Unemployed Negativity

 

Marx wrote, "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living," but he neglected to add that it is the nightmare of traditions that weighs the heaviest in moments of crisis. Ever since 2016, we have seen a revival of some of the darkest moments of the imagination, Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower has made the best sellers list, and 1984 has been reread, made the subject of a documentary, which I have not seen, and also to some extent remade, as The Draw, which I did see. 


It is more than a little unfair to call the film a remake of 1984; it can be viewed uncharitably as a mashup of several dystopian fictions, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, etc., but that is what I meant by the nightmares of the past weighing on the present.  The dystopian novel, especially 1984 and Brave New World, are in some sense the most influential works of twentieth century political philosophy, at least in the English speaking world, all the more influential because they are works of fiction. One could even argue that they make up two political positions in themselves, depending on if one fears the ability of the state to surveil and monitor or its ability to distract. Given that the latter, the ability to distract and entertain, is generally understood to come not from the state, but from capital, from industry, the two works of fiction end up being their own version of right and left, depending if one is persuaded by the anti-communism of 1984 or the inchoate anti-consumer society elements of Brave New World. Or maybe the reason these two books have such a lingering effect on the contemporary imagination has less to do with their own power, and the reading lists of high school English courses, than with the fact that surveillance and the spectacle have become the two faces of modern power. The book titles are then just stand ins for our own society. 
The Draw takes place in the not too distant future in what appears to be the UK, given the accents and weather. In this future the dominant technology is the Eye-Light, a device worn on the temple that allows people to alter what they see and ultimately how they are seen. People create "avatars" basically more attractive, fashionable, even interesting versions of themselves, these are what people see and interact with. As we see in one date scene that opens the film, this essentially reduces people to nothing more than the fleshly substrate of their projected fantasies--sort of like if our social media selves could walk around the world with their filtered and edited version of who we are. Or, perhaps that is not right, since the Eye-Light shapes what one sees, everyone interacts with a fantasy of what they would like to see. In any case there is no actual relation, just a projection of what one wants to see. 
The film centers on Alec, who works as an avatar engineer, helping people create their perfect avatars and outfits. There is some irony in this, because he is extremely dissatisfied with the avatar world. He is at first vaguely frustrated  and disconnected, daydreaming at work. 
In some sense the alienated individual is the formal precondition of the dystopian fiction in the same way that the foreigner is to utopian fiction. In the latter case, the foreigner is a necessary condition for the exposition that the utopia needs while, in the former, in dytopias, the vague sense that something is wrong is a necessary condition to begin the action. Each of these functions as a kind a limit, in the case of utopias, they are, as Fredric Jameson argued, places where nothing ever happens, all of the major sources of conflict, man versus man, nature, society, etc., have been eliminated. Exposition must then take place of action, and the only thing that can happen is a foreigner can be shown around and told how society functions. In the case of dystopia, the fact that there is some alienation, some dissatisfaction, suggests that the dystopia is not complete, that resistance persists, even in the inchoate feeling that things could be better. 
In the case of The Draw, Alec begins to live a life of quite rebellion. He first begins to take pictures on an old 35 mm camera. Analog media is outlawed in the future because it cannot be updated or transformed by the filters of the Eye-Light. His rebellion is shared by Jade, a coworker. Their relationship, a relationship by two people who see each other as they are, no filters violates the norm. Later, we learn that marriage has been made illegal, and they violate that norm as well. Their relationship has elements of 1984 in terms of its dynamic. He dreams of some actual escape from their society, whereas she is just looking for a few moments of escape. In one of the funniest visual scenes in an otherwise door film, she figures out how to escape the social pressure to be constantly connected to the Eye-Light, by connecting hers to a sort of coach potato scarecrow of clothes watching television. The only way to avoid surveillance is to appear to be watching the spectacle. That their violation is a marriage in a society defined by a kind of onanistic hedonism, where people are dating each others fantasy images, carries with it echoes of Brave New World. In the first it is a matter of finding authentic rebellion, while in the latter it is a matter of authenticity as rebellion. 
One of the best scenes of the film concerns the idea that everyone's right to their fantasy space is enforced. It presents us with a society of people who prefer to interact with their images of people than the messy, complexity of actual people. I could not help but think of the stories I have heard about AI interactions, and the friendliness of chatbots. The film is definitely more concept than execution, but that has always seemed to me to be one of the pleasures of science fiction as a genre, the concept is more important than the execution. The effects of the movie remind me of episode of Doctor Who more than anything else, in which an austere office building can stand in for the future.  
I was happy enough to find out about it. I should mention how I found out about it. I happened to read about it in the New York Times Five Science Fiction Movies to Stream.  I have noticed that they run these every once in awhile, with different genres, horror, action, etc. They are a way to find out about films that my own algorithms on streaming services rarely shows me. Which is another reminder that the world of The Draw, in which we are trapped in a world defined by our own preferences, in which nothing interrupts our own daydream, is not so far off. 

 

As I mentioned when I first reviewed it here, Frédéric Lordon's Figures du Communisme is an oddly titled book. It is not about some communist past or event, about the Soviet Union or China, but what communism must mean if it is to be a force of transformation in the future. Its central topics, the environment, work, and the intersection of race and class, are not exactly topics that immediately come to mind when perusing the history of communist thought. Or all of the sections, the long discussion of race and class is the most interesting (and the reason why I agreed to translate it).
In that section, Lordon develops a distinction between the structure of capital and the structure of race and sexism in contemporary society.  What follows is a long citation from the draft of the translation. 

"The superior position of capitalist domination in the structural hierarchy of the relations of domination indicates therefore that we are in a capitalist society. But how—and what to add—to ensure that this statement does not amount to a pure and simple circularity? Namely, that in capitalist society, capitalism is institutionally expressed, instrumentalized, and defended. And it is formally. This is without a doubt the decisive point. The social relations of capitalist are juridically inscribed. The right of property is written in the Constitution, the subordination of workers in the labor laws. Given that it is solidified in law, capitalist domination is as a consequence defended by the State, which as such is an avowed “Bourgeois State.” This is flagrant when the police protect a reunion of known oligarchs under the name “Le Siècle.” It is no less so when the police repress—with unheard-of savagery—activist movements of manifest anti-capitalist scope (the ZAD, the Labor Law protests, etc.), on the grounds of "protecting institutions." In the mind of the police or administrators “institutions” are undefined entities which designate nothing other than the social order in force. But then, how better to reveal—in this particular instance—that this social order is capitalist than when the "defense of institutions" is deployed to destroy anti-capitalist protesters? 
 It is not entirely the same with racist and sexist dominations, they are not inscribed in the most fundamental texts. It is entirely to the contrary: they say exactly the inverse—equality, universality, the republic, human rights, etc. Of course, nothing of this limits either racism or sexism. But here, these take on their own particular modality: unacknowledged, diffuse, delocalized—systemic. “Systemic” is the inverse of “systematic,” qualified as its name indicates, an effect of the system, that is to say an effect produced by the multiplicity of informal social mechanisms, without a global organizing pole or subject—whereas the "systematic," on the contrary, refers to a conscious, deliberate, and therefore localizable organization. This is why in the qualifications disputed today, by example with respect to the racist violence of the police, it would be conceptually more just to say that in the first approximation these are systemic, and not institutional (or we could say: more systemic than institutional). The institutional such as we are using it here, supposes a formal inscription-- enshrined in a foundational text. The systemic, which, is contained in practice, that is to say, directed by a multiplicity of agents, and traversed by a multiplicity of mechanisms, admittedly forming in fine a coherence of the collective which could be called precisely, the racist system, but without having to resort to the hypothesis of an engineer of the system, which only presides over the systematic. The racism of the police is systemic, it is not only institutional Indeed, it is precisely along this front line that the police mount their defense—(deliberately ,or perhaps out of sheer stupidity, conflating "systemic" with "systematic," and lumping both together with "institutional”): nowhere, indeed, will one find a directive, an order, a text, or an explicit principle calling for Black people and Arabs to be specifically mistreated.In line with this purely formalist argument, the absence of all formal institutional inscription, makes it possible to “prove,” albeit tautologically, that the police as an institution are not racist....These are the characteristic denials to which formal arguments, pushed to the very limit of their formalism, inevitably lead. However, there is no need of directives for which the police among themselves, with their hierarchy, abandoned to their worst passions, operating outside of view in surplus zones established as ghettoes, steep and mutually reinforce one another in the most crass and generalized racism—informal, yet systemic.
 It is, however, difficult not to see that the present era undermines the clarity of these conceptual distinctions. Because the institutional texts are more infused with racism: anti-immigration laws (which are anti-certain immigrants), for example—or, as is now the case, the "anti-separatism" laws—whose fundamental Islamophobia they believed they could conceal by glossing it over as a "reaffirmation of the principles of the Republic," evidently failing to perceive the "special" coloration that this fine maneuver imparted to the said "Republic." Here the evidence of systemic racism is on the way of taking on an “institutional” consistency. It was likely the inevitable outcome of a continuous drift toward systemic state racism—that it would ultimately produce a discontinuity, paving the way for institutional state racism.
 The shifting boundaries between the systemic and the institutional in matters of racism exemplify, par excellence, the transitions of a capitalist society in the throes of an organic crisis—as well as the characteristic rhythms of these transitions: everything moves at high speed. However, the fundamental dividing line still holds true: when society today is racist and sexist, it is against its fundamental declarations (and their institutional inscriptions in the texts of the highest level of juridical normativity): when society is capitalist it is in accord with these fundamental declarations. This is why on can say, with reason, that contemporary society is a capitalist society. It would be a racists society or a sexist society (in the sense of structural dominance, and not int the sense of the evident presence of racism and sexism in society), if, for example, it were explicitly constructed on the basis of ethnic or theo(phallo)cratic principles. The societies of apartheid formally recognized the racial difference, an expressed them in their affirmation of their highest values—and actively defended them. In the same way sexist societies are those that require the minority status of women. Racism and sexism are positive values, which merit by consequence being defended. Contemporary society declares no such thing, for god’s sake no! It even swears it wants to fight hard against it—though, of course, that in no way prevents it from being racist and sexist, albeit without ever fully admitting that is what it is doing. On the other hand, it is explicitly inscribes the principles of capitalism—property, freedom—in its fundamental texts--and we have lost count of the times the police have been dispatched to the aid of capital for this very reason. In fundamental reality, in capitalist society this is what the police are for. Interpersonal disputes are, in a sense, the small change of policing—paradoxically intended to make one forget the large denominations, or rather—if one may play on words—the big payoff: the rift between capital and labor, of which the capitalist police are fundamentally the overseers. 
 In today’s society, therefore, racism and sexism are (with the preceding reservations) systemic. Capitalism itself is completely institutional. More exactly, it is primarily institutional and systemic as a surplus. Because beyond the formal inscriptions, capitalism is equally maintained by all of the informal social mechanisms, diffuse, decentered, uncoordinated ex ante (even if, in fact, they are perfectly coordinated ex post—and produce an effect of a system). These are the mechanisms that Marx names ideology and Gramsci hegemony. In the case of sexism or racism, the system is the hypocritical substitute of an official institution, in the case of capitalism it is its natural complement—because the logic of its formal positive values is extended into a discourse of informal apologetics. In any case, we now know of the fact of the particular superior place of capitalist in the structural hierarchy of relations of domination: 1) Its extension: Capitalists aside, capitalist domination affects everyone, since everyone is concerned with the stakes of material survival—and capitalism, as a mode of production, has entirely captured these stakes. Structural hierarchy is therefore expressed through the relations of inclusion between various "spheres": all racialized people and queer individuals are wage earners, but the converse is not true (relations of inclusion are not symmetrical...). 2) Capitalist domination corresponds to the general organization that society explicitly demands, from which it formulates the fundamental principles, to which it gives a multitude of formal institutional expressions, and which it would actively defend through the armed forces. No other relation can claim a similar status in contemporary society. 3 The relationship of capitalist domination—while it benefits from the existence of other relations of domination, insofar as the latter are capable of advantageously complicating its own—may also contemplate dispensing with them. There is no imperative need for it to reproduce the reservoir of “unworthy” from the depths of those most shamelessly amenable to such instrumentalization—since it itself produces the reserve army. It can therefore keep its ear to the ground, registering the reorientations of the great currents of opinion, and compose itself accordingly. Of course the racist and sexist dominations have been made entirely functional, and if the latter come to be challenged by the work society performs upon itself, capitalism will first seek minimal compromises—for example, through the strategy of tokenism. If, however, these accommodations were to prove insufficient, the concessions that a serious assault on other relations of domination would impose upon it would be in no way fatal to it."
End citation. 
There is much that can be said about this formulation, first it can be said that Lordon gives two formulations for the dominance of capitalist domination. First, it affects everyone since it concerns the very stakes of material survival, everyone has to make a living, and thus they have to sell their wage labor. Second, capital is not just the dominant relation materially, effecting everyone, it is officially named as such. The defense of property is openly admitted to be the goal and function of the state, and its police. This distinguishes capitalism from other forms of domination, based on race, sex, or gender, which are, in Lordon's view, always in tension with the universalistic foundations of modern societies, "stated in such assertions as "all men are created equal." Lordon's distinction between capitalist domination and other forms of exploitation is meant to analyze their different function, how they work; it is not meant to dismiss or discredit the latter.  The goal, and subtitle, of the chapter, is to construct a counter-hegemony, and a counter-hegemony against the ruling order must be able to bring together anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and anti-sexism, which is why Lordon sets up a kind of categorical imperative of struggles. As Lordon writes,
"Thus, in order to make a grand pronouncement, one could formulate a political ethic of struggles, or of the coexistence of struggles, Its primary principle would be to do nothing in its struggle that could harm other struggles. Starting with simply refraining from badmouthing them—as useless distractions. And also to not engage with—or pass through—spaces, platforms, or "allies"—even if in merely chance encounters or purely instrumental engagements—that objectively cause harm to other struggles. "
Lordon's statement of strategic intersection is an important one, I find myself returning to it often, but it does not resolve the other matter, and that is the fundamental distinction that he make about capitalism and racism, about the domination of capital and its distinction from other forms of domination. The book contains its own critical evaluation of this point in the form of a long letter from Félix Boggio Éwanjé-Épée (editor of Périod) on this chapter which is the final chapter of the book. Éwanje-Épée  addresses both of Lordon's arguments. With respect to the first, Éwanje-Épée does not question the material centrality fo capital, contests the very terms of a division between the economic basis of society and other  forms of domination, as if it were possible to talk about capital without not just a domination, but without extra economic domination. As he writes, "there is no capitalism without extra-economic exclusion, oppression, or domination." From this historical point Éwanje-Épée questions the theoretical division between rules written and unwritten. As Éwanje-Épée writes, 
"I remain very skeptical with respect to the idea that a bourgeois society would be doctrinally, or in its pure version, is opposed to extra-economic exclusions, privileges, and discriminations. This holds absolutely no truth among liberal thinkers. Take universal suffrage, for instance: historically, it was by no means championed by liberals, but rather by the Radicals of 1793, the Chartist labor movement in England, the insurgents of 1848, the Communards, and so on. The ideologues of capitalism are fundamentally in favor of all naturalized hierarchies—whether based on religious caste or slavery—and accuse the activists seeking their abolition of "fanaticism ."
Éwanje-Épée raises an important question of how exactly we understand bourgeois societies own claims to universality. I am reminder here of Marx's own critical evaluation of the universality of bourgeois rights in "On the Jewish Question," There is much to be said about how societies such as ours stated and repeated such universal claims of "all men" while simultaneously understanding that such claims not only did not mean all humans, the gender exclusion is openly named, but not even all male humans, the racial exclusion was understood if unstated. This argument takes us back to fundamental problem of western society, as Éwanje-Épée, it claimed universality, while simultaneously criticizing those who took such universal claims at their word as fanatics. Case in point, John Brown, who put the idea all men (sic) are created equal into practice during the age of slavery. 
One of the few Americans who "fanatically" believed that all men are created equal.
The Last Moments of John Brown by Thomas Hovenden 
However, as I argued earlier, I wonder if one can also frame a critical response to Lordon based on Spinoza despite the fact Figures du Communisme is Lordon's least Spinozist book. Despite this Lordon's argument about the dominant form of domination, about their being intersecting forms of domination, is drawn from from Althusser. However, Althusser's was in some sense the opposite of Lordon's, the idea of overdetermination meant that all dominations are necessarily framed by their relations with the others. As much as there is a dominant domination, that dominant domination cannot exist outside all other dominations. For now, I will say that Lordon and Althusser move this question of domination in opposite directions, Lordon tries to figure out the criteria of the dominant domination, while Althusser, would argue that any dominant dominations can only be heuristically separated from the other dominations that make it possible and it makes possible. I would say more about how "overdetermination" is a thoroughly Spinozist concept, but I will leave that aside for now. The fundamental point is that there is no essence of capitalism outside of actually existing capitalisms. This is the corollary of the general ontological point that Macherey illustrates in his Sages ou Ignorance: 
"One must never lose sight of the fact that, within the original perspective adopted by Spinoza, every essence is the essence of a thing in this twofold sense: that, without it, the thing of which it is the essence cannot exist; and, conversely, the essence itself possesses reality as an essence solely by virtue of the relationship it maintains with the thing of which it is the essence—and thus, it too cannot exist without that thing. It follows from this that there are only singular essences: although Spinoza himself never employs the expression "singular essence," he speaks solely of singular things, singular thoughts, singular causes, and so forth." 
In other words, words more relevant to our concern here, there is no generic capitalism, what exists is the singular essence of racial capitalism, or more to the point, racial, patriarchal, colonial....etc. colonialism. Although, to say that all of these elements exist as causes (and effects) of the same structure does not mean that they are instituted in the same way.  The distinctions that Lordon raises are not meaningless, racism is structured differently than capitalism, or more to the point, the racial aspects of domination are structured differently than the capitalist aspects. At the same time, neither capitalism nor racism can function just as structure, they must also exists as subjects, or constitute subjectivity. Despite the Hegelian play on words here, I would argue this is a very Spinozist point (one that Lordon has made before) that any social order must reproduce itself not just at the level of material conditions, or foundational documents, it must reproduce itself at the level of subjectivity, at the level of desire, imagination, and ideas. This is true not just of capitalism in the abstract, but the specific capitalism we live in, which has as its conditions and effects, the reproduction of racial, gender, and other hierarchies. 

 

Something is amiss in society. Many people have noticed a seemingly recent tendency of people acting in such a way in public as to disregard the very presence of other people, listening to music without headphones, having facetime conversations in coffee shops (also without headphones), and so on. Perhaps all of this started with Covid, which exasperated the already existing social distancing of modern life (in the name of saving others), or perhaps it started with smart phones, which are perhaps the greatest anti-social technology since the automobile. Personally, I think that the increased anti-social tendency is in some ways a reaction to Covid, I think that the idea that we had to treat everyone, even employees as human beings in part generated some of the massive reaction against sociality as such that we are living through, but that is a digression you can follow the links to. Whatever the causes might be, the Hobbesian war of all against all seems to have trickled down into a series of ever frustrating micro-aggressions of everyday life.

All of this raises the question, what does it mean to live in a society. For a long time, I was obsessed with this provocative, yet cryptic passage from Althusser's contribution to Lire le Capital. Althusser writes, 

"The mechanism of the production of this ‘society effect’ is only complete when all the effects of the mechanism have been expounded, down to the point where they are produced in the form of the very effects that constitute the concrete, conscious or unconscious relation of the individuals to the society as a society, i.e., down to the effects of the fetishism of ideology (or 'forms of social consciousness' - Preface to A Contribution….), in which men consciously or unconsciously live their lives, their projects, their actions, their attitudes and their functions as social. In this perspective, Capital must be regarded as the theory of the mechanism of the production of the society effect in the capitalist mode of production. We are beginning to suspect, even if it is only because of the works of contemporary ethnology and history, that this society effect differs with different modes or production."
It is a strange formulation, provocative and cryptic, or perhaps provocative because it is cryptic. It is also a somewhat abandoned concept, appearing briefly in this text from 1965 only to disappear for the most part. (I have not kept up with all of the posthumous published drafts by Althusser, so I may have missed something)  I have written about it before in one of my first published essays, and I distinctly remember an reviewer (probably number two), telling me to drop the concept. It was a dead end. I am not so sure. It is possible to trace a line forward from this idea to Althusser's later theory of ideology, and backward to Spinoza and Marx. It unearths one of the common critical threads of Spinoza and Marx, their critique of the tendency to treat effects as causes. This is what links Spinoza's critique of the anthropomorphic image of God and Marx's critique of the commodity form. 
What does this mean when it comes to society?  It means that society exists because we act as if it does, society, being social is an effect that we treat as a cause. It is a bit odd, however, especially in a book on reading Capital, that Althusser argues that Capital is a theory of the society effect in the capitalist mode of production. I can only think of a few passages where anything like a society or social relations are addressed in Capital. There is of course the famous line, that I have quoted all too often,  "The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education [Erziehung], tradition, and habit [Gewohneit] looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws." This passage suggests a particular production of subjectivity, and production of society, in capitalism, capitalism functions because we treat its institutions, wage labor being central, as not something imposed, but natural. And, speaking of lines that I quote way too much, there is also Marx's comments about the sphere of circulation being one of "freedom, equality, and Bentham." Which is to say if there is a society effect in Marx it is often an anti-social one, one in which we are socialized as asocial, as isolated and separate. To end this reflection with one more passage, this time from the Grundrisse, one that I wrote a whole book as a meditation on, as Marx writes, 
"Only in the eighteenth century, in 'civil society', do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations."
All of which is to say, that if there is a theory of the society effect in Marx, or if Marx posits a society effect in capital, it is a strangely asocial sociality, one of isolation, fragmentation, and competition. Of course this is what Althusser might mean when he says that the "society effect differs with different modes of production."
Shifting terrains somewhat abruptly, I have been following this question of what does it mean to be social in a different thread, one that follows Spinoza rather than Marx, and Macherey rather than Althusser, I was very excited to read that Macherey's latest book on Spinoza, BdS: Études Spinoziennes, had a chapter titled "Est-il Simple d'obéir." I found his remarks about obedience in Sagesse ou Ignorance: La Question de Spinoza to be quite provocative.  As in that book the starting point is the discussion of obedience in Chapter 17 of the Theological Political Treatise. As Spinoza writes,
“However, for a proper understanding of the extent of the government’s right and power, it should be observed that the government’s power is not strictly confined to its power of coercion by fear, but rests on all the possible means by which it can induce men to obey its commands. It is not the motive for obedience, but the fact of obedience, that constitutes a subject. Whatever be the motives that prompt a man to carry out the commands of the sovereign power, whether it be fear of punishment, hope of reward, love of country or any other emotion, which it is he who makes the decision, he is nevertheless acting under the control of the sovereign power. From the fact, then, that a man acts from his own decision, we should not forthwith conclude that his action proceeds from his own right and not from the right of government. For whether a man is urged by love or driven by a fear of threatened evil, since in both cases his action always proceeds from his own intention and decision, either there can be no such thing as sovereignty and right over subjects or else it must include all the means that contribute to men’s willingness to obey. whenever a subject acts in accordance with the commands of the sovereign power, whether he is motivated by love, or fear, or (and this is more frequently the case) a mixture of hope and fear, or by reverence—which is an emotion compounded of fear and awe—or whatever be his motive, he acts from his ruler’s right, not from his own.” 
Macherey focuses on the way that Spinoza effectively inverts Kant's categorical imperative. As anyone who has taken an intro to ethics class will remember, Kant stresses that it is not enough to have one's actions be in accordance with morality, a shopkeeper might be honest because they think it is good for business, a person might be kind because they want to be liked, and so on, but one must be determined by it, by the categorical imperative. It is our inner motivation, and not the actions themselves that are most important. What Spinoza describes here is the exact opposite. As Macherey writes,
"Nevertheless, if one follows this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, the result is that obedience is not at all natural—at least not in the sense of that positive, and so to speak causal, self-evidence to which reason has access. Not only does the cultivation of justice and charity have no need to appeal to such evidence in order to assert itself, but it succeeds in doing so only by grounding its practice on entirely different terrain—thus, if not by radically ignoring such evidence, then at least by bypassing it. From the standpoint adopted by Spinoza, the notion of a categorical imperative—or the strict sense of the word "imperative" as referring to an imperium—would therefore be tainted by a certain ambiguity, and indeed, in the final analysis, would be contradictory: the only true imperative would be the conditional one, linked to the criterion of utility as it operates on the plane of the mediate infinite mode—a concept that, conversely, would be utterly devoid of meaning on the plane of the immediate infinite mode."
These two concepts, mediate infinite mode and immediate infinite mode, play an important role in this book, they refer to the two causalities that define every mode, every finite thing, which is at once situated in a causal series effected by this or that thing, which is turn affected by another, and so on, that is "mediate infinity," but at the same time everything that exists is an expression of the infinite power of god or nature, an immediate infinity. This is similar to André Tosel's reflections on (in)finite in Spinoza. The point here is that obedience relates only to the former, to the infinite mediated, to be affected by others, and not to the immediate infinite, the tendency to perservere in one's being. As Macherey goes onto write, 
"Consequently, obedience pertains exclusively to action undertaken under the scrutiny and control of a sovereign power—specifically regarding its effects, and not its inner motivations. These motivations are of no concern whatsoever to the authority wielded by such a power, for they ultimately stem from an irrepressible impulse—unlimited in its original principle—namely, the innate tendency to persevere in one’s being to the fullest extent; this tendency, being naturally inherent in every individual, constitutes their natural right and cannot be stripped away without causing that individual to cease to exist."
This opposition between Kant and Spinoza could be more productively be understood as a difference between ethics and politics, or ethics and social life more broadly. In ethics intentions matter, but in politics, or social life, only the actions matter. In political or social life it does not matter on some level, why people conform to the law, out of fear of punishment or sense of social responsibility, what matters that they do, and any existing state probably utilizes multiple means, means for different people and even for the same people at different times. 
Of course this heterogeneity of means and methods disappears in the very "society effect" it produces, to draw on another common point of intersection of Spinoza and Marx, what we see is obedience, not its causes.   As Marx writes, "the taste of the porridge does not tell you who grew the oats..."The causes disappear in the effect they produce. I think that this offers another way to make sense of the social breakdown that I referred to at the beginning. I think many of us, believe we live in a society (to quote Seinfeld), and think that others do so as well. That their actions, all of those little acts of deference and accommodation, were due to a shared understanding of social belonging and commitment to shared social space. As Spinoza argues, we judge others from our own temperament, and thus when we act in a social manner, aware of the presence of others, and taking it into account, silencing our phone at the movie theater, holding open doors for others, saying "excuse me" to get by people and so on, we assume that others do so for the same reasons. However, it seems we are learning that many of these people were doing such things because they were afraid that they would be caught,  shamed, or harassed, if they violated these social norms. This motivation, acting out of social acceptance, is the most volatile and unstable. As soon as one person violates the norm without consequences, has a zoom meeting in a café without headphones, then everyone around them feels like that is possible as well. On a broader level, part of the appeal, and effect of Trump, is that his very existence in the highest office of US politics has been in undermining the very standards for acting, he has let everyone feel that it is okay to be crude, cruel, racist, and sexist. To put it into Freudian language, we did not elect a new superego, or even an ego ideal, some standard, but an id, which is why his violations of the norms of his office, and basic decency, only increase his appeal. He is the fantasy of being able to do anything and get a way with it. 
I do not want to end talking about Trump, but in thinking about all of this I am reminded of a passage from one of Marx's first published pieces, "On the Jewish Question" in which he writes the following, 
"The state abolishes, after its fashion, the distinctions established by birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it decrees that birth, social rank, education, occupation are non-political distinctions; when it proclaims, without regard to these distinctions, that every member of society is an equal partner in popular sovereignty, and treats all the elements which compose the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state. But the state, none the less, allows private property, education, occupation, to act after their own fashion, namely as private property, education, occupation, and to manifest their particular nature . Far from abolishing these effective differences, it only exists so far as they are presupposed; it is conscious of being a political state and it manifests its universality only in opposition to these elements."
There are a lot of ways to make sense of this passage, and like all things in Marx's essay, it is overdetermined, provocative and problematic ideas dwell side by side, but I have always understood it as a statement of the limitations of the law as a social force. Declaring that property, social rank, or birth make no difference politically, to legally declare them to be irrelevant, has its effects, anyone can run for office, but it does not eliminate the existence of these hierarchies. They continue to have their effects, effects not just in the private life of individuals, but in political life as well. Anyone born in the US over thirty five can run for president, but only a few have the finances to fund their own campaign. 
Marx was drawing his distinction from the US, from the American revolution, which abolished certain claims of title or property as necessary to political life (while keeping others in place). He is referring to the eighteenth century. However, I think that his point can be extended to the nineteenth and twentieth, to the trajectory that moves through the abolition of slavery to the civil rights act and beyond, actions which have made distinctions of race, gender, and sexuality "non-political" distinctions. In other words, the process by which certain kinds of discrimination were rendered illegal and socially unacceptable. To make certain actions of discrimination illegal, unprofitable, or even socially unacceptable, is not the same as eliminating them, they continue to exist and have their effects in social life and in the hearts and minds of people. (I am reminded of Spinoza on the limits of power over speech and thought).  I think that many of us believed that racism suffered some heavy blows from the period of reconstruction to the civil rights era, but we are seeing now that racism did not disappear even as it was stripped of legal enforcement and cultural recognition, it just retreated. No one wanted to be seen as a racist, but that did not mean that they stopped harboring racist views and ideals. The same could be said for the revolutionary transformations around the status of gender, and sexuality, these revolutions were more about legal norms and social customs than actual changes of attitudes and ideals. 
On this point, and to bring Marx and Spinoza, together, I am reminded of Spinoza's caution that it is never enough to cut off the head of the tyrant, without changing the social relations that underly his rule. "This, then, is the reason why a people has often succeeded in changing tyrants, but never in abolishing tyranny or substituting another form of government for monarchy." As many have argued, Spinoza's anti-revolutionary claim here is one in which revolutions fail because they do not go far enough, do not change the social relations which tyranny rests on. I think that we can say the same things about the series of transformations referenced above, which changed the legal structure of discrimination and racism, but left its social basis intact. As Franck Fischbach writes in Faire Ensemble: Reconscruction sociale et sortie du capitalisme, drawing on Spinoza, "Individuals will not come together institutionally, legally, and politically unless they are prepared for, supported in, and shaped by social relationships that enable, foster, and inform social practices of reciprocal complementarity, mutual utility, mutual fittingness, and mutual aid." Politics is downstream from the political, in the social and economic relations that produce the relations and activities that make solidarity and recognition possible. 
We are learning now, the hard way, how incomplete the transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth century were, how much they affected actions and not thoughts, were inscribed in laws but not practices, and how much further we need to go if we really want to live in a society. Or, more to the point, to live in a society that lives up to our ideals. More to the point, a society which has as its economic basis isolation, individuation, and competition, is ill suited to function as a society. 

