More electoral ruminations

Apparently, Zizek (sort of) supports Obama. This marks a change from four years ago, when Zizek welcomed Bush’s victory. Now, I am not usually concerned to follow all the microscopic twists and turns of Zizek’s party line; especially in matters like this, since I think that he is way too Eurocentric to understand what’s going on in America. But for once I think he might be on to something.

As Jodi summarizes Zizek’s argument (since she expresses it far more clearly than Zizek himself does):

Zizek’s position on Obama is rooted in the realization that appearances matter. It matters whether our society is one in which the officially acknowledged ideology claims that torture is sometimes useful, that some couples destroy the fabric of society, that its perfectly fine if the top 1% of the population are vastly wealthier than all the rest. With Obama, then, the domain of the officially acknowledged and acceptable changes. And this change brings with it a whole set of different potentials, different possibilities. The truth of the claim, then, rests not simply in whether Obama, Biden, and their handlers believe it. It’s more than that, the minimal or virtual difference that shifts the entire political frame, that creates opportunities that otherwise would have been foreclosed.

In other words, no matter how hypocritical the Democrats are (and they are, if you think — for instance — about how Biden pours forth all this rhetoric about helping the less well-to-do citizens of this country, while at the same time he has spent his entire political career working hand-in-glove with the credit card industry to screw over working- and middle-class Americans just so Visa and MasterCard can increase their already obscene profit margins even further) — nonetheless, the fact that they pay lip service to human rights, human dignity, and freedom from unnecessary suffering makes them morally superior to the Republicans, who are so crassly cynical that they overtly and positively revel in the prospects of torture, bigotry, destroying the environment for quick corporate profits, and enriching the already-rich at the expense of everyone else.

Thus, the Democrats’ hypocrisy is to be preferred to the Republicans’ cynicism, for good Kantian reasons (though Zizek would probably give Hegelian ones instead). As Kant famously said about the French Revolution, no matter how much this uprising might have “miscarried” or been “filled with misery and atrocities,” nonetheless any decent human being, observing the events of the Revolution from afar, would have to be caught up in “a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm”; the sheer fact of this “sympathy,” despite everything that goes wrong in actuality, itself testifies to “a moral predisposition in the human race.” In other words, the sheer fact that something like the French Revolution could occur, no matter how badly it went wrong subsequently, gives us a legitimate ground for hoping that human beings are not forever subject to the Hobbesian alternative of either continual war of all against all, or severe and violent repression.

In the present circumstances, this means that Obama’s rhetoric of hope, no matter how vapid and empty it may actually be, still matters. Anyone who thinks that Obama will actually change things is in for severe disappointment if he wins. It’s pretty clear that Obama will do no more than restore Clintonian neoliberalism, in place of the revanchist militarism and rampant looting and pillaging that characterizes the current Bush-Cheney regime (and that McCain, for all his promises of “change”, will do nothing to alter). In other words, Obama may well rescue us somewhat from the nightmare of the last eight years, but only to the extent of restoring the status quo ante, with its foreign bombings and domestic “rationalizations” of the economy, that we rightly objected to in the 1990s. Nonetheless, the fact that Obama, Biden, and company pay lip service to humane values that they will not actually uphold is in itself a cause for hope, for maintaining a “hope we can believe in,” or (to quote a past Presidential candidate whom it is now taboo to mention) for “keep[ing] hope alive.”

This is why I think it is important to vote for Obama in spite of everything. There is an essential moral difference between Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin; just as (in a comparison that Zizek, to his credit, does not shy from), there was an essential moral difference between Stalin and Hitler. Zizek condemns the currently fashionable habit of lumping Stalin and Hitler together as totalitarian dictators. The difference, as in the Presidential race today, has to do with hypocrisy. Stalin professed support for human rights like free speech, for self-determination, for peace, and for harmony and equality among individuals and peoples regardless of race, ethnicity, etc.; all these principles are enshrined in the Soviet Constitution of the 1930s. Of course, in fact Stalin was a megalomaniacal tyrant who ruled arbitrarily, violated all of these ideals, and put millions of people to death; but Zizek is entirely right to suggest that such hypocrisy is morally superior, and far to be preferred, to Hitler’s overtly racist and anti-democratic ideology — which he unhypocritically put into practice. It’s for this reason that American Communists of the 1930s-1950s (observers of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath from afar, just as Kant was an observer of the French Revolution from afar) are far more honorable and decent (for all their ludicrous idolization of Stalin and sleazy maneuvers against other factions on the left) than the anti-Communists of the same period.

In recent years, and especially in the weeks following McCain’s selection of Palin, conservatives have excoriated liberals for, basically, thinking that conservatives are stupid, and that stupidity is the only explanation for why anybody would, say, be enthusiastic about Palin. And I think that the conservatives who argue in this manner are somewhat correct — at least to the extent that, as I’ve said before, many liberals’ scorn for Palin has prevented them from seeing the great appeal she has, affectively, to large segments of the electorate. We shouldn’t argue the election on the grounds that Palin is “unqualified” or that she is “trashy.” Rather, we should make it clear that even the most minimal sense of human dignity requires us to throw the Republicans out of power. It is not stupid to vote for McCain/Palin; rather, it is evil. Republicans are intrinsically, and necessarily, morally depraved. Anyone who votes for McCain/Palin, or supports them, by that very fact demonstrates that he or she is a person utterly devoid of basic morality, and lacking in any respect for others. To vote for McCain is to shit on human civilization, and show utter contempt for human values and human hopes. And not in spite of the Democrats’ hypocrisy, but rather precisely because of this — because their hypocrisy is, as it were, the compliment that vice pays to virtue — the moral thing to do in this election is to vote for Obama.

[ADDENDUM: I should clarify that the above is written in the knowledge that it is an entirely futile utterance. Even though there are nearly 6 weeks left until the actual election, it is pretty clear at this point that the race is already over. McCain is the indubitable winner, with the only question being whether his margin of victory will be as slender as Bush’s margin over Kerry, or as vast as Bush Sr.’s margin over Dukakis (of course, it will probably end up being somewhere in between). So you might say that this posting enacts a sort of proleptic mourning. The irony, though, is that I am mourning, not the failure of some grand hope, but rather merely the continued frustration of a hope that, even in “victory,” would not have been fulfilled. I am mourning, in advance, the failure of a failure. Such is the depressive postmodernist condition: in comparison, even something like Walter Benjamin’s melancholia seems like the most lurid optimism, a grand modernist gesture that we cannot believe in any longer. But it is precisely in such a situation that Kant’s injunction, that we must believe in, and have hope for, the prospect of an improvement of the human condition even in the face of all empirical evidence for the contrary. Our deepest moral obligation is to be faithful to this hope, even though its fulfillment cannot be foreseen, and even though it is something that can be promised “only indefinitely and as a contingent event.” ]

[2ND ADDENDUM: I fear that I am beginning to sound like late Derrida, with all his words about infinite deferral, democracy to come, etc. I can only repeat what I have said before; that essentially Derrida’s thought is a minor, but honorable, footnote to Kant.]

An Issue That Won’t Go Away

Things are getting out of hand. There’s even a call for papers on Sarah Palin, together with a definitive Lacanian analysis by the current Pope (Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan’s son-in-law) and a typically cretinous and self-congratulatory effusion by Camille Paglia, who has never met a butch woman, or for that matter a misogynistic woman, whom she didn’t swoon over.

I’ve already written more than enough about Palin; I don’t have the desire (or maybe I just don’t have the stomach) to engage in further analysis here. I just want to note that the problem I have with all these accounts (and even with infinite thought’s far more thoughtful response) is that they all take the question of gender, or of the construction of femininity, or of sexual difference, as being far more central to the situation than I think it actually is.

Of course it is true that McCain chose Palin largely on account of her gender; and that her affective effect upon “the American people” (an entity that I do not believe actually exists, but that I am using, in scare quotes, for convenience here), is rooted in her gendered (and explicitly marked as gendered) performativity.

But to redefine the election in terms of some analysis of how Palin reconfigures the essential figure of Woman seems to me entirely to be missing the specificity of what is happening in this election. There is little to choose here between Miller, who says that Palin “knows that the phallus is only a semblance and, furthermore, one not to be taken seriously: it is the de-complexified femininity”, and Paglia, for whom Palin represents the “robust and hearty” femininity, and a “can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism”, that supposedly existed in American frontier society before it was spoiled by the “whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism” of the last thirty years.

