Desiring Desiring-Machines

The 'blog Larval Subjects contains a post in which critical theory devoteés are likened to victims of the Stockholm syndrome (said devoteés being, of course, the imprinting captives to the theorists' captors). My friend Rob over at popmatters.com's Marginal Utility offers these remarks.

My two cents: Of late I’ve become convinced that so much of the perceived difficulty of theory is an effect of translation. While plodding recently through a particularly wretched rendering of Derrida (The text: The Truth in Painting; translator: Geoffrey Bennington. Bad, bad, bad.), I found myself mentally correcting it much the same way I’d correct my freshman comp. students’ papers — making passive constructions active, dispelling pronoun–antecedent ambiguity — until eventually Derrida’s ideas didn’t seem so hard to grasp.

I initially thought that Bennington should know better, that he was just being lazy by not doing the obligatory translational “post-production” of tightening up the prose. But then I considered that perhaps there’s some utility or value in making a bad translation of French theory. Maybe not purging the translation of unneeded Gallicisms somehow enhances the work’s intellectual aura, the belief being that in this condition the translation preserves some of the maddening, oh-so-French intratextual dithering of the original. Problem is, this is something that is difficult to reproduce in an analytic language like English. Thus you get tortured locutions that are not at all effects of the deeply nuanced considerations being made, but of the approximations in English of French discursive tics and tendencies.

Austerlitz (Benjaminian Musings)

Both Sebald’s Austerlitz and the National Socialist propaganda machine represent a sort of foil of poesis, or a sort of an anti-poesis, in the sense that the success of the project in either instance depends on a necessary repression of history’s fundamental becoming. The latter, a particularly disrespectful, authoritarian cousin of poesis, attempts to enforce univocality on its object, history, the essence of which is really characterized by flux, lability, polysemy, forcing supplementary stasis—ossification—upon suppleness. Becoming becomes Being through a violent transmutation of the present progressive of history into the present perfect of the photographic image, which inaugurates a simulacrum of history in the form of the archive in that the essential vitality of becoming, instead of remaining immanent to events, is attenuated into the silent metonymies of association connecting each constituent photograph of the archive to the others.

Such violence, however, sets in motion an infinite regress as old as Zeno: segments remain, in spite of any photochemical violence wrought upon them, intractably divisible into more segments; even something as lightning-quick as a shutter-click contains a duration itself infinitely divisible. As a consequence, there lurks in the perceived synchrony of the photographic image an indomitable diachrony only partially repressed through attenuation—a part maudite, an indivisible remainder, ghostly, half-remembered, haunting the photograph. Every photograph, then, contains a fiction: the triumph of the will to meaning over time itself in the age-old struggle of mimesis and reality, resulting, as the National Socialist’s Weltanshauung suggests, in an imagined nation of human imagination populated by privileged elements suspended in harmonious synchrony and purged of fugitive diachrony, its unassimilable Other.

Dialectics silenced, history apotheosized, happenstance and contingency overdetermined as efficient causes and thus fixed into necessity, into a national narrative—the National Socialist project finds an apt material metaphor in the photograph, an object born of light (kinesis, ousia), emulsion (matrix, milieu), paper (substrate) and fixative (logos)…

A Roof of One's Own

I cannot help but continue thinking Giorgio Agamben's concept of the state of exception quite apposite when it comes to everything that's going on in the current housing market debacle.

The sovereign's organs, in this case, the Fed and the Treasury, determine the states of exception that leads to thrifty and prudent people getting screwed by the inevitable inflation to follow. The sovereign and homo sacer, used here in a more attenuated sense as s/he who has been placed outside fundamental economic laws that punish improvident behavior, occupy spaces beyond the thresholds that contain prudent householders and renters, whose own financial well-being has been thrown on the fire in order to deal with the aftermath of the housing bubble. Troubling thing is, though, these thresholds tend to drift and to contract, until the very status invoked as the ideal — "homeowner" as fully realized American citizen — no one any longer actually has. Democratizing access to a certain status, in other words, effectively destroys that status.