 

Picture of me being handed my diploma by Greg Prince, then President of Hampshire College
The slogan "You will not replace us" gained broad recognition after the infamous "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville. It was the distillation of what has come to be known as "Great Replacement Theory" one of the pillars of the modern white supremacist movement. The idea is that the well documented demographic shifts which will make this country more diverse and less white, are not just the cumulative effect of different marriages, births, and migrations, but are some kind of grand conspiracy. Aside from the obvious racism, I have never understood the existential crisis behind this slogan; we all will die, and to some extent we all will be replaced.
Most of us are constantly being replaced. What I mean by this is go back to your college, and I bet you will find a new version of you. Did you have a punk rock show on college radio? Were you the person really into movies, who would debate Kurosawa versus Kobayashi, Godard versus Truffaut? Or where you really into your place on the [insert sport here] team? No matter what you did or who you are, someone probably already occupies that place. The same is true of high school, whether you were in the chess club or smoked under the bleachers, someone else is doing that now (but they probably vape). I would say this is a good thing as well. If what we did, and who we are, mattered to us at all, we should try to be replaced.
I realize that I am playing loose with the slogan here, eliding the real racial animus that fuels it, but I am trying to replace its imaginary crisis with a real one. The problem is not that we are being replaced, but that many of us find ourselves in conditions of non-reproduction. I use this term not in the sense that Chantal Jaquet uses it, as the ability of some people to transgress their class position, to escape the pressure of the reproduction of the relations of production. My use of the term is closer to what Annie McClanahan means when she writes about "reproductive rift." As McClanahan writes in Beneath the Wage, 
"To understand these conditions, I have found it helpful to borrow the idea of "metabolic rift" developed in Marxist ecological thought. Metabolic rift theory describes how capitalism exhausts the two resources it needs most--nature and workers--by disrupting natural and social cycles of self-subsistence and social renewal. Separated from nature, workers can neither sustain themselves nor prevent the destruction of the natural world from which their sustenance once came. In parallel, service workers today experience what we might term a "reproductive rift": domestic workers are unable to afford housing child care workers are unable to afford child care; delivery gigworkers are unable to afford groceries. Thinking of these situations as instances of reproductive rift help us understand why organized service workers are not merely emphasizing their right to a "fair share" of their own reproductive output, but instead demanding wages to rising subsistence costs."
McClanahan primarily refers to this rift in terms of the immediate reproduction of the conditions of production, workers unable to afford the food, clothing, and shelter that they need to come back to work the next day, forcing them to rely on social networks, family, or additional work--gigwork, in order to survive. Of course this also extends to a larger sense of reproduction, the new workers that capitalism needs. People living in their basements, or with four roommates, or Ubering after shifts at a restaurant, are not having kids, not reproducing the relations of reproduction. 
I am thinking of the reproductive rift in a manner what is both broader, encompassing the reproduction of future generations, and more narrow, I am thinking about the conditions that produced me. Occasionally, I will get the question, by students or graduate students, how I came to study the things that I did. Philosophers who write on Marx are still fairly rare, even rarer is the kind of intersection of Marx and late twentieth century philosophy that shaped my first book. So I often get the question, "where did you go to school." I cannot really answer that question, or cannot give them the answer they want. PIC, Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture at Binghamton, where I did my graduate work, has long since been shuttered and closed, and now, on the day that I am writing this, I learned that Hampshire College is also closing. I give both of these institutions a great deal of credit in shaping the person that I became, at least in terms of education. 
What both gave me was a great deal of freedom, and space to figure out what I wanted to study, and let me study things that I would not have been able to study. It is bizarre to me, now that I have been teaching for over twenty years, that I did a Div III, basically an undergraduate thesis, on Deleuze, Guattari, Freud, and Foucault. Even stranger, half the reason that I ended up reading that book, which I remember buying at City Lights, was that Margaret Cerullo had a blurb on the back, I am referring to the old, purple crayon editions.  Although if I am giving shout outs to Hampshire faculty, I have to mention Meredith Michaels, who taught the philosophy class that made me want to study philosophy, and who chaired my Div III even though I think we both know that I was punching above my weight. 
I could go on and on with nostalgia about Hampshire, but I will spare you that, dear reader. What I want to return to is this rift, of reproduction. It is not just me that I am worried about. In the past few years we have seen a few of the great figures of philosophy and theory pass, Fredric Jameson, who would have turned ninety one today, Antonio Negri,  Paolo Virno, Asad Haider, Marina Vishmidt, and Joshua Clover, to name a few. Some of these deaths were tragic, lives cut short too soon, and some came after long lives, and they were no doubt horrible losses to the people they knew and lives they touched, but to the rest of us, to those who knew those people primarily through their books, essays, and lectures, the question that I think we should ask, or at least that I find myself asking, is what are we doing to reproduce the conditions of their production. Do we have the spaces and conditions to develop such critical perspectives? This goes beyond the unique learning space that was Hampshire and PIC, and into the general breakdown of higher education. I fear that the next Fredric Jameson is covering a five course load as an adjunct faculty member and will never get to write their The Political Unconscious. Or that the next Asad Haider will attend a university that has purged philosophy and critical thinking on race and identity from its curriculum. A free man might think of death least of all, but it seems to me that part of a meditation on life is thinking about how to sustain the conditions of critical thought and action that we rely on now. 
"They will not replace us" is not slogan or a demand, but in some sense an accurate descriptive statement of where generations of thinkers, artists, and scientists stand, on platforms the stairs to which are being actively dismantled. 

 

In the past few months I have been thinking more about "racial capitalism," or, more to the point, one I alluded to, but did not develop in The Double Shift, and have posted about here, about the intersection between the hierarchies produced in the labor relation and the hierarchies of racism. On what could be called the racial division of labor. 

I would like to thank Alex Taek-Gwang Lee for drawing attention to the limitations of The Double Shift on this point, as Alex writes in a review of The Double Shift and Nick Nesbitt's Reading Capital's Materialist Dialectic: Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians. (A book that I also reviewed here)

"Read’s focus on the ideology of work in largely Euro-American contexts means that the global division of labour, the colonial history of work discipline and the racialisation of labour relations receive less sustained treatment than one might wish, given his own tools."

As much as I take Alex's criticism to heart, the real reason I have been thinking about race more and more is, to put it bluntly, the increasing tendency of the US to double down on its status as a racial ethno-state.  While it might be permissible to separate a discussion of work from racial politics as an academic exercise, any attempt to think and engage in politics has to take as its starting point the intersections of race, class, nation, gender, sexuality, etc., most definitely etc., as Bill Haver would say. 

This is a lot more than I am going to get into here, just documenting some of my ongoing research interests. Anyway, as AI likes to say, the more I delve into the canon of racial capitalism, the more I think about two passages that are absolutely unavoidable for thinking about race and politics. These passages are familiar to anyone, and are often cited more than their books are read. The first is from W.E.B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880. It is as follows:

"It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while the received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect on their personal treatment and the deference shown them...The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule."

I was thinking primarily of the first sentence, which is the famous one, but I cited most of the paragraph because I think it is important. 

The second is from Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order with was cowritten by Stuart Hall, Chas Chritcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. It is as follows:

"But race performs a double function. It is also the principal modality in which the black members of that class 'live,' experience, make sense of and thus come to a consciousness of their structured subordination. It is through the modality of race that blacks comprehend, handle and then begin to resist the exploitation which is an objective feature of their class situation. Race is therefore not only an element of the 'structures'; it is a key element in the class struggle--and thus in the cultures of black labour. It is through the counter ideology of race, color, and ethnicity that the black working class becomes conscious of the objective contradictions of its objective situation and organizes to fight it through." 

Although this passage is perhaps more familiar in its TLDR version "race is the modality in which class is lived." That in some sense my first point about these passages. Black Reconstruction is a book about the civil war, one that puts the actions of the enslaved center, and about how the history of the incomplete project of Reconstruction gave us the color line as a persistent problem of the twentieth and twenty first century. It is a massive work of reeducation that challenges the entire story of the US, of which the discussion of the "wages of whiteness" plays a small, but integral role. In the same way Policing the Crisis is a massive study of how the "moral panic" around mugging became integral to not just media and political strategies but a way of governing in dissensus. In this book the short discussion of race as a modality of class is only one part of the entire argument. They are both required reading for making sense of the world today, but they are often reduced to these passages, which are cited and debated on their own. 

I am not saying that this is wrong, that these passages need to be simply placed back into the works from which they come, and their corresponding debates. They are cited, quoted and misquoted, because they are powerful statements.  For a long time, I was tempted to think of these statements along the formula of what Balibar called "the other scene," the way that economic relations are always displaced onto subjective identities. To cite a paragraph that I have cited all too often:

"I even think that we can describe what such a schema would ideally consist of. It would not be the sum of a ‘base’ and a ‘superstructure,’ working like complement or supplement of historicity, but rather the combination of two ‘bases’ of explanation or two determinations both incompatible and indissociable: the mode of subjection and the mode of production (or, more generally, the ideological mode and the generalized economic mode). Both are material, although in the opposite sense. To name these different senses of the materiality of subjection and production, the traditional terms imaginary and reality suggest themselves. One can adopt them, provided that one keep in mind that in any historical conjuncture, the effects of the imaginary can only appear through and by means of the real, and the effects of the real through and by means of the imaginary; in other words, the structural law of the causality of history is the detour through and by means of the other scene. Let us say, parodying Marx, that economy has no more a ‘history of its own’ than does ideology, since each has its history only through the other that is the efficient cause of its own effects. Not so much the ‘absent cause’ as the cause that absents itself, or the cause whose effectivity works through its contrary."
I think that we can see elements of this in both Du Bois, the way in which an economic status, a wage, has a psychological dimension, or class appears in the form of race. Of course this is reading things backwards, it is very likely Du Bois and Hall who influenced Balibar. (As I have mentioned, there are some interesting parallels in Balibar and Hall's writing on race). 
However, this detour by the other scene overlooks the way in which the deplacement from the mode of production to the mode of subjection takes place along with a much more immediate hierarchy. In other words the mode of production has its own divisions which are racialized and feminized. On this point I have been influenced by Annie McClanahan's Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work, which I am currently reading. 


What follows is an excerpt from something I am working on that follows this line of thought, of the hierarchies of the economy directly producing and reproducing racial and gender hierarchies, 
The history of tipping, from household servants, often women, to Pullman Porters and Red Caps, mostly black, has been a history of preserving the racial composition of the wage, as primarily for white men. Similar exclusions have maintained piece work status for agricultural work, primarily done by immigrants and other minorities. These histories continue into the present, as Annie McClanahan argues, 
"Tipwork is also no less racialized and feminized today than it was in the early twentieth century. In the mid-2010s, female-identified workers made up more than 70 percent of all tipped workers and 66 percent of tipped restaurant workers, but they made fifty cents per hour less than workers who identified as male in equivalent positions. 
The stark divide between waged work outside the home and the unwaged work inside the home has been replaced with the “tip” as a mediating figure. Tip work not only produces much more economic uncertainty, it also increases surveillance and control, by outsourcing it to the customer. From its conception tipping was always recognized as both an economic relation, a way to make customers directly pay labor costs, and a relation that produced a particular hierarchy and dependence. Its racialization and feminization is inseparable from the desire to maintain and perpetuate these hierarchies. These qualities are not only part of tipping’s history, as relics of the past, they are actively being recreated on new grounds as tips are disseminated across all sorts of apps that mediate new forms of gigwork. In a similar way, piece work has been given a second lease on life by platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which divide up digitally mediated work, transcribing, translating, image recognition, customer service, and so on, into a series of small tasks that can be outsources all over the world. The perpetuation of these economic relations into the present is also a maintenance of the way in which they reproduce a profoundly hierarchical relation. Rather than include everyone within the category of the wage, recognizing their abstract labor, it creates a division within labor itself, between those who are recognized by the wage, and those who are subject to tips, or fragmented into piece work.
 If one wants an image of how all this functions as a contemporary distribution of the sensible, imagine entering a hotel, a woman smiles and greets you as you check in, as you walk to your room you pass the cleaning staff, often immigrants from Africa or Latin America. You will not interact with these people, except to perhaps leave a tip when you check out. The entire passage through the space of the hotel is a space through a gendered and racial hierarchy. We could say the same about restaurants, with their highly gendered division of work that is integral to the service economy, as well as a division between front and back of the house that is often articulated around racial lines. Add to this a laptop connected to gigworkers both locally, the food delivery services and car services that are part of urban life, and globally, the tasks that keep social media and artificial intelligence, we have a daily education in the hierarchies of gender, race, and nation. The passage through these spaces is often a passage through hierarchies that they reproduce.
To return then to the passages from Du Bois and Hall, it seems to me that those famous passages can be read as a kind of "double shift," to use my own lingo, the way in which racial (and gender) hierarchies are always both part of the mode of production and the mode of subjection, both part of the materiel organization of hierarchies and their representation and conceptualization. The scene is at once the same scene and its other. This is why there has been so much debate about these provocative lines from both Du Bois and Hall, there is a lot of attempt to reduce them to the primacy of race or class, wages as material or psychic, overlooking the fact that it both/and not either/or. 

Chantal Jaquet's first book on what she called "transclasses" took up the subject of non-reproduction, of people who move from the dominated to the dominant class, in part because she argued that such transformations were perhaps the only way to grasp the conditions and forces of social transformation in times that were bereft of revolutionary movements. "In the absence of change on a collective scale, questions of the causes, means, and limits of individual non-reproduction are crucial." The movement from class to class makes it possible to grasp the larger transformations that make revolutions possible.
It is perhaps not surprising that Jaquet has now followed that book up with a book doing just that, theorizing revolution from the perspective of transclasses. Doing so demands returning to the ambiguity of transclasses. As Jaquet wrote earlier, non-reproduction is often an aspect of reproduction. "Individuals from the lower classes who climb the social ladder are used as mascots or symbols reinforcing the social order and fueling the ideology of the self-made man. They serve as political showcases and alibis to reject collective demands and contain people's sense of injustice." The greatest justification our existing hierarchies have is the fact that they are not without exceptions. Class rule is sustained by its exceptions. 
In her new book, Révolutions Transclasses: Une nouvelle théorie de l'émancipation  Jaquet examines further they way in which "non-reproduction is immanent to reproduction." The very existence of the bourgeoisie as a class, and the proletariat as a class presupposes that they are constantly permeated by exceptions and transformations. The bourgeoisie is as much made up of the nouveau riche, those that have broken out of their proletarian beginnings, as the proletariat is defined by those who have been rendered downwardly mobile due to the various elements of capitalist precarity. Jaquet reads Marx and Engels' famous descriptions of class struggle in the Communist Manifesto, pointing out that it is as much a text of transclass transformation as it is a text of class struggle, the confrontation of bourgeoisie and proletariat is also made up disruptions in which the bourgeoisie are constantly proletarianized. As Marx and Engels write, "The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers." This downward movement is coupled with those few proletarians who through a combination of luck and talents, find themselves among the bourgeoisie. 
Jaquet's thesis on this point suggests a new way to look at class, at their constitution and destruction. Recognizing that transclass transformations are not just exceptional moments in the production of classes changes what we understand by class, classes have to be understood not as groups, as things, but as processes. As Jaquet writes, 
"In considering classes through the angle of inter-class transformations it becomes possible to better comprehend their mode of constitution and conservation. Far from being an accident or a case of exception, the passage from one class to another is an expression of the necessary movement of non-reproduction immanent to social reproduction. It is therefore necessary to stop considering it as an epiphenomenon because it plays an essential role in a detailed comprehension of economic and social reproduction." 
Jaquet makes a distinction between what she refers to (in the passage above) as interclass transformations, the transformations from class to class that leaves class hierarchy in place, and what she refers to as extra-class transformations, transformations that not only move from class to class but challenge the very idea of class. This leads to a reconsideration of what is meant by a classless society, and what is meant by revolution. Révolutions is a more Marxist book than Jaquet's first book on transclasses, which drew more from Spinoza. Which does not mean Spinoza is absent, transclass is Jaquet's contribution to Marxist-Spinozism. However, the intersection of Spinoza and Marx is strained by this question of revolution. As is well known Spinoza did not hold out much confidence in revolutions. As Spinoza argued in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, it is never enough to cut off the head of the king if you do not transform the structures and the people that have come to desire a king. "This, then, is the reason why a people has often succeeding in changing tyrants, but never in abolishing tyranny or substituting another form of government for monarchy." Such a claim would be opposed to Marx's famous exhortation of overthrowing chains. However, as Jaquet argues, this demands an attempt to refine and clarify what we mean by a revolution. Jaquet draws on Spinoza's discussion of mutatio, on the radical transformations of form, (including the famous Spanish poet), to argue that revolutionary transformations must be both a destruction, a destruction of the old ways of living, thinking, and perceiving, and the creation of a new one. A simultaneous pars destruens/pars construens. As Jaquet writes, 
"Thus while individual inter-class transclassism espouses a logic of transitio, collective extra-class transclassism espouses a logic of mutatio. The first is a matter of the migration of classes, the second is a mutation which abolishes them. This is why in defining the revolution which institutes a society without classes could be defined as the effective movement of mutant people."
Jaquet's combination of Spinoza and Marx draws together the former's "materialist ethics" with the latter's politics of social transformation, giving a concrete basis to that often used formulation of "ethico-political."
This mutation does not end with the radical transformation of classes. Class domination is not the end all and be all of domination. As much as patriarchy and racism intersect with class, they are not defined or determined by it. This leads to Jaquet to engage with theories of intersectionaly, and the intersection of race, class, and gender. Jaquet's early work on Spinoza's idea of "complexion" and "ingenium" proves well suited to consider the multiplicity of determinations that define an individual. As Jaquet writes,
"Unlike intersectionality, the concept of complexion rests on a holistic approach that rejects the separation of determinations that are necessarily embodied and intertwined. It refers to the singular psychophysical complex that integrates the history of the body and the mind—including their affections and modifications—through the interplay of relationships woven with the external world."
As Jaquet argues the revolutionary question is how to unify the various struggles, against class domination, patriarchy, and racism, without imposing a stifling uniformity on them. 
The answer to this question entails a third kind of transclass transformation, what Jaquet calls "supra-transclass" this a mutation not just of the class, but of all of the categories of domination and hierarchy. Of course it is a challenge to even think of such a thing. On this point Jaquet turns to Spinoza' concept of common notions to think about the intersecting complexions that define mutations. As with Nick Nesbitt's very different book, Jaquet insists on the revolutionary dimension of Spinoza's critique of representation.  The common is not the similar. The attempt to figure or represent some commonality cannot be separated from its hierarchy. As Jaquet writes, "This slippage from the common to the similar indeed has unfortunate political consequences, for, on the one hand, it fuels disputes over precedence and divisions among forms of struggle." The attempt to identify similarities in struggle produces its hierarchy and differences. In contrast to this the common demands to be thought through its singular and incomparable relations. As Jaquet writes, "In other words, the common is inseparable from the singular and can only be apprehended—in a differentiated manner—through it. The similar always simultaneously encompasses the dissimilar and can never attain perfect sameness."
The common must be constructed. It cannot just be perceived. Jaquet argues that there are two conceptions of the common in Spinoza. As she writes, 
"In Part II of the Ethics Spinoza distinguishes thus between "that which is common to all [omnibus communia] (EIIP37) and that which "is common to, and peculiar to, the human body and certain external bodies by which the human body is usually affected, and is equally in the part and the whole of each of them" (EIIP39). In the first case it is a matter of what we could call the "omni-common" and in the second case, the "proper common"  [commun propre] if indeed such an oxymoron is permissible. On this double basis, Spinoza elaborates a theory of common notions which consists in conceiving adequate, on one part, that which appears to all bodies, and that which concerns only the human body and certain external bodies only."
What does this "double basis" mean for thinking about the complexions of struggle. Jaquet suggests that the omni-common, the common affecting all, is the common that drives our ecological struggles, while the common propre is that the different ways different bodies are affected by different struggles. It is in the relation between the two that we create a logic and language of emancipation. As Jaquet writes, 
"This "omni-common" and this "proper-common"—which together constitute it—anchor it in the reality of bodies and prevent it from becoming a hollow figure. On the contrary, it becomes concrete in the strongest sense, for it encompasses the entire richness of diversity and the density of reality. Thus, it is by analyzing what must be preserved, modified, and promoted within this omni-common and this proper-common that it becomes possible to formulate an ethico-political theory of universal emancipation."
In politics we are constantly beginning from those common notions that stem from a particular situation, a particular body, and its exploitation, domination, or marginalization. In fact, I would argue that these words, exploitation, domination, marginalization, especially as they are applied to both singular instances and across them, to frame political struggle, are an attempt to construct a common language of politics, they are attempts at common notions. This project is often burdened by resemblances, for an attempt to find the things that look the same among the different types of oppression, in what way is racism like sexism, domination like exploitation, etc.. From these singular instances we begin to construct our understanding of that which affects everyone, the omni-common. This double movement is both epistemological and political, in both we constantly move from the singular to the common without effacing either. I think that Jaquet has done a great job of trying to think the connection and disconnection of the singular and the common, the ethical and the political, the exceptions and the rules they reinforce. 