Such analyses transform the socially and historically conditioned gender relations that are at work in American society today into transcendent and trans-historical structures. They blithely ignore the ways that Palin’s media persona (the “hockey mom” entirely dedicated to Family who is also the ferocious “pitbull” or “barracuda”) could never have been imagined in another time and place, because it is so closely tied to the economic situation of American middle-class families today (in which the necessity for both parents to work subsists uneasily alongside the still unequal distribution of household and child-raising chores), to the ways that the feminist movement of the 1960s and after, together with the “sexual revolution” of the same era, the explosion in technologies of contraception, etc., have radically restructured gender conceptions and roles even among the most “conservative” and familialist sectors of the population, to the revival of fundamentalist Christianity in the last forty years on an entirely new basis (which is inseparable from the latest technologies of business and marketing, so that it has has very little in common with any sort of “old-time religion”), to the reconfiguration of shopping and consumption in our post-Fordist era (e.g. the new kinds of malls and the ubiquity of chains like Walmart, Target, etc., without which “hockey moms” could not possibly exist), to the ways that race has been reconfigured in post-civil-rights American (something that is, of course, essential to Obama’s image as well), and so on almost ad infinitum.

Any consideration of gender roles and positions aside from all these factors (and many more) simply misses the mark. Palin has not substituted plenitude for lack, or “physical fortitude and indomitable spirit” (Paglia) for wimpy, shrill, “politically correct” feminism. Rather, she is a phenomenon of the contemporary mediascape in which such binary oppositions are meaningless and pointless. Both the excitement she has generated (as a super-Mom who can do it all) and the disdain she has attracted (with bourgie liberals openly, and old-style country club conservatives more circumspectly, looking down on her as “white trash”), need to be understood, rather, in terms of communicative capitalism and its relentless premediations.

If Palin embodies any sort of plenitude, it is that of the commodity economy, rather than that of an economy of gender. Palin was (quite brilliantly) chosen by McCain because — like any successful commodity product in the postmodern marketplace — she embodies what Alex Shakar, in his novel The Savage Girl, calls a paradessence: a “paradoxical essence,” a conjunction of contradictory qualities. “Every product has this paradoxical essence. Two opposing desires that it can promise to satisfy simultaneously.” The paradessence is the “schismatic core, [the] broken soul, at the center of every product.” Thus coffee promises both “stimulation and relaxation”; ice cream connotes both “eroticism and innocence,” or (in more psychoanalytic terms) both “semen and mother’s milk.” The paradessence is not a dialectical contradiction; its opposing terms do not interact, conflict, or produce some higher synthesis. Rather, the paradessence affirms everything indiscriminately; it is a matter of “having everything both ways and every way and getting everything [one] wants” (from pp 60-61 and 179).

Palin is a paradessence, and hence a wildly popular commodity, because she combines the family-centeredness of the ideal suburban Mom with the ruthlessness of a corporate “warrior” in the dog-eat-dog neoliberal economy, or of a hard-core ideologue/foot soldier for the Far Right. She is sort of a perfect combination of June Cleaver and Ilse Koch. She both energizes the GOP’s fundamentalist-Christian base (which was previously very suspicious of McCain), and appeals to non-fundamentalist, independent white voters (who find her even more charismatic than Obama — with the added advantage that she’s white, to boot). It is probable that, given how gender formations work in America today, so powerful a paradessence would have to appear in the form of a woman, rather than a (heterosexual) man. But the most valid categories for comprehending Palin remain those of media theory and political economy, rather than those of the metaphysics of gender difference.

Palin

Obviously Sarah Palin is a right-wing maniac. She opposes sex education and favors abstinence instruction only; she opposes abortion, even in cases of rape; she supports everything the oil companies want, and thinks that global warming may not even exist, and if it does, it is not the result of human actions; etc. etc. ad nauseam. All that is good enough reason not to want her anywhere near the White House.

But I’m stunned by the vituperation that seems to be overcoming the “liberal” portion of the blogosphere, denouncing her on the basis of her lack of experience, her teenage daughter’s pregnancy, etc.

For one thing, “experience” simply does not matter. At all. It is a completely bogus idea. The lack of experience didn’t stop Ronald Reagan from being the most effective political leader of the last half century (and therefore the one who did the most harm, and caused the most human suffering, of any President in American history). Neither does Der Arnold seem the least bit hindered in his machinations by having less “experience,” and less knowledge of anything outside Hollywood, than the average joker driving down the street. The fact is, “experience” can be easily borrowed or bought. Reagan didn’t need experience or understanding, because he had the right-wing policy wonks from the Heritage Foundation backing him. And Arnold has handlers inherited from his GOP predecessor Pete Wilson. A politician doesn’t need actual “experience,” as long as he or she has the right advisors. With the right advisors, a chimpanzee could be an effective US President (and the chimp would probably pull in higher approval ratings than Bush now does).

As for “personal” or “family” issues, who cares? The story about Palin allegedly being Trig’s grandmother rather than mother has all the usual flavor of paranoid conspiracy-mongering. It has exactly the same affective logic, and makes about as much sense, as 9/11 conspiracy theories, or David Icke’s allegations about our reptilian overlords, or JFK assassination conspiracy theories. I’d go so far as to say that, even in the unlikely event that the “grandmother” theory should prove to be true, I would still say that its underlying logic disqualifies it from being given any importance whatsoever.

With regard to the news of Palin’s 17-year-old daughter actually being pregnant now, all I can say — rather crassly — is that the chickens have come home to roost. This is what happens when you indoctrinate your post-puberty children with the doctrine of “abstinence”, and deny them any knowledge of contraception. (See the movie Teeth for the best account of this dynamic). Of course fundamentalist “family values” are a nightmare. But the moralizing criticism of Palin on these grounds, that I have seen in so much “liberal” commentary of the past day, itself buys into these same odious “family values”. Enough said.

There are two things that especially trouble me about the “liberal” blogosphere’s attacks on Palin. One is good old-fashoned misogyny. I just don’t believe that a white male candidate would ever be subject to the sort of treatment that Palin has gotten: the smirks, the knowing winks, the ridicule of her prowess as a hunter, the doubts as to whether she can be an effective public servant at the same time that she is a parent to children under 18 (and especially one with Down’s Syndrome), and so on. I am in no way opposed to the basic need for partisanship, for taking off the gloves and attacking the other party. But I wish I could see a bit more thought going into the premises of all these “liberal” attacks on Palin, the sorts of values that they are appealing to. We are not going to win if we base our attacks against the Republicans on the Republicans’ own odious prejudices and presuppositions.

The other thing that disturbs me is the air of self-congratulatory triumphalism that surrounds all these attacks on Palin. Nearly everything I have read from the “liberal” blogs and media takes the gleeful line that McCain has just blown the election, that his choice of Palin is an egregious blunder, that at best it bespeaks panic and desperation. I’m sorry, but this sort of evaluation is sheer idiocy. Of course the selection of Palin is a gamble — the selection of someone relatively unknown, and therefore untested in the heat of policy discussions and electoral battles always is. But that doesn’t mean that Palin is automatically a public-relations disaster. Just watching five minutes of YouTube clips is enough to show that Palin is one of the most charismatic and telegenic politicians in the US today. She radiates a combination of spunky energy, cool authority, and down-home reassurance. There is no question that she will be powerfully appealing to mainstream voters. She is yet another example of the right wing’s brilliance, over the last thirty years, in manipulating affect — in getting voters to feel good about candidates, and therefore to vote for them even against their own actual conscious interests.

In short, anyone who sees the selection of Palin as a self-inflicted wound for the McCain campaign simply doesn’t get it — doesn’t have a clue about how politics works in America today. If Obama has a chance of winning the election despite ingrained American racism, this has nothing to do with the state of the economy, or the war. It is because Obama arouses confidence and enthusiasm — in a manner that Kerry, Gore, Dukakis, Mondale, etc. were totally incapable of. (Whether this enthusiasm and excitement are able to travel, whether they can break through the glass ceiling and affect other people besides Obama’s core constituency, is still open to question. The campaign will very much turn on it — it is by no means a done deal). It troubles me how so many Obama supporters and enthusiasts are so smug in their certainty of victory, and I should say also in their sense of moral superiority and self-righteousness, that they cannot see what is right in front of their faces. In this case, the fact that Palin is a media figure of potentially huge appeal. You can’t fight or counteract something of which you are totally oblivious. There may be skeletons in anybody’s closet that ruin their chances in public life when they emerge; but at this point, Sarah Palin is more a Sarah Connor than she is a Harriet Miers or Tom Eagleton. We need to be worried about her effectiveness — and about McCain’s sharpness in picking her, in contrast to Obama’s going for Biden as a safe, conservative choice that signals politics-as-usual — instead of prematurely celebrating the demise of the Republican ticket.