I find in the Fed's current remedies to the mortgage crisis — buyout–bailouts and tax "carry–backs" — a certain homology with the machinations in Bush's Justice Department. It's the same logic as that underwriting the notion of "the ownership society," which allows mouthpieces in the DOJ, and even Bush and Cheney themselves, to claim that none of the anti-terror legislation ushered in over the past seven years has done anything negative to essential constitutional protections like habeas corpus, when, in fact, habeas corpus has been stripped of all its legal "teeth." It has been reduced to a purely a formal, conceptual entity, a placeholder in conversations about the constitution and the law; just as "the small business owner" is a purely rhetorical construct for campaign speeches, its objective correlative having been all but driven out of existence by big box stores.

Fish Baits

Concerning the Stanley Fish review mentioned in my previous post, which, incidentally, appears to have drawn the attention of folks over at Print Culture, my friend, in an e-mail message to me, make the following observations:

The problem with French theory, I think, is its language, which is an even more recondite Newspeak than that spoken by Enlightenment rationalists, with their zeal for coining words to categorize everything. This incomprehensible discourse became a safe haven for professionalizing academics who were coming under fire for not producing anything pragmatic. The fortress of impenetrable jargon made it plausible for the academics to argue that what they were doing was over their philistine critics' heads.

But deconstruction -- the idea that ideology is constructed and malleable -- has mainly been a boon to advertising, supplying working models for undoing prejudices against, say, wasteful spending or frivolous identity-making. Deconstruction immediately opens the possibility of ongoing, perpetually incomplete (and perpetually profitable) reconstruction. Hence women are always "becoming" women and men, men, etc.

I suppose deconstruction bears responsibility for lending itself to those we'd least like to see brandish its exegetical powers, namely marketers and PR flaks; but, in hindsight, this seems like it was inevitable, even if French theory had never taken off in the US and turned the nation's universities into hermetic cloisters of a new secular priest class. It just too bad that deconstruction can't lead us out of the deadlock it has led us into.

Which is perhaps why I've found myself drawn to Badiou's work. Badiou is a French theorist who's up to something quite different from his cohort. I especially like how he reconceptualizes the Real as simply the void or null set that makes positive sets possible, rather than some all-encompassing yet ineffable roil of force that informs our every word and thought without being expressible in them. Though Badiou's ontology is difficult to summarize succinctly, the upshot, as it applies in ethical and political domains, is that truth needn't be a priori; it can be contingent and a posteriori and remain truth. Badiou offers, I think, the possibility of reconciling the competing agendas of academicians in the humanities. Events in their radical, unforeseen contingency can guide accurate veridical ad hoc discourses of them, if individuals only enter into an honest composition with the event's truth.

Freedom Theory

Yesterday's online edition of the New York Times contains a review by Stanley Fish of François Cusset's history of French theory in these United States, to be published in English early next month. Fish takes the opportunity to survey the fate of transplanted Gallic innovation from his privileged vantage point from the ivory tower's pinnacle, and concludes with Cusset that, in the hands of American practitioners, these various imported "-isms" (Fish focuses mainly on deconstruction) became the very things that their originators abhorred: political instruments to be brandished at a stultifying status quo in the name of liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Funny thing is, though, these instruments — particularly deconstruction — proved ill-suited to the tasks to which they were turned, for the principle governing deconstruction, as well as French theory generally, is that a definite position — on anything — is the hobgoblin of little minds. French theory could certainly deconstruct the political assertions of the status quo, but it could not construct an alternative to them in their place. The misguided attempt to do so on the part of leftist American intellectuals, Fish writes, has led to an enfeebling, permanent saturnalia:

But, Cusset observes, “Americans do not take kindly to things being impossible,” and even though the “very logic of French theoretical texts prohibits certain uses of them,” they have not refrained from “taking a criticism of all methods of putting texts to work and trying to put them to work.” The result is the story Cusset tells about the past 40 years. A bunch of people threatening all kinds of subversion by means that couldn’t possibly produce it, and a bunch on the other side taking them at their word and waging cultural war. Not comedy, not tragedy, more like farce, but farce with consequences. Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks, the whole ball of wax. Read it and laugh or read it and weep. I can hardly wait for the movie.

Fish strikes a keynote usually associated with departmental fuddy-duddies that literature and the humanities has collapsed into a babble of political tongues, ones of such limited application that they seldom apply to any more than a few individuals, and perhaps to only one individual in many cases, viz., the whole phenomenon of identity politics.

