conditions for communism.

I agree with Zizek on this — indeed, my largest disagreement with Hardt and Negri is precisely that they seem to affirm a soft version of the inevitable-movement-of-history, or “objective conditions” thesis — but I think that a phrase like “radical voluntarism” works to insinuate a positive thesis — a sense of “what is to be done?” — that simply isn’t there. Which leaves us back in our current condition: the demoralization of an impotent left. I have no solution for this dilemma — and I don’t think Zizek or Badiou (or Hardt or Negri either) have any more of a solution than I have, although they are way to eager to adopt the rhetoric of seeming as if they do.

All this was symbolized at the very end of the conference. As everyone was getting ready to leave, Zizek asked us to all stand up and sing “The Internationale”. Almost nobody did (there were a few people in one corner singing it, but they couldn’t be heard above the general hubbub). In my case — and I suspect this held for a large majority of the hundreds of people in the auditorium — I would have liked to sing “The Internationale”, but I couldn’t — because, although I am vaguely familiar with the melody, I do not know the words.

Communism conference — Michael Hardt

Michael Hardt’s talk, “The Production of the Common,” at the London conference On the Idea of Communism, summarized a lot of his ideas over the last several years in a way that I found helpful. He defined “communism” as having to do with the common — as opposed to both private property and state property. And said he wanted to put the focus on political economy and on the question of property. (This in contrast to the other speakers on his panel, Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hallward, who were both far-ranging and lucid, but foucsed rather of questions of political action and organization. Indeed, I have now gone to nine talks — with three more to come — and Hardt’s and Negri’s were the only two which so much as mentioned political economy. Quite odd for what is supposed to be a Marxism conference). I will try to summarize what Hardt said, with a little commentary

In the 18th century, and still in the 19th when Marx wrote, capitalism was in transition from a form based mostly on immobile property, which is to say agricultural land, from which surplus was extracted in the form of rent, to a form of capitalism based on mobile property, which is to say manufacturing (since a factory can in theory be built anywhere), from which surplus was extracted in the form of profit (i.e., although Hardt didn’t express it this way, from the direct expropriation of absolute and relative surplus value). The landlords were losing out to the new industrial capitalists. Even still in Marx’s time, there were less industrial workers than there were agricultural ones, but industry was the dominant mode of production in the sense that it was the one that imposed its forms and methods of organization on all the rest (a “dominant,” as Jameson would say).

Today, Hardt said, we are in the midst of another transition, this time from industrial production to “immaterial production.” The number of workers involved in immaterial or affective production is still much smaller worldwide than the number of factory workers, etc., but immaterial production is the leading edge that imposes its forms of organization on the rest, just as industry was in the 19th century. (This, in part, was Hardt’s response to criticisms of the entire notion of immaterial production on the grounds that millions of people still work in factories, even if it is mostly today in the “underdeveloped” world instead of in the wealthy nations of the West, or global North). [Hardt didn’t mention this, but his periodization fits in well with McKenzie Wark‘s idea of a movement from landlords to industrialists to the current “vectorial class” of the owners of property rights to “information.” Hardt, like Wark, is focused on what Wark calls “the property question”].

Today, informatic or immaterial production is focused on questions of so-called “intellectual property” (this is my term, not Hardt’s), in the forms of copyright, patents, etc. A company’s physical products often have value, not because of any actual use, but because they are manifestations of a “brand” to which consumers are attracted, or with which they identify. Massive sums of money are gained from things like patents on genetic sequences, genetically modified crops, rights to copyrights on music, video, and text, to (often frivolous) patents on supposed inventions, to control of certain channels of distribution, to a company’s working methods and “trade secrets,” and so on. Even traditional hard-manufacture factories are governed by informatics, and profit comes as much or more from control of the informational organization that governs production, than from the physical items in themselves that are produced (as these latter are not sold for much above cost).

According to Hardt, all this means that immaterial production has more similarities to the pre-industrial capitalism focused on the extraction of rent than it does to the (pre-informatic, or perhaps Fordist) industrial system that focused on the extraction of surplus value as profit. The most dynamic sort of capitalist appropriation today comes in the form of a renewed “primitive accumulation,” or privatization of the common: one can see how both the patenting of genetic sequences taken from plants used by traditional cultures, and the copyrighting of “new” ideas and their expression, fits into this paradigm. This means that the struggle against capitalism must take on radically different forms, compared to those of the 19th and early 20th centuries. According to Hardt, immaterial production qua primitive accumulation is more a case of the direct appropriation of the common by capitalists, than it is one of the indirect expropriation of the common through the sale and purchase of labor power as was the case under industrial capitalism.