[ADDENDUM: I should also mention class prejudice: bourgie white “liberals” looking down their noses, with their usual parochialism and bigotry, at a woman and family they consider to be “rednecks” or “white trash” — as was pointed out in Gawker, of all places.]

The Red Men (Matthew De Abaitua)

Matthew De Abaitua’s The Red Men (2007) is a literary/SF novel about digital simulation and corporate power in the new millennium. In the wake of 9/11, and with the increasing power of computing technology, the “brand age” of the late 20th century, in which we founded our identity on our favorite corporate brands, has come to an end. It has given way to the “unreal age” (64), a situation in which we find ourselves still subsisting after the apocalypse, or “after the end of the world” (175ff). In the “unreal age,” the cheery brand identification of the 1990s has been replaced by a general atmosphere of fear, anxiety, and distrust. The Red Men offers us a vision of how corporate power and exploitation continue to flourish in this new age of anxiety, and after the “irrational exuberance” of neoliberalism has collapsed along with the economic bubbles that fueled its excesses (cf. 73-74).The corporate-dominated control society now works through an eerie combination of disenchantment and mystification, low-level uneasiness and aggressive solicitation, dreary resignation and the looming threat of brute force.

The Red Men articulates all this through a combination of its general ambiance and its careful prose. The book presents a recognizable present-day world (specifically, England) whose deviations from actuality into science-fictional extrapolation are all-too-disturbingly believable. At the same time, striking aphorisms well up throughout the narration, linking the protagonist’s hair-raising experiences to larger trends. The book is smart, self-conscious, and self-lacerating: but all this in an utterly unpretentious way. On a psychological level, The Red Men combines a lucidity born of disappointment and disillusionment with a deeper understanding of how such disenchanted lucidity is itself an alibi for failure, cowardice, and complicity. And on a sociological level, it probes the ways in which we continue to mythologize an innovative future long after that future has been exhausted.

Nelson Millar, the narrator of The Red Men, used to be (in the long-ago mid-1990s) the editor of a too-hip-for-words magazine called Drug Porn, which fancied itself as being ever so scandalous and transgressive — but which, of course, was really just another medium for commodifying dissent and selling cool fashion accessories: “with retrospect, the notion of an alternative magazine is as preposterous as an alternative arms manufacturer, or a counter-cultural oil company. It is a consumerist medium. Hopeless to deny it” (32). [The example of the ludicrousness of “an alternative arms manufacturer” resonates with how I have been thinking about Iron Man]. Now Nelson is a “responsible” married man with a small daughter, instead of a hipster snorting coke in expensive clubs every night. “I was thirty, and the self-mythologizing begun in my adolescence had finally come to an end” (33). Like so many members of the so-called “creative class”, he now works doing “creative thinking consulting” (40) for a corporation on the “cutting edge” of technological innovation and marketing. His “creativity,” such as it is (and it doesn’t seem to add up to very much), is now the property of his employer, in what turns out to be an alarmingly literal sense (as I will explain shortly). Nelson perpetually feels defeated and disappointed — he has learned that his life will never amount to very much, and that he is really only good at obeying orders and submitting to bosses and other domineering authorities. This depressive (masochistic?) position is, in fact, the ideal and proper status for a citizen of the new corporate world.

Nelson works for an ultra-hip and ultra-modern company called Monad. Monad itself is the epitome of the “new economy,” grounded in (so-called) immaterial or affective labor. “Monad is naive. Monad is novelty. We don’t define ourselves by what we do because next week we might be doing something entirely different” (40). More officially, “the nature of its business is listed as ‘Other service activities’ and ‘Other business activities'” (59). In fact, Monad does an advanced form of market research and advertising consulting. Its sole product is images, or the promoting or products. Monad markets and sells auras; it is a corporation for a time when the aura surrounding a commodity, rather than what it actually “does”, is the real “use-value” of that commodity.

Monad draws upon — or licences the right to use — an artificial intellligence construct named Cantor (after the mathematician known as much for his depressive madness as for his fundamental work on set theory and on the notion of infinity). “The Cantor intelligence” is so advanced that it seems to have somehow come to Monad from the future — although we are also told that it was originally produced by US military intelligence (59) and that it emerged through evolutionary algorithms for generating software by Darwinian selection (358). In any case, Cantor runs digital simulations of real people; and it also instantiates itself in robots, so that it can physically act in the real world. The simulations allow Monad to test in advance the consequences of advertising campaigns, and also of political and economic policy decisions. The robots are used mostly for security and crowd control and enforcement. They come in two varieties, both seven feet tall: Dr Easy, with soft features and soulful eyes, designed to evoke feelings of trust and reassurance; and Dr Hard, harsh and frightening, designed to threaten people and to scare them into compliance.

The narrative of The Red Men basically draws out the full consequences of these premises, and these technologies. The novel is gruesomely comic in the way it depicts the chains of command in corporate hierarchies, and the ways that superiors exploit their underlings and make them grovel. At the same time, it recounts the increasingly manic consequences of Cantor’s creation of simulated personalities. In the first part of the novel, the high-ranking executives at Monad have their personalities replicated and simulated as a kind of privileged focus group for market research. These simulations are known as “Red Men” (hence the novel’s title). As they become increasingly autonomous, and develop away from their models, they also become even more egotistical, aggressive, power-mad, and willfully obnoxious than their originals. They engage in ever-more-ruthless Darwinian struggles, both among themselves and with actual people in the real world. Occasionally, they interact physically with the world, by taking over Dr Easy robot bodies. But even without this, the reach of the Red Men extends throughout the Net. They manipulate data, and work through Net-connected devices like mobile phones, in order to extend their power and persecute people they don’t like (including those ‘originals’ that don’t live up to their levels of ruthlessness).

The second part of the novel extends the simulations even further, as Monad replicates an entire suburban town, in order to have it available for market research, and for trying out new measures of control and manipulation. “Redtown is the simulation of a British town. That simulation will allow us to predict the consequences of our actions, and so act with complete confidence of the outcome” (179). In order to create Redtown, the citizens of Maghull, an actual Liverpool suburb, are bribed, cajoled, and bullied into submitting to brain scans and intrusive interviews, so that Cantor can construct sufficiently detailed simulations of them. Even though people are leery of haivng themselves replicated, not to mention of letting a machine learn their deepest secrets, they cannot resist the corporate juggernaut.

Nonetheless, this simulation of an entire town runs into several problems. For one thing, the Monad programmers realize that “we will have to incude ourselves in Redtown. The Maghull we are copying is a Maghull changed by our interference. The observer alters the observed” (280). This threatens to turn into an infinite regress. For simulation does not just reflect, or “represent”, a prior, external reality; it necessarily affects and alters the reality to which it refers, de-realizing it (as Baudrillard more or less said), infecting it with its own processes of manipulation and feedback. For another thing, there is the question of what happens if the marketers (manipulators) using the simulation “don’t get the results [they] expect” (322). At one point, Redtown is presented with “supply-side tax cuts” that are supposed to “motivat[e] the work force to be more productive,” and with more rigorous “homeland security” measures, designed to take advantage of the way that “the concomitant increase in ambient fear levels” is supposed to “increase consumption” (340). The experimenters are upset that these effects do not occur; the virtual citizens of Redtown do not work more and buy more, but become massively depressed and unmotivated instead. But since the error cannot lie with the policies, nor with the simulation, it must be the people themselves who are at fault.

Mere plot summary cannot convey the true intricacies of The Red Men; at the same time that the plot extends into ever greater areas of delirium, the implications of the simulation and robot technologies — which cannot be separated, as technologies, from their role as “social machines,” i.e. from the social, economic, and political circumstances of their use — become ever more detailed and multilayered. The novel touches on everything from the ways that the 24/7 demands of the “new economy” impinge upon, and remold, things like emotional intimacies, sexual relations, and family life, to scary suggestions about the ideologies that accompany “new economy” corporate formations (the executives at Monad and its related companies seem to be affiliated, on the one hand with fundamentalist Christianity, and on the other with a strange brand of Gnosticism).