We are told again and again that institutions like medicine, journalism, and the university have lost the trust of Americans, and must work to regain that trust. Of course the pundits and politicians that tells us this are more often than not the very ones who have undermined this trust. This is definitely the case with RFK, and, more importantly, it allows me to use one of my favorite memes from one of my favorite shows. However, a few weeks ago the New York Times ran a column by Lydia Polgreen, that offers a different account of at least one institution, journalism. 
Here is a long quote from the piece in question: 

"The conventional story goes something like this. Once, journalists stuck to the facts and reported the world as it was, hewing to the who-what-where-when, giving each side a chance to present its case and letting readers make up their own minds. Then, amid the great social upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s, journalists became partisans and the news became slanted to represent one side. The problem accelerated with the advent of new venues where journalism appeared: cable news in the 1980s, and most shatteringly, the social media that emerged in the 2000s.
But there’s a problem with this account: It leaves out what journalism actually looked like. The period from the 1970s to the turn of the century, when trust in news organizations fell sharply, was a golden age of news gathering, one in which newspapers had fat profit margins and invested heavily in high-quality journalism. Far from a time of failure, it was a period of astonishing advances in quality and ambition.
The early triumphs of that era — the Pentagon Papers, published by The Times, and The Washington Post’s Watergate investigations — are legendary. Yet more generally the period was marked by a deep cultural shift in journalism, away from rote reporting on the events of the day and toward more aggressive investigations and more analytical writing about an increasingly complex world. The stature of journalists rose: Out went screwball comedies like “His Girl Friday,” and in came serious thrillers like “All the President’s Men.”
At the end of the century, a journalism scholar published a fascinating comparative study of regional newspapers in the early 1960s and the late 1990s. “Papers of the 1960s seem naïvely trusting of government, shamelessly boosterish, unembarrassedly hokey and obliging,” Carl Sessions Stepp, the researcher, wrote. Newspapers of the ’90s were “better written, better looking, better organized, more responsible, less sensational, less sexist and racist and more informative and public-spirited.”
This sounds, you might think, salutary for the health of democracy. But it may have been precisely this move, away from deferential stenography and toward fearless investigation, that led to declining trust in the news media. Aggressive, probing and accountability-oriented journalism held up a mirror to American society — and many Americans didn’t like what they saw." 



Polgreen's column suggest that there is an affective rather than an epistemic basis to distrust of institutions.  To put it all too bluntly, when institutions tell us what we want to hear we trust them, when they tell us things that make us uncomfortable we do not. What we trust and distrust is predicated not on some awareness of the reliable or unreliable nature of the source, but of how we feel about it. I am reminded here of Frédéric Lordon's assertion that it is not the Appendix to Part One of the Ethics that is the basis of ideology, but Proposition Twelve of Part Three. The proposition states, “The mind as far as it can, strives to imagine those things that increase or aid the body’s power of acting.” There is a fundamental ambivalence to this Proposition, one that is reflected in its Demonstration. On the one hand this proposition asserts the very basis of our activity, an increase in our capacity to act, it is the core of rationality. At the same time, it relates this striving to the imagination, we strive to what we imagine will increase our power and activity. In other words, we like hearing things that make us feel good about ourselves, our possibilities, and our actions in this world, and do not like hearing things that make us feel threatened or insecure. 

I think that this can also be applied to another institution that has come under distrust, the university. We hear a lot about the supposed bias of faculty. Often this is based on things like party affiliation, but as I said before and will say again, activities outside of the classroom, like party affiliation or posts on social media, do not really say anything about activities in the classroom.  When we do hear of things in the classroom, like the story out of the University of Oklahoma, one of the things that is striking about them is that they are less about conservative versus liberal, than something much more fundamental. They are about the desire to have one's already existing opinions confirmed rather than challenged. As much as the essay in question made vague references to God's divine plan for gender roles, it was less a paper on religion, or the bible than the way that religion reinforce what one already thinks, to paraphrase Spinoza, imagining those things that aid or increase the body's power of imagination." The student in question, openly admitted in the essay that she quickly wrote the paper because she had a strong opinion on the matter. 
(I am not a scholar of religion, or of religious studies, but often when confronted with such things as "open carry" services  at places of worship and other aspects of contemporary religion, I often wonder how much of what is called religion boils down to simply the idea that what one thinks and believes is divinely ordained.)
Much of what is presented as a bias against so called conservative thought at universities is not really about the different canons and arguments of political philosophy and economics. It is not a demand to teach more Hobbes, Burke, Hayek, or Strauss in classrooms. It is not about texts at all but, how particular people feel, and whose feelings matter. Many of the bills against Critical Race Theory and other subjects have made this clear, stressing the affective dimension in language that specifically prohibits anything that would make someone uncomfortable because of their race.  Of course the irony of this is that the people pushing for these bills are often those who want the freedom to assert openly racist ideas, ideas that, as Stuart Hall reminds us, have long since been scientifically discredited. 
Given the study cited above, it would be interesting to see how the incorporation of the insights of feminism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism in academia, brought about by the student protests of the sixties, has changed the affective composition of the university as well. As contested knowledges become part of the curriculum they also contest some of the ways people feel about the world.  Requirements to consider diversity, to incorporate different perspectives and points of views, may feel like an affront to some. What I am speculating is that there might be a parallel between what happened in the university and in journalism, a parallel in that what is perceived as bias is perhaps better described as something that contradicts the way that things should feel. This is all very rough and speculative. Most importantly it does not distinguish between the university as it exists, in all of its myriad forms, and a particular image of the university in discussions in the media. 
What I can say is this: "bias" is a word that gets bandied around a lot, in classrooms and in discussions of classrooms, and to me the word always carries with it a strong epistemic burden. To say someone is biased is to claim that you know the truth of the matter in question, gender roles or the role of race in history, to use the two examples above, and know that the person speaking or writing on the manner deviates from that truth because of their preexisting opinions. To call someone biased is to claim to know a lot, but that is not how the word is often used, it is often just used whenever someone says something that one does not want to hear. Of course such claims are not limited to conservative critics, but, at this moment, those critics are the ones that have the force of the news media and the state on their side. A student who failed an essay by arguing that gender is a spectrum, or is itself an entirely social construct, would not have access to the same avenues of mobilization. 

No one likes to have what they already think and believe challenged. Which is why Spinoza cites Ecclesiastes on this point, "He who increases knowledge increases sorrow." Of course Spinoza cannot be satisfied with such an answer, and he needs to start from our limit of power in order to increase it. I would imagine that this is true of the journalists mentioned above, and some of the academics, one does not cover corruption in local politics or the history of racism in the US to simply make people feel bad, but to ultimately challenge and change those things, to go from a what we think will make us happy, to what will truly make us happy. However, one has to first know the world, know its real limitations and problems, before one can change it. Secondly, the capacity to change it demands not just knowledge, but the capacity to act on it. Without that education can be a real bummer, and no one likes that. 

 

As has often been mentioned, on this blog and elsewhere, Hegel's famous section on Lordship and Bondage begins with the assertion that "Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness." This has often been interpreted to mean that self-consciousness needs to find itself in being recognized by another. We know ourselves by being recognized by others. Despite this assertion, thus familiar with the story, and it is a story, of the master and slave, know that the passage suggests that there is another way to know ourselves, we come to know ourselves through our work. 

There is a tension between these two different senses of recognition, the one that passes through another and the one that passes through the relation with objects and the material world. As I wrote about this in The Politics of Transindividuality
"The dialectical reversal of this passage, the point where the master is revealed to be a slave, and vice versa, turns as much on the relation to the object as to the relation to the other: the master is a slave, not just because he is recognized by one who he cannot recognize, but because his relation to the object is as a pure object of desire, absolute mediation in its immediacy, while the slave works on object. As Hegel writes, ‘Work, on the other hand, is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing.’ This work coupled with the fear of death proves to be another direction for recognition, at least in part: the slave is not recognized, but comes to recognize him or herself through a world that is the product of labour. Labour constitutes another basis for recognition. Whereas the opening of the passage began with a rigid division between appetite and desire, between relations with the world of objects and the world of subjects, desire for things and desire for recognition, the overturning of the relation of master to slave obscures this very distinction. What is more important to Hegel is less the sharp division between the desire for recognition, what we might want to call intersubjectivity, and the relation with things, than the fundamental negation of one’s determinate condition: to be recognized is to be seen as something more than this determinate existence, a point that can be arrived at through the instability of fear and the determination of work as much as it can through recognition."
And
"The first, recognition proper, is through what is traditionally understood as intersubjectivity, I am recognized when another sees me as I see myself, understands my desires as valid. The second suggests that there is also a recognition of sorts in work, a process by which ‘the bondsman realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own.’ This is a fundamentally different sense of recognition, less through the inter-subjective relation of individual to individual than through the way in which one sees oneself, one’s labours and intentions, reflected back to them through objects and institutions."
Moving from Hegel's text to the world, we can say that in all work situations were are always dealing with both, the recognition by others and the recognition of ourselves through our effect on the world. Aside from the isolated crafts person, who can perhaps admire what they made in isolation, most of what we produce or do in the world comes to us through our relation with others. We know that we have made something good because other people tell us. If one wanted to historicize this, one could say that this is increasingly the case, very few jobs involve produce things that can we can admire or assess on our own most of what we do at work is recognized by others. The shift from the production of things to services has made it impossible to maintain the recognition of work as an alternative to the recognition by others. A waiter, a teacher, a lawyer, or a care worker cannot point to some thing, some transformation of the world in order to prove their effects, as opposed to how people judge or asses them; their work is in transforming how people judge or assess them, which does not mean that everyone assesses them correctly. They do not struggle to be recognized through work, but struggle to be recognized at work.


This is definitely the case in Sam Raimi's Send Help. The film opens with Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) struggling to be recognized at her consulting firm. In the opening scene she produces a report for one of her boss to present at a meeting. He assures her that she will receive credit, but we see him remove the little post it with her name on it before going into the meeting. This little slight proves to be only a hint of what is to come. Linda later learns that the new boss, Donovan (Dylan O'Brien), the son of her old boss, has given the promotion that she was promised to her supervisor (the same one who tossed the post-it). Donovan's reasons have everything to do with this split between inter-subjective recognition and recognition of work. He would rather promote his fraternity brother who he can play golf with than the woman who writes his reports. Appearances matter more than reality.  Linda is everything that Donovan would not want to recognize, a woman, older, whose presentation is more on the side of the practical and frumpy than successful or sexualized. Raimi brings all of his years making horror to a scene in which Linda talks to Donovan with a fleck of tuna salad on her face. Everything about her, from her sensible boxed lunches and supportive footwear, horrifies him. He cannot recognize her, even when he is told that her work is fundamental to the office. 
Linda confronts Donovan about this lack of recognition, and he offers her one last chance to supposedly prove herself on a trip to Bangkok. The trip is actually one last chance for the boss to appropriate her work, to get her to solve one lingering problem with a merger, before she is transferred far away. Things go wrong on the flight, the plan crashes, and Donovan find themselves stranded on a deserted island. It is at this point that the film becomes Hegel's Dialectic of Lordship and Bondage: The Movie. 
Linda has spent years learning the ins and outs of the skills necessary for survival, her dream was to be on Survivor. She begins to produce food, shelter, water, everything that they need, and unlike the office, there is no middle man to appropriate her products and erase her name from the documents. This does not resolve everything so quickly. Donovan is slow to recognize her work, and more importantly slow to recognize her. He demands that she do more to make it so that they will be rescued, and even suggests that they build a raft and try to find help on the open sea. Linda has no plans to leave, life on the island makes it possible for her to do the things that she excels at and finally be recognized through her labors. Like the bondsman in Hegel's dialectic, she is less recognized by her boss, than by herself, transformed by what she can do, by the actualization of her potential, and the thrill of the hunt. 
I am not going to give the whole plot away, mainly because there were a few minutes when I could not tell where the film was going, balanced someplace between horror and comedy. The film has a few shifts in tone and direction that are enjoyable, and since such pleasures are few and far between, I will skip over recounting them. I will conclude by pointing out the film's remake of the dialectic raises two questions to Hegel's original. First, can such a struggle every really end; or, put differently, how can recognition be separated from the drive to denigrate or "misrecognize" the other? Throughout the film Donovan is very reluctant to admit that Linda, an inferior, and a woman, is the reason that he is still alive, insisting to be seen as a boss even though he is entirely dependent on her. He refuses recognition even when such recognition seems warranted. Second, can such a struggle every really take place as a purely intersubjective relation between two individuals separate from the general cultural moment. This last question is particular pressing because we live in an era in which the boss is in some sense recognized more than the worker. The boss is seen as the ultimate worker, the one who not only works the hardest, but also creates jobs, the job creator, while a worker, an employee is seen as something of a failure, a failure to be a true entrepreneur, to become a boss. It is the merit of Send Help that it reveals that a world in which everyone just aspires to be a boss can only be a horror movie. 

 

I have a lot of books from the Spinoza Studies series 

One of the best pieces of advice I got in graduate school came from Warren Montag. He was visiting Binghamton University. We were talking about Spinoza and he said to me to the effect of reading Alexandre Matheron, Pierre Macherey, Pierre François Moreau, etc. was absolutely necessary for understanding Spinoza scholarship, and those books would never be translated into English. They were too big, five volumes in Macherey's case, and too niche of an audience. He told me I needed to get to work learning to read French. So I did.

Twenty five years later quite a few of the books mentioned above have been translated and published in Edinburgh Press' Spinoza Studies series, with more on the way. I am not saying this to say that Warren was wrong, he was right. It was because of him that I translated one of them, Fischbach's Marx with Spinoza, added a preface to another, Sánchez Estop's Althusser and Spinoza, and have reviewed manuscripts and translations for a few more. So much so that I have paid for none of the hardcovers above. Will work for books. I am not trying to take credit for the Spinoza explosion, just saying that I have done my part. 

The publication of twenty or so books in the series has changed, or should change, the status of Spinoza, and Spinozist thought, in the English speaking world. We are long since the point where we could simply say that Deleuze, Althusser, or Negri, are spinozists, explaining their thought with a reference to Spinoza. Such an explanation runs up against the real limitations of the fact that these philosophers do not agree on many things, least of all what Spinoza meant. Deleuze's Spinoza of bodies and powers is very different from Althusser's focus on the imagination and science and both are different from Negri's focus on the multitude. When only a handful of Spinozists were known it perhaps made sense to call someone a spinozist as a explanation of their philosophy; now it has become necessary to ask what kind of Spinozist one is, or what of Spinoza's thought is being retained or interpreted by someone who draws on Spinoza's thought. From one philosophical substance an infinity of perspectives have emerged. 

For that reason Katja Diefenbach's Spinoza in Post-Marxist Philosophy is a welcome edition to the series. It is also a translation of a massive book, this time from German. It is the first book that I have seen that tries to think through the different invocations of Spinoza in "post-marxist philosophy."  I should add that one of the things that interests me about "red spinozism," to use Alberto Toscano phrase, is that in some aspects it is a collective enterprise. There is a great deal of communication and collective research in a lot of the scholarship, concepts proposed by Sévérac taken up by Lordon or Matheron taken up by Fischbach. I have found these collective, or even transindividual, lines of communication and connection more interesting than any debates or disagreements which is not to say that they do not exist. (As an aside, I should say that I have always been drawn to collective projects of thought, my biggest influences have been Althusser's circle, post-autonomist Marxism, and, more recently, Spinozist Marxism, all of which have been structured around the sharing of ideas and projects of research than about the claims to have the one right interpretation, a fight for an intellectual hegemony as William Haver used to say). 

For Diefenbach, the central point of conflict within Marxist-Spinozism is between Antonio Negri and Etienne Balibar. In order to say more about that, it is necessary to discuss her reading of Negri, which is quite brilliant. Negri's intervention with respect to Spinoza has been reduced to a caricature of itself in recent debates, in which it is reduced to the thesis of a division within the Ethics, a division between the transcendent foundation of the Parts One and Two. Diefenbach argues that the real focus of Negri's reading is the opposition between Spinoza and Hobbes. This opposition goes beyond Spinoza's remark in his letters, about the inalienability of power, which Spinoza summed up as, "I always preserve natural right unimpaired and, I maintain that in each state the supreme Magistrate has no more right over its subjects than it has greater power over them," to become a fundamental division of political anthropology (something I have written about here). 

This division of political anthropology concerns the very conditions of relations, of sociality. For Hobbes this concerns not just the infamous state of nature, as nasty, brutish, and short, but the fundamental condition underlying this state of nature, the fact that the original condition of humanity is not just conflict, it is isolation. People relate only through their competition and conflict. This is why Negri says that Hobbes is "the Marx of the bourgeoisie." Isolation and subjugation are necessary conditions for appropriation. For Spinoza such a condition is impossible, not because he has a rosier view of humanity, "man is a god to man" rather than a "wolf to man," but because human beings as finite modes are always already in relation through their mutual dependency and the imitation of affects (relations that are both those of conflict and agreement). An isolated individual, not shaped by relations with others, is an ontological impossibility. Whereas Hobbes argues that politics must in some sense be imposed, made possible by the state, for Spinoza any institution of politics is founded on a sociality that always already exists. As Diefenbach writes, 

"Hobbes conceives all transindividual relations as non-relations of egoistic competition, whose propensity to conflict must be eliminated in the formation of the state by means of the absolute authorization of a sovereign; Spinoza by contrast, incorporates conflict into the genesis of the state by founding the consistency of the process of state formation on the extent to which the powers of the multitude are integral to the life of the institutions. Negri is fully aware that this difference between Spinoza and Hobbes derives its spectacular signification and trenchancy only from the kinship between the two authors, from the shared methodological and physical hypotheses and claims concerning natural right from which they draw different conclusions on all levels of their respective systems."

And later..

"Whereas Hobbes passes from humans, negative interdependency to the institutionalization of social separation and political union without collective interrelation, Spinoza discerns in their relations of interdependency a positive resource that sustains their capacity for transformation."

The idea that society is nothing other than a particular organization of the affects, and its corollary that every affective relation is already organized, even informally, as a common point of reference in Spinozist thought, appearing in different ways in Negri, Balibar, and Lordon. Where Negri differs in in finding a process by which the organization of affects becomes both more expansive and more stable. As Negri writes, 

"The constitutive process of potentia  develops in Spinoza, as we know, through successive integrations and institutional constructions, from conatus to cupiditas and on to the rational expression of amor. At the center of this process stands cupiditas. Cupiditas is the moment in which the physical character of appetitus  and the corollary of conatus, organizing themselves in social experience, produce imagination. The imagination is an anticipation of the constitution of institutions: it is the potency that arrives at the edge of rationality and that structures its journey, that expresses  this advance."

As Diefenbach writes, summing this up,

"In [Negri's] view, the expansiveness of the imitation of the affects--the contagion effects associated with it, which spread to entire groups of individuals, the feedback effects caused by the expectations of reciprocity, the escalation effects that are sparked by the imaginations concerning the strength of other's feelings, and the freedom or powerlessness of their person, reveals a dynamic force of socialization that is not annulled by its inner ambivalence."

It is this last point that becomes crucial to Diefenbach's reading of Negri. The progression of the Ethics, the constitution of a subject that is more rational and active, becomes in Negri's reading a constitution of a collective that is more stable and productive. I am just going to say briefly there there are fundamental similarities, between how Negri reads Spinoza and how Negri reads the history of capital. In each we find a progression in which more and more activity, the increased productive nature of cooperation, produces a new political horizon that of the multitude. As Negri writes with Michael Hardt in Empire,

"The powers of science, knowledge, affect and communication are the principle powers that constitute our anthropological virtuality and are deployed on the surfaces of Empire. This deployment extends across the general linguistic territories that characterize the intersections between production and life. Labor becomes increasingly immaterial and realizes its value through a singular and continuous process of innovation in production it is increasingly capable of consuming or using the services of social reproduction in an even more refined and interactive way. Intelligence and affect (or really the brain coextensive with the body), just when they become the primary productive powers, make production and life coincide across the terrain on which they operate, because life is nothing other than the production and reproduction of the sets of bodies and brains."

The reading of Spinoza for Negri is always political, always caught up with the conjuncture. In each case one looks to the logic of constitution, or what Diefenbach calls collective appropriation, the way in which the powers of sociality, and the socialization of power, expand and are strengthened.  Even if one brackets the question of the "interruption of the system" that Negri is famous for, there is a way in which the speculative argument always takes us back to the political moment. As Negri writes, "The Ethics could not be constituted in a project, in the metaphysics of the mode and reality, if it were not inserted into history, into politics, into the phenomenology of a single and collective life: if it were not to derive new nourishment from that engagement.” At is at this point we are confronted with both the strength of Negri's reading of Spinoza, which always insists on the identity of metaphysics and politics, that the metaphysical is political and the political is metaphysical, and its limitation, the placement of that identity within a teleology, progression, or a least a trajectory of liberation. That Negri does so with respect to Spinoza, who is known for his rejection of final causes is incredibly striking. 

It is also at this point that we get the tension with Etienne Balibar. This tension can be stated simply, for Balibar ambivalence in the constitution of the collective is never annulled or resolved. In fact one can argue that Balibar pushes the ambivalence and tension to its maximum point. At the center of Balibar's reading, of at least the Ethics, is Proposition 37 of Part IV, or more to the point, the two demonstrations that follow from this, one from affects one from reason. Spinoza argues that the state, politics are founded in two ways, first as a logic of imitation, as we all seek that others should love what we love, in the social nature of the affects, and second, as a matter of reason, a recognition that nothing is more useful to man than man. These two foundations do not succeed or supplant one another, they coexist. Social relations are at once rational and affective, imagined and known. As Balibar writes, 

"Sociability is therefore the unity of a real agreement and an imaginary ambivalence, both of which have real effects. Or, to put it another way, the unity of contraries--of rational identity and affective variability, but also of the irreducible singularity of individuals and the "similarity" of human behavior--is nothing other than what we refer to as society."

Or, as Diefenbach puts it, 

"The fundamental problem of politics 'is to know how reason and imagination interact' and how, out of these interactions, they constitute the sociality of humans. It does not follow that the 'unity' of this process turns the passions into mere means of the realization of reason, as in Hegel, another great theorist of anthropological for whom reason actualizes itself in the necessary detour through the most varied empirical phenomena, passions and particular interests in order to find its objective revelation in the state."
And later,
"Spinoza’s thinking knows no oneness, only oneness-effects. In the field of politics, this deconstruction of the one ungrounds any organic or subjective conception of a collective mind. The thinking of the multitude is not one, in a twofold sense. Where its union of minds originated in nationalist or religious affect-imitations, it is based on the suppression of social difference, rendering it negative and sad to a precarious degree. The mind consists of an aggregate of confused ideas in which the love of neighbour is fused to hatred of others. Despite its considerable forces of cohesion, this sociality resting on affect communication will necessarily disintegrate in historical time and catalyse enormous surges of violence. By contrast, if the togetherness of the multitude is primarily organised by common notions, the imaginary nature of the idea of social oneness becomes comprehensible and the veluti indicates the dismantlement of social stereotypes and the differentiation of social standpoints. Thus, we must recognise that there exists no ‘absolute unification of the thought-of-the-masses’, no ‘maximum of “communal thought”or consciousness in Spinoza. Growing rationality propels a heterogenisation of ideas that in the final instance would concur, in a disjunctive synthesis, only in their difference. The political, however, must not be identified with such a differential concordia of thought; rather, it is guided by the critical and deconstructive acts which, amid social conflicts, erode the efficacy of moral and prescriptive signs, analogical languages and fictional semblances from below and transform governmental mechanisms that rest on the phantasm of a representability of society from inside so that more and more actions in ever broader spheres can be singularised and the tendency of societal struggles to re-erect immunitarian identities can be curbed. "
Such a formulation draws heavily from Balibar, drawing out the implications of a persistent division between affects and reason, imagination and knowledge, in society. Politics is a matter of trying to make society more rational, more democratic, there is no rational society, no society of sages, but there is a process of a society becoming more rational. As with Negri above, this is not just a reading of Spinoza, but a place where the interpretation of Spinoza is interrupted by contemporary socio-political realities, or where Spinoza interrupts the way in which we make sense of existing socio-historical realities. Balibar has analyzed the intersection of reason and imagination in actual existing societies, stressing the way in which the nation, race, or ethnicity or other imaginary identifications undermine and interact with the rationality of the citizen.  
I think that Diefenbach is right to draw out a real tension, even a contradiction, between Negri's reading of a progressive logic of socialization and Balibar's ambivalent division between affects and reason in every social relation, every social formation. We could debate who is correct when it comes to Spinoza (I am with Balibar here) but such a debate misses I think a fundamental point of what it means to be Spinozist Marxist. 
With both Negri and Balibar there is a provocation that draws them to Spinoza, a provocation that goes beyond philosophical questions. For Negri it is a matter of understanding the role of subjectivity, and of labor, in a society in which the old divisions between base and superstructure no longer seemed adequate. Production and culture, production and cooperation cannot be separated because so much of production, in the form of services and cultural production, produces cooperation and social relations. In Spinoza for Our Time, Negri argues that 1968 is a pivotal year in reading Spinoza, not just because that was the year that Deleuze, Gueroult, and Matheron's books appeared, but that was also the year that marked a transformation in the nature of capital (One is reminded that Althusser also turned to Spinoza in 1968 to understand ideology, and specifically the conflict in the school as the Ideological State Apparatus). Marxist-Spinozism is a response to a crisis in Marxism. In a similar way Balibar's investigation of the conflict between the imagination and reason in social relations stems from a different era, and a different crisis. The rise of conflicts around ethnicity and race, and the effacement of solidarity around class, forces us to rethink the role of imagination and reason in society. (I would add that maybe the reason that Balibar seems to be a better reader of Spinoza to me is because the politics that I have known are more about the conflicts between imaginary identifications and real dependencies than they are about the increasing proliferation of the proletariat through all of society as the multitude). It is difficult to separate the politics of the conjuncture from the reading of the text. One cannot easily separate a theory of the affects from the affective composition of the moment, or the power of the imagination from the existing imagination of power. This brings us to the challenge of Spinoza, as Macherey argues in BdS: Études Spinoziennes, one of the challenges of Spinoza is that ontology, ethics, politics, and I would add, epistemology, or a theory of knowledge, are always pursued at the same time, any division between them is heuristic, which is not to say that it is not necessary. 
From Magazine Littéraire 


Diefenbach's book is an excellent book on the divisions and debates around Spinoza, a necessary read for anyone who is interested in this transformation of thought, but it is also necessary to understand that this transformation of thought is also a transformation of bodies, of relations. We have yet to write that history, or rather, the history that sees them both together. 