Now, I am largely in agreement with Hardt (and Negri, and some of the economists associated with their position, like Marazzi and even to some extent Moulier Boutang) about the transformations in capitalism over the last fifty years, and especially since the 1970s. But I am not sure I entirely accept the framework through which Hardt interprets these developments. In particular, I do not think that immaterial production involves a more “direct” expropriation of the common than was the case when industrial capitalism extracted value. It is true, as I have already said, that a lot of this new source of capital appropriation comes from a kind of “primitive accumulation” — corporations are now appropriating the commons in the form of things like genomes and songs and procedures of working, in the same way that landlords appropriated the commons of land at the time of the enclosures. But I don’t think that this is either a novelty or a reversion. It is rather the case that “primitive accumulation” never went away; it is a continual structural feature of capitalism, and was at work in the industrial age as much as it was in the agricultural stage, and as much as it is still today. Capitalism always both appropriates to itself things that it didn’t produce — and this precisely by “privatizing” them — and extracts a surplus from the processes of production that it directly initiates and supervises.

That is to say, there isn’t that great a difference between, on the one hand, how industrial capitalism imposes “cooperation” on large numbers of workers simultaneously, and draws profit from the economies of scale due to this cooperation (which is a form of relative surplus value) as much as it does from the initial inequalities built into the process of buying and selling “labor power” as a commodity (which is what Marx calls absolute surplus value); and, on the other hand, the way that immaterial capitalism today draws its profits from turning employees’ collaborative projects, and the cultural knowledge of indigenous peoples, into “intellectual property” locked under copyright and patent. In both cases, there is a double movement: on the one hand, the appropriation of what would otherwise be (or what previously was) common, and on the other hand, the transformation of that “common” precisely into a commodified form that stores or embodies congealed “labor” and that allows for the “marketization” of the product. The transformation of home knitting into manufactured clothing is not that different from the transformation of a plant with medicinal properties into a patented drug, or into a genetic sequence that can be used for controlled production of the medicine.

So, the point is that primitive accumulation and surplus-value extraction go together, both in 19th-century industrial production and in today’s immaterial production. This is why I don’t accept Hardt’s claim that production today somehow involves a less mediated and more direct appropriation of the common than was the case in the large factories of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Primitive accumulation or appropriation doesn’t occur apart from those other techniques of the extraction of surplus value — and this is just as much true for immaterial production today as it is, and was, for industrial production.

If we are to see a difference in the capitalism of the contemporary era, this has to to with the fact that, today, capital has become even more mobile and abstract than it was in the age of heavy industry. The movement from industrial to immaterial production is an intensification of the movement from agricultural to industrial, an even further internalization of capitalist social relations, an increase in the “mobility” or “flow” of capital. Today we are coming closer than ever to the limit-condition of the real subsumption, instead of the merely formal subsumption of all of society under capital. There is less and less of an “outside” that capitalism can “primitively” accumulate, and more and more is included in the mass of what is directly managed by capital’s disciplinary and modulatory procedures. (But there is only an asymptotic approach to the absolute of “real” subsumption; such a totality is never fully achieved. There always has to be some outside that capital has not appropriated yet, and without such an outside capitalism would entirely stagnate — a point made as much by Schumpeter as by Marx).

To say that we are moving ever closer to real subsumption is equivalent to saying that now — under what Jonathan Beller calls “the cinematic mode of production” (although I think it is rather post-cinematic — which is a point I am still working on), or what Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism” — surplus value is extracted in the processes of distribution and consumption as well as in the process of primary production. For Marx, circulation involved the faux frais of the capitalist mode of production, and had to be subtracted from profit. But today, in an “information economy” or ‘attention economy,” circulation is itself a direct source of further profit. Hardt and Negri are correct to associate this situation with real subsumption displacing merely formal subsumption. But they seem to me to be overly opimistic when they suggest that this means that we are finally reaching the point where the “objective conditions” for communism finally exist, or that the property form has become a “fetter” on the technological means of production, a fetter that is ready to be burst asunder. It just ain’t so. Digital technologies bring with them new forms of potential liberation, certainly; but they also bring new forms of control, new potentials for micromanagement and control via continual modulation (as Deleuze says in his great article on the society of control).