Also, Monad’s virtualization of everything finds its counterpart, obverse, and competition in the activities of an equally shady corporation called Dyad, which provides “improvements” of the human body (sold to wealthy business executives) through mind- and emotion-enhancing drugs, and through “xenotransplants” of internal organs origiinally grown in pigs. Where Monad’s simulations are based upon a cognitive theory of mind (the Cantor artificial intelligence admits that it is blind to the unconscious), Dyad deals with raw physicality, unconscious drives, and Cronenbergian bodily metamorphoses. (Is it Zizek’s “obscene supplement”?) The two corporations are competitors and enemies, but they are really two sides of the same coin, mutually implicated with one another. Although Dyad is sworn to destroy Monad, it turns out that all the Monad executives are customers of Dyad as well. The pursuit of power, wealth, and “self-improvement” passes through the use of biophyisical enhancements, just as much as it does through the creation of avatars with superhuman intelligence and speed. It should be no surprise, then, that at the climax of the novel, when Dyad finally manages to bring down Monad, it also necessarily destroys itself.

I could go on, for The Red Men is extremely rich in detail, and in ideas. Passages that seem like throwaways, or digressions, or literary indulgences, almost always turn out, by the time you’ve gotten to the end of the novel, to be conceptually incisive, and affectively pointed. The Red Men is a brilliant work of social theory, in the same way that (as I have argued before) novels by authors like J G Ballard and Bret Easton Ellis are works of social theory. The Red Men is as informative and thought-provoking, when it comes to working out how society actually works in the 21st century, as anything by Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, or Manuel Castells.

Negri?

I’m reading Negri’s The Porcelain Workshop with continual exasperation. What is he talking about?

For instance, almost at random: “When we speak of difference, we are therefore speaking of resistance. Difference cannot be recognized within the homologation [sic; this is not a careful translation] that biopower imposes on society” (page 98).

One doesn’t need to be a Zizekian to make a Critique of the Gotha Program-like dissection of every phrase in a passage like this. In fact, difference need not, and usually does not, imply resistance. Capitalism today, with its niche marketing and just-in-time, “flexible” production schedules, likes nothing better than to recognize difference, to proclaim its love of differences, to provide commodities tailored to each and every, no matter how minute, difference. Negri claims to be drawing on a Deleuzian inspiration; but it was Deleuze who denounced the danger of “lapsing into the representations of a beautiful soul: there are only reconcilable and federative differences, far removed from bloody struggle. The beautiful soul says: we are different, but not opposed” (Difference and Repetition, page xx).

Isn’t there a bit too much of the beautiful soul in Negri’s vision of the multitude, even if he insists on the “antagonism” between the multitude and Capital? The most important thing that Negri says is that, in “postmodernism”, or post-Fordist capitalism — what I like to call “aesthetic capitalism” — we have moved from what Marx called the formal subsumption to the real subsumption of society, and all social life, under Capital. This means that Capital is no longer satisfied to profit from “archaic” modes of production and technologies, of things that are outside its orbit in their social actuality, even if profit can be expropriated from them — the situation under merely “formal subsumtion.” Under real subsumption everything without exception is reorganized according to the capitalistic form: leisure time as well as work time, the “domestic” sphere of unpaid female labor as well as the “productive” sphere of male factory labor, the “private” no less than the “public”…

But Negri is so eager, and so quick, to move on to the resistance and creativity of the multitude that he acts as if this resistance and creativity is the main thing that “real subsumption” means. He glides all too quickly over the horrors of real subsumption, not to mention the fact that this real subsumption involves, precisely, the capitalization, or commodification, or “branding”, of precisely that vision of personal “liberation” that was so exalted in the 1960s. (This is something that Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello are especially clear about, in their important if overly lengthy and repetitious book The New Spirit of Capitalism).

So, when I read statements like the following, I can only wonder what planet Negri is living on:

We have already insisted upon the importance of “real subsumption” understood as the essential phenomenon in the shift from the modern to the postmodern. However, the fundamental element of this transition also seems to be the generalization of resistance in each intersection of the great grid of real subsumption of society under capital. The discovery of resistance as a general phenomenon, a paradoxical opening in each link of power and a multiform apparatus of subjective production, is precisely where the postmodern affirmation lies.

Say what? I would think that the predominant feature of “postmodern” existence, with the fading of “grand narratives,” is precisely the fact that resistance — even if it is present everywhere — becomes ever more scattered, more atomized, more ineffectual, more invisible. As Jodi remarked the other day, resistance is simply ignored by the government and the corporations, including by the media, because it is simply irrelevant to a “faith-based” (as Ron Suskind would put it) power system that doesn’t even bother to take it into account: “the [anti-war] movement doesn’t matter because public opinion doesn’t matter.”

This fits in with other aspects of the situation that I have groused about before. Most notably, the wondrous “creativity” of the multitude that Negri celebrates so strenuously is not a form of empowerment, much less of resistance, but precisely a new way of extracting surplus value — this is precisely what “real subsumption” means. Creativity today takes the form of things like crowdsourcing and ludocapitalism — “customers” now pay corporations for the privilege of doing their research and development work for them (which is the way, for instance, that a virtual world like Second Life is built), or volunteer to engage in “word-of-mouth marketing”; and even play turns into a form of work, that is to say of the unremunerated expenditure of labor-power.

This is also where I think that Nate is right in complaining that Negri makes “a variety of claims made about the present which are not actually attributes of the present as distinct from earlier eras,” including “implied claims about the past due to claims marking the present off from the past, such as the notion that now because of immaterialization of labor adequate representation of the proletariat is impossible – the proletariat is _now_ a multiplicity, as if it could previously be adequately represented.” I see this again and again when Negri argues, for instance, that the potential (potentia) of the multitude is incommensurate with the structures of power (potestas), such as when Negri speaks of

a new analysis of labor organization, wherein value becomes the cognitive and immaterial product of creative action, and at the same time escapes the law of value (the latter understood in a strictly objective and economic manner). We encounter the same idea, on a different level, when we localize the ontological dissymmetry between how biopower functions and the potential (puissance) of biopolitical resistance. If power is measurable (measure and disparity (écart) are precious instruments of discipline and control), potential (puissance) is, on the contrary, the non-measurable, the pure expression of irreducible differences. (page 39)

I find this passage astonishing, because the disjunction or “ontological dissymmetry”, that Negri discusses here, as if it were a special new development of “postmodernity”, is precisely the central point of Marx’s theory of surplus value — and arguably of Marx’s entire body of thought. There is a radical incommensurability between humanity’s productive and reproductive “species activity” and enforced work; and therefore between qualtiatively distinct forms of human activity and their homogenization in the form of abstract, socially necessary labor; and therefore also between the “value” of labor-power in a capitalist economy (this value ultimately correlating to what workers are paid) and the “value” of what that labor-power produces; and therefore, at a still further remove, between use-values and exchange-values as dimensions of the commodity form. This radical incommensurability (or what Gayatri Spivak calls “the irreducible possibility that the subject be more than adequate — super-adequate — to itself”) is the necessary condition of possibility in order for exploitation — the expropriation of surplus value — to take place at all. How can Negri imagine that what he is describing here is a radically new conditon, that marks a rupture or “caesura” from the previous history of capitalism? How can he write as if Marx’s radical critique of “the law of value (understood in a strictly objective and economic manner)” were actually Marx’s erroneous buying into such a law, or his buying into such a law that was valid in the 19th and 20th centuries, but suddenly is no longer so today?

I could go on — but then I would never finish this post. The basic problem is, I think, that the new “production of subjectivities” that Negri celebrates cannot be separated from the ecstasies and excesses of consumerism; because consumption itself increasingly cannot be separated from productive labor, the two blending into one another almost seamlessly in the regime of aesthetic capitalism. Karatani has some interesting ideas about how we might resist and oppose capitalism on the basis of our dual identity of “workers qua consumers and consumers qua workers” (Transcritique, page 294) — but this is a way of thinking to which Negri seems entirely oblivious.

Iron Man (proposal)

Here’s a brief abstract I wrote for a prospective paper (to be submitted in several places) about Iron Man.