The irony of this all, as I see it, is that precisely in its refusal to admit that when we talk about the world its actually the world that we talk about, and not some prior discourse about the world, French theory has contributed to a refashioning of the academic world in its own image and likeness as a fractious, anarchic place — a bellum omnia contra omnes of agendas and egos — never again to find the sweetness and light of common endeavor or purpose.

A Conflicted Catholic Can't Get to Sleep

But, strangely, when you look at the corpse of this tortured man, a particular and curious question arises: if all his disciples, his chief future apostles, if the women who followed him and stood by the cross, if all those who believed in him and worshipped him had seen a corpse like that (and it was bound to be exactly like that) how could they believe, looking at such a corpse, that this sufferer would resurrect? … The people who surrounded the dead man … must have felt horrible anguish and confusion on that evening, which at once smashed all their hopes and almost their beliefs. They must have gone off in terrible fear, though each carried within himself a tremendous thought that could never be torn out of him. (Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 408)

Happy Easter.

Of Bubbles, Bear Stearns, and Agamben

In a recent entry in his 'blog, Marginal Utility, over at popmatters.com, my friend Rob expresses some reservations concerning the ideological underpinnings of President Bush's meme, "the ownership society," which propelled many would-be gentry into the housing market, and, eventually, into financial waters well over their heads. Rob points out that

[t]he state, the media, and business all linked arms to tout home ownership as the only legitimate path to bourgeois security and fulfillment of the true American dream (the “ownership society"), and then aflame with that ideology, eventual subprime borrowers scrambled to get themselves some of that sweet home equity. Who could blame them? The abuses of the lending industry were so egregious, it was easy to overlook the overreaching by borrowers who were just trying to live the dream that had been foisted on them. Seemingly everyone endorsed this program—the state, the banks, the press, your friends and neighbors—so now the sentiment appears to be that everyone should pitch in to clean up now that the program has been revealed to be a total mess.

And I guess everyone is pitching in, to some extent, though it seems that the usual suspects in the boardrooms, who in many cases cashed in on lavish bonuses despite the ongoing housing-bubble collapse and its collateral financial damage (Bear Stearns, for instance, handed its officers billions while its shares were trading at fifty dollars a piece. One week later, J. P. Morgan announces its plan to buy Bear Stearns for two bucks a share, a decline in share price of 96 percent — in one week! And the Federal Reserve is pitching in with $30 billion worth the T-bills, swapping them for Bear Stearns's toxic sludge of bundled mortgage loans), will not have to tighten their belts very much at all. No, once again, the average citizen will have to offset the risks taken in the stratosphere of high finance by enduring the inflation that will inevitably follow from dollars being printed over time. How nice it must be to have the productivity of an entire citizenry as an insurance policy against imprudent speculation. Again Rob:

No one likes foreclosures—everybody involved loses. But no one likes deadbeats either. And no one likes ridiculously unaffordable prices for residential real estate. And homeowners who can’t afford the mortgages they signed up for—credulously or not—are not automatically victims. The real victims are the renters, who are seeing their rents increase with inflation while jobs become scarcer.

Yes, the unpleasantness will be manifold and far reaching, sweeping up in its train not just those unfortunate enough to have gotten in the housing market at the bubble's crest. The only ones likely to escape stint or sanction are those whom the Fed is so busy bailing out — individuals who likely have plenty of reserve funds parked offshore.

If you're familiar with the work of Giorgio Agamben (he's all the rage in lit-crit circles these days), particularly his concept of Homo sacer, you know that Homo sacer is a juridical designation that has its root in Roman law and applies to individuals who for legal reasons cannot be sacrificed. That is, they've been juridically divested of qualia which conventionally apply to them in ordinary circumstances, like, say, those of a law-abiding American citizen who enjoys rights and protections secured her by the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Agamben's concept of Homo sacer essentially responds to Foucault's notion of biopolitics, which Agamben finds as dependent on the conventional sense of the individual as citizen — critically dependent on it, in fact. For only if the subject is constituted according to this juridical norm can regimes of discipline and surveillance find purchase in her consciousness. Agamben introduces a distinction in what Foucault takes to be a unitary status; Foucault's disciplined subject represents bios, the organic expression of interlocking discourses that animate her subjectivity, whereas Homo sacer represents zoe, "bare life" that's been placed outside regimes and discourses by the very powers from which these regimes and discourses flow. Homo sacer as subject is no longer subject to the law, or, more specifically, is a subject who is subject to the law a that no longer applies to her. The power of this designation resides with the sovereign. He can decide on who or what counts as zoe or bios and can determine what Agamben calls "the state of exception."