Hardt said at several points that the restrictions of copyright, patent, etc., because they are privatizing the common, are thereby making immaterial or affective labor less “productive” than it could be — which isn’t altogether wrong, but also isn’t the right point to be making — since “productivity” (like “efficiency”) is a category of the private enterprise system and wouldn’t have the same meaning (certainly wouldn’t be measured in anything like the same way) in a world of communism, or of the unrestricted common. Part of the point is precisely that (as Hardt, together with Negri, says — and as Virno says as well) even the most individualized and particular acts of human invention rely so extensively on the whole past accumulation of human invention, that private property rights become absurd. I maintain my signature on this blog, for instance, but it would be utterly ludicrous for me to maintain that my ideas and words come from nowhere — in fact, they come from what I have heard and read and otherwise encountered in the society that I live in. My own personal spin on things is still a spin on what arises and exists elsewhere, or in many elsewheres. And people can make what they want of my words, including things that I absolutely detest, which disabuses me of the notion that these words are “mine” in any metaphysical, propertarian sense.

At best, my words here will become part of what Hardt beautifully called — quoting from Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts — “the production of man [sic] by man” — this by way of making the point that those early manuscripts are anything from essentialist, since they see “human nature” not as something that exists once and for all as our basis, but rather as something that human beings themselves continually remake. Our very remaking of ourselves is at stake, and this is one further reason why the relentless privatization of the common is so obscene. But I am made uneasy when Hardt also calls this remaking a process of “biopolitical production” — because, once again, I think that this characterization is only valid under the conditions of capitalist appropriation, and that it would have to be characterized differently if it were truly to be, and to remain, common. I think that more than vocabulary is at stake here; Hardt and Negri’s terminology reflects what I see as their excessive optimism about how conditions for the common have (supposedly) already been achieved in the heart of capitalism itself.

One final word, on finance. Hardt cited the current financial crisis as an instance of capital’s inability to manage its own complexities in a useful manner. But things seem to me to be a little more complicated than this. Obviously, the system is dysfunctional; and obviously, the insane proliferation of derivatives and other “arcane financial instruments” is a symptom of informatics run amok. More orthodox Marxists often say that finance is merely fictive, since it is not related to, or backed up by, any actual production. But this “ungrounded” finance itself needs to be seen as part of the infrastructure of immaterial and affective capitalism; and as an effect of immaterial and affective labor. In such a context, “fictive” does not mean unreal or ineffective — as we are currently experiencing, the effects of delirious financial capital flows are all too material and evident. This is something that needs to be theorized much more than I am able to do here. I am still trying to figure things out; I would definitely say that, for instance, Christian Marazzi‘s ideas about the linguistic nature of these types of finance is inadequate. But I haven’t found anyone yet who can explain it to me, or theorize it, better.

2009 UK “Post-Cinematic Affect” Tour

I will be in the UK next week for what I may as well call my “Post-Cinematic Affect” tour, since all the talks I will be giving will be extracted from a manuscript-in-progress of that title. Basically, there are sections on Grace Jones’ “Corporate Cannibal” video, on Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate starring Asia Argento, and on Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. (All of these are heavily revised and expanded versions of texts originally published on this blog). For each talk I will be doing one or two of these sections; the two talks in London will together cover the entire manuscript.

The schedule of talks is as follows:

  • Monday 16 March: Goldsmiths, London (“Dangerous Modulations: Grace Jones’ Corporate Cannibal”)
  • Tuesday 17 March: Anglia Ruskin, Cambridge (“Dangerous Modulations: Grace Jones’ Corporate Cannibal”)
  • Wednesday 18 March: Salford University, Manchester (“Post-Cinematic Affect in Boarding Gate and Southland Tales”)
  • Thursday 19 March: University of Western England, Bristol (“Post-Cinematic Affect: Grace Jones and Justin Timberlake”)
  • Saturday 21 March: Kings College, London (“Post-Cinematic Affect”: keynote address for “Emergent Encounters in Film Theory” conference).