IRON MAN AS SOCIAL/CORPORATE FANTASY

Iron Man stands apart from other comic book superheroes in several striking ways. His superpowers do not come from an alien origin or a spider bite; rather, they are products of postindustrial technology. There are other superheroes whose powers are technologically based, such as Batman; but Iron Man’s cutting-edge engineering could not be further removed from Batman’s artisanal use of technology. It is also noteworthy that where most superhero costumes are disguises used to preserve anonymity and strike terror into foes, Iron Man’s suit is actually the literal source of his powers. In addition, although Tony Stark/Iron Man is a millionaire-turned-crimefighter just like Bruce Wayne/Batman, there’s a sharp contrast between Batman’s vengeful, almost sociopathic, outsider status, and Stark’s highly networked public persona, who stands at the center of corporate and military power.

For all these reasons, Iron Man is a fairly unique figure. Many American superhero stories of the last fifty years can be diagnosed as male-adolescent compensation fantasies: the nerd is empowered to strike back at his tormentors, and achieve the glory of saving the world. But Iron Man puts a strange twist on this scenario. For in his case, the redemption- and power-fantasy is also a fantasy of the military-industrial-technoscience complex, and ultimately of Capital itself. Corporations are recognized as “persons” under the law, and Tony Stark is very much the personification of a corporate entity. Iron Man’s technological triumphs, his ambivalent relations with the US military and intelligence communities, and his vulnerabilities as well (the shrapnel that threatens to enter his heart, and the alcoholism that is his constant temptation), all cross the line that separates individualist psychodramas from allegories of the ways that libidinal forces directly invest the socius (as Deleuze and Guattari would put it).

For this essay, I look beyond the recent Iron Man hit movie to consider a wide range of Iron Man’s incarnations in Marvel comics. I will pay some attention to Stan Lee’s invention of the character as a Cold War figure in the early 1960s, and to the depiction of Tony Stark’s corporate struggles and problems with alcohol in the comics of the 1970s and 1980s; but my main focus will be on Mark Millar’s, Warren Ellis’, and Matt Fraction’s radical reinterpretations of the character in the last several years. My aim is neither to critique the ideology of Iron Man comics, nor to claim that the book is somehow deeply subversive; but rather to use this comic book series in order to develop some ideas about how social fantasy works in our era of neoliberal globalized capitalism and of post-Cold War, post-9/11 paranoia and surveillance.

Grace Jones, Corporate Cannibal

“Corporate Cannibal”, the new Grace Jones video (directed by Nick Hooker) is utterly astonishing. Jones is 60 years old (!); and this is the first new work she has released in close to twenty years. But “Corporate Cannibal” is anything but safe and nostalgic.

Corporate Cannibal

The video is in black and white, and the only images that appear on the screen are those of Grace Jones’ face and upper body, black against a white background. But Jones’ figure is subject to all sorts of electronic distortions. The most common effect is one of elongation: her face is stretched upwards, as if she had an impossibly long forehead, as if her notorious late-80s flattop haircut had somehow expanded beyond all dimensions. Or else, her entire body in silhouette is thinned out, gracile (if that isn’t too much of a pun), and almost insectoid. The image also bends and fractures: her mouth stretches alarmingly, her eyes bulge out and expand across the screen like some sort of toxic stain. And sometimes Jones’ figure multiplies into two or three distorted, and imperfectly separated, clones. Nothing remains steady for more than a few seconds; the screen is continually morphing, and everything is so stylized and disrupted that we don’t get a very good sense of what Jones actually looks like today. Her facial features remain somewhat recognizable — Grace Jones has never looked like anyone else — and at a few moments, we get a brief almost undistorted close-up of her eyes, nose, and mouth — but there is something monstrous as well about this individuated “faciality”; and in any case it is gone almost before we have had the time to take it in.

Corporate Cannibal

The electronic manipulation of Jones’ image throughout the video is reminiscent of the ways that Nick Hooker manipulated images in his earlier videos — except that those earlier videos are in full color, and they generally appear trippy and pyschedelic. There is nothing of that feel in “Corporate Cannibal,” which is altogether violent, ferocious, and sinister. This is due partly to the starkness of the black and white; and partly to the harsh minimalism of the video, which returns insistently to the same few distorted poses, even though it is unstable and continually in flux. Hooker’s color videos are about free-flowing metamorphosis; but “Corporate Cannibal” is about modulation, which is something completely different. I mean that modulation is schematic and implosive, rather than free-floating and expansive. The modulations of “Corporate Cannibal” don’t give us the sense that anything can happen, but rather one that no matter what happens, it will be drawn into the same fatality, the same narrowing funnel, the same black hole (again, I am not sure whether this is the right pun), the same code of electronic processing and morphing. There is no proliferation of meanings, but rather a capture of all meanings, as they are drawn down into the same obsessive grid of distortions and transformations.

Although the video’s background is white, and Grace’s figure is black (again, can we separate how this works and what it means pictorially, from how it works and what it means racially?), nonetheless the video as a whole does not suggest any sort of figure-background relationship. It is rather the case that Jones’ distorted body is a signal traversing an (otherwise blank and empty) field — there is nothing there besides this figure, no background at all. This also means that the video is not a “picture” or a “representation” of Jones’ face or body; the video image does not refer to a source or model beyond itself. Rather, Jones’ figure is itself the electronic image or signal — rather than an external referent to which this image/signal would refer. Indeed, at the very start of the video, and at certain moments within it, it is impossible to decide whether what we are seeing is a manipulation and distortion of Jones’ figure, or whether it is just “noise” or feedback, an artifact of the electronic manipulation field itself. For Grace Jones’ body and voice are themselves, already, electricity, light (or darkness) and sound, digital matrix and intense vibration. The video is modulating Jones-as-signal, rather than distorting some pre-existing image-of-Jones-as-real-body. The electronic image is itself a visceral embodiment of Jones, rather than being an immaterial picture of an embodiment that would exist elsewhere. And Hooker is not manipulating her image, so much as he is modulating the electronic signal that she already is (and, presumably, doing this at her command).

Corporate Cannibal

In this sense, “Corporate Cannibal” is the latest in a long history of Grace Jones’ reinvention of herself, via the rearrangement of her body. Jones’ performances in the 1980s can be contrasted with those of Madonna. Both singers emerged from the world of disco, and from a culture of campy performance that was largely associated with gay men. Both became gay icons, as women “performing” femininity rather than naturalizing it. Both flaunted an aggressive sexuality that was at odds with the old-style patriarchal norms of what women should be like. And both grasped the ways that this post-second-wave-feminism sexual “freedom” was deeply complicit with consumerist commodification, i.e. with the way that it was not just particular objects that worked as commodities, but that lifestyles, personalities, etc., were themselves increasingly being commodified.

And yet, despite this common ground, there was (and is) a vast difference between these two performers. Madonna put on and took of personas as if they were clothes; indeed, the clothes were often what made the persona. The brilliance of this strategy was the way it suggested that everything was postmodern surfaces, or styles. There was nothing beneath the surface, no depths and no essences. Every “identity” was factitious; and this allowed Madonna to play with them, freely and pleasurably. Because these personas were all stereotypes and fictions, none of them had any real consequences, none of them were irreversible, and none of them had any cost other than the up-front financial one.

Grace Jones’ transformations were altogether more troubling, more aggressive, and more transgressive. In a sense, these transformations were incised more deeply in the flesh, for all that they were (no less than Madonna’s) a matter of clothes and styles and the powers of the fashion world. In part, Jones’ transformations were “deeper” than Madonna’s because they had to be: without Madonna’s white skin privilege, Jones couldn’t treat her self-mutations as casually as Madonna did. She couldn’t retreat to the anonymity that was the implicit background of Madonna’s performances, the neutrality and lack-of-depth that existed (or rather, didn’t exist) behind all the costumes. Grace Jones (nee Grace Mendoza), as a black woman, is always already “marked” as a body — in a way that Madonna Ciccone is not; which means that she cannot simply dismiss depth, and present a play of pure surfaces, the way that Madonna can. She had much more at stake in her metamorphoses than Madonna ever could have had.