 

2025 will probably go down in history as a pivotal year in the US's decline into a particular kind of media driven twenty-first century fascism. It is the year that Trump got his paramilitary force, in ICE, it is also the year in which we saw the fourth estate capitulate to the administration, turning over CBS news to a bootlicking blogger, firing comedians, and gutting journalism to pour money into a fawning documentary about the first lady. The times would seem to be ripe for a film dealing with the combination of authoritarian power and media spectacle. We got two, both based on books by Stephen King. Books written over forty years ago. 

The Running Man  and The Long Walk are both books that Stephen King published under the name Richard Bachman. The Running Man was published in 1982, The Long Walk in 1979, although it was written much earlier. It was the first novel that King wrote, during his Freshman year at the University of Maine in 1969. Both of these books were relatively unknown until someone figured at that Bachman was King writing under a pen name. Apparently he was writing so much that he was competing with himself. After King's secret got out both books were then published as part of a collection with two other novels, titled The Bachman Bookis in 1985. The Running Man was then made into a film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1986. Both books take the same basic premise, an authoritarian government coupled with a brutal televised spectacle of death to placate the masses. 

As a teenager, I was really into Stephen King. I know that is a strange thing to say about one of the biggest authors of his time. It was mass culture, back when an author could be part of mass culture. As a kid growing up I would spend part of my summers visiting my grandparents in Stillwater, Maine--not too far from where many King stories were set. Derry always seemed to be an alternative version of Brewer, and Castle Rock was not too far from that area as well. My parents had also both gone to the University of Maine a few years before King's freshman year. Reading King always felt a little more personal than just being one of the millions of fans.I remembering reading the Bachman books and thinking that they were all uniformly dark, as King himself has said, they are young man's books, dark, cynical, and angry. That anger was at a different time. So we can ask ourselves how does it translate into the present. 

With the exception of recently reading The Shining to teach the film, I have not read anything by King in decades. So I am working on my memory here. I remember thinking that The Running Man was oddly prescient when it was published. The first film adaptation missed this aspect entirely. In the book "The Running Man" show is more like a souped-up version of America's Most Wanted. It was played out across the country, everyone was on the hunt. The first film replaced this setting with American Gladiator, moving the action to an underground maze, and replacing being hunted by everyone and anyone with themed antagonists in costumes. It is also a film made at the point where Schwarzenegger's one liners are truely groan inducing. Schwarzenegger made two great science fiction/action movies in the eighties, The Terminator and Total Recall. This was not one of them. 

 

In the eighties, the action film was less a particular genre than a genre filter that science fiction had to pass through in order to be made into a movie. Science fiction during the decade was largely a subset of the action movie. This is particularly striking when it comes to Philip K. Dick's works which generally function as just basic ideas or concepts, to which action scenes can be added.  I find a lot of the action from that decade to be dull. Even They Live, one of my favorite films from that period, gets boring when it collapses into a series of gun fights in the third act. 

One of the nods to the first film is that Schwarzenegger is on the 100 bill(Of course in a dystopian future being on the currency is probably not a good thing)

The Running Man seems like one of those films that could be remade, or rather, readapted from its source material. (With the proliferation of words for IP films, reboots, and requels, we do not seem to have a word for something that is less a remake of a film than a remake of the original source material). At the same time, what is prescient in the 1980s can seem dated in 2025. The film is much truer to its source material than the first film. There are no opera singing villains festooned in electric lights. The "hunt" is carried out by an elite group of soldiers, but also anyone with a cellphone or a flamethrower. Everything about the surveillance and facial recognition technology places the film in the present, or not too different future. This means that it struggles with the question of technology. In the original book "the runners" have to submit a video tape everyday, proving they are alive and preventing them from going into total isolation. The film updates this with having them drop off tapes into drone powered drop off boxes, but beyond that  the film doesn't really know what to do with change of from technology from 1980 until now.  Over the course of the movie we get underground zines, a Youtube like channel trying to radicalize the masses, and all of this coexists with drone cameras and deep fake technology.

   

The use of "deep fake" technology raises a question that the film does not really address. At one point in the film the question is raised as to why not fake the same whole thing. The answer given by the show's producer, Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) is that viewers need the unpredictable spark that real participants offer. It is only the spark they need, as we see the producers are not above interfering with the narrative, fabricating footage, and even killing people to get the story they want. In that way it is very close to the kayfabe logic of "reality television," in which the raw material maybe real, but the real can be produced, provoked, and edited to fit a story. 

This was downright prophetic in 1980, but a film made forty five years later cannot simply point to the date it was first written and claim to be insightful. It has to confront the reality of the present. Of course we do not have a reality based television show where people are hunted to the death--yet, but we do have an administration that increasingy follows the logic of reality television, producing events that are at once real and manufactured. As it has been argued, ICE is more about producing content than it is about catching the supposed "worst of the worst." The question that the film runs up against, but does not address, is how can one puncture this tightly interwoven web of fiction and reality. A web that is all the more inescapable because we all produce it. It is going to take more than a few zines or youtube channels to challenge such a power. Movies are not politics, and in the end the film caves to pressure to entertain in the actual year 2025 by changing the book's dark ending with a more uplifting one. 

Fredric Jameson has written that utopias come up against the narrative demands of fiction, a world in which all of the problems of life have been resolved is devoid of the necessary conflict to drive a story. A related problem confronts dystopian fictions, especially when they become blockbusters. The film demands action, and I don't just mean car chases and fight scenes, but the capacity to act, to change the world, but a world in which one person, or even a ragtag band, could actually change things would not be a dystopia, or would not be dystopian enough. The possibility of action, of transformative action, would suggest that whatever kind of control exists is not total. The classic literary dystopias, 1984 and Brave New World, solve this by making an action tragic. All rebellions are crushed or contained. 

 

The Long Walk is a film which embraces dystopia at the expense of action. The film takes place in a world in which the US has undergone a war and an economic crash. The struggling country turns to a yearly event, in which fifty young men walk until there is only one standing. That young man wins money and a "wish." King has mentioned that what prompted the novel was the senseless slaughter of watching his peers be drafted to fight in Vietnam. Of course that subtext would not longer work. 

The given by "The Major" (Mark Hamill) to the young men slightly shifts and updates the subtext. 

The Major: Each year after the event, there's a spike in production. We have the means to return to our former glory. Our problem now, is the epidemic of laziness. You boys are the answer. The Long Walk is the answer. When this is broadcast for all the states, your inspiration will continue to elevate our gross national product. We will be number one in the world again!
[All: Yeah!]
The Major: Now, uh... I'm not gonna go though the whole rule book, but it boils down to this. Walk until there's only one of you left. Maintain a speed of three miles per hour. If you fall below the speed, you get a warning. If you can't make speed in ten seconds, you get an additional warning. Three warnings, you get your ticket. Walk one hour at speed, one warning is erased and so on. If you step off the pavement, you will get your ticket without warning. The goal is to last the longest. There's one winner and no finish line. Any of you can win. Any of you can do it if you walk long and steady enough. If you refuse to give up. I look at each and every one of you, and I see hope. Now, boys, who's set to fucking win?
[All Cheering]
The Major: I said... who's ready to fucking win?
The Long Walk does nothing to update the technology of the original. There are no drones or deep fakes. Everything is stuck in world which looks like the late sixties, or at least looks like nothing has been updated since the late sixties. It is unclear when it takes place, the past and poverty intertwine. Even the machine guns date back to the Vietnam era. The film does not change the time or setting, just the subtext. 
I was curious enough about the speech that I checked the book. It is not in the novel. The speech subtly shifts the film's subtext from war to work. Thus we can see in it some of the ideological logic of capitalism. The Major is right, one of them will win. One out of fifty. That is true. One hears the same thing in the contemporary work place, and, if you are me, when you teach a class about work. Some people are going to make it, become rich. It is impossible to deny that. Of course many more will not, that is just as true. It is the exception that rules, or the fantasy of becoming the exception. The film takes a premise which has now become familiar, a brutal game to the death televised for the masses, but this is a game without skills, where archery or martial arts training will not help you, all you have to do is walk. The focus on walking extends the fiction that anyone could win, winning is a matter of will, of perseverance, not ability, while simultaneously limiting the scope of action. There is nothing to do but walk. 
The more interesting thing is what happens over the course of the long walk. The boys not only form friendships, but they engage in actual acts of solidarity, helping each other stay awake, even carrying each other when they collapse. Such acts are ultimately tragic. They know that only one of them will win, only one of them will live, and there is nothing they can do to change that. (As with Alien: Romulus, David Jonsson is the best thing about this movie)
The Long Walk changes the ending of the book as well, but it cannot change their character's fate. It does, however, show that there is solidarity, or at least the possibility of solidarity, even in a world of brutal competition. 
Of the two films I want to believe more in the possibility of The Running Man, that we can rise up, or at least print zines, and challenge the system, but it seems to me that The Long Walk has captured the feeling of the present, forced to compete in a game that almost no one will win. Even though it reminds us that we can still refuse to internalize the rules of the game, we can still show solidarity in competition, kindness in cruelty. 

 

As it has often been said, movies teach you how to watch them. This pedagogy can take on almost Pavlovian forms as in the case of horror movies such as Jaws, which teaches you to treat a few notes on a tuba as terrifying. However, every film instructs you how to view it, and a lot of the struggle with watching different kinds of films has to with learning how to see things differently. If you come to a Béla Tarr film with John Woo habits you are going to be bored. Our viewing habits make our viewing practices. A lot of our debates about attention are about this process of learning, of how we have had our capacity for attention reduced. Netflix films made to be watched while doing laundry or scrolling on our phone prepare us to watch other films the same way, and when they cannot be viewed that way we get confused. Every film teaches you how to watch it, but only one film I can think of tells you where you should watch it and  that film is The Last Dragon, or, as we are supposed to call Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon.

I am thinking of one scene in particular that occurs early on in the film. It shows a packed theater watching Enter the Dragon. Watching is the wrong word, they are not just passively sitting there taking it in, they are reciting lines, throwing popcorn, offering their own commentary. It is cinema as a mass art, as Walter Benjamin, would argue, an art for the masses and by the masses. I have memories of going to screenings like that on the east side of Cleveland growing up, where the audience was part  of the show. I am not sure where I saw The Last Dragon, but the film is pretty clear--this movie is best seen with an audience who knows how to break the fourth wall. The scene also makes clear that this film cannot be viewed by itself. Unless you have seen, unless you love, the films of Bruce Lee, this movie is not for you. This is a movie not just about Bruce Lee, his cultural impact, but the particular connection forged between Kung Fu movies and black culture.  
The Enter the Dragon scene is the film's origin story, apparently the idea for the film was hatched when the screenwriter, Louis Venosta saw a tenth anniversary screening of the film in a packed theater in Harlem. I will argue that it is the best scene in the whole film, the edits that constantly set up parallels between the action on the screen and the antics in the theater are so much fun to watch. Watching the film again, I was reminded of Alain Badiou's remarks about cinema as a democratic art.  One of the things that Badiou writes about in that text, that I never could relate to, is the moment when a bad film transcends itself to become something else. I know that it happens, but I have always been hard picked to come up with examples.  As Badiou writes,
"This is the great democratic advantage of the art of cinema: you can go there on a Saturday evening to rest and rise unexpectedly. Aristotle said that if we do good, pleasure will come “as a gift.” When we see a film it is often the other way around: we feel an immediate pleasure, often suspect (thanks to the omnipresent non-art), and the Good (of art) comes as an unexpected bonus.
In cinema we travel to the pure from the impure. This is not the case in the other arts. Could you deliberately go and see bad painting? Bad painting is bad painting; there is little hope it will change into something good. You will not rise. From the simple fact that you are there, lost in bad painting, you are already falling, you are an aristocrat in distress. Whereas in cinema you are always more or less a democrat on the rise. Therein lies the paradoxical relation. The paradoxical relationship between aristocracy and democracy, which is finally an internal relationship between art and non-art. And this is also what politicizes cinema: it operates on a junction between ordinary opinions and the work of thought. A subtle junction that you don’t find in the same form elsewhere."
Those few moments in the movie theater the movie rises, both formally in its use of montage, and in terms of its history. It is the moment when the film is both most artificial, most self-conscious about being a film, and most real, most true to what the film is really about. It is not a film about "the glow," about becoming a master, or even defeating the Shogun of Harlem. It is a film about watching kung fu movies. 
The Last Dragon is not a good film, not by any stretch, but it is a film punctuated by moments that rise to something like the cult classic it became. The Bruce Lee montage is one such scene, Julius J. Carry III portrayal of Sho'nuff is another. It is for this reason that the film continues to have effects into the present. It is even cited in Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You, the speech that Detroit (Tessa Thompson) gives as part of her performance is cited from the film. (I actually have a lot of questions about that particular intertextual moment.)
The Asian World of Martial Arts Catalog was a big part of my misspent youth
As I white kid in suburban Cleveland I was not the film's target audience, but I loved the film. As kid taking Karate and Tae Kwon Do classes people would constantly bring up The Karate Kid to me, but I never connected to it. Watching The Last Dragon again I understand the source of the connection. When "Bruce" Leeroy Green (Taimak) dons a ninja suit to show up to rescue Laura Graham (Vanity) the suit he wears is the same that you could buy from Asian World of Martial Arts, along with the throwing stars and nunchucks. The Karate Kid may have been close to the kinds of Karate Tournaments that used to take up my weekends as kid, but The Last Dragon understood that the appeal of martial films is in the fantasy not the reality. I do not have much more to say about the film, but watching it again made me want to punch Quentin Tarantino. 

 

A few weeks ago I was trying to formulate a pithy little formulation for social media. It went something like this, "Political theory is a matter of determining which principle a polity should follow; political practice is a matter of interpreting a principle differently for one's followers." It did not quite work as a post no matter how I reworked it, but what I was trying to get at is the pervasive and unavoidable inconsistency of the relationship between principle and practice in contemporary politics. We have so-called "free speech warriors" who are very worried about  the "chilling effects" on free speech by students who protest speakers, but have nothing at all to say about state governments banning the teaching of Plato, and a federal government that makes education funding contingent on universities promoting their agenda, and, more recently, we have defenders of the right to bear arms arguing that just carrying a gun is enough to justify a summary execution. All of this goes beyond hypocrisy.  Since I could not get it to work in a few characters, I thought that I would reflect on it more here. 

I would like to ask a bigger, and more abstract question, what does it mean to apply a principle, to hold oneself to a principle? In answering this I am going to start in a fairly unlikely place, at least for me, and that is with John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill). In On Liberty  the Mills offer the following reflection on principles and the lack thereof: 

"There is, in fact, no recognized principle by which the propriety or impropriety of government interference is customarily tested. People decide according to their personal preferences. Some, whenever they see any good to be done, or evil to be remedied, would willingly instigate the government to undertake the business; while others prefer to bear almost any amount of social evil, rather than add one to the departments of human interests amenable to governmental control. And men range themselves on one or the other side in any particular case, according to this general direction of their sentiments; or according to the degree of interest which they feel in the particular thing which it is proposed that the government should do, or according to the belief they entertain that the government would, or would not, do it in the manner they prefer; but very rarely on account of any opinion to which they consistently adhere, as to what things are fit to be done by a government. And it seems to me that in consequence of this absence of rule or principle, one side is at present as of wrong as the other; the interference of government is, with about equal frequency, improperly invoked and improperly condemned."
When I teach Mill, (and I should say that is my primary relationship to Mill, as someone who occasionally teaches On Liberty in a political theory class, I do not claim to be a Mill scholar), one of the things I try to stress is that Mill's description can be used to make sense of a lot of political debates, debates where, as is often the case, to cite John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill again, people are governed by taste and opinion.  This is what gets the world we live in where the same people will have no problem with a government that dictates how people should conduct themselves sexually so long as it allows them to own semi-automatic weapons, while other people have no problem with a government that supports religion so long as it is their religion. This is because, as Mill and Mill argue, they do not frame these questions of government power in terms of an abstract principle, one of the limits of authority, but according to their own opinions and tastes. As Mill and Mill also write, 
"Men’s opinions, accordingly, on what is laudable or blamable, are affected by all the multifarious causes which influence their wishes in regard to the conduct of others, and which are as numerous as those which determine their wishes on any other subject. Sometimes their reason—at other times their prejudices or superstitions: often their social affections, not seldom their antisocial ones, their envy or jealousy, their arrogance or contemptuousness: but most commonly their desires or fears for themselves--their legitimate or illegitimate self-interest."
(I should mention parenthetically, the Mills have some interesting things to say on this point about custom and second nature--which is a topic I find interesting). 
Of course anyone who is familiar with even the cliff notes version of Mill knows how he solves this, with his famous "harm principle" (although he does not call it that), which puts the limits of liberty at the exact point where one's actions can harm others. I say exact point, because, to use one more example, harm is a tricky concept, leading to all kinds of slippery slopes, so one could read Mill as the original libertarian, in which drugs, gambling, etc., are all legal, or its opposite, in which second hand smoke, PFAs, and all other unintended effects of actions, even hate speech, have to be regulated because of their harms. Everything depends on how harm is defined, on how one understands causality and the  effects of actions on others (and what one understands about chemical compounds and the effects of trauma). What might have seemed libertarian in the nineteenth century becomes more controlling in the twenty-first as we understand more and more about how all sorts of actions have effects and harms that go beyond our intentions. Mill's principle is lost in the changing definitions of harm. 
Despite these limitations, one can see the appeal of Mill's argument, which is in some sense the appeal of liberalism. Things would be better if we framed so many of these debates about the limits of state power and the rights of subjects, in terms of general principles rather than specific anecdotes, each with their own specific vibes. If we asked the question should the president, any president, get to dictate what is taught in schools, or who is on late night television, or asked the general question, should a group of armed masked individuals be able to stop and harass anyone on the streets, we would probably get different answers than those animating politics (on the right) at this moment. We do not frame those questions in such a way, and because we do not, they are decided by particular habits, customs, and prejudices (in every sense of that word). 
Principles cut both ways, they constrain as much as they enable. In the Mills' version this means that as much as I want to claim the right to do anything that does not harm others I must also grant that to others. If I am going to let my freak flag fly, something which was important to Mill, than I must let others fly theirs as well. This reciprocity, or, in Balibar's terms equaliberty, is fundamental to the very structure of rights. They must be recognized by others, and thus I must recognize the rights of others. Of course it is precisely this reciprocity, or recognition, that is missing in contemporary politics, in culture, many people who claim the right to the freedom of speech do not want others to have.  Reciprocity breaks down in a zero sum game of competition. (This is why I argued early that the Second Amendment is the dominant right in American politics, not just because of the aesthetics of violence, but because it is a right that functions better in a zero sum game. You want to be the one with the gun. This is why we see all other rights being remade in its image. Appeals to the first amendment, to free speech, are often thinly veiled assertions that claim the right for themselves, while excluding others). 



To continue this point by moving back into the origins of the liberal tradition, it is worth considering John Locke. For Locke the state of nature was not nearly as brutal as it was for Hobbes, not a war of all against all, what it was plagued by was not perpetual war but the threat of particularity. As Locke writes,
"That in the state of nature every one has the executive power of the law of nature, I doubt not but it will be objected, that it is unreasonable for men to be judges in their own cases, that self-love will make men partial to themselves and their friends: and on the other side, that ill nature, passion and revenge will carry them too far in punishing others; and hence nothing but confusion and disorder will follow, and that therefore God hath certainly appointed government to restrain the partiality and violence of men."
It is not perpetual violence, but partiality that the state rescues us from. That was the theory. However, what do we do when we are confronted with a state that openly flaunts its own bias, is abundantly clear that it serves some people, and not others, enforces some laws, not all, or more to the point, enforces laws selectively. 


At this point it is worth departing from the liberal tradition. I have recently been rereading Katja Diefenbach's Spinoza in Post-Marxist Philosophy (that is the kind of reference that one would expect on this blog). One of the things that comes up in her reading of the various Marxist readings of Spinoza, and I will say more about this book later, is that for Spinoza the problem of knowledge and the problem of politics are thoroughly intertwined. This is an argument one can find in the other big book on Spinoza that came out recently,  Kletenik's Sovereignty Disrupted, which traces it back to his Jewish and Islamic sources, but she gets it from Balibar  (who plays a central role in her book). As Diefenbach writes, 
"The fundamental problem of politics 'is to know how reason and imagination interact' and how, out of these interactions, they constitute the sociality of humans. It does not follow that the 'unity' of this process turns the passions into mere means of the realization of reason, as in Hegel, another great theorist of anthropological for whom reason actualizes itself in the necessary detour through the most varied empirical phenomena, passions and particular interests in order to find its objective revelation in the state."
I know that the Hegel reference seems like a bit of an aside, and it is, but I will add to it--going more and more off topic--(something that happens in my classes as well) to say that in The Politics of Transindividuality I made the argument that one of the things that connects Marx and Spinoza is their rejection of an teleology that would resolve the imagination into reason. As I wrote in that book, 
"The question of appearance returns, only now it is not just a matter of the ambiguous appearance of individuality, but of the appearance of social relations, social relations that appear primarily as the quality of objects, as in commodity fetishism, or as the effect of capital itself. Between the sphere of circulation, which is made up of isolated individuals, and the sphere of production, which represents their cooperative relations as the relations of capital, transindividuality, everything that exceeds the individual, cannot appear. Isolated individuals appear, the power capital itself appears, but social relations, the way individuals shape and are shaped by their relations, producing themselves and their social conditions, does not appear. The fetishism, of commodities and of capital itself, is Marx’s explanation as to why the Hegelian passage from the particular to the universal is interrupted. One could argue, following the reading of The Philosophy of Right that we have developed here, that this interruption is developed on Hegelian grounds. The fetishism of commodities might be another way of framing the split between work and consumption as transindividual individuations. The only difference is that the individuation through consumption, through what Hegel called the sphere of need, does not lead to recognition of its universal dimension, its connection with and dependence on others, but to fetishization, a naturalization of the capitalist economy. There is no education of the particular, its eventual recognition of its connection with others in the state, instead there is a bifurcation of transindividual individuation. On the one side there is the isolated and competitive individual of the sphere of production, while on the other there is the cooperative social individual of the hidden abode of production. However, this second individual does not appear, does not see itself in institutions and structures, instead what is immediately visible is the fetishism of commodities, money, and the power of capital itself."
In other words, both Marx and Spinoza argue, in different ways, and on different grounds, that the passage from particularity to universality is fundamentally interrupted. 
To close this parenthesis, and leaving Hegel out of it, we can frame three different ways of understanding the relation between imagination and reason, between what is shaped by custom and taste, and what is framed by thinking. The first, Mill and Mill, is predicated on the idea that if we had a principle, some abstract rule, we could better understand the limits and scope of government power because we would ask the question abstractly. The abstract principle is the antidote to particularity. The second position, that of Spinoza, the realist one, suggest that such a passage is not possible, not just for some, the vulgus, but for all of us. Sometimes we are reasonable, governed by rational ideas, and other times we are governed by our passions. The reference to Marx then maps out a third position one that is less anthropological and more historical. How we think, how much we are capable of framing things in terms of abstract concepts or particular images, affects, or vibes, is not a static given, but is itself a product of social relations. 
This connects to something I have posted before, and will say again, we have to understand what we are living through as not just a change of a political order, but an epistemic one. It is a regime in which the things that we think of as hypocrisy, or the violation of principles, do not register because they are never framed in that way. They are framed in terms of vibes or moods, and as such the shift and change with the time and the moment. That is how we get people who can champion people brandishing guns at a protest one year and arguing that just having a gun is grounds for execution years later. These are not principles or arguments, but affects, fear, and imagination. Thus, in moving away from Mill I have brought us back to him, to the importance of education, to the idea that we need to at least try to be more reasonable if we are going to be free (which is of course also back to Spinoza).  Updated 3/19/2026 To reflect the recently acknowledged co-authored status of On Liberty as a book by John Stuart and 