Fragment

A footnote from work in progress:

There is a hidden affinity between the aesthetics of Deleuze and of Adorno. For both thinkers, the authentic work of art resists an otherwise ubiquitous culture of commodification, by virtue of its force of negativity (Adorno) or of counter-actualization (Deleuze). Deleuze’s account of how modernist art works to “prevent the full actualization” of the event to which it responds, and to reverse “the techniques of social alienation” into “revolutionary means of exploration,” echoes Adorno’s insistence that it is “only by virtue of the absolute negativity of collapse” that art can “enunciate the unspeakable: utopia.” For both thinkers, and despite their radical differences in vocabulary, art restores potentiality by derealizing the actual. The question that haunts aesthetics today is whether such strategies of derealization are still practicable, in a time when negation and counter-actualization have themselves become resources for the extraction of surplus value.

Eugene Thacker

The DeRoy Lecture Series Presents

Friday March 6, 3pm
English Dept Seminar Room
Wayne State University
Room10302
5057 Woodward
Detroit

Eugene Thacker
“After Life”

Eugene Thacker is the author of Biomedia (University of Minnesota, 2004), The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture (MIT, 2005), and co-author with Alexander Galloway of The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (University of Minnesota, 2007). He co-edits the book series “Anonymous Theory,” and has previously collaborated with RSG (Radical Software Group), Biotech Hobbyist, and Fakeshop. Thacker is Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, & Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

JCVD

I watched JCVD last night, and I loved it. But then I dreamed about it all night, which is not something that happens with very many movies. This suggests that JCVD has some deep affective resonance for me; I’d like to figure out what it is. Also Charlie Bertsch asked me how I thought it compared to The Wrestler, which I also liked, though not anywhere near as much.

Both JCVD and The Wrestler are about highly athletic men who have slowed down in middle age. They both used to be big stars, but now they are both struggling to make a comeback. And in both films, this is the situation both of the protagonist, and also of the actor playing that protagonist. Now, I’ve never felt that Mickey Rourke ever went away — during the years of his obscurity, I continued to enjoy his star presence in such movies as Spun (2002), Sin City (2005), and Domino (2005). [And don’t forget how he is the only macho action star to have also successfully played such a role as that of St Francis of Assisi — as he does in Liliana Cavani’s underrated Franceso (1989).] But I couldn’t be happier that Rourke is winning all that attention for The Wrestler. In his portrayal of one-time wrestling hotshot Randy “The Ram”, he manages to be both masochistically exhibitionistic (in the wrestling scenes, of course), and at the same time sweet, clumsy, and clueless in equal measure (in the scenes depicting the rest of his life, at his job in the supermarket, his home in the trailer park, and his botched relationships with his daughter and with the Marisa Tomei character). I am rooting for him to wih the Best Actor Oscar (though I will be very surprised if he actually does; while Hollywood loves rehabilitation stories, their love goes only so far, and The Wrestler is too much the sort of termite-art, semi-disreputable genre movie that the Oscar crowd looks down upon, preferring to give awards to white elephants).

Jean Claude Van Damme, in contrast, will never be nominated for an Oscar. His performance in JCVD obviously does not achieve (and doesn’t even aim for) the gonzo bravura heights of Rourke’s turn in The Wrestler. But there’s a sense in which his simple presence on the screen is even more audacious than that of Rourke. And also, I really hadn’t seen Van Damme in years — his IMDB profile shows that he has been continually busy, but mostly in straight-to-video films that I had never even heard of.

In any case, in JCVD, Van Damme simply plays a double of himself: “Jean Claude Van Damme”, a middle-aged, one-time martial-arts-action-star, with his career now on the skids. He’s coming home to Brussels, after failing miserably in Hollywood. His agent can only find him roles in the crummiest, lowest-budget movies; his finances are so low that all his credit cards are rejected by the ATM; and (in the opening section of the film) he loses custody of his daughter after a bitter divorce trial (in which his ex-wife’s lawyer denounces the moral depravity and glorification of violence in Van Damme’s movies, and his daughter complains to the court that other kids in school make fun of her for having such a washed-up has-been ex-star of a father).

But even before the divorce-court flashbacks, the movie makes you pay attention to Van Damme, and to what he can and cannot do. Over the opening credits, there’s an amazing long sequence shot, filled with special effects and digitally composited add-ons, in which Van Damme makes his way down a street, dispatching bad guys right and left with gunshots, with kicks and karate chops, or by banging them down with various props; he manages along the way not only to dodge bullets, and drag along somebody he is rescuing, but even to douse a flamethrower (I can’t remember quite how; I will have to watch the shot again). The sequence is so shamelessly over-the-top, and so extended, that it becomes absurd, or sublimely ridiculous: sort of the movie equivalent of really bad, but compulsively addictive, methamphetamines. Finally, the credits over, Van Damme reaches a door, and steps inside; at that point, there’s a cut, we see the cameras that were filming the scene; an exhausted Van Damme remarks that, at age 47, it’s hard for him to do those long single takes the way he used to.