And so, if Madonna’s transformations were always playful and fantasy-like, Grace Jones’ transformations were considerably harder and harsher — which doesn’t mean that they were devoid of pleasure, but that Jones’ own pleasure in them was not necessarily something that she shared with her audience — her figures, unlike Madonna’s, are not necessarily ones you can identify with. (Think of the difference between the coyness of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and the Ballardian savagery of Jones’ “Warm Leatherette”). Another way to say this is to say that Jones is definitely a dominatrix, while Madonna isn’t (even if she sometimes plays around with the edges of s&m). Yet another way is to say that, while Madonna plays with the image of “femininity,” pointing out its artifice, its artificiality, and its inessentiality, Grace Jones instead blasts this “femininity” apart, blows it up altogether. Her metamorphoses always have a transgressive edge. She assaults the divisions between male and female not with a cozy androgyny, but with a cold and forbidding, ungenderable more-than-masculine hardbody. She similarly assaults the divisions between white and black by simultaneously embracing the worst stereotypes and snarling Fuck You at them. In messing so seriously with both gender and race, Jones pushes beyond the human, transforming herself (before it became fashionable) into a posthuman or transhuman, a robot; or even more, as k-punk suggests, into a chilly and affectless object-machine, whose “screams and the laughter seem to come from some Other place, a dread zone from which Jones has returned, but only partially. Is it the laughter of one who has passed through death or the scream of a machine that is coming to life?”

The difference between Madonna and Grace Jones is therefore both affective and ontological. Where Madonna is playful, Jones is playing for keeps. And where Madonna critiques subjectivity by suggesting that it is just a surface-effect with nothing behind it, Jones critiques it by actually delving beneath the surfaces, or into the depths of the body, to discover a dense materiality that is not subjective any longer. Jones no longer accepts the subordination that Western culture has so long written into the designations of both “woman” and “black”; but she does this neither by recuperating femininity and blackness as positive states, nor by claiming for herself the privileges of the masculine and the white; but rather by subjecting the whole field of these oppositions to radical distortion, to implosion, or to some sort of hyperspatial torsion and distortion.

“Corporate Cannibal” is entirely consistent with Jones’ past experiments, and in fact pushes them to a new extreme. Our technologies have ramified and changed since the 1980s, and Jones has followed them by emerging as the new video flesh (in a manner that was prophesized by Cronenberg’s Videodrome, a film that came out at the same time as Jones’ greatest hits — the early/mid 1980s — but that today, in “Corporate Cannibal,” is no longer a matter of prophecy and science-fictional extrapolation, but simply one of sheer present actuality). In the video, Jones is frightening, ferocious, predatory, vampiric. She has become pure electronic pulse, materiality of the electronic medium (which we were always wrong to consider intangible, dematerialized, or disembodied) — and she will utterly devour and destroy (convert into more image, more electronic pulse, more of herself) whatever thinks it might be able to stand apart from the process.

All this is made explicit in the lyrics to “Corporate Cannibal”: but conversely, these lyrics only have their extrarordinary effect because they have found the proper regime of images to make them operative. Jones’ voice is at first wheedling (“Pleased to meet you/ Pleased to have you on my plate”), before it turns stentorian, imperative, and threatening; and at the end of the song it modulates again, beyond words, into a predatory growl or snarl. She is telling us flatly that she will destory and devour us (“I’m a man-eating machine… Eat you like an animal… Every man, woman, and child is a target”). She is a vampire, but not a romantic one: rather, the song expresses Jones’ absolute identification with Capital as a vampiric force (remember that Marx long ago described capitalism as vampiric: “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks”). Jones sings: “I deal in the market… A closet full of faceless, nameless, pay-more-for-less emptiness… You’ll pay less tax but I will gain more back… I’ll consume my consumers.” Her lyrics absurdly juxtapose the cliches of corporate-speak (“Employer of the year”) with those of pulp horro (“Grandmaster of fear”). All this is set against a grinding, dissonant musical accompaniment, with harsh backbeats and shrieking guitars that are, however, more downbeat than metal (a number of blogs have compared the music to that of Massive Attack a decade ago, at the time of their album Mezzanine).

The overall effect is terrifying, although the terror is overlaid with an awarness of the cliches or stereotypes of that which induces terror. This is extreme expression for a world in which there are no longer any extremes, because everything can find the niche in which it is marketable. Grace Jones is forcing us to confront the way in which, today, even the transgression that might have thrilled us twenty-five years ago is little more than another marketing strategy. Or the way in which, beyond all those discourses about race and gender and “the body,” the only thing that is “transgressive” today is Capital itself, which devours everything without any regard for boundaries, distinctions, or degrees of legitimacy; which “transgresses” the very possibility of “transgression,” because it is always only transgressing itself in order to create still more of itself, devouring not only its own tail but its entire body, in order to achieve even greater levels of monstrosity. Or, as Dejan puts it, in the video “you can see directly the intimate bond between animation and the mutability of Capital,” as Jones’ electronic mutations or modulations track and embrace and coincide with the metamorphoses of Capital itself, in our world of delirious financial flows and hedge funds and currency manipulations and bad debts passed on from one speculator to the next — all of which depend upon, and indeed energize, the same digital technology that also makes Nick Hooker’s video manipulations possible. I think that “Corporate Cannibal” — with its continual modulations and deformations that are no longer just on the surface of the world but inhabit and shape its depths, and with its violent Weird energy (in the sense of post-Lovecraftian “weird fiction” with its simultaneous slight hokiness and intense anxiety and dislocation) — gives the most profound expression or articulation that I have yet come across to the affect of the vertiginous “globalized network society” we live in today.

Capitalism, Consumerism, and Waste

No system of exploitation is ever total, just as no machine is ever one hundred per cent efficient. There is always some friction, some entropy, some dissipation of heat. In every process of transformation, some energy is lost. And this is true of capitalism as well. When social production is organized and appropriated by the monstrous body of Capital, Deleuze and Guattari say, then “a part of the libido as energy of production [i]s transformed into energy of recording (Numen)”; and again, whenever some of the circulated social product is consumed, “a part of this energy of recording is transformed into energy of consummation (Voluptas).” The crucial point, in both cases, is that only “a part” of the energy can be carried over from one form to another. The rest is lost. This sets a limit upon the overall accumulation of capital.

As Georges Bataille reminds us, non-capitalist economies often value and celebrate the very experience of loss, so that economic waste becomes a source of non-economic authority, power, or prestige. But capitalism rejects the logic of “unproductive expenditure,” and seeks instead to overcome this loss, or at least to reduce it to a minimum. Neoclassical economists fetishize efficiency, and construct idealized mathematical models from which all waste and friction have been magically eliminated. And in practice, capitalist innovation is largely driven by the compulsion to abolish waste, and to exploit every last bit of potential. Under the threat of competition, businesses are always trying to squeeze more out of the connective synthesis of production, to appropriate a greater portion of its energies. They accomplish this by increasing the productivity of labor: that is to say, by intensifying the extraction of what Marx calls relative surplus value. But of course, no matter how far this process is carried, full efficiency is never achieved. There is always something lost, and therefore always room for further intensification and further savings.

The disjunctive synthesis of recording also involves a necessary loss. This comes in the form of what Marx calls the faux frais of the circulation process. There will always be some “cost of circulation, which does not add anything to the values converted,” but rather “means a deduction from the product.” Now, Marx himself has great difficulty in determining just which activities in the sphere of circulation entail such a loss, and which are in fact productive (value-adding). And we may well agree with Jonathan Beller that, in the age of communicative or aesthetic capitalism, “the circulation of capital” must itself be “grasped simultaneously as productive and exploitative,” involving the direct extraction of surplus value every bit as much as production proper does. Nonetheless, this does not suffice to eliminate the faux frais of “storage costs, maintenance costs, protection costs, interest on capital etc., without counting the waste and spoiling which nearly all commodities suffer when they are inactive for long.” Neither bookkeeping, nor the storing of unsold inventory, nor anti-theft protection is costless — even though these practices may well serve to protect against other, greater costs. In circulation and distribution, no less than in production, some value is always leaking away, subtracting itself from the divine energy (Numen) of “self-valorizing” capital.

Energy is also dissipated in the conjunctive synthesis of consumption. In theory, wage laborers under capitalism should only receive the minimal income that is needed to replenish their expenditure of labor power, and reproduce their conditions of existence — so that they are available to work for another day. But as Marx notes, these conditions of existence are themselves historically variable: “the number and extent of [the worker’s] so-called necessary requirements, as also the manner in which they are satisfied, are themselves products of history, and depend therefore to a great extent on the level of civilization attained by a country.” For instance, in the developed world today, things like televisions and mobile phones — not to mention toilet bowls, and toilet brushes to clean them — are included in the “means of subsistence” that workers receive in exchange for the sale of their labor-power. (This is one area in which union activity, and other forms of so-called “reformist” political activity, do indeed have concrete, observable effects upon the quality of people’s lives). In any capitalist society, the level of replenishment, or the excess of historically determined “necessary requirements” over literal bare subsistence, must be marked as an unavoidable deduction from the accumulation of capital.