From a presentation I gave at Space Gallery on one of the best scenes of ideology in contemporary film
As I said before on this blog, ideology is perhaps better grasped as an intersecting field of problems and questions than a concept or theory. It is a way of thinking together the relation between the question of knowledge, the social order, and political power. Of course, these different aspects are unequally and unevenly applied in different thinkers, a point that I tried to sketch out earlier with Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Marx. 
Sticking with the themes of using proper names as placeholders, which they often are, I can say that there are two more aporias, or at least tensions, that I would like to mention here. (Despite the argument of being for or against dualisms, so much in philosophy depends on how we understand the relation between pairs of concepts, as contradictions, aporias, antinomies, and so on, but this is more than a parenthetical point). These tensions define the concept. The first comes from Balibar, who writes,
"I shall take the liberty of advancing the following interpretation: domination by an established order does indeed rest, as Marx argued after Hegel, on the ideological universalization of its principles. But, contrary to what Marx believed, the 'dominant ideas' cannot be those of the dominant class. They have to be those of the dominated, the ideas which state their theoretical right to recognition and equal capacity."
Elsewhere on this blog, and in The Double Shift, I have offered my own interpretation of this statement, referring to it as a Machiavellian correction to Marx, based on Machiavelli's advice to rulers in The Prince. As Machiavelli writes, 
"So a ruler must be extremely careful not to say anything that doesn’t appear to be inspired by the five virtues listed above; he must seem and sound wholly compassionate, wholly loyal, wholly humane, wholly honest and wholly religious. There is nothing more important than appearing to be religious. In general people judge more by appearances than first-hand experience, because everyone gets to see you but hardly anyone deals with you directly. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few have experience of who you really are, and those few won’t have the courage to stand up to majority opinion underwritten by the authority of state."
Or, as Althusser puts it in his little book on Machiavelli,“The prince must take the reality of popular ideology into account, and inscribe therein his own representation, which is the public face of the state.”
Rather than see Machiavelli and Marx as opposed, I prefer to think of these two assertions to be in perpetual tension. How this works out in practice is the ruling ideas constantly need to incorporate the ideas of the ruled, of the dominated, in order to rule. In Machiavelli's time this meant incorporating religion and piety into their presentation. In our day and age, the established pieties are less religious and more economic, everyone must appear to be a worker and be familiar with the economy, that "religion of daily life,"as André Tosel reminds us. In some sense ideology is the space where the ideas of the dominant become the idea of the dominated, and vice versa, as experiences are constantly trickling up and moving down according to the vicissitudes of class rule. 
 To take one example, the last four or five decades in the US have seen drastic cuts to the taxes of the wealthiest Americans, but these tax cuts are often presented as if they answer to the demands of the dominated class.  Which is not to say that this is a complete illusion, or Machiavellian manipulation. It is more that the ruling class has been able to translate and transform the worsening economic conditions of the ruled, declining wages and increased costs of housing, education, and health care, into a demand that serves the rulers, a demand for lower taxes for the highest brackets. 
Two images which should be looked at side by side
One definition of hegemony could be this transformation of the experiences and grievances of the ruled into the ideas of  and for the ruling class. As Marx and Engels write in The German Ideology, 
"For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class."
So called "tax reform," which has primarily been a matter of cutting taxes for the wealthiest is perhaps the best example of the interest of one class being represented as "the common interest of all of the members of society." It is where the interests of the ruling class are translated into the struggles of the ruled, and vice versa, bringing together the Marxist and Machiavellian critique of ideology. As I have argued elsewhere, work is also a place where the experience of the ruled and the interests of the rulers are combined. The very definition of the wealthy as "job creators" is an ideological term made to make the interests of the ruling class appear to be synonymous with the ruled. 
A lot more could be said about this tension between the Marxist and Machiavellian aspects of ideology, but all of this is a preamble to another tension that I want to explore. Once again taking proper names as placeholders I would say that this is a tension between a Gramscian dimension and an Althusserian dimension of ideology.
By the Gramscian dimension I am referring to the famous statement  of Antonio Gramsci with respect to Fordism in America, "Hegemony here is born in the factory and requires for its exercise only a minute quantity of professional political and ideological intermediaries." To simplify things greatly, we could identify this assertion with the idea that ideology does not stem from some attempt to disseminate ideas through the superstructure, the state, and media, but is already produced at the base. As Gramsci writes, "the structure dominates the superstructure."
To flesh out this idea I turn to two interpreters of Gramsci, Michael Buroway and André Tosel. With respect to the first, Michael Burawoy, is less an interpretation than a matter of putting this idea to test in different contexts, examining how "consent is produced at the point of production." As Burawoy argues, "The production of things is simultaneously not only the production and reproduction of social relations but also the production of an experience of those relations." Burawoy's own work, his working in sites of production, demonstrates how the experience on the factory floor produces its own "consent" to its structures. Burawoy is particularly attentive to the way in which the structure of work itself, the way tasks are distributed, and promotions are earned, produces their own legitimacy in that it gives people a way to structure their striving (to be somewhat Spinozist, or Lordonian about it). As Buroway writes, "Ideology is, therefore not something manipulated at will by agencies of socialization--schools, family, church, and so on--in the interests of a dominant class. On the contrary, these institutions elaborate and systematize lived experience and only in this way become centers of ideological dissemination."



Tosel's reading of Gramsci is focused less on the specifics of the politics of the factory floor than on the general social transformation that it is part of--particularly the way in which the rationalization of the factory becomes a general social logic. For Tosel this is the significance of "passive revolution," a revolution of the norms of ethical and political life produced not by the dominant class, at least directly, but produced by the way in which economic life is structured. 
In contrast to Gramsci on this point we have Althusser, and his claim in the famous essay on ideology, that "the reproduction of labor power takes place outside of the firm." As Althusser goes onto argue, ideology necessary demands a different logic, and a different temporality, one that is beyond the purview of individual capitalists, and individual firms, one focused not on production, but on reproduction. Reproduction demands a fundamentally different institution, that of the Ideological State Apparatus, the can reproduce labor power, as skilled, docile, and exploitable. This is what is done by the church, in the feudal era; the school, in the time of Althusser's writing, and some new institution, such as the media, in the modern age. The superstructure reproduces the conditions of the base. Of course such an assertion fundamentally inverts the very image, making the base depend on the superstructure. As Balibar writes,
"Instead of adding a theory of the “superstructure” to the existing theory of the structure, he aims at transforming the concept of the structure itself by showing that its process of “production” and “reproduction” originarily depends on unconscious ideological conditions. As a consequence a social formation is no longer representable in dualistic terms—a thesis that logically should lead us to abandon the image of the “superstructure." Another concept of historical complexity must be elaborated, with opposite sociological, anthropological, and ontological prerequisites.
Thus it is possible to oppose Gramsci and Althusser, at least according to these two statements, "Hegemony is born in the factory"and "reproduction takes place outside of the firm." With the first there is the assertion that there is no such thing as purely economic activity, of a base that would not also be superstructure, and, with the second, there would be the assertion that the base, the economy, necessarily relies on a production of subjectivity which is prior to it, and exceeds it. In the first subjection is produced at the site of production, while in the second subjection always requires a necessary supplement. 
One could even add this opposition, this tension, to the one above between Marx and Machiavelli, this would allow us to map different forms and types of ideology, depending upon how much it contains elements of the ruling or ruled class, on the Marx/Machiavelli axis, and how much it is produced in and through economic activity, or how much it is relayed in and through institutions of the superstructure, on the Gramsci/Althusser axis.  Such an graph would give us interesting figures of overlap: the bottom left corner, at the intersection of Gramsci and Machiavelli, would emphasize the spontaneous dimension of ideology, the place where the everyday experiences of the dominated produce their own ideology, while the upper right quadrant, at the intersection of Marx and Althusser, is where we would place a theory of the superstructure. 



As much as it might be interesting to draw such a graph, and it is possible to place different conceptions of ideology on it, it would seem to miss the point entirely by representing a dynamic process as a static image. The tension between Marx and Machiavelli, Gramsci and Althusser, is less about different positions than it is a process, or two interlinking processes: the first is one in which the experiences and ideals of the dominated class are being represented, and distorted, by the dominant class; the second is one in which the material conditions, economic relations, are constantly being represented and distorted by cultural institutions. In The Double Shift I tried to make sense of this as a double determination drawing from Marx and Spinoza. I have added multiple figures here only to suggest that the problem of ideology is complex enough that different theories, different interventions, see and grasp different sides of it. Sometimes it is necessary to stress, as Marx did in formulating the concept, that the ideas that are dominant at a given moment in society have a necessary class basis, sometimes it is necessary, to insist that the factory is not just the imposition of mute necessity, that the economy is also experience, as it was for Gramsci and Buroway, and sometimes it is necessary, as it was for Althusser, to stress that the superstructure is also a site of struggle. We all pose the question of ideology from the conditions we are given, a statement which includes this blogpost as well. 
Updated 2/17/26
I was thinking about all of this when I read Isabelle Garo's L'ideologie ou la pensée embarque, as short little book that takes up the problem of ideology by rereading Marx and Engel's German Ideology against the present. Garo formulates things differently, more dialectically than the aporias I traced above. One thing that she stresses, which picks up both the Marx/Machiavelli problem and the Althusser/Gramsci is that ideology is always first and foremost related to its material conditions. As she writes "Representations of any kind only fulfill their function of social mediation through the reciprocal relationships they maintain with real life and its contradictions, with the multifaceted practical experience of those who are the targets of the messages and who sometimes remain resistant to even the most skillfully orchestrated campaigns." This leads her to assert that there is a double causality to ideology
"1) The first stems from a socially defined and politically prescribed ideological mission, possibly state-sanctioned (referred to here as the "ideological function"), which determines pre-defined content from above; 2) the second arises from the complex reality of the constant development, as it were, of representations by socially diverse individuals whose social consciousness is determined from below (by social life) or, in a sense, laterally (by the imperatives of theoretical research, for example), according to a logic that may be distinct from the first or even contradict it."
Garo's argument formulates the two tensions above, drawing them together. The Marx and Althusser endpoints of their respective axes are conjoined by this ideological mission, while the Gramsci and Machiavelli endpoints are conjoined by their formation in daily life. 

 

One of my favorite Toadies from popular culture 

There is a rather influential thesis that comes down to us from Hegel as read by Kojève and then later Francis Fukuyama and Axel Honneth. The thesis, as it has been interpreted, states quite simply that history is driven by a drive for mutual recognition. In other words, we strive to be recognized by people who we also recognize, to be an equal among equals. Built into this argument is the idea that the recognition must be reciprocal, it is not enough to be recognized by someone, to have someone see us as who we want to be seen as, the person seeing us must be someone that we could recognize in turn, someone whose perspective and criteria we respect.. As the blog "Philosophy bro" put it, no one wants to receive a compliment on their fashion sense from someone wearing cargo shorts. (apologies to anyone who likes cargo shorts, but I think that we can all fill this in with our own example of some particular aspect of taste that calls a person's judgement into question). The various interpretations might agree or disagree on whether or not we have achieved this ideal of mutual recognition, but they all agree that it is what drives history--the revolutions of democracy have made this ideal more and more of a reality. 

I suspect that one reason why this theory is popular among academics is that academia is in some sense driven by such a dynamic. The pleasures of academic life are few and far between, and increasingly dwindling, but there is nothing quite like getting a positive blurb from someone that you admire or respect, or seeing yourself cited in a great book. While interpretations of this thesis range from apologies for the existing neoliberal order after the fall of the Soviet Union to critical demands to expand the terrain of recognition, it is hard to argue against its utopian core. It is good to be recognized. 

What is most striking about this thesis now is not the question as to whether it is is conservative or revolutionary, but whether it applies at all. What we see in contemporary neo-fascism is a desire to be recognized by those one would never recognize in return. To take two cases in point, Elon Musk's drive to purchase and run twitter seems to be driven almost entirely to get the adulation of fanboys and bots, each with less than a thousand followers and avatars that suggest they have not moved out of their parents' basement. He has seemed to pursued this recognition by people he would not recognize in turn at the expense of his self-respect and his company. 

One cannot overlook Toadie in the history of popular toady figures

The second example is of course Donald Trump. There are no shortage of examples here, from his rallies, to his cabinet meetings in which he is regularly praised at length for his myriad accomplishments, real or imagined. Trump actively avoids any relation that could be one of mutual recognition, he prefers fans or subordinates. There must always be a hierarchy, one that places Trump on top. He does not seem to care how transparent or cheap the praise is, as long as it is praise. This lack of shame could be seen when he accepted the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize . Watching him accept the award, and put the little medal around his neck is just cringe inducing. How could he not see the award as such a blatant attempt to kiss his ass. Part of the common sense appeal of the ideal of mutual recognition is that we all have stories of times that we have been confronted with its distortion, from the praise of a loving, all too loving parent, who can't see why anyone would not also love us, to the criticism of a student who after receiving a failing grade tells us that we are the worst professor ever. There is a spontaneous philosophy of recognition than teaches us to bracket the praise of those who idealize us and the criticisms of those who are motivated in their contempt for us. 

Whoever designed the FIFA Peace Prize"understood the assignment," to use the parlance of our timesIt looks live five zombie hands grasping at a devastated world.

This brings us to the anthropological postulate at the heart of the struggle for recognition; such a thesis necessarily presupposes that there is something unsatisfying about such asymmetrical recognitions, of being recognized or misrecognized by someone one cannot recognize in return. It is why Kojève argues that the master, recognized by only someone he cannot recognize in return, surrounded by a toadying yes man, is an existential impasse. It is this image of the tyrant and the toadie that has come to us not just from readers of Hegel, but from popular culture. This image has two parts; the tyrant is unaware of his own abilities or limitations, and cannot see who they really are because they only have their idealized images reflected back to them, and the toadie so caught up in toadying that they have loss touch with reality. We recognize them as failures to be human, to connect. 

I could have illustrated this whole thing with Mr. Burns and Wayland Smithers

We could conclude that Trump and Musk are particularly delusional, but to focus too much on them misses the way in which we can see a general breakdown of mutual recognition throughout multiple social relations. Much of what makes up the so-called "manosphere," from pick up artists to incels, is predicated on a refusal of any relation that is predicated on anything like mutual recognition. I believe that any such thing would be considered "gay." In its place we get a fetishization of hierarchy and domination as the sine ne qua non of any relation that any self-respecting man would enter into, complete with its fantasy of tradwives. Of course it is hard for everyday ordinary people to find the toadying yes men, or, more importantly, women, to play that role. 

It is from this perspective we can understand the rise of AI, and the ideal of AI friends, girlfriends, and chatbots. They offer to democratize tyranny, to make every person with a wifi connection a master surrounded by slaves.  Musk himself made this abundantly clear when he tweeted an AI generated video of a woman saying, "I will always love you" as a demonstration of what the technology offers, revealing once again that he has retained everything from science fiction except its meaning. 

It is worth remembering that despite Kojève's attempt to make the struggle of master and slave a kind of template for history, its role in Hegel's thought is to pose the problem of self-consciousness, of how we come to understand and recognize ourselves. For Hegel we come to know ourselves by knowing how other people see us, how they recognize or fail to recognize us. Which then raises the question as to who we are now, if we no longer seem to desire recognition, no longer want to see ourselves among equals. Perhaps  we could conclude that we are no longer the sort of subjects that desire mutual recognition, or maybe we never were, accepting it only as a kind of compromise between our ultimate desire, to be recognized without recognizing, and our greatest fear, to live without recognition. Of course everything depends on whether or not we see this desire as some eternal aspect of being human, replacing the supposed desire for mutual recognition, as the foundation of history (this to me is the most important criticism of Kojève, that he anthropomorphizes Hegel), or as itself a product of history, a production of subjectivity. Democracy might aspire to an ideal of mutual recognition, but we live in capitalist society more than we live in a democracy, and such a society is predicated on multiplying the hierarchies, between capitalist and worker, between customer and employee, and now, between humanity and machines that promise us everything we would want from each other (except the demand to be recognized in turn.) 

 

One common refrain one hears about AI is that it is inevitable. It is nothing other than the progressive development of the possibilities of technology. Such an assertion could be considered a version of technological determinism. It is technology, what Marx called the forces of production, that drive history. On this view history proceeds from the engineers workshop to the factory and into society.
Some have attributed this position on technology to Marx himself, drawing on his remark in The Poverty of Philosophy, "Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist." Without rehearsing the entire argument on Marx and technology, one that often draws from a series of quotes and passages cited from various texts and thus, as is often case, a changing position, it is possible, at least for this post, to shift to a different position, one predicated not on the primacy of the forces of production, of technology, but the relations of production, of the social and economic relations. 
As Louis Althusser gives this formulation his characteristic precise formulation when he writes the following, "Within the specific unity of the productive forces and relations of production constituting a mode of production, the relations of production play the determining role, on the basis of, and within the the objective limits set by, the existing productive forces." Althusser formulation poses a problem in the form of a thesis. How is it possible grasp the determining instance of the relations of production in what appears to be the determination of the forces? This question is complicated by the fact that forces are not simply posited as an effect of the relations, but have their own role to play in setting limits. 
To return to the question of AI we can see that one of the primary uses of this technology is to reduce the costs of production, to not so much eliminate the role of workers in writing text and creating images but to reduce the role of such work to a negligible amount, to that of proofreading and editing what a machine produces. In this way the worker is reduced to a "conscious organ" of the machine, as Marx wrote. AI is adopted not out of an inevitable drive to make things faster or better;  the primary role that AI provides is to make this process cheaper, standardized, and easier to control. Cheap comes at the price of quality, and thus we see "slop" as the defining word of the year, as poor quality images, videos, and texts permeate the online space. Beyond this general imperative to make labor cheaper and more disposable, there are two examples where it is possible to see the hype around AI being more about the relations than the forces of production, Hollywood and the university. 

To take the first example Hollywood. Hollywood, and film and television production in general, has been one of the most visible lines of conflict around AI use. It featured prominently in the 2023 Writers strike and continues to be a contentious issue, with directors and filmmakers taking visible stands for and against the use of this technology. So far there have been stories of it being used in movie posters and other peripheral aspects of film production, and I imagine more than a few screenplays have passed through ChatGPT, but it is not these ideas of cost cutting that dominants the image of AI in Hollywood. One often hears about the idea that with AI it will be possible to train a machine on various existing screenplays, television shows, or novels and get a new screenplay. I do not know if this technologically possible, but I do know that this image of the future is in some sense already here.

What I have referred to as the "Intellectual Property Film," the sequels, reboots, and prequels of some existing movie franchise, comic book, or television show are often written in exactly this way. A writer, or more often, a group of writers comb through existing versions to produce something new, yet not quite new. One of the defining characteristics of the "comic book movie" is that with a few exceptions, such as the first Watchmen film and the Sandman series, the movies are not adaptations of existing stories or narratives. They are instead adaptations of general tendencies or directions of existing plots and storylines in the original versions. Thus we get several films that are modifications of the gritty and dark Batman from Frank Miller's comics and related stories. What is produced at the film is both like and unlike what has already been produced in other medium, an uncanny image of what has come before. Déjà vu is our historical situation and dominant form of cultural production. 

I plan to have more to say about this book when I finish it. 

In their forthcoming book, Imagination Artificielle, Intelligences Aliénées, Grégory Chatonsky and Yves Citton have argued that one of the defining characteristic of AI image production is a kind of déjà vu in which what is new appears to be at the same time old, everything new is at once familiar. This has to do with the way in which AI images draw from the stockpile of existing images in order to produce something which is a slight variation of what we have already seen. As they write, "The generated images resemble other images without being those images: influence inscribes these similarities in generalized family resemblances." One can thus see in AI image generation a fundamental dynamic of capitalism, there must be something new, new stories new images, but these stories and images must resemble as much as possible what has already proven profitable. In the technology of AI, in the forces of production, we see what already existed in the relations of production, the idea that some existing intellectual property can be a source of nearly infinite, but slightly different, reproductions. It is the fantasy of dead labor becoming a productive force in and of itself with labor reduced to a minimal role.

The idea of AI produced art or music is in some sense of culmination of the dead weight of existing intellectual production over the living. One of the striking things of the streaming model, of movies, television, and music, is that its ability to cheaply deliver content is almost matched by its inability to produce anything new. Spotify can make the entire discography of dead artists available at the click of a button, but it cannot pay or support living artists; Netflix can buy up Warner Brothers, Disney can buy everything else, but the cost of this is an undermining the entire film industry by shifting distribution to streaming. In some sense AI solves a problem that the streaming services has created. Spotify may turn out to be better at creating the basis for AI generated songs than promoting living artists.

A similar pattern of the primacy of relations over forces can be found in the second example, the university. Here I am not referring to the problem of cheating, and writing prompts replacing writing, but to the idea that AI can replace writing centers, language instructors, and professors. The fantasy of replacing (relatively) expensive and labor intensive instruction with some new technology has been an ongoing story of the university as long as I can remember, remember MOOCs, and the dream that lectures would come from a handful of "world class lecturers," reducing everyone else to TAs? What we are seeing with AI is the same old dream reborn with new machinery, we are told that AI can grade essays, teach, and instruct better than humans. Technology is the fantasy of capital extricating itself from its dependence on workers. The dream of an AI university is coupled with a fantasy, or nightmare, of a faculty that is radicalizing students, turning them against their own society. AI offers the dream of a cheaper and more docile professoriate. As Marx also writes about technology, "It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class."

These are just sketches and not analyses, my point with both is to draw a different picture of AI than the inevitable march of technology, of the forces of production, and instead to see the way in which the demand for such technology, its uses, and the dreams associated with it, are products of the relations of production, of the existing relations of capitalism. 

 

Oleksander Roitburd, Spinoza in Tuscanyfrom The Gallant Age of Enlightenment

Michael Hardt's Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy was a formative book for me in graduate school. Formative in the sense that it shaped my reading of Deleuze, but also in that it shaped my idea of what a book on a philosopher could or should do. What impressed me about Michael's book way back then is that he did the necessary work to excavate some of the concepts underlying Deleuze's books, not just Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson, but also Dun Scotus and Hegel, while at the same time recognizing that Deleuze's work is not pointed towards the past, to its history, but to debates with such philosophers as Althusser and with such movements such as autonomy. It is rare to find a book that is equally comfortable discussing scholastics and Nanni Balestrini. 

I thought of this book and this encounter when reading Gilah Kletenik's Sovereignty Disrupted: Spinoza and the Disparity of Reality. Kletenik's book can be understood to have two intertwining objectives; first, as the title suggests it is an attempt to trace the critique of "sovereignty" in Spinoza's thought. Sovereignty is understood to be multifaceted, ranging from the ontological sovereignty of God, to the anthropological sovereignty of humanity as a kingdom within a kingdom, to political sovereignty. This expansive sense of sovereignty, form ontology to politics, is justified by its second objective, situating Spinoza's thought within the trajectories of Jewish and Islamic philosophy that is its true source. As Kletenik writes, "In the rivulets of medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy to which Spinoza is heir, the philosophical is political and the political is philosophical." In order to appreciate what is at stake in Spinoza's critique of sovereignty and his thought overall, it is necessary to situate his thought within the Jewish and Islamic traditions that influenced it. 

It is with respect to this first aspect, with Sovereignty that Kletenik's book proves to be situated towards the present. As Kelentik writes, "The hierarchy that underpins sovereignty and the superiority it secures configure familiar 'Western dominations' such as cishet male supremacy, white supremacy and human supremacy. These supremacies are all promoted by additional doctrines enrooted in sovereignty to witt, that nature is hierarchically arranged and reason is supreme." Such a claim is going to seem painfully anachronistic to many. One has to be clear about what Kletenik is claiming here, it is that a particular conception of sovereignty, of humanity sovereign to nature, and reason sovereign to emotion, that has undergirded much of the logics of racism, sexism, etc. and that Spinoza is a not such much a critic of those later developments, which he was largely unaware of, but as a critic of sovereignty he undermines them in a way that is quite useful. On this point Kletenik is quite clear on the difference between what Spinoza the person thought and what Spinoza as a philosophy makes clear. As she writes, 

"There is no reason to apologize for, explain away, or diminish Spinoza's sexism. It is real. To be clear, I am suspicious of efforts to plumb the so-called canon merely to excavate materials that might confirm the truths that many have only now come to grasp. Much as Spinoza cast aspersions upon the need to rely on the authority of other philosophers to validate his views, I too do not seek the authority of Spinoza to confirm my queer conceptions of sexgender. But I am keen to think with Spinoza. I regard his critique of teleology and the epistemic missteps that precipitate it as generative for probing sexgender."

On this point I am reminded of what Warren Montag says, that Spinoza's fundamental assertion that we are all affected, subject to the imagination, applies to Spinoza as well. As Montag writes with respect to reading Spinoza, "...it is perhaps worthwhile applying to him his own protocol of interpretation and to ask in in what way his own texts are determined not merely by the internal power of his mind, but by external forces more powerful than he and, further, beyond his control or comprehension."Spinoza's limits are not ours, however, and we can use what is productive in his thought to move beyond his all too human, or should we say "all too modal" limitations. As Kletenik makes clear a few pages later, his critique of universals, and the human tendency to seek an imagined order in nature is quite useful for undermining the supposed natural binary of sex. 

"The binary system of sexgender classification exemplifies the perils that Spinoza delineates as inherent to universal notions. It also typifies the ways in which nature refuses to bend itself to our categories, repeatedly validating that "order in nature" is nothing but "a relation to our imagination." What is "male" and what is "female"? Much as Spinoza demonstrates with the category "human," determining sex depends on whom you ask: Is the difference anatomical? Chromosomal? Hormonal? Something else? There is no agreement on the matter. The fact that tens of millions of people--at least 1.7 percent of humans--do not "satisfy" the "conventional" metrics for assigning "sex" underscores the imprecision, contingency, and failure of the classificatory system. The routinely perceived "ambiguity" displayed by the anatomical "markers" of certain individuals, not to mention the regular "disagreement" between a given person's "sex traits," betrays the fallacious of these sovereign constructs."

The same claim can be made with respect to colonialism, it is not that Spinoza himself was a critic of the colonial order that is important, but that much of the logic of colonialism is predicated on a kind of logic of sovereignty. Hence the importance of Descartes to the logic of colonialism. As Kletenik writes,

"A central thesis of this book is that how we perceive reality at once reflects and simultaneously reinforces our commitments. Constructions of reality anchored in purports to sovereignty naturalize it and, in turn, sanction exercises in it. Sovereignties beget further sovereignties. By presenting an ontology stripped of sovereign pretenses, Spinoza denaturalizes sovereignty, rejecting its most pervasive manifestations. This is especially pertinent in the context of reason and rationality, which have conventionally supported human pretenses to superiority and purports to exceptionalism. By rejecting these sovereignties, Spinoza tenders an innovative epistemology, which packs not yet fully tapped potential for thinking reason otherwise."

Oleksander Roitburd, Descartes and a Moving Matter

With respect to the second aspect, Spinoza's Jewish and Islamic sources, Kletenik not only brings to light the way such thinkers as Maimonides, Gersonides, and Ibn Sina influences Spinoza, but the way that anti-Judaism has shaped Spinoza's reception. I am sure that many people are aware of Hegel's remarks about Spinoza, but what is perhaps surprising is how much this figure of the Jewish other persists in readings of Spinoza. As Kletenik writes about Zizek.