I'm tempted to regard the very concept of "ownership society" and the ensuing financial debacle as expressions of sovereign power, which, because we live in a representational republic (theoretically, at least), is not so straightforwardly autocratic, but perhaps just as efficacious in its deployment as any fiat or fatwa. Every citizen without felony convictions over the age of eighteen has the right to vote, of course, but property ownership has always been the burr under the saddle of universal suffrage. Recall, for instance, all the agitation with the Reform Bill of 1832, which proposed extending the franchise to those whose property was assessed at ten pounds, and not just leaving it a privilege of landowners. The whole political history of the past three centuries is one of greater inclusion in the electoral process. Yet the "ownership society" seems to me to move in the opposite direction, one in which homeowners are in some respect fuller fledged citizens than renters, the former so much bios to the latter's zoe.

While this sort of expression of sovereign power — a president's initiative and the regulatory and financial instruments behind it — may be distasteful in and of itself, it also has an incredibly sinister down side we're only now beginning to see in the form of foreclosures, defaults, "torch outs," and, most distressingly, the post-bubble Hoovervilles popping up in bosky suburbs like Ontario, California and Bellevue, Washington. The pressures of negative equity and unaffordable mortgage rate upticks are creating new ranks of Homo sacer as they are demoted from the bios of homeowner to the zoe of homeless. Their demotion in status, along with the habitation choices confronting them (squatting or tent cities), bear an eerie resemblance to slum dwellers of developing-world megalopolises. Consider Zizek's remarks on this. Working with Agamben's concepts, Zizek observes that

a slum-dweller, much more than a refugee, is Homo sacer, the systematically generated "living dead" of global capitalism. He is a kind of negative to the refugee: a refugee from his own community, the one whom the power is not trying to control through concentration, where […] those in power do the concentrating while the refugees do the camping, but pushed into the space of out-of-control; in contrast to the Foucauldian micro-practices of discipline, a slum-dweller is the one with regard to whom the Power renounces its right to exert full control and discipline, finding it more appropriate to let him dwell in the twilight zone of slums. (The Parallax View, 269)

With Zizek's remarks in mind, I think we begin to see why the Federal Reserve has devoted itself to propping up the financial sector at the taxpayers' expense. And I think that it has to do at least in part with the ideology behind the "ownership society," which to my mind is simply a permutation of the ideology of consumer society in general. This ideology imposes greater conditions on full participation in society than simply having been born or naturalized in the United States, paying taxes, and avoiding brushes with the Law. It's similar to when President Bush exhorted citizens shortly after 9/11 to express their patriotism by shopping: participation in civic life has been conflated with participation in the economy. This is an exceedingly foreboding development from political point of view, because it implies that citizenship is something you must purchase, not something that belongs to you by natural right. Certainly a homeless person sleeping in the park theoretically enjoys the same rights as a McMansion owning middle manager, but the elimination of welfare benefits since the Reagan years betrays a collective political attitude far different than the one we publicly pay lip service to. Anything impeding one's attainment of middle-class status is seen as somehow undemocratic, un-American, and believing this plays right into politicians' hands. Republican supply-siders, for instance, believe that high marginal tax rates somehow limits the average persons' success. And out goes the baby with the bath water in the form of disintegating infrastructure, budget-starved entitlements, and, most importantly, regulations meant to curb excesses and thus mitigate risk. So, as less risk is spread broadly across society, more of it falls on each individual, which in turn affects the premium attached to middle-class security.

What I think we're seeing in the body politic is something similar to what we see in IT and cell phone markets, namely, "tiered" citizenship akin to the tiered services one can buy at different price points. The ideology of the "ownership society," in other words, equates citizenship with consumption. And once one accepts this as the condition of her citizenship, her status as bios becomes subject to the vicissitudes of the market until such an exorbitant price is attached to it that she can no longer preserve that status. The otherworld of slums or tent cities then await her, where she wanders anonymously in the gloaming with the other bare life sharing her fate.