Another way to put this is to note that workers are also consumers. As Kojin Karatani puts it, capitalism’s alienation of its workers, and its consequent “separation between the spheres of production and marketing,” leads to a situation in which “laborers are totally equal to consumers… It is not that individual workers buy the very same things that they produce, but that in totality… laborers qua consumers buy what they produce.” One result of this identification is a displacement of attention from production to consumption, leading to “the illusion of the consumer subject that plays a major role in consumer society.” By privileging consumption, neoclassical economics elides the labor process altogether. It ignores questions of the organization of production (connective synthesis) and of the allocation of resources (disjunctive synthesis). Instead, it focuses exclusively upon the individual consumer’s “preferences” and “choices” under conditions of supposed scarcity. (Deleuze and Guattari would call this a “segregative and biunivocal” use of the conjunctive synthesis). In this way, neoclassical economics makes considerations of efficiency mandatory; and it renders both exploitation and waste literally unthinkable. Within the neoclassical framework, there is no way to conceptualize them at all.

Nonetheless, consumerism is not a mere ideology. It would be wrong to say, as old-fashioned Marxists sometimes used to do, that we are “really” workers rather than consumers. Rather, these two functions are always intertwined. Consumerism is an “objective” illusion, one that effectively functions, and has actual consequences, in our everyday lives. The prospect of dissipation through consumption is a necessary compensation for the tedium of productive labor. As workers, we are almost entirely constrained. We have to continue working, just in order to survive; and we have to obey the orders we receive in the workplace. And even though we acquiesce in these harsh conditions, the surplus of our productive activity is still stolen from us. There is nothing uplifting or liberating about productive industrial (or, for that matter, post-industrial) labor; which is why the old-line Marxist (Stalinist or Stakhanovite) glorification of the “heroic worker” is so ludicrous and grotesque. If this were all, then wage labor would be little different from slavery. And indeed, David Graeber precisely argues that “industrial capitalism [i]s an introjected form of the slave mode of production… what one buys when one buys a slave is the sheer capacity to work, which is also what an employer acquires when he hires a laborer. It’s of course this relation of command which causes free people in most societies to see wage-labor as analogous to slavery, and hence, to try as much as possible to avoid it.”

But this is only one side of the story. Deleuze and Guattari say that, when we return to the scene of production as consumers, we are given a sort of compensation or bribe: we recover a “residual share” of the surplus that was stolen from us in the first place. There is always a “residual energy” returning to us in the form of enjoyment: a “residual share [une part residuelle],” a “recompense [un salaire],” a “reward [une prime].” There is always “a share [une partie] that falls to the subject as a part of a whole, income [un revenu] that comes its way as something left over” — however feeble and inadequate this sum may be. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the subject per se is most accurately “defined by the share of the product it takes for itself [la part qu’il prend au produit], garnering here, there, and everywhere a reward [la prime] in the form of a becoming or an avatar, being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state.” The subject, so defined, has “no ego in the center”; it is “nothing but a series of singularities… collecting everywhere the fraudulent premium [la prime frauduleuse] of its avatars.”

It is no accident that Deleuze and Guattari’s terms for describing this subject are primarily economic ones, referring neither to wages nor to “profit of enterprise,” but to revenue derived from the ownership of property (interest or dividends). The subject of the conjunctive synthesis (the “schizo”) is a sort of rentier: not a prosperous one, but a pathetic figure of faded grandeur, such as we might find in the pages of Balzac, who barely ekes out a living from his various sources of income. Of course, the overwhelming majority of wage earners are not actually property holders even in this limited sense (except to the extent that the more fortunate among them might have paid off the mortgages on their homes, or might have saved some residues of their earnings in pension funds invested in stock and real estate). But Deleuze and Guattari seek to emphasize the radical incommensurability between the roles of worker and consumer, even though the same people are usually both. We are forced, as Karatani says, to buy back as consumers the very goods that we initially created as producers, and that were taken away from us. This “alienation” is the reason why my subjective jouissance as a consumer has nothing to do with my objectified toil as a producer. I do not consume in the same way that I produce. Even the money that I spend wastefully and gleefully, as a consumer, on (as Deleuze and Guattari say) “an imposed range of products (‘which I have a right to, which are my due, so they’re mine’)” seems utterly disconnected from the money that I earn painfully in wages or salary — despite the fact that it is, of course, exactly the “same” money. It is only, and precisely, in such a climate of disconnection that “acts of consumption” can be exalted as our only possible “expressions of freedom.” Or, as Graeber puts it, “rather than one class of people being able to imagine themselves as absolutely `free’ because others are absolutely unfree,” as was the case under slavery, in consumer capitalism “we have the same individuals moving back and forth between these two positions over the course of the week and working day.”

Finally, this crazed consumerism is the way that the capitalist mode of production manages a loss that it incessantly disavows, but that it cannot actually escape. Unproductive expenditure may well be the very point of the conjunctive synthesis of consumption. For this synthesis continually exempts or extracts something from the otherwise infinite processes of production and circulation. It provides a terminus for the otherwise aimless and limitless movement of the valorization of capital. For the conjunctive synthesis marks the point at which the circuits of money and commodities (C-M-C and M-C-M’) are broken, so that exchange comes to a momentary end. In the residual subject’s jouissance, the commodity is withdrawn from circulation, in order to be used up or destroyed. The conjunctive synthesis thereby deducts something from capital accumulation. And yet, without this synthesis and its deductions, the capitalist economy could not function at all. As Marx and Engels tell us, even in the ‘normal’ situation of bourgeois society, “a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed.” Or, as David Harvey puts it, since capital is always in danger of being choked by overproduction and overaccumulation, it must continually resort to “violent paroxysms” of “the devaluation, depreciation, and destruction of capital.” Specifically, this is what happens on a major scale in moments of economic crisis. But on a minor or “molecular” level, the conjunctive subject or consumer is itself always in crisis — and it can only alleviate this situation by indulging in another round of shopping, purchasing, and consuming.

My Winnipeg

Guy Maddin has really been on a tear lately. With Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), and now My Winnipeg (2007), he has been making the best films of his career. My Winnipeg is a little different from the others, in that it is ostensibly a documentary. It is supposedly Maddin’s personal portrait of his home town, though it mixes actual documentary content with material that is hallucinatory and fantasmatic — both in relation to the actual history of Winnipeg, and in relation to Maddin’s own personal history.

What this means in practice is that there is less emphasis on plot than in most of Maddin’s films — My Winnipeg does not have all the overwrought twists and turns of melodrama with which Maddin’s earlier films are packed, and instead is more of a free-floating, nonlinear collage. Actual documentary footage is mixed with fake documentary footage,real and fake present-day footage, and bizarre “reenactments” (together with shadow-puppet reconstructions and some stock footage). The emotional center of the film is autobiographical (or so Maddin claims) — the central character is supposedly “Guy Maddin,” and there’s a lot of material reminiscent of the family triangle in Cowards Bend the Knee! — with the mother’s beauty parlor and the father’s work for the hockey team — and of the monstrous mother of Brand. But this is mixed with accounts of Winnipeg’s history — some of which is, more or less, true (like an account of the Winnipeg general strike of 1919), but most of which is evidently invented (such as the claim that Winnipeg is especially noteworthy for its large number of sleepwalkers).

In fact, sleepwalking provides the major organizing metaphor for My Winnipeg. The film starts with “Guy Maddin” (played by an actor, though the voiceover which provides the film’s narration is, I believe, actually Maddin’s own) asleep on the train, trying to leave town. His voiceover monologue speaks of his continual attempts to leave the city, and his utter inability to do so. Winnipeg is a dream, a fantasmagoria, from which he is unable to awaken. The city is filled, Maddin tells us, with sleepwalkers wandering through the snow, back to their childhood homes, to which they still possess keys, and where the current owners are legally obligated to let them back in. Maddin himself, and all Winnipeggers, are ceaselessly trying to return to a past that they cannot recapture, though its ghosts (or hauntological traces) are everywhere and cannot be effaced. Maddin has always used deliberately degraded black and white film footage, shot in styles that emulate silent film, in order to show us images that are explicitly in the past tense, rather than the present (of course film is actually in the past, but most films strive to give us the illusion of heightened presentness and presence. Film’s extraordinary immediacy and intensity gives it a sense of presence almost by default, and this is what Maddin is always engaged in fighting against). Here he raises this pastness to a meta-level: nearly everything that he shows us no longer exists, and his documentary images are signs of this having-perished.