"These currents persist in Zizek's more recent ventures, wherein he proclaims: 'Spinoza spoke from the interstices of the social space(s), neither a Jew nor a Christian' and proceeds to assert that 'we should act like Saint Paul' by recognizing the constraints of particularity. Here not only is Spinoza's Jewishness indispensable to grasping his thought, but it also warrants Zizek--following Hegel--to parrot that classic Christian critique of Judaism, its particularism. Spinozism is thus to be overcome 'the passage from the Spinozan One qua the neutral medium/container of its modes and the One's inherent gap is the very passage from Substance to Subject.' Indeed, philosophy 'seems to repeat itself again and again, Oriental spirituality, Parmenides, Spinoza--all stand for the inaugural gesture of philosophy which has to be left behind if we are to progress on the long road from Substance to Subject.' Jewish Spinoza and is 'Oriental' thinking are to be sublated and superseded as 'Western' philosophy marches onwards. Even as 'Western' philosophy supposedly advances, its anti-Judaism remains consistent across the centuries."

I was a little surprised to read this, but I admit that I stopped following Zizek several books ago. What was more surprising was what Kletenik has to say about Deleuze.

"Before proceeding, it bears emphasis that Deleuze never wavers in Christianizing Spinoza. This surfaces not only in the systematic transubstantiation of Spinoza's theories into Deleuze's philosophy but also manifests in his portrayal of Spinoza's philosophical contributions. Deleuze, together with Félix Guattari, conceptualizes Spinoza's 'plane of immanence' as 'the nonthought within thought.'...[W]hat matters here is what they proceed to purport that 'the supreme act of philosophy' is 'not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every place...that which cannot be thought, which was thought once, as Christ was incarnated once, in order to show that one time, the possibility of the impossible.' And so they proclaim: 'Spinoza is the Christ of philosophers and the greatest philosophers are hardly more than apostles who distance themselves from or draw near to this mystery.' Deleuze is not satisfied in simply Christianizing Spinoza's ideas, which is par for the course in 'Western' philosophy, he must forcibly convert Spinoza himself, much as his converso ancestors were during the Inquisition, under the penalty of death. While they were only expected to ritualistically digest the Body of Christ, Spinoza has now been incarnated as Christ or the Christ of philosophers to testify to the impossible." 

As someone who came to Spinoza by Deleuze, I considered myself as someone who made peace with Deleuze's misreadings. As is often the case with Deleuze, what is wrong about the philosopher in question, such as parallelism, is interesting in Deleuze and Guattari's work. However, I had never seen things in quite this light. To me the line about the Christ of philosophers just seemed like one of those points of hyperbole Deleuze gets into from time to time. I now think about it differently after reading Kletenik's book, which has transformed my understanding of Spinoza. 

I am struck by Kletenik's ability to wrest Spinoza's insights from his own limitations, finding a critique of heterosexism and racism, in a philosopher who was subject to his own imaginations of patriarchy and colonialism, while at the same time her criticism that such a transformation, a wresting from particularity, might be the inaugural gesture of philosophical anti-Judaism. I am not saying that these are the same, but it raises the question as to how some ideas reflect and reinforce existing hierarchies and some break free. It also raises the question of how to drawn the line between what of any philosopher's work is inadequate, a passive reflection of its own forces and hierarchies, and adequate, a productive contribution to knowledge. Such an interpretation demands a kind of reading, perhaps a symptomatic one, that can perceive the social forces in the order of ideas. Kletenik makes a direct connection between the order and connection of ideas and social relations, connecting Spinoza and Marx. As she writes, 

"Furthermore, Spinoza is not only affirming that our ways of perceiving reality are socially conditioned but that precisely the perceptions of reality that gain traction are those which reinforces the existing power structures in society, as Marx later enunciates: 'The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas."

And later

"What we think and why we think it, the ideas that become most influential, as Marx reminds us--in a move unmistakably influenced by Spinoza's appendix to part I--are so precisely because they are the ideas of those in power, and the ideas of those in power are such because they serve their interests. It bears emphasizing how this line of inquiry is incoherent by the precepts of Augustinian, Cartesian, 'Western' dualism. Such ruminations are foreclosed by a posture that presumes the mind to transcend its body, to exist in a realm beyond the corporeal. The specks of Jewish immanence that Spinoza absorbs from Maimonides and Gersonides rebuff dissevering of mind from body, confirming all thinking in humans as tethered to a body that exists in time and space. This coincides with the ethical investment that fuels this tradition, its focus on life lived in society, its decidedly political orientation."

Of course I am sympathetic to this Marx/Spinoza connection, even if I think that the relationship between Spinoza's appendix and Marx's thought might be more complex. More importantly, I think that Kletenik's reading of Spinoza, which demonstrates that Spinoza's thought can be dissevered from his limitations of his particular time and place while at the same time showing that the reception of Spinoza still carries with it a motley collection of ancient prejudices, forces us to think both the identity of the order and connection of ideas with the social order and those differences that make change possible. 

 

Mysterious Island

When I was in undergrad at Hampshire College one of my professors, Meredith Michaels would refer to certain books as "worker bee" books. The term was not pejorative. Worker bee books were the books that did the work, traced the development of a philosophers thought, or the connection between different philosophers. They were patient and methodological. They were not the kind of books to be read on a whim, but they were the books that you were very glad existed when you did your research. The work they did laid the foundation for other claims and ideas. Incidentally they were the kind of books that were primarily bought by research libraries, which is to say as we lose research libraries, or as their budgets are cut or put towards online co-learning centers, we are losing some of the basic infrastructure of thought. The worker bees build the hive. 

Melanie Zappula's L'Imitation d'autrui et l'Invention de soi: Le concept d'ingenium chez Spinoza is one such book. As the title suggests its singular focus is on the concept of ingenium, a word that can be translated as spirit, complexion, or temperament. Zappula spends a lot of time talking about precisely what is at stake in all of those various translations, and why Spinoza used this term in particular, especially in the way that it avoided identifying exclusively with the body, as in temperament, or mind, as in spirit. However, the more striking and important thing is the way in which the term is used for Spinoza to refer to both an individual, and a people as being defined by their particular ingenium. As Zappula writes,"The concept of ingenium appears thus as a univocal concept which designates the singular affective complexion of a person or of a people this does not preclude questioning the potential effects of asymmetry."

With respect to the former, that of the individual, Zappula argues that there are four decenterings of the concept of identity.

1) Identity of a person is not substantial since a person is not a substance but a mode

2) the affective identity of a person is not characterized by permanence but by its capacity to integrate changes

3) identity of the self is not characterized by opposition with another, but by difference with an other and the integration of these differences, as is demonstrated by the imitation of affects of an other.

4) the affective identity of a person is not thought a priori, that is to say independently of its existence, only on the plane of essence, it is made by its existence, which implies that it is not possible to separate essence from existence. 

Every ingenium, every individual, is both singular and relational, which is to say singular because they are defined by their relations, and relational because they are singular.  The word I would use for this is transindividual, Zappula does not go into that word, although she does cite Balibar's writing on it. This is in part because her focus is Spinoza and not the concepts and debates that Spinoza has made possible. However, it is also because she is interested in thinking the asymmetry of these two different senses of ingenium. This brings us to what is in some sense the problem of Spinoza's political and social philosophy. Given that Spinoza also refers to the ingenium of a people, a collective, and not just that of individuals, how are we to think that intersection of the ingenium of a people and the ingenia, plural and different, of the people?

This problem is central to Spinoza's thought, as much as Spinoza writes of the power of a people that is combined to act as if with one mind, he also argues that no one can surrender their right to act and think. Between these two extremes, between the identity of a people and the irreducible identity of people is the entire problem of politics. 

As Zappula argues in Spinoza's political writing, particularly the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, there is the need to adapt politics, the laws, to the ingenium, the character, of the people. This is in some sense Spinoza's explanation for prophecy, which attempts to cater to the imagination and passions of the people. Politics is not entirely powerless when it comes to the ingenium of the people. It is something that can be adapted, transformed,  as well as adapted to. As Spinoza also writes in the TTP about the people of the ancient Hebrew State, whose character, ingenia, were in some sense shaped by discipline and commands that they developed habits of obedience, "[T]o men so habituated to it obedience must have appeared no longer as bondage, but freedom.” 

How do we reconcile these two relations of the ingenium of the people, one in which it is the habits and customs, which are upstream from democracy, something which the state must adapt to and the other in which the institutions of the state produce the very ingenium, the habits they need in order to function. Zappula's answer is to distinguish between two different aspects of the state. It is the laws which must adapt to the existing ingenium of the people, but the laws are not the entirety of politics. The politics which shapes the behaviors and habits of the people is in excess of the law. Of course Spinoza did not clearly articulate what this other to the law is, and this is precisely where words like ingenium, habits, or manners, come into play, to designate that aspect of human life which is not natural, but social. produced in and through relations and institutions. He did not theorize this aspect, but he did give us a striking example in his description of the customs, habits, and practices of the ancient Hebrew state. 

Spinoza did not articulate this because it was barely known by his time, all of these words like ingenium, character, temperament, especially as they are situated at the intersection of the individual and the social, are the words which have now been fleshed out by social and political thought.  Which is not to say that everything about them is known, or that Spinoza's thought about the social nature of the affects might not have something to contribute. Of course he does, but, as is often the case Spinoza's insights, his movement beyond substantial accounts of individuality, to a relational understanding, one that encompasses affects and ideas, bodies and mind, are at the same time hampered by his limits. When it comes to examining the constitution of the imagination and affective constitution of a people Spinoza only had the history of scripture and its interpretation to draw from. Today, we can benefit from the study of the myriad scripts which society produces and reproduces. 

This then is the thesis that I would like to use as a conclusion: the ingenium that politics must necessarily adapt to is produced not just upstream of politics, of the laws and dictates of the state, but outside of it, in the worlds of popular culture, and, most importantly, in the capitalist economy, which shapes so much of our thoughts and desires. That is the short version. The longer version is that the right is much better at mobilizing the affective and imaginary resources of day to day life under capitalism, to make people into at least the fantasy of a people (but that is going to take more than a blogpost to address). 

I just learned this morning that Paolo Virno has died. Virno's work has been a huge influence on both my writing and my teaching. In my class on work we regularly read the chapter "Labor, Work, Intellect" from Grammar of the Multitude for the way it updates both Arendt and Marx for the late twenty-first century. Of all of the post-autonomist turns to the transformations of labor, his is the most engaging. His influence on my writing is even stronger. His investigation of the concept of transindividuality is second only to Balibar's in getting me to write a book about it. What follows is an excerpt from that book. 
As Marx writes, 
Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are the products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge objectified [vergegenständlichte Wissenskraft]. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. 
For Marx the development of this general intellect takes the form of machinery, scientific knowledge, and technology. Thus, in the same notebook, Marx describes a fundamental transformation in the status of labour power, it ceases to the motive, or even directive force of the productive process, to become merely a conscious organ; ‘it relates more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself.’ Marx’s fragmentary analysis in the notebook envisions a future in which capital, as ‘the moving contradiction’ undoes its own basis, undoing labour as the measure of wealth. The status of this concept of the general intellect, its more or less fragmentary, or even orphaned place in Marx’s writing, as a word or concept more mentioned than developed, has opened the door to multiple attempts to develop its content, filling in either the philosophy, that Marx excluded, or the history that he could not envision. 
Virno offers two correctives to Marx’s projection, two correctives that begin to transform Marx’s picture of a demise of capitalism to the basis for a description of Post-Fordist Production. First, Virno argues that much of what Marx has described has come to pass, knowledge has become a dominant productive force, transforming capitalism, but this has not led to an emancipatory reversal. There has been no reduction of working time, or liberation from wage labour. ‘Labour time is the unit of measurement in use, but no longer the true unit of measurement.’ Second, what Marx failed to grasp, or predict, was the extent to which ‘the general intellect manifests itself as living labour.’ The general knowledge of society is manifest not just in machines, technology from the locomotive to the Internet, but also in living labour, in the diffused knowledge of workers that interact not just with technology, but with increasingly complex social relations. Virno’s correction of Marx encounters the same question of the relation of technology and social relations as Simondon, as much as technology, specifically the machinery of mass industry, forms the basis for thinking about transindividuality, it cannot be reduced to it. It is necessary to also consider the transindividual character of general social knowledge. Virno insists, on a point that will be crucial to his understanding of transindividuality and anthropogenesis, that this knowledge is not the specialized knowledge of scientists, engineers, and web designers, but knowledge as a generic capacity. ‘The general intellect is nothing but the intellect in general.’ This is due to the fact that this knowledge concerns the most fundamental capacities of human existence, such as language and the capacity to learn, but it is also due to the instability and precariousness of the job market. As individuals are shifted from job to job, intellect is defined more and more as the capacity to learn new tasks, new protocols and programs, rather than a set body of knowledge. This can be seen in the increased emphasis, in job training and literature, which focus on professionalism rather than specialization. As Virno writes, 
Specialization is something impersonal, an objective requirement that can be evaluated based on shared parameters. Professionalism on the other hand is seen as a subjective property, a form of know-how inseparable from the individual person; it is a sum of knowledges, experiences, attitudes, and a certain sensibility. Correctly understood, post-Fordist ‘professionality’ does not correspond to any precise profession. It consists rather of certain character traits. 
Professionality is ultimately a manifestation one’s generic capacity to act and relate in the world. While Fordism stressed stability, fixing people to machines and their place in the productive process, Post-Fordism does not stress any particular traits, but the capacity to develop new traits. Thus, moving from the limits and possibilities of Marx’s text, to a general definition, Post-Fordism is understood to be a transformation of both the stability of work, the repetition and habit that constituted its world, and the integration of communication, knowledge, and social relations into the productive process. 
The effects of this transformation are not just limited to insecurity and instability. The entry of the general intellect into the production process transforms the basis of the ‘real abstraction.’ The term ‘real abstraction’ is framed between Marx’s Grundrisse and Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour. In the former Marx argues that the concept of labour, as an abstract general idea, is a practical and effective reality only at a given historical juncture, and due to historical transformations. Labour, labour indifferent to its activity and object, becomes a reality only with the development of capitalism and the technology and social relations that make it flexible and indifferent. While Marx introduced the idea of abstraction becoming a historical and practical reality, Sohn-Rethel developed and deepened this idea, turning not to labour, and abstract labour, but focusing on exchange rather than labour to develop the reality of abstraction. For Sohn-Rethel the true scandal of Marx’s thought, at least in terms of philosophy, is in positing an abstraction that has practice rather than thought as its origin and genesis. The abstraction of exchange value takes place in the practice of the exchange of commodities, not in the consciousness of the actors. Commodity exchange, and with it the whole sphere of value, presupposes an abstraction that is lived more than it is comprehended. Sohn-Rethel’s primary emphasis here is on the practical, which is to say material basis of this abstraction, but it is equally possible to say that this abstraction is transindividual. This could constitute a second scandal, one that confronts not the mental nature of abstraction but the solitary nature. As Sohn-Rethel writes, ‘Nothing that a single commodity-owner might undertake on his own could give rise to this abstraction, no more than a hammock could play its part when attached to one pole only.’ Virno draws ambiguously from both of these sources to argue for a historicization of the real abstraction. The distinction is loosely framed on the distinction between Fordism and post-Fordism, between the productivity of labour as abstract and interchangeable and the productivity of a general social knowledge. This distinction is framed in terms of two different dominant real abstractions, the first, money and the commodity form, abstractions of equivalence, while the second phase of real abstraction is marked by the general intellect. As Virno writes, 
Whereas money, the ‘universal equivalent’ itself incarnates in its independent existence the commensurability of products, jobs, and subjects, the general intellect instead stabilizes the analytic premises of every type of practice. Models of social knowledge do not equate the various activities of labour, but rather present themselves as the ‘immediate forces of production. 
The transformation of the real abstraction is a transformation of the production process, but is not limited to it, extending beyond it to encompass social relations. The real abstractions of Fordism, money and the labour form, stressed equivalence, rendering different types of work interchangeable. It is from this equivalent that the ‘sphere of exchange’ derives its particular liberatory image, the idea of ‘freedom, equality, and Bentham.’ Virno argues, echoing some of the themes of The Communist Manifesto, that this equivalent has an inescapable liberatory dimension, an equivalent that tears ‘asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors.’ Virno follows what is arguably the most celebratory of Marx’s texts, the most willing to recognize the revolutionary dimension of capitalism, in arguing that this equivalence, the fact that the different labours of different individuals, regardless of race, gender, or age, are all part of abstract labour is liberatory or egalitarian. To risk a rough parallel with Balibar, Virno’s figure of the worker and not the citizen is his egalitarian prehistory of the present. Understanding these entails turning to a particular aside of Marx. In the passage on “commodity fetishism” Marx draws a parallel between a society of commodity produces predicated on abstract labour and forms of Christianity such as deism that extol “man in the abstract.” Whereas we previously argued that this ideal of isolated humanity is itself a kind of fetish, a fragmentation and effacement of existing social relations, Virno posits an egalitarian dimension. Capital is on some level indifferent to the categories and definitions that would separate different individuals and their labor. The real abstractions of the wage, commodity, and abstract labour conceal exploitation but espouse equivalence. The change of the general equivalent is then a change of the general set of values and norms underlying capitalism. Whereas the real abstractions of Fordism posited an equivalence between different individuals, the real abstractions of post-Fordism, of the general intellect, stresses the incommensurability of these different forms of knowledge. The abstraction of equivalence is replaced with the radical difference between different productive protocols. The shift from one real abstraction to another is also a shift from in values and ideals. 
For Virno, Post-Fordist labour and the general intellect directly engages and puts to work the transindividual dimensions of existence. Making sense of this claim involves unpacking the specific modality of transindividuality in Virno’s thought. In the Grundrisse, in the same notebooks that detail the general intellect, Marx also coins the term ‘social individual’ as the cornerstone of wealth, produced not only in the workshop, or formal education, but in free time as well. To some extent the very appearance of this phrase begins to suggest that Virno’s second correction is not entirely alien from Marx’s thought, there is already in the notebooks at least a nascent idea of the general intellect as living labour, as a productive activity. However, the appearance of the formulation in the same notebooks as Marx’s depiction of knowledge as a productive force makes it possible to see both of these phenomena as connected. For Marx this connection is to be found in the most advanced period of capitalism that he knows, that of the emerging factory, while for Virno they are best understand to anticipate post-Fordism. Virno says little about the role of transindividuality in cooperation and the labour process in Marx’s analysis of capital, focusing on the shift to post-Fordism. More importantly, this formulation of an individual that is simultaneously ‘individual’ and ‘social’ makes it possible to connect Marx’s thought, with Simondon’s ontology. As Virno writes, defining one by means of the other, ‘Social should be translated as pre-individual, and ‘individual’ should be seen as the ultimate result of the process of individuation.’ 
Virno’s translation of Marx’s terms into Simondon’s underscores the specific way in which he is making sense of the latter’s ontology. Virno argues that the preindividual basis of individuation is made up of three components, sensation and habits, language, and the relations of production. The first of these is identified as natural, the second historico-natural, and the last, the relations of production, is historical. Thus it is possible to understand Virno as dividing the pre-individual between its natural and historical components, splitting the difference between Simondon’s formulation and Stiegler’s interpretation. Of all these terms, the historico-natural is perhaps the most in need of clarification, especially since it becomes increasingly central to Virno’s philosophical anthropology. Language is historico-natural in that it is both the product of a natural capacity, mouth, lips, tongue, brain, but one that can only take its formation at a given historical capacity, as much as nature describes the capacity for language, any given language is the product of history. Virno differentiates these component elements of the preindividual, situating some with nature and others with history, in order to unravel some of the knot that ties nature and culture, materiality and spirit. However, Virno maintains two of Simondon’s fundamental theses, that individuality is never concluded, never finished, it is a process of individuation; and, secondly, that the collective is not the suppression of individuation, but a constitutive element of this process. This collective in which individuals continue the process of individuation, is itself an organization of the preindividual, as the capacity for language becomes a particular language, and the biological possibility of habits are organized in determinate habits and relations. As Virno writes, ‘The collective is the sphere in which the pre-individual becomes the transindividual.’ Most importantly Virno utilizes Simondon to make a central point, about contemporary production and subjectivity, overcoming certain conceptual oppositions between the individual and the collective. To argue that with the general intellect the generic capacities of intelligence, knowledge, and communication come into the centre of the production process is not to argue that human beings, individuals, become interchangeable pseudopods of this generic capacity. What comes to the fore in the contemporary productive process is neither some indifferent generic capacity nor some highly individualized performance, but both at once, it is the transindividual individuation, the intersection between the singular and the common. For Virno this intersection of singular and common proceeds almost unproblematically, eschewing the tension and even anxiety that characterizes Simondon’s understanding of the link between collective and individual individuation. 
Virno shares the same fundamental thesis as Stiegler, a thesis that could be broadly characterized as the assertion that contemporary capitalism intersects with the fundamental aspects of individuation and subjectivity in an unprecedented way. For both Stiegler and Virno, what we are dealing with now is the intersection of political economy and anthropogenesis. For Stiegler this intersection is framed through the tertiary retentions, memories, inscribed in signs, tools, and stories that define humanity. As consumer capitalism turned towards these inscriptions, commodifying them through the culture industry, it commodified the defining characteristic of humanity, the inheritance of transindividual individuations. Both Stiegler and Virno understand humanity to be defined by a particular lack of instinctual determination, but while Stiegler stresses the creation and inheritance of a specifically human memory of grammatization, defined by tools and traces, Virno, drawing from Gehlen, argues more forcefully for this indetermination being the defining characteristic of humanity. ‘In terms of morphology, man is, in contrast to all other higher mammals, primarily characterized by deficiencies, which, in an exact, biological sense, qualify as lack of adaptation, lack of specialization, primitive states, and failure to develop, and which are essentially negative features.’ Human beings lack specialization, the instincts and aptitudes that define the animal kingdom, and in their place have a drawn out, perhaps even lifelong practice of learning and forming habits. This lack of determination, the openness to the world, can also be understood as the preindividual basis for individuation. Mankind’s nature, the capacities for language and habits, does not constitute a basis for an individual or collective identity, only the potential for different individuations. The deficiency of instinctual determination is the potential for new habits and languages, for individuation of collectives and groups. 
This lack of specialization, of individuation, is the condition for all history, which is why Virno describes language, habits, and fashion as historico-natural: they are natural in that each depend on natural capacities and deficiencies, the biological capacity for language or the deficiencies of instinct that make habits possible, and are historical in that the specific nature of this language or that cultural habit can only be defined by their history. This is true of all history, every specific language, cultural habit, and fashion is a specific actualization of these potentials, a particular compensation for these deficiencies. What defines the present mode of production, however, is that it is not just an actualization of this potential, but the potential itself becoming productive. ‘Human nature returns to the centre of attention not because we are finally dealing with biology rather than history, but because the biological prerogatives of the human animal have required undeniable historical relevance in the contemporary productive process.’ Post-Fordist labour, the labour of the general intellect, does not simply exploit particular habits, particular languages, particular cultural dimensions, but the capacity for acquiring new habits and new languages. The generic capacities of the species, rather than their specific manifestations, are directly put to work. 