In 1991 or thereabouts, Kathy Acker told me that she thought Van Damme had the most gorgeous and perfect body of just about anyone on screen. Today, it isn’t that he is decrepit — he looks pretty good, and pretty solid, for somebody his age (he is considerably younger than me, and about 10 months older than Obama) — but he is no longer young, and he clearly doesn’t have the looks, or the moves, that he used to. Nonetheless, everyone loves him because he is a star; everyone wants to take a photo with him, or to see him demonstrate his trademark drop kick. The young Maghrebi men in his Brussels neighborhood video store even give him extra props for being the only big action star who hasn’t demonized Arabs or Muslims as bad guys. But all that is really in the past; now he’s short of money, and short on career options. He’s even lost a hoped-for comeback movie role to Steven Seagal (who has even agreed to cut off his ponytail in order to get the part). This sense of hapless failure, combined with the general (unfair) impression that Van Damme cannot act (that his young body was the one and only thing he had going for him), gives an atmosphere of haplessness and decay to everything that he does in the film.

The plot, of course, is a mere (and largely implausible) contrivance, as it so often is in B movies. Van Damme goes to the post-office/bank to see if he can get some money; he inadvertently stumbles into a holdup in progress, and is held as a hostage, along with the other customers and employees. But the robbers force Van Damme at gunpoint to be their public voice, appearing in the bank’s window and negotiating by phone with the police; they make it appear to the outside world as if he were the one holding hostages and demanding ransom. And so it all becomes an international media spectacle, with Van Damme’s celebrity as the focal point. Basically, everyone thinks he’s gone beserk due to his recent career setbacks. The international TV crews are there, as are Van Damme fans thrilled to think that he is apparently doing his action-movie routine in real life. Van Damme’s American agent and lawyer both dump him in disgust; his parents show up, and tearfully beg him to give himself up without hurting anyone. Meanwhile, inside, Van Damme’s action chops are useless when faced with guns; instead, he’s the voice of sweet (albeit weary) reason, trying to reassure the other hostages, and to defuse tensions. He suggests alternative actions to the robbers, trying to avoid a massacre; and he also plays mind games with them to some extent, trying to turn them against one another (and finally succeeding to a degree).

But real life isn’t anything like an action movie. And so Van Damme can’t really do that much. This is emphasized, precisely, by the film’s numerous self-reflexive, meta-cinematic turns. Action is scrambled, and repeated from different perspectives, and out of chronological order. Movie fantasy scenes of Van Damme’s drop kick are interspersed with scenes where we see how ineffectual he actually is. The whole movie is shot in ultra-widescreen, and its general look is overlaid by a washed-out patina (I do not know what filter, lighting arrangement, or digital effect is used to generate this): this gives JCVD an overall feel that is difficult to describe: perhaps I could call it “gritty realism,” but with the quotation marks indicating that it is more the abstract idea of being gritty and realistic, than something that actually is gritty and realistic. I mean that this abstraction, this distancing, is the movie’s deliberate effect. There’s a curious dislocation operating everywhere: it indicates that, even when we are seeing Van Damme outside of his movie persona, as he “really is,” this reality cannot shake itself free of the impotent aura of his stardom. Van Damme can never be just “himself”; he can never return to being plain and simple Jean-Claude Camille François Van Varenberg.

All in all, then, the movie offers a melancholy take on celebrity, as well as allowing Van Damme to deconstruct his whole career, and the movie business that gave him that career. The high point of the movie is another single long take, in which the background of the beseiged bank, with robbers and hostages, falls away, and Van Damme addresses the camera directly, for something like six minutes, with a film-studio platform as his backdrop. He speaks fervently and emotionally of his life, and of the state of the world, at one point nearly breaking down in tears. His monologue is filled with existential anguish. He recalls that he was not brought up in luxury, and says how thankful he is to have seen his dreams come true, and how sad he is that so many people do not live to see their dreams come true. He recalls his many marriages and divorces, and says that there was love in every one of these relationships, even if they ultimately failed to work out. He speaks of love and loneliness, and the sad state of the world, and of how, even for someone as fortunate as he has been, there are always failures and disappointments.