CIty history and family history run parallel. The “Forks” — the triangular confluence of rivers around which the city was built — is conflated with the (similarly shaped, i.e. vaginal) lap of the mother, from whom Maddin seems unable to tear himself away. The film slips back and forth between an evocation of the past of the city as a whole, and a series of “re-enactments” of Maddin’s own childhood, in which (within the film) actors are hired to play the young Maddin and his siblings, while Mother is played — so we are told — by herself in old age (though in fact, the role of the mother is played by none other than the great Ann Savage, known to film buffs because of her amazing performance as the absolutely meanest and most evil of all femme fatales, in Edgar Ulmer’s Detour, more than sixty years ago). The mother is smothering and controlling, yet at the same time oddly comforting; she is monstrously alive and monstrously present, no matter how old (whereas the father is long dead, and is only evoked evanescently, as a sort of absence). Bits of family history get reenacted, often in multiple takes (we see Savage practicing her lines, with clapboards announcing the shots — her role is the most crucial in the film, but it is always a rehearsal for a primal scene that cannot be evoked directly, perhaps because it only exists as “past”).

The principles of femininity (embodied in the mother’s beauty parlor) and masculinity (embodied in the locker rooms of the hockey arena, where the father worked as a trainer to the hockey players) go beyond the family and provide a key for organizing the history of the city as well. Nostalgic memories of heterosexual couples in the old city gradually give way to an increasingly lurid “secret history” of furtive gay and lesbian encounters. The male and female poles of the family increasingly emerge as separate, self-referential series. In this respect, Maddin’s psychosexual musings end up being more attuned to Proustian bisexuality and fundamental homosexuality, than to the Oedipal/Freudian register with which they begin.

Haunting images, as beautiful as they are surreal and ludicrous, continually appear and disappear throughout the film. There’s a buffalo stampede, and there are the cadavers of horses who flee in terror from their barn on fire in midwinter, only to be frozen in the middle of the river (the site of their heads and manes sticking out of the ice becomes the location for informal fertility rites). There’s the municipal swimming pool, built during the Great Depression (I am told that this facility really exists), in whose locker rooms strange homosexual encounters take place, both terrifying and intriguing the young Maddin. Not to mention the male beauty contests in the old Eaton’s department store (I think this is Maddin’s own myth or fantasy) and the exhibits of the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame in the Hudson’s Bay department store (which really exists).

Above all, there are the two buildings torn down during redevelopment in the past decade: the old Eaton’s, and the original hockey rink (minor-league hockey is now played in a new rink built on the site of the old Eaton’s). Maddin presents the interconnected destruction of these two edifiices as a crime against history and memory, a futile attempt by Winnipeg to erase its own past. Though Maddin himself repeatedly claims in the course of the film to be trying to escape his own past, his ghosts, and his city, it becomes more and more evident, not only that he cannot escape these things, but also that he does not really want to.

My Winnipeg ends by reverting both to the General Strike, and to the plight of the poor and dispossessed. Maddin tells us (in another of his — I presume — counterfactual constructions) that by city law, homeless people are not allowed on the streets, but forced to inhabit the rooftops instead. We see them there, warming themselves as best they can, and collecting fragments of “Happyland,” a Luna Park-style amusement park of the old Winnipeg that was (supposedly) destroyed in the monstrous buffalo stampede. From this depiction, Maddin imagines the figure of “Citizen Girl,” a heroic revolutionary straight out of Soviet silent film, who will restore the city, restore the rights of the poor, and bring back the old buildings (the shots of the demolition of Eaton’s and of the hockey arena are run in reverse). Absorbed in this final fantasy, Maddin never awakens, and never makes it out of town. The past is finally restored — but (as Deleuze says about Proust) restored as the past it is, rather than as the present it once was.

My Winnipeg is Maddin’s most hauntological film, as well as his most “political.” Even if we take the film’s political argument as tongue-in-cheek (and of course it has much more to do with the aesthetics of Soviet montage, than with the politics of the Soviet filmmakers), it still provides an overwhelming sense of how the vulnerability, yearning, humiliation, and ecstasy that pervade all of Maddin’s films are as much social as they are familial. Maddin has always played off campy humor against abject affect; but in this film, these two dimensions of feeling are more indiscernible than ever before, fusing in a kind of all-embracing ghostliness.

The Problem of Taste

When we are free only as consumers, the market replaces all other forms of contestation and valuation. Conflicts that might have been resolved at other times through violence and coercion, or consensus and negotiation, or voting, or other political processes, are now adjudicated entirely through cost-benefit analysis and the mechanism of prices. This also means that the only form of judgment is aesthetic judgment. Questions of empirical fact and of the understanding (Kant’s First Critique), together with questions of morality (the Second Critique), are displaced into questions of taste (the Third Critique). And since questions of taste have no objective basis, they can only be resolved by seeing how the sum of individual choices plays out in the marketplace. It could scarcely be otherwise, once we assume, with Virginial Postrel, that the market can provide for everybody’s wants, and that we can simply “look away from the stuff we don’t like.”

However, the great fantasy of market adjudication rests on what Kant would call a paralogism. Kant cites two great “commonplaces about taste”: first, that “everyone has his own taste”; and second, that “there is no disputing about taste.” These would seem to go along with the premises of free-market theory. But Kant goes on to tell us that aesthetics is not merely subjective; it is about more than just personal preferences. Indeed, for Kant, a question of mere preferences, like my choice between vanilla and chocolate ice cream, isn’t really an aesthetic question at all. The difficulty of aesthetic judgment comes from the fact that we demand “other people’s necessary assent” to our aesthetic claims — even though we also know that these claims have no objective basis. My aesthetic judgments are irreducibly singular, but at the same time they appeal to a sensus communis. Although they are groundless, they are “put forward as having general validity (as being public)” — they are never merely a private matter. The result, Kant says, is that we continue to quarrel about taste, even though we know we cannot dispute over it.

The difference between disputing and quarreling, Kant says, is that, in the case of disputing, “we hope to produce\ldots agreement according to determinate concepts, by basing a proof on them, so that we assume that the judgment is based on objective concepts.” That is to say, disputes can be adjudicated by reference either to facts, or to agreed-upon norms. But quarrels cannot be resolved in such a way. They are indeterminate, irreducible, and without higher appeal. They offer no built-in path of reconciliation. This is precisely why Postrel counsels us to “look away” from our aesthetic disagreements, instead of continuing to argue about them. And yet, such arguing never goes away. Even as atomized consumers, we do continue to quarrel over our tastes — “and rightly so,” as Kant remarks. We must quarrel, because our aesthetic judgments, however singular and ungrounded they may be, are nonetheless public and communicable. Every expression of aesthetic taste thus makes the presumption that society does indeed exist, and that it is more than just an agglomeration of “individuals and families.” Aesthetically considered, the social is not a matter of identities, but one of differences and singularities. It is guaranteed, not by any supposed norms of “communicative reason,” but by the very fact that we quarrel in the absence of such norms.

The upshot of all this is that the question of “taste” remains a problem for the aesthetic capitalism that is premised upon satisfying it for everybody. In spite of personal differences and ostensible market indifference, not all tastes are equal. Some tastes are in fact more socially prestigious — today we would say cooler — than others. Veblen long ago remarked that social judgments of taste involve “invidious” distinctions. Today, Scott Westerfeld, in his novel So Yesterday, reminds us that “most people aren’t cool,” and “will never be cool,” no matter how avidly and expensively they consume — and the way they dress proves it. Even that great democrat Andy Warhol, who claims that “I never met a person I couldn’t call a beauty,” nonetheless finds some expressions of taste interesting, and others just corny. “When I see people dressed in hideous clothes that look all wrong on them, I try to imagine the moment when they were buying them and thought, ‘This is great. I like it. I’ll take it.’ You can’t imagine what went off in their heads to make them buy those maroon polyester waffle-iron pants or that acrylic halter top that has ‘Miami’ written in glitter. You wonder what they rejected as not beautiful — an acrylic halter top that had ‘Chicago’?”