Virno’s formulation of the increasing centrality of the natural, or historical natural, aspects of transindividuality, the putting to work of the generic capacity rather than specific instantiations of language, habits, and comportments, takes up a different formulation from the Communist Manifesto than the generalized proletarianization developed by Stiegler. In the that text Marx famously argued that with capitalism the various religious and political veils of exploitation are stripped bare, and humankind is confronted with ‘naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.’ Coupled with Marx’s remarks about the destruction of ‘motley feudal ties’ and limited national consciousness and literatures, it is possible to understand Marx as arguing for what Badiou called ‘the desacralization of the social bond.’ The naked nature of capitalist exploitation, the constant need for new markets, new commodities, exposes the contingency of any limited and restricted social relations. Virno extends this idea, arguing that it is not just the artificiality of any social that comes to light, but the ‘congenital potentiality of the human animal’ that takes on a particular actuality. Capital, by ceasesly transforming natural orders and undermining ‘natural superiors,’ exposes the contingency of every social order. This potential, the potential to take on new habits, languages, and comportments, to be individuated differently according to preindividual elements and different transindividuations, was always at work in different historical periods and modes of production, only now it comes directly to light in the flux and contingency of the capitalist production process. While the real abstractions of the wage and commodity form extended the potentially liberartory ideal of abstract humanity, the real abstraction of the general intellect extends a different liberation, one less dependent a generic figure than the possibility of generalized transformative work. There is, however, an ambiguity to this actualization; primarily Virno suggests that the particular manifestation of mankind’s generic capacities as labour power could lead to a dramatic revitization of political action, but there is also the possiblity that the capitalist exploitation of transindividuality will be seen not just as the exposure of this potential but its realization. The stripping away of the various halos, religious and otherwise, could be understood not as the exposure of the contingency of any social order, but as the realization of a the true natural basis of every social order, one based on labor and competition. As Virno states above, the historical becoming of mankind’s biological existence, a biological existence that is nothing other than preindividual capacity to individuate cannot be understood as the ultimate realization of nature itself. The current phase of capitalism is often justified as being nothing other than the pure imposition of natural necessity, of mankind’s fundamental tendency to compete the secret of all human history. It is impossible to aknowledge capitalism tendency to strip bare all other social orders, denaturalizing their various codes and structures, without struggling with its tendency to present itself as the truth of all social systems, as the exploitaiton or competition that has always existed, stripped bare. This is Virno’s explanation of Jamesons’s assertion, ‘It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.’ 
Stiegler and Virno difference in terms of how they read The Communist Manifesto, the former stressing proletarianization, the later stressing the relentless transformation of social relations, underscores a deeper difference in how they understand the intersection between capitalism and anthropogenesis. Stiegler argued that the intersection was primarily framed through consumption, specifically the consumption of the culture industry in which the media of film, television, and the internet fundamentally transformed the tertiary retentions that formed the basis of transindividuation, while Virno argues that this shift is primarily through production, through the new productive processes of post-Fordism. This shift can be seen in how they situate their analysis with respect to Horkheimer and Adorno’s seminal analysis of the culture industry. Stiegler argues that this analysis needs to be deepened and radicalized, the schema that constituted the generic characters and predictable plots of the culture industry needs to be extended to schematization, the synchronization of thought that constitutes temporal objects. In contrast to this, Virno argues that what defines and delimits Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of the culture industry is its Fordist dimension, the ‘spiritual production’ of movies, television, and music were subject to the same overarching logic of the assembly line, a logic that stressed mass production and standardization. Much of Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument hinges on this crucial point, that the products of culture in order to be profitable must appeal to the widest possible audience, reducing everyone to that audience. As Adorno writes, 
‘The pre-digested quality of the product prevails, justifies itself and establishes itself all the more firmly in so far as it constantly refers to those who cannot digest anything not already pre-digested. It is baby-food: permanent self-reflection based upon the infantile compulsion towards the repetition of needs which it creates in the first place.’ 
Virno’s argument is not just that this period of standardization has been surpassed, hundreds of channels and millions of webpages replacing the old standardization of ‘A’ and ‘B’ pictures, making possible a culture industry of differentiation rather than standardization, but that the transition to post-Fordism must be understand as fundamental shift in the role of the culture industry. The culture industry does not just produce consumer goods, entertainment and distraction; it is no longer situated at the relative periphery of the economy, placating and disciplining a largely industrial base, but is central. As Virno argues, 
The culture industry produces (regenerates, experiments with) communicative procedures, which are then destined to function also as means of production in the more traditional sectors of our contemporary economy. This is the role of the communication industry, once post-Fordism has become fully entrenched: an industry of the means of communication. 
For Virno the culture industry must be considered an industry not just in the sense that it continues and perpetuates the ‘proletarianization’ of production into consumption, replacing the basic and fundamental know how with standardized experiences and commodities, but in that it produces the ‘means of production’ of other industries, it produces the capacity to communicate, the knowledge and sensibilities, necessary for production itself. As Marx argued, and Virno repeats, the ‘social individual,’ the knowledge that becomes part of the production process is often produced outside of it, in ‘free time.’ As Marx writes, 
Free time—which is both idle time and time for higher activity—has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and at the same time, practice [Ausübung], experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society. The consequence of this is that the very activities that were defined in opposition to work, have now been rendered productive. Virno cites Heidegger’s two famous characterizations of ‘inauthentic life,’ ‘idle talk’ and ‘curiosity,’ framing them less in terms of authenticity and inauthenticity than in terms of their understated sociological content. The groundlessness of ‘Idle talk’ and ‘curiosity’ is defined less in terms of their fundamental opposition with authentic existence, than their opposition to production. It is precisely this that has changed with the integration of communication and knowledge in the production process. ‘Idle talk,’ which is nothing less than the capacity of language to constitute its own ground, for speaking about nothing to become its own something, ‘Things are so because one says so’ and curiosity, the search of novelty for novelty sake become productive paradigms in the age of post-Fordist production. It is precisely such groundless, or self-grounding language, and persistent search for novelty that is put to work by contemporary Post-Fordist techniques of marketing and production. As Virno writes, ‘Rather than operating only after the workday, idle talk and curiosity have built their own offices.’ Marketing could not exist without idle talk, and curiosity, without statements becoming their own basis and the ceaseless desire for the new. It is not just the technologies of the culture industry, the screens and computer interfaces that have migrated into the production process, but the sensibilities and capacities: the attitudes and comportments that were defined by their independence from work have become part of it. 
What is at stake in the transition to Post-Fordism is a breakdown of not only the division between consumption and production but the much more classical division of human existence into labour, action, and thought. This division, which has its roots in Aristotle, but was famously revived by Hannah Arendt in the middle of the last century, posited labour as instrumental, dominated by the categories of means and ends, and action, determined by the categories of plurality and unpredictability. (Arendt’s distinction was three-part division, a distinction between the cyclical nature of labour, caught up in the biological process of life, the instrumentality of work, and the uncertainty and plurality of action, but Virno focuses on just the distinction between the two). Arendt’s analysis of the distinction is framed in terms of seeing the eventual displacement of action by work (and labour) as instrumentality and a concern for the necessities of existence enters into the public sphere. Virno argues that the opposite has taken place; it is not that action has become work, but work, the productive sphere, has increasingly adopted the characteristics of action. As Virno writes, 
I maintain that it is in the world of contemporary labour that we find the ‘being in the presence of others,’ the relationship with the presence of others, the beginning of new processes, and the constitutive familiarity with contingency, the unforeseen, and the possible. I maintain the post-Fordist, the productive labour of surplus, subordinate labour, brings into play the talents and qualifications which, according to a secular tradition, had more to do with political action.
Arendt’s critique, like that of Horkheimer and Adorno remained in a Fordist paradigm, understanding the intersection between work and politics, to be dominated by mass production, instrumentalization, and standardization. Work, homo faber, posed a problem to politics because it risked carrying over the instrumentality, teleology, and necessity into the relam of politics. Arendt’s concern was that politics would become a factory. In contrast to this, the post-Fordist present presents us with a different intersection in which the plurality, contingency, and plurality that defines action has been put to work, becoming the source of production and profit. For Virno the critiques of the attitudes, sensibilities, and ethics of the mid-twentieth century have to be fundamentally revised given the shifts in the contemporary relations of production, shifts that have brought what were once the marginal dimensions of cultural production to the centre. 
Despite the fact that Virno reverses Arendt’s central idea regarding work and action, or argues that the history itself has reversed her analysis, he holds onto and in fact extends one of the central terms of her criticism, that the scrambling of the division between work and action also undermines the division between public and private. For Arendt this distinction dissipated in the rise of what she termed ‘the social,’ as what used to be considered private, the economy, increasingly comes to dominate the tasks of the state. Virno, drawing from the idea of transindividuality, understands this transformation differently; it is less a matter of the private entering into politics (as Marx argued the politics of the state have always served class interests) but of recognizing the profound transformations of both public and private, as intellect becomes a productive force. As we saw in the first chapter, transindividuality as a concept cuts across divisions of individual and society, public and private, arguing for their constitutive intertwining. With the rise of the culture industry and the productive nature of the general intellect, this intertwining becomes uncanny: there is something public, common, in every thought, and something private, intimate, in every new product of the culture industry. It might be possible to say, preserving the classical schema of Arendt’s thought, a schema derived from Aristotle, that for Virno the central issue is neither work (poeisis) nor action (praxis) but the becoming public of intellect. However, public takes on a strange, even ambivalent signification here, encompassing both the public as exposure to other, which is to say relational, dimension of the productive process and the public as it is traditionally understood, as a political process. This ambivalence of the term reflects and indicates the ambivalence of the current historical moment. These two points, the reversal of the relation of work to action, and the ambiguity of the dissolve of the public and private are related. The inclusion of communication, interaction, and relation into the productive process, produces an odd reversal. People are more political, more interactive, communicative, in the realm of production, a realm considered private by definition, than they are in the political realm. In the hidden abode of production they interact, talk, and communicate, while in the political sphere they pull a lever to vote, the public sphere of democratic politics is constrained to Fordist technologies of communication and relation. The public can have any candidate they want, so far as it is from one of the established parties. The ambivalence of the public stems from this fundamental contradiction. As Virno writes, 
When the fundamental abilities of the human being (thought, language, self-reflection, the capacity for learning) come to the forefront, the situation can take on a disquieting and oppressive appearance; or it can even give way to a non-governmental public sphere, far from the myths and rituals of sovereignty. 
As it stands ‘publicness’ exists in the private sphere under the rule of capital, where it is subject to hierarchy and domination of exploitation, and in the turn the ossified official public sphere, the sphere of political decision and action.

Thus, to return to the contradiction Marx glimpsed between exchange and production as two different individuations, it is no longer a matter of the isolated subject of freedom, equality, and Bentham in the sphere of exchange contrasted with the cooperative power of species being in the hidden sphere of production, or of the anarchy of competition against the discipline of production, but between what could be called a public sphere without publicness, a politics governed by mechanical and disciplinary manners of counting votes and amassing responses to surveys, and what Virno calls ‘publicness without a public sphere,’ the economic exploitation of the general intellect. The former refers to the ossified structures of representational democracy, which exclude the very public that they claim to represent. The later is what happens when publicness, the powers of knowledge, communication, and relation are developed, made productive, but denied any political transformative power, subject entirely to the rule of profit. Virno argues that this rule takes the form of hierarchies and subordinations that are increasingly personal, personal because they encompass not just labour power, understood as the capacity to work, but the capacity to communicate and relate. ‘Nobody is as poor as those who see their own relation to the presence of others, that is to say, their own communicative faculty, their own possession of a language, reduced to wage labour.’ There is thus a double alienation, a loss of a world in that this capacity cannot become public, but also a fundamental alienation from the conditions of one’s own communicative activity, an alienation from the preindividual relations that are constitutive of individuation. Virno’s redefinition of alienation as an alienation from the preindividual, or rather from the constitutive relation to the preindividual, that which conditions without being conditioned is the closest his analysis of post-Fordist transindividuality comes to Stiegler’s critique of the proletarianization of subjectivity. 
 It is possible to understand Virno as radicalizing and extending Marx’s critique of the split between the political sphere and the economy, an extension that perhaps benefits from Antonio Negri’s analysis, which sees the true generative force of social relations to be in the process of production, in living labour. It is not, however, a matter of opposing the egotistical subject of civil society with the cooperative force of living labour, but of recognizing that the very qualities of political action, communication, contingency, and relations, already exist within the post-Fordist labour process. However, it is crucial not to over emphasize the ‘prefigurative’ dimension of this possibility, presenting it as communism residing in the hidden abode of production. Marx’s own analysis is useful here, as much as Marx recognized the cooperative dimension of species being he argued that in capitalism it was something that could only appear as an attribute of capital itself. As Marx writes, 
This entire development of the productive forces of socialized labour (in contrast to the more or less isolated labour of individuals), and together with it the uses of science (the general product of social development), in the immediate process of production, takes the form [stellt sich dar] of the productive power of capital. It does not appear as the productive power of labour, or even of that part of it that is identical with capital. And least of all does it appear as the productive power either of the individual workers or of the workers joined together in the process of production. 
Virno follows this analysis, extending the term fetishism to encompass precisely this process by which characteristics that belong to the human mind, ‘sociality, capacity for abstraction and communication, etc.,’ are assigned to a thing, such as money. Virno’s redefinition of the fetish is in line with Marx’s observation that the capital appears to be more productive as cooperation and knowledge become a productive force. The idea that cooperation increasingly takes the form of the form of capital itself, that capital becomes the fetish, offers much for thinking about capitalist sociality, a sociality defined by the paradoxes of ‘gregarious isolation.’ However, it still leaves the sense that there is a cooperative kernel underneath the mystical shell, as if it were possible to simply dispense with this appearance of capital to arrive at the cooperative relations within. 
 As we saw with Marx’s analysis in Capital, as much as it was possible to locate a cooperative dimension, the cooperative possibilities of species activity, in the production process, this cooperative dimension was still subject to exploitation, the effects of which lead to a despotism over the productive process. Virno marks a similar ambivalence over the productive cooperation of the general intellect, but it is framed in different terms consistent with the fragmentation of the factory space and factory discipline in the contemporary production process. As much as the flexibility, communication, and cooperative dimension of post-Fordist labour constitute the possibility for a realization for democratic forms of political action, denied in the formal spheres of representation and participation, Virno argues that the predominate forms that this cooperation takes is cynicism and opportunism. The materialist basis for this cynicism is given in the transformation of the real abstraction, the shift from the abstractions of the equivalent to the abstractions of the contingent and incommensurable. The absence of any common reference, any common rule, between different protocols, paradigms, and forms of knowledge, as workers go from client to client, and job to job, each with their own rules and paradigms, constitutes the materialist basis for an indifference to the very idea of common rules. If cynicism is a subjective response to the incommensurability of different tasks and different jobs, then opportunism is the response to their instability. Post-Fordism has dispensed with the long-term labour contract, and with it the ethical values of deferred gratification, dependability, and commitment. In its place it has created the values of networking, flexibility, and manoeuvrability. Opportunism is a response to this transformation, and to the breakdown of any division between personal relations and economic relations, it is social relations as universal networking. The exploitation of the general intellect does not stand above it, as a division between cooperation and command in the Fordist labour process, but penetrates into its deepest recesses transforming its basic components into opportunism and cynicism. Cynicism is quite simply the tendency to see the current relations, with their differing and changing rules and habits, as all there is. It is the tendency to accept the given and shifting terms of power without worrying about their ground.
In an interview Virno illustrates the ambivalent nature of the social individuality, the simultaneous emergence of the transindividual nature of subjectivity and social relations and its control by commodification, by drawing on several terms from the Marxist tradition. As Virno states, 
 Reification is what I call the process through which preindividual reality becomes an external thing, a res that appears as a manifest phenomenon, a set of public institutions. By alienation I understand the situation in which the preindividual remains an internal component of the subject but one that the subject is unable to command. The preindividual reality that remains implicit, like a presupposition that conditions us but that we are unable to grasp, is alienated. 
 Virno is close to Stiegler on two points here. First, in giving a somewhat positive dimension to reification, in which the externalization of the preindividual in the things, structures, and institutions, is the condition of the becoming public of the preindividual. Virno’s revalorization of reification is surprising given its long history in Marx, but is consistent with both his understanding of the general intellect as both technology and subjectivity as well as his understanding of public as a constituent plurality. Although, even this positive dimension of reification is undercut somewhat by Virno’s redefinition of the Marxist concept of fetishism in the same interview, a redefinition that paradoxically encompasses what is general considered to be reification, the transformation of activity into a thing. As Virno states, ‘Fetishism means assigning to something—for example to money—characteristics that belong to the human mind (sociality, capacity for abstraction and communication, etc.)’ Taken together these two redefinitions of Marxist terms through Simondon’s concepts reflect the fundamental ambiguity of exteriorization, or grammatization, in which the inscription or recording of the preindividual in technologies or machines, both reveals and obscures its collective power. Virno, however, further develops the negative dimension of this exteriority be redefining alienation as a ‘preindividual’ that remains implicit but unable to grasp. This is the closest Virno comes to Stiegler in that this redefinition of alienation could be considered another way of representing what the latter calls proletarianization, the machines and commodities which condition the preindividual but cannot be modified or transformed. 
 In sharp contrast to Stiegler, who sees in the intersection between transindividual individuation and capital only the dissolution of any the constitution of the collective and the individual, Virno sees the constitution of a new collectivity and new individuality, a social individual and multitude, in the contemporary process of production, even if this social individual is currently only a possibility lingering in an abode of production which remains hidden—not by the factory doors but by the fetish of capital and money. To the extent that the dynamic and transformative potential of transindividuality appears, it appears as the power of capital. The fundamental ambivalence of this situation, as simultaneously liberating and oppressive is encapsulated by the role of the public. As Virno writes, 
 When the fundamental abilities of the human being (thought, language, self-reflection, the capacity for learning) come to the forefront, the situation can take on a disquieting and oppressive appearance; or it can even give way to a non-governmental public sphere, far from the myths and rituals of sovereignty. 
 What could be called ‘actual existing’ transindividuation, the domination of the productive powers of transindividuality under the rule of capital and postfordist exploitation, is the disquieting and oppressive appearance, but this appearance has to continually be judged against the possibility of a new public, one far from the state or capital.

 The following is the text from a presentation at the Radical Philosophy Hour. It also takes up a question that I posted about years ago. 

Let us begin with a statement that will function as something of an axiom for what follows: politics, political conflict, political communities, and political identity, have as much to do with affects as they do with ideas, principles, and values. However, it is equally necessary to follow this axiom with a problem, and that is that such a claim for the affective constitution of the political, is more or less doubled now by a sort of affective reduction of the political. What I mean by this is the tendency to speak about politics, to frame politics, as if it is entirely a matter of affects of love and hate. This is not new, but I would argue that it has been intensifying in political discourse. I remember in 2015, Rudy Giuliani declaring that his fundamental worry about Obama, now well into his second term, was that he was not sure that he loved America. Moving closer to the present, Donald Trump regularly characterizes his various enemies, from the Democratic Party to Stephen Colbert, as simply those who hate him and hate America, reducing all politics to a matter of emotions. At his speech to the Claremont Institute in July, JD Vance offered the strongest statement of this sort of affective reduction when he gave the following argument about what unifies the left. As Vance States,
"What unites Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and big pharma lobbyists, it isn’t the ideas of Thomas Jefferson or even of Karl Marx. It’s hatred. They hate the people in this room. They hate the President of the United States. And most of all, they hate the people who voted for that President of the United States in the last election in November. This is the animating principle of the American far left."
Vance’s formulation reads as a kind of twist on Spinoza’s formulation of a group united by a common affect. It is in some sense a reduction of politics to affects. Vance argues that this common hatred is the only way to make sense of the contradictory tendencies of the left, as a group which advocates for religious liberty, even when the religions in question, especially Islam are supposed to be intolerant; supposedly hates capitalism while being made up of billionaires, and is opposed to racism, but is mostly white. Vance’s list of contradictions in some sense represents an unwillingness to understand some of the basic problems of liberalism, which has constantly struggled with the question of tolerance and its limits. His other contradictions, that of billionaires against capitalism and white people against racism, can be understood as either symptoms of the paradoxical decline of progressivism to an elite position, or, more generously, as symptoms to the way in which political ideals stand out as strange exceptions in a political terrain dominated by interest rather than ideals. I am less interested in other explanations for this formulation, however, than the way in Vance’s articulation of a politics of hatred has becomes something of a talking point of the Trump administration. Just a few weeks ago Mike Johnson labelled the “No Kings” protest against the Trump administration on October Eighteenth as the “Hate America” rally. What could be discussed in terms of principles, and ideals, the limitations to government, the power of the presidency, is reduced to a simple affect, to hate.
Taken together the abstract formulation and the current situation constitutes something of a problem, if not a provocation. How is it possible to not only distinguish the affective constitution of politics from its reduction to affects, to emotions, but to use the former to make sense of the latter, to understand how politics is reduced to emotions, in other words, to understand the politics of the reduction of politics to affect we have to understand more about the politics of affect. If one wanted a textual source which functions as something of the beginning, or at least a starting point, we could start with Spinoza’s Political Treatise. In that text Spinoza writes the following: 
Since men, as we have said, are led more by passion than by reason, it naturally follows that a people will unite and consent to be guided as if by one mind not at reason’s prompting but through some common emotion, such as a common hope, or common fear, or desire to avenge some common injury.
 For Spinoza emotion, or more properly, affect is the common basis for the multitude because the capacity to be affected is the general condition of humanity. It is thus more immediately and readily available as the basis for commonallity than a common idea or representation. Spinoza’s claim has been developed by such thinkers as Frédéric Lordon, Chantal Jaquet, and Yves Citton, who, in different ways, have all claimed for the affective organization of politics. As Lordon argues, picking up from Spinoza, “it is through self-affecting, which produces a common affect, that the multitude constitutes itself into a coherent unity, which is to say into a political formation rather than a disparate collection of individuals.” The emphasis on self-affecting is central to Lordon’s claim. Spinoza’s geometry of the affects demonstrate how an affect can become stronger the more that is reinforced by others, we feel things more intensely if we perceive others feel them as well. It is easier to love what others love, to hate what others hate, this is the imitation of affect. This imitation of affect becomes even more intense as we begin to feel that it is not just specific others that feel the same way, but others in general, when a particular affective valorization is seen as something universally shared. It is at this point that an affect takes on added dimension, it no longer seems to be self-affection or even based on relations with others but appears to come from above, it is a command. This is what Lordon (along with Citton) term “immanent transcendence,” the way in which every individual, and every social relation, produces its own sense of transcendence in the feeling that certain loves and hatreds, certain desires and fears, are not just its desires, alone, but constitute a common world. What Spinoza defined as a common affect, a common way of feeling, necessarily comes with a hierarchy, a hierarchy that is all the more effective in that it is concealed. As Lordon writes, “what in fact comes from the bottom is perceived and imagined as having all of the attributes of coming from the top: vertical authority, affective community, and incommensurable power.” Spinoza argued that the polis, the political body, is necessarily defined by a common affect, to which Lordon adds that such a common affect is paradoxically produced by the immanent relations of imitation but perceived as a transcendent command. Understood this way, the affective constitution of politics begins long before a political leader starts talking about “hate” or even “love.” 
There is a micro-politics of affects. This micropolitics begins in the way in which various objects, various activities, have an affective dimension as objects of common love and hatred. To live in a community is to live within its values, which form the vectors of desire. As Lordon writes with Sandra Lucbert,
 “From where do we get our orientations of desire if not from the objects themselves? From other human desires. Either we imitate (or counter-imitate) them directly, or we submit to the social verdicts of desirability (but this is another, mediated form of imitation), says Spinoza. Or again, under the guidance of our imagination, we are busy finding what will satisfy our Other (our Others), says Lacan—and the two paths, here, are much more complementary than contradictory.” 
In some sense these vectors are the basis of how a community constitutes itself, and identifies itself, it is made not just by common affects, which is another way of saying a common set of objects considered to be desirable as well as those considered to be undesirable. Here we are reminded of the consideration that Spinoza gave to traditions, include traditions of diet and even hairstyle in the constitution of a people in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. A constitution of affects is also a symbolic order. Lordon and Lucbert refer to this order as a hegemony. 



How are we to understand the relationship between this micro-politics of affect, the structuring and orientation of affect that makes up a hegemony, and this reduction of every political position to one of affects? In some sense we could say that the political rhetoric merely grounds itself on the existing organization of affects. Reproducing in rhetoric what already exists in practice. Invocations of mom and apple pie in political speeches repeat and reinforce what already is produced at the level of affects. However, that they need to be reinforced already suggests that they are not given. Spinoza argued that in some sense a political order founded only on the common affects and common desires is fundamentally unstable. Common affects, common loves and hatreds, come up against the limit of individual differences of inclination and orientation. Invocations of the love of mom and apple pie as the basis for a social order means something very different to someone who had a difficult relationship with their mother or just does not care for apple pie. These deviations are irreducible, and unavoidable, but they are also fairly inconsequential. The real threat is that they cease to be individual deviations from the norm, and take on their own collective power, constituting a new body within the body politic. As Lordon and Lucbert write, “That the symbolic has a politics has for its immediate corollary that it has a history: history of its contestations—and their displacements of the frontier lines.” The symbolic is both historical and political because it is not natural. As Lordon argues, there is a fundamental anarchy underlying any system of social values. Everything that exists affects everything that exists in multiple ways. There is thus no reason that why this or that object or thing could or should be valued in such a way. A society could just as easily pick another pie, or even cake, for its image of a common image of desire, or, another organization of the family for its object of love. Perhaps more to the point, the institutions that make up society, this or that organization of the family, this or that religion, and this or that economic order, have no basis other than their constant reinforcement. Things could always be otherwise. On this point Lordon and Lucbert come close to an earlier generations turn to Spinoza, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, despite their opposition with respect to other points: Deleuze and Guattari argued that all societies are in some sense haunted by the prospect of the anarchy of desire, the possibility that the existing values and norms, what they call codes, could be undone. The historical and contingent nature of any existing affective hegemony perpetually haunts it, especially as these deviations risk becoming more than the localized deviations of this or that individual and become the organization of collective revaluations. 