This scene is remarkable, and affectively powerful, not just because it comes up when we do not expect it, and ruptures the realist frame of the film. But also, and more importantly, because of the way that it mingles sincerity with the utmost artifice. Van Damme steps out of the frame of the fiction (even of the fiction that this is his “real life” rather than a turn on a movie set) in order to deliver a genuine cri de coeur. But at the same time, the very things that guarantee the monologue’s “authenticity” — its inordinate length, its direct address, and the earnestness with which Van Damme speaks out, and faces up to the pitiless eye of the camera — all these also foreground themselves as artifices, because they are a self-conscious demonstration. Van Damme is showing the world that he can act. He emotes, he turns the emotions on and off; he shows us the virtuoso range of his persona. He proves to the world that he is not just “the muscles from Brussels,” but also somebody with a heart and a brain, and with strong dramatic chops. In other words, the effectiveness of his performance hinges entirely on our not quite taking it seriously, but instead taking it as a performance, as a masterful display of technique. We are being forced to believe, not in what Van Damme actually says, but in the way he says it, and beyond that in his power of fabulation. So one watches this scene with the same fascinated sense of delirious over-the-topness, as one does the sequence shot during the opening credits.

To my mind, this means that JCVD is an honest and affecting film — precisely in the way it includes its own artifices in everything that it avows. (This is also why I think that it reaches further than The Wrestler, which lovingly explores the artifices of wrestling, but does not quite extend this exploration to itself, or to its own medium). And because of the film’s conviction, its trust in its own artifice, and because Van Damme is at once so resourceful and so hapless and helpless, because of the way he has made this film that pulls out the rug from under his whole career — because of all this, we must imagine Jean Claude Van Damme (as Albert Camus said we must imagine Sysiphus) happy.

Bruce Robbins

The DeRoy Lecture Series presents:

Bruce Robbins
“Chomsky and Cosmopolitanism”

Friday, January 23, 3pm
English Department Conference Room, 10302, 5057 Woodward
Detroit, Michigan
Wayne State University

Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has also taught at the universities of Geneva and Lausanne in Switzerland and at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and has held visiting positions at Harvard, Cornell, and NYU. His most recent book is Upward Mobility and the Common Good (Princeton 2007). He is also the author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (1999), The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (1986), and Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (1993) and is co-author of the Longman Anthology of World Literature (2003). He has edited Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (1990) and The Phantom Public Sphere (1993) and co-edited (with Pheng Cheah) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (1998). He was co-editor of the journal Social Text from 1991 to 2000 and is on the editorial board of boundary 2.

Celebrity

I am not sure whether this works at all, and at best it is extremely tentative, but I will post it anyway. I am trying to think about contemporary media celebrity, and how it is different from the kind of celebrity associated with movie stars in the early and middle twentieth century. I am writing this especially with Justin Timberlake and Asia Argento in mind, because they are the celebrities with whom I am most obsessed right now. But it should apply just as well to Brad and Angelina (and Jen), and to Britney and to Madonna.

In order to theorize this, I make use of Graham Harman‘s description of what he calls “allure.” But I should probably say that I am abusing Harman’s concept, rather than using it. I am abusing it, in the first place, because, even if I am getting his idea right (which I am not sure I am), I am trying to apply it in a particular historical context. This is wrong, because metaphysical notions, should be “generic,” as Whitehead puts it, or applicable equally to everything in existence. Harman is always driving home a similar point: for instance, to take seriously Heidegger’s ideas about our relation to Being means to reject the claim, which Heidegger sometimes makes, that Germans (unlike Chinese, Americans, or Brazilians, say) would have an especially privileged relationship with Being. In the second place, it’s wrong because Harman has recently rethought the account of allure that he gives in Guerrilla Metaphysics, and upon which I am drawing here.

Nevertheless, here goes…

Post-cinematic celebrities are perturbing presences. They circulate endlessly among multiple media platforms (film, television talk shows and reality shows, music videos and musical recordings and performances, charity events, advertisements and sponsorships, web- and print-based gossip columns, etc.), so that they seem to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Their ambivalent performances are at once affectively charged and ironically distant. They enact complex emotional dramas, and yet display a basic indifference and impassivity. I feel involved in every aspect of their lives, and yet I know that they are not involved in mine. Familiar as they are, they are always too far away for me to reach. Even the Schadenfreude I feel at the spectacle of, say, Britney’s breakdown or Madonna’s divorce backhandedly testifies to these stars’ inaccessibility. I am enthralled by their all-too-human failures, miseries, and vulnerabilities, precisely because they are fundamentally inhuman and invulnerable. They fascinate me, precisely because it is utterly impossible that they should ever acknowledge, much less reciprocate, my fascination.