This allows to say two things about the reduction of politics to its affective dimension, the reduction of political orientations to the simple opposition of love and hatred. The accusation or projection of hatred, the claim that one’s opponents have everything that should be loved, is an attempt to do two things at once. It is first of all an attempt to present one’s opponents as not just those who have a different vision of society, different goals, and different ideals, but as someone who desires differently, is fundamentally alien. It is surprising to hear leaders still call their opponents Marxists and communists, decades after the end of the cold war, but there is a fundamental shift in the use of this term: communists are no longer agents of an enemy state but individuals with a fundamentally different sensibility and different affective orientation. It is, as Richard Seymour argues, an anti-communism without communism, in which communism is a floating signifier attached to anything that would contest the existing hegemony of affects. Which is why we often hear the term “communism” combined with “crazy”: communism is no longer the name for a different economic organization of society but the name for a different orientation of the affects, someone who hates “America” first and foremost. Although lately the name of this affective outside has shifted from Marxists to “Antifa,” a term all the more useful in that it is detached from any referent, or known history. It is the affective outside to all that should be loved and venerated. 
It is worth remembering that for Spinoza an affect is in some sense at the lowest order of knowledge. When we are affected by something we perceive something of the body affecting us, and something of our own body, but in a confused way that intermingles both. To relate this back to the current moment, fears, such as a fear of crime, or immigration, are as much reflections of a body which tends to find fear in everything, than they are reflections of the world. It is worth remembering Spinoza's basic anthropological orientation that "we are born conscious of our desires but ignorant of the cause of things." This ignorance includes our own affects, our own most intimate fears, which in their immediacy appear so natural so given, obscuring the conditions of their production. This is particularly true of fear, it is at once so immediate, part of our sense of survival, but mediated. This is particularly true of the fear of crime, which benefits from "if it bleeds it leads" news coverage and police procedurals that have more murders in a season than a year in a city. Affects are an unavoidable dimension of individual and collective life, but this does not mean that they are the only way to make sense or inhabit the world. Transforming our affects is also a matter of transforming our understanding. 
This brings us to the second dimension, the reduction of politics to affective terms is also meant to shore up the existing hegemony of affects, compel allegiance, but it does so negatively. As we have seen such rhetoric speaks more of hate, than of love, or, to be more precise, it posits itself as a kind of counter-hatred. It demands that we hate the haters, hate those who hate America, hate the President. What is positive, or affirmative, is only given in and through a reaction. A negation of a negation is, however, is not the same as an affirmation, it always remains tinged by the sad affect which shapes it. As Spinoza writes, “The joy which arises from our imagining that a thing we hate is destroyed, or affected with some other evil, does not occur without some sadness of mind.” There are limits to a hegemony which is organized around a counter hatred. It cannot separate itself from the sad affects that are at its origin. This is not the most important limitation to a rhetoric aimed against the haters. The affective hegemony of society works all the more effectively when it appears to be automatic, when the associations and values are produced in such a way as to efface the very conditions of their production. The reason that “money occupies the mind of the multitude more than anything else,” according to Spinoza, is that it has been attached to not only every possible thing we desire, as the means of realizing all of our wishes, but also because it is immediately recognized by others as an object of desire. Our entire life has been an education in the desire for money. This organization of desire is all the more effective in the way it is reinforced by various practices. No one says, “you should love money,” or more to the point, “hate those who hate money.” If they do it is only as an afterthought to any constituted affective organization. 
What I have referred to as the affective reduction of politics, the positing of all political distinctions in terms of hatred and love, is not only a reduction of what we used to think of as politics, the defense of positions based on arguments and ideas about the best way to live, to an affective core, it is also in some sense a crisis of the very affective organization of society. The proclamation demanding one hate the haters is itself a symptom of an affective order that is already in crisis. To give one example, to say that one should hate those who hate capitalism, is to already admit that capitalism is no longer holding hegemony over the affects in a way that it perhaps has in the past or should. The affective order works the best when it is given as the common backdrop of life, not when it is called upon and invoked as a cause or demand. This seems to me where we are now caught in these two trajectories, in a moment where affects dominant our sense of politics, displacing ideas, ideals, and programs, but this domination is at the same time a crisis of the affective order. The hegemony of affect as the language of politics obscures the crisis of the affective hegemony. People are not loving the right things, capitalism, the nation, heterosexuality, all those things that were posited as unproblematic and automatic objects of desire for us spiritual automatons, have instead become things that need to be defended from the specter of their haters. The centrality of the language of affect obscures to what extent we are living through a crisis of affect. The final question then is what this means for a politics of transformation. It seems that any such politics would be stuck with the task of contradictory tasks of both expanding the affective dealignment from the existing order while simultaneously expanding our way of making sense of politics beyond the affective dimension.
The entire video of the panel, with my presentation and Delia Popa's, can be found here. 

I had the opportunity to respond to Jacques Lezra's book Defective Institutions: A Protocol for the Republic at SPEP's virtual conference this year.  There is much to talk about in the book, but I decided to focus on his discussion of the police, partly because it allowed me to stitch together some thoughts about the police in the current political moment. My remarks are below.
There is a consensus of sorts about the police that is all the more striking in that it can be found across different and divergent theoretical perspectives. This view is that the police only appear are only necessary when the generally established rule or order is in crisis. The very appearance of the police is in some sense a failure of authority, consensus, or hegemony. In using these different terms, authority, consensus, or hegemony, I have drawn from very different political traditions and ideas on how political order functions and what it is, is it by definition legitimate, a consensus of individuals, or is it to some extent a distortion or manipulation, as in the case of hegemony. To focus on the two examples cited by Jacques Lezra, in Defective Institutions, examples which have very little in common in terms of their politics, philosophies, or ontologies, Hannah Arendt and Louis Althusser. Hannah Arendt argues that violence must be distinguished from authority, that violence, that of the police or otherwise is itself a crisis in authority. Althusser, in his famous essay on Ideology makes a similar point. As Althusser writes, “the subjects 'work', they 'work by themselves' in the vast majority of cases, with the exception of the 'bad subjects' who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (Repressive) State Apparatus. But the vast majority of (good) subjects work all right 'all by themselves', i.e. by ideology (whose concrete forms are realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses).” This does not mean to suggest that Arendt and Althusser agree on anything more than this point. There is a world of difference between authority and ideology as different figures of noncoercive rule. The first is to some extent legitimate, or at least can be, there is such a thing as just authority, while ideology is an imaginary relation, a kind of constitutive illusion. Nonetheless these are to some extent both ways of posing a distinction, perhaps the oldest distinction in political thought between violence and what is the other of violence, what other form of rule exists. These are differences in terms of what is considered to be opposed to violence, but they are both clear that something else, some other way of constituting subjects is what is in effect for most of the time. Violence, the police only come into play in those moments of crisis, or for those bad subjects who exist outside of the interpellation of ideology. 
I am leaving aside for the moment that when it comes to the latter, to Althusser’s essay, the police function as one particular example of both the Repressive State Apparatus, listed along with the military and other forms of organized violence, and as the example of ideological interpellation. Anyone who has read the essay remembers the example of the police and their call “hey you!” which as Althusser reminds us, always reaches the right person. That the police are on both sides of the division, as both violence and ideology, perhaps indicates to what extent this division has always been tenuous, and increasingly so. There are different figures to draw from when it comes to this distinction between force and violence, Althusser draws from. In Machiavelli the split underlying violence and reason is framed almost mythically between animal and man. A ruler must know how to rule as a human, through reason and laws, and as an animal. The animal, however, is split into two, between the fox and the lion. Both qualities are necessary, “…for the lion does not know how to avoid traps and the fox is easily overpowered by wolves. So you must be like a fox when it comes to suspecting a trap, and a lion when it comes to making the wolves turn tail.” In Althusser’s schema the lion becomes the Repressive State Apparatus and the fox becomes the Ideological State Apparatus, although for Althusser the latter is less about avoiding traps than in creating one, in constituting ideology. Althusser connects the fox, the deception, with one of the major points of Machiavelli’s advice for any future prince, that one must appear to be religious, appear to be of the people, governed by the same norms and values as they are. As Althusser writes, “The prince must take the reality of popular ideology into account, and inscribe therein his own representation, which is the public face of the state.” Ideology is not the ideas of the ruling class, but is a reflection back to the ruled of their own spontaneous philosophy. At the time of Machiavelli’s writing this popular ideology was religion, was the Catholic church, but as Althusser argues, the modern school offers an ideology of individuality that is no less pervasive. 



The question that I would like to raise, along with, or in relation to Lezra’s book, or at least the chapter titled “All Cops Are Bastards” is to what extent it is necessary to think not so much the opposition between violence and hegemony, but violence itself, or, at least the capacity and right to do violence as a kind of hegemony. It seems that at this point we can begin to wonder if there is any distinction between ideology and force, between fox and lions, maybe the cleverest thing the fox can do, to retain the structure of the fable, is to appear to be a lion, or at least a wolf, to appear to have force is itself a kind of force. If one wanted a quick and easy image what I am getting at, at least in terms of contemporary politics, one could think of the image of the US flag, often in black and white, with a single solitary blue line. The police are not situated on the borders of the flag, outside of the image of sovereignty, but are integral to it. It is worth remembering the role the flag plays not just as a symbol of the nation, but as an integral part of so many rituals of ideology, from the pledge of allegiance to the national anthem, and it is these rituals, these practices, and not supposed ideas, that define ideology according to Althusser. The Blues Live Matter flag is not just an attempt to recognize the police, to appreciate their role, but to fundamentally blur any division between authority and violence, ideological state apparatuses and repressive state apparatuses. If one wanted to continue this study of the iconography of bumper stickers, one could cite another common image, that of combination of the blue lives matter flag with the skull logo of the Marvel comics vigilante The Punisher. This combines the nation, violence, authority, and somehow rebellion at the same time, the idea that the true law is outside the law, and with it the idea that the true community, is one that is not recognized by the state, but exceeds it. The police then become the embodiment not of government, not of an institution, but of the society. As Lezra writes, 
Hence the police—the institution that the modern state charges, whether explicitly or implicitly, with regulating consensus and with rendering sovereignty indisputable; hence the efforts modern states make to invest the police with authority; to make of them an institution commonly understood to be founded in what is “common to all”: commonly understood to be founded in a normative, presocial idea of the “common” good or common weal. The police is authoritative and authorized, when it is not understood as an institution-device compounded of devices for producing, normalizing, and administering the experience of commonality, and of determining not just what may or may not, but what can and what cannot be experienced as common. (Lezra, 151) 
How does the police, a particular institution, with particular means and methods, come to be understood as the institution of the common? Given that this is a question not just of the common, of the democratic basis for politics, but also of the relationship of sovereignty and violence, it is perhaps fitting that Hobbes’ Leviathan offers one of the first articulations of the modern relation of police and common life. After making his famous argument about the state of nature as being “nasty, brutish, and short” Hobbes gives a second argument for the need of a coercive force, one based on the common elements of life. As Hobbes writes, 
It may seem strange to some man, that has not well weighed these things; that Nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another: and he may therefore, not trusting to this Inference, made from the Passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by Experience. Let him therefore consider with himself, when taking a journey, he arms himself, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there be Laws, and public Officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall be done him; what opinion he has of his fellow subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow Citizens, when he locks his door; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? But neither of us accuse man’s nature in it. The Desires, and other Passions of man, are in themselves no Sin. No more are the Actions, that proceed from those Passions, till they know a Law that forbids them; which till Laws be made they cannot know: nor can any Law be made, till they have agreed upon the Person that shall make it. 
Hobbes formulation is one that is cited again and again in arguments for the police—often without being cited and without naming him. It is an argument in which the failures of the police to provide security can only become arguments for more police. It is also one in which these failures, these threats to the security of common life, are seen as remnants of the state of nature, like weeds breaking through the asphalt. Any other causal explanation, that they may be produced by the very society and social relations of seventeenth century English society, that they might have something to do with its own social relations, such as the immense inequality of such a society, is not even entertained. They are not products of society, but of nature. Testaments to the partial and incomplete status of any social order over its natural basis. The sovereign is never sovereign enough, the Leviathan can always be more monstrous. In other words, and this is the way that the argument functions to this day, failures of policing, the existence of crime or danger, in contemporary society, can only call for more policing. Finally, it is also worth noting that Hobbes argument is predicated not on the actual reality of such crimes, but their perception. It is the fact that one locks up their trunks or carries weapons that is offered as evidence, not that one is actually robbed or assaulted. To once again put it in the parlance of our times, it is a matter of feelings not facts. We could say, in following Althusser’s idea of symptomatic reading, that what we see he is an inversion of causes and effects: effects, the distrust of one’s own servants and children, and fear of one’s neighbors, is taken as being equivalent to disorder itself, and its actual causes. 
Lest this reading of Hobbes seems like a departure from the questions at hand, that of violence and hegemony, it seems to return to two questions central to Lezra’s book: first, and most generally there is the question of the relationship between institutions and their general form and function and their initial causes or impetus. In other words, What particular idea or sentiment is the general structure of the institution a response to? Hobbes’ answer would seem to be that the police are a response to the fear that common life, that our existence with and among each other is constantly under threat. If this the basis of police than it is hard to see how it can be restricted or contained. This is a recurring theme in the philosophical discourse on the police. Hegel in Elements of the Philosophy of Right argues that since the police are there to protect the police against potential harm there is no limit to their jurisdiction. As Hegel writes, 
There is admittedly only a possibility that harm may be done. But the fact that no harm is done is, as a contingency, likewise no more than that. This is the aspect of wrong which is inherent in such actions, and which is consequently the ultimate reason for penal justice as implemented by the police. 
Hegel’s concept of the police is, according to the use of the term at its time in Prussia, a broader notion than contemporary law enforcement, encompassing the sorts of things affecting public safety, such as the quality of products and the conditions of public roads, that are now relegated to different institutions, such as the Food and Drug Administration or Department of Transportation. What remains constant beyond such institutional divisions and transformations, however, is this idea that every activity encompasses the possibility of harm or danger. Thus “policing,” protecting people from potential harm or violence is a necessarily expansive and unlimited concept. As Hegel goes on to write, “When reflection is highly developed, the police may tend to draw everything it can into its sphere of influence, for it is possible to discover some potentially harmful aspect in everything.” This idea of an expansive nature of the police appears again in Walter Benjamin’s essay on the “Critique of Violence.” What Benjamin stresses, focusing on the more contemporary sense of the term, is that the police are neither an instance of law creating violence, founding a new order and authority, or law preserving violence. Their particular area of influence is the gray zone between existing and new laws, often being called upon to preserve the peace, or monitor suspicious activity, with no real limits on what these activities entail. As Benjamin writes: 
“Therefore the police intervene "for security reasons" in countless cases where no clear legal situation exists, when they are not merely, without the slightest relation to legal ends, accompanying the citizen as a brutal encumbrance through a life regulated by ordinances, or simply supervising him. Unlike law, which acknowledges in the "decision" determined by place and time a metaphysical category that gives it a claim to critical evaluation, a consideration of the police institution encounters nothing essential at all. Its power is formless, like its nowhere tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized states.” 
As an institution the police have a particular defect that they are without limitations and restrictions. This brings us to the second question from Lezra, the one that immediately follows the discussion of the police, is there an alternative? What would it take construct a common life without the police? Or, as Lezra argues, this question could be framed in terms of its corollary, what would it mean to think of abolition, not just as a demand, but as a practice? I have attempted to frame this question against the backdrop of the overdetermined figure of the police. The way the police appear not just as the monopoly of violence, necessary to enforce the state, but also as the image of very authority of the state, and as the necessary condition of common life and existence. Lastly, it is worth noting the affective dimension of the police, as Hobbes makes it clear, the police appear whenever there is fear of possible harm or wrong, that is what gives them their ghostly presence. The police are not just out there, but our in us as well in our desires for security, safety, and comfort. As the old slogan from May 68 goes, there is a cop in our heads. As Lezra writes, “How then do we abolish these objects we have stored away that inhabit us and act on us like the sense, the ambiance, offered by familiar, familial, forgotten things? That have become, today, the shape of instinct?”(170) This is the question of abolitionism. It seems to me that the answer, or at least the beginning of an answer can be framed by returning to Althusser’s use of Machiavelli. Both ideology, the fox, and violence, the lion, are parts of the animal aspect of humanity, they are both set apart the human aspect, that which obeys rules, or is reasonable. To jump then from Machiavelli to Spinoza, following a path that Althusser traced multiple times, Spinoza argues we, human beings agree, insofar as we are guided by reason. The alternative to the police, to a commonality predicated on fear and threats, is one in which we grasp that elusive object of our common humanity. Perhaps that is what is at stake in abolition. The question then, to put it more directly, is the following: is it possible to institute our common capacity to reason? Or does such a common always escape or evade institution? Such that we always institute a particular idea of society, a particular fear of its dissolution?
Presented at SPEP October 25, 2025

 At first glance, the only thing that Pierre Macherey and Paolo Virno have in common is that they are, in my opinion, underrated as philosophers. They are both the less well known member of a school, or orientation that is primarily identified with other figures more often discussed; Macherey is often seen as one of the names associated with Althusser, but not referenced as much as Etienne Balibar or even Jacques Rancière and Virno with autonomia or post-operaism, but less famous than Antonio Negri and less infamous than Mario Tronti. Macherey is barely translated into English, but thanks to Seagull books, most of Virno's work is available. The other, more interesting thing that they have in common, is that they have both turned to the concept of labor power as a philosophical concept. 

To put it simply, maybe too simply, labor power is the term Marx coins to stress that what the worker sells to the capitalist is a capacity, a capacity to work. It is up to the capitalist to actualize this capacity, to turn a potential to work, a capability, into actual work performed. In the passage from the slide above, and in "The Productive Subject" Macherey compares this actualization of potential to a kind of everyday metaphysics in which the passage from capacity to actuality is less a speculative matter than a practical one. As Macherey writes

"From this point of view, we could say that when the capitalist occupies himself with his workers’ labor-power, which he has acquired the right to employ in exchange for a wage, treating it as a “productive power” whose productivity he intends to increase in order to produce relative surplus value – he practices metaphysics not in a theoretical but in a practical way. He practices this peculiar sort of metaphysics not during his leisure time, as a distraction or mental exercise, as he would a crossword puzzle, but throughout the entire working day dedicated to production. By opening up his company to notions such as “power,” “capacity” and “causation,” he thereby makes them a reality, realizing these fictions, these products of the mind, which he then employs with daunting efficacy. In this way, with payrolls and charts of organizational tasks at hand, he shows, better than a philosopher’s abstract proofs, that the work of metaphysics could not be more material, provided that one knows how to put it to good use in introducing it into the factory. One could, incidentally, derive from this a new and caustic definition of metaphysics: in this rather specific context, it boils down to a mechanism for profit-making, which is no small matter. This means that, amongst other inventions that have changed the course of history, capitalism has found the means, the procedure, the “trick” enabling it to put abstract concepts into practice – the hallmark of its “genius.”



Macherey's remarks here could be seen as the basis for a new consideration of metaphysics, a sort of metaphysics of real abstractions, for lack of a better word, in which it is practice, day to day life, and not speculation that is the terrain for such concepts as potentiality and actuality. One could imagine here a "Metaphysics of Capital," a title that I am sure someone has used before. However, such an assertion overlooks an important part of Marx's criticism, the history of this very category and condition. As Macherey writes, 
"Before becoming a so-called natural given of economics, the existence of labor power rests on the relationship of domination, a constraint whose actual nature the legal form of the contract eludes by exploiting the confusion that is key to its operation. In fact, if the worker were not forced, not only would he not offer his labor power for hire to the capitalist, but he would not possess this very force, which is a fiction completely fabricated by the regime of wage labor, a potential reality assumed to exist separately from the conditions of its realization..."
The metaphysics of capital presupposes its history. This is why, in Macherey's recent writing on labor power, he returns to the question of symptomatic reading. History, the history of those who only have their labor power to sell, and politics, the power relations that make it so some only have their labor power to sell are the two constitutive occlusions of capital, of political economy. In a sense Macherey's argument would seem to be that political economy cannot see power. Labor power moves then from a metaphysics to a kind of epistemology, to be the answer as to why capitalism, or its apologists, cannot see its history, and cannot see the inequality underlying the exchange between worker and capitalist. What is effaced is power in two fundamentally different senses, which is why it cannot be a metaphysics, the power of domination which reduces individuals to sellers of their labor power, and the productive powers of labor that produce wealth. Impotence and potential coexist in the same relation--the fundamental relation of having to sell one's labor power in order to survive. As Macherey stresses in La Chose Philosophique this coexistence exceeds the philosophical opposition of essence and appearance:
"Marx's true discovery is therefore that capitalism takes advantage of an ambivalence of the kind on which the concept of "force" is predicated on; to create value, this system of production based on the establishment of wage labor uses the equivocal status given to a "force," "labor power," capable of existing both potentially, or as a potentially, and an actuality, and from which it has found the means to extract maximum of profit in the two forms, the extraction of absolute surplus value (by extension of the working day) and relative surplus value (by increasing the productivity of labor power). This ultimately lies the secret of wage labor: its exploitation is based on the sleight of hand performed, at the time the employment contract is entered into, between what is purchased, namely the right to employ labor power in the form of a maximum amount of work actually performed, and what is actually paid to the worker, the cost of reproducing his labor power treated as a commodity in its own right. So, when Marx refers in passing to the relationship between essence and appearance, he is speaking without realizing it – for in fact he does not speak of it, while speaking of it, without however speaking of it,...--of the relationship between potentiality and action, the key to the material exploitation of labor power by the capitalist: the latter pretends to buy "labor" and to remunerate it at its value – this is what Ricardo maintains – while in reality he rents the right to use in a certain place and for a certain time, under the guise of making it pass from potentiality to action, "labor power", by playing on the double value with which the notion of "force" is credited...This tour de force, a true exercise in sleight of hand, consisted of drawing effects that could not be more real, and what is more, countable in hard cash, from an ambiguity put in place on the level of philosophical ideas which initially constitutes his playing field: the capitalist, past master in the art of passing off shadows as lanterns, is an experienced philosopher, a "speculator", and a most devious one!"
The task is not to recognize the metaphysics at work in capital, but to recognize that the process of exploitation exceeds our established metaphysical categories, which is why essence and appearance fail to do it justice.

Paolo Virno's return to labor power is boldly stated at the opening of the essay with the bold title "Historical Materialism" that is part III of Déjà vu and the End of History. As Virno writes,
"The concept of labour-power, though it recurs in every turn of phrase throughout economic and sociological analysis, has itself hardly been thought about at all. Professional philosophers shrug their shoulders at the thought of doing so, and at most busy themselves with themes which are its corollary (biopolitics for example). And yet this concept, which is apparently self-evident and even superficial, is very much tangled up with study of historical time.The capitalist production relation is based on the difference between labour-power and effective labour. Labour-power is pure potential, very much different from the corresponding acts."
Virno's approach to labor power is framed through his revival of a kind of negative philosophical anthropology, specifically the works of such thinkers as Arnold Gehlen, who understand humanity through the fundamental condition of a default of instinctual determination. As I wrote in The Politics of Transindividuality,
"Virno, drawing from Arnold Gehlen, argues for this indetermination being the defining characteristic of humanity. As Gehlen writes, ‘In terms of morphology, man is, in contrast to all other higher mammals, primarily characterized by deficiencies, which, in an exact, biological sense, qualify as lack of adaptation, lack of specialization, primitive states, and failure to develop, and which are essentially negative features.’ Human beings lack specialization, the instincts and aptitudes that define the animal kingdom, and in their place have a drawn out, perhaps even lifelong practice of learning and forming habits. This lack of determination, the openness to the world, can also be understood as the preindividual basis for individuation. Mankind’s nature, the capacities for language and habits, does not constitute a basis for an individual or collective identity, only the potential for different individuations. The deficiency of instinctual determination is the potential for new habits and languages, for individuation of collectives and groups. 
 This lack of specialization, of individuation, is the condition for all history, which is why Virno describes language, habits, and fashion as historico-natural: they are natural in that each depend on natural capacities and deficiencies, the biological capacity for language or the deficiencies of instinct that make habits possible, and are historical in that the specific nature of this language or that cultural habit can only be defined by their history. This is true of all history, every specific language, cultural habit, and fashion is a specific actualization of these potentials, a particular compensation for these deficiencies. What defines the present mode of production, however, is that it is not just an actualization of this potential, but the potential itself becoming productive. ‘Human nature returns to the centre of attention not because we are finally dealing with biology rather than history, but because the biological prerogatives of the human animal have required undeniable historical relevance in the contemporary productive process.’ Post-Fordist labour, the labour of the general intellect, does not simply exploit particular habits, particular languages, particular cultural dimensions, but the capacity for acquiring new habits and new languages. The generic capacities of the species, rather than their specific manifestations, are directly put to work." 
This idea underlies the fundamental assertion in the Historical Materialism essay that "Meta-history irrupts into ordinary history in the none-too-sublime guise of labour power." Meta-history, humanity's combination of indetermination, lack of instinctual determination, and capacity to learn, becomes an actual element of history. For much of human history this capacity has been the backdrop of history, as humanity's capacity to learn habits and language is actualized in actual habits that make up culture and existing languages. However, in capitalism, one sells oneself as labor power, as a capacity to work, as potential and this potential is put to work as potential. 

In previous works Virno has been very interested in the transformation of potentiality in capitalism. For Virno the kind of work of that defines what post-operaismo labelled with the unfortunate monicker "immaterial labor" and what we might call, more mundanely, the service economy, the work of communicating, relating, and selling to others, is one in which potential is no longer the backdrop of the skills put to work but becomes something that is directly put to work. Work is less about doing this or that particular thing, but of dealing with the contingency and indeterminacy that used to be reserved for politics. As Virno writes in Grammar of the Multitude, 
"By general intellect Marx means science, knowledge in general, the know-how on which social productivity relies by now. The politicization of work (that is, the subsumption into the sphere of labor of what had hitherto belonged to political action) occurs precisely when thought becomes the primary source of the production of wealth. Thought ceases to be an invisible activity and becomes something exterior, “public,” as it breaks into the productive process. One could say: only then, only when it has linguistic intellect as its barycenter, can the activity of labor absorb into itself many of the characteristics which had previously belonged to the sphere of political action. Up to this point we have discussed the juxtaposition between Labor and Politics. Now, however, the third facet of human experience comes into play, Intellect. It is the “score” which is always performed, over and again, by the workers-virtuosos. I believe that the hybridization between the different spheres (pure thought, political life and labor) begins precisely when the Intellect, as principal productive force, becomes public. Only then does labor assume a virtuosic (or communicative) semblance, and, thus, it colors itself with “political” hues."
Or, as he puts it, "the general intellect is the intellect in general." This assertion underlies his general point about meta-history. Meta-history, the conditions of all historical difference and change, is directly put to work in history. The abstract potential to do work is no longer the backdrop of the concrete work of society but is directly put to work. As Virno writes elsewhere this is why so many advertisements for jobs discuss things like professionalism and commitment; work is less about concrete skills and habits, than it is about the general tendency to adopt new skills and habits. 
One could draw a straight line between Macherey's metaphysics and Virno's meta-history, both are about the relation between potentiality and actuality, capability and action, that is at the core of labor power as a concept. However, such a straight line is warped by their very different approaches to history. Virno's history is one of periodizations in which the transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism, from production to services, is a fundamental transformation of the relation between potential and actuality, a history of the becoming increasing abstract of abstract labor. Macherey's history is less one of periods, than conditions, it is one in which the historical conditions of activity, the historical conditions of selling labor power, are effaced in the increasing reification of capitalism as a social relation. History is whatever is occluded whenever wage labor is taken as just the way things are rather than the product, and reproduction, of particular power relations. 
This is only one way to think about the points of convergence and divergence. The question that I wanted to examine, or at least pose, is what is at stake in seeing labor power as a philosophical concept. How this changes the concept, problematizing it in a way that is perhaps not always the case if it is taken as an economic or sociological concept, but also problematizing philosophy with the concept, by introducing the history and power relations that produce every concept, but concealed in it. 

 In the US every presidential election is treated as a transformation of the nation, of the zeitgeist, like Brecht's line about the government electing itself