In short, post-cinematic pop stars allure me. Graham Harman describes allure as “a special and intermittent experience in which the intimate bond between a thing’s unity and its plurality of notes somehow partly disintegrates.” For Harman, the basic ontological condition is that objects always withdraw from us, and from one another. We are never able to grasp them more than partially. They always hold their being in reserve, a mystery that we cannot hope to plumb. An object is always more than the particular qualities, or “plurality of notes,” that it displays to me. This situation is universal; but most of the time I do not worry about it. I use a knife to cut a grapefruit, without wondering about the inner recesses of knife-being or grapefruit-being. And most of the time, I interact with other people in the same superficial way. And this is largely a good thing; if I were to obsess over the inner being of each person I encountered, ordinary sociability would become impossible. It is only in rare cases — for instance when I intensely love, or intensely hate, someone — that I make the (ever-unsuccessful) attempt to explore their mysterious depths, to find a real being that goes beyond the particular qualities that they display to me. Intimacy is what we call the situation in which people try to probe each other’s hidden depths.

[Explanatory Note: Three additional things need to be noted here. In the first place, Harman’s discussion does not privilege human subjectivity in any way. His descriptions of how objects exceed one another’s grasp in any encounter applies as much “when a gale hammers a seaside cliff” or “when stellar rays penetrate a newspaper” as it does when human subjects approach an object. When I use a knife to cut a grapefruit, the knife and the grapefruit also encounter one another at a distance, unable to access one another’s innermost being. In the second place, I do not have any privileged access into the depths my own being. My perception of, and interaction with, myself is just as partial and limited as my perception of, and interaction with, any other entity. And finally, none of this implies that a person, or any other entity, actually possesses some deep inner essence. The argument is that all entities have more to them than the particular qualities they show to other entities; it says nothing about the status or organization of this more — or at least, what Harman says on these topics is irrelevant to the way I am using or abusing his ideas here.]

What Harman calls allure, however, is what arises in the rare situation — generally an aesthetic one — when an object does not just display certain particular qualities to me, but also intimates, and forces me to become acutely aware of, its deeper, hidden existence as something other than, and more than, these qualities. This inner, or surplus, existence is something that I cannot reach — and yet that I cannot forget about or ignore, as I ordinarily do in my interactions with objects, and other people, in the world. The alluring object displays the fact that it is separate from, and more than, its qualities — which means that it exceeds everything that I feel of it, and know about it. It draws me beyond anything that I am actually able to experience. And yet this ‘beyond’ is not in any sense otherworldly or transcendent; it is situated in the here and now, in the very flows and encounters of everyday existence.

This is why pop culture figures are so affectively charged. They can only be grasped through a series of paradoxes. When a pop star or celebrity allures me, this means that he or she is someone to whom I respond in the mode of intimacy, even though I am not, and cannot ever be, actually intimate with him or her. What I become obsessively aware of, therefore, is the figure’s distance from me, and the way that it baffles all my efforts to enter into any sort of relation with it. Such a figure is forever unattainable. Pop stars are slippery, exhibiting singular qualities while, at the same time, escaping any final definition. This makes them ideal commodities: they always offer us more than they deliver, enticing us with a “promise of happiness” that is never fulfilled, and therefore never exhausted. In terms of a project of affective and cognitive mapping, pop stars work as anchoring points, or as particularly dense nodes of intensity and interaction. They are figures upon which, or within which, many powerful feelings converge; they conduct multiplicities of affective flows. At the same time, they are always more than the sum of all the forces that they attract and bring into focus; their allure points us elsewhere, and makes them seem strangely absent from themselves. Pop culture figures are icons, which means that they exhibit, or at least aspire to, an idealized stillness, solidity, and perfection of form. Yet at the same time, they are fluid and mobile, always displacing themselves. And this contrast between stillness and motion is a generative principle not just for celebrities themselves, but also for the media flows, financial flows, and modulations of control through which they are displayed, and that permeate the entire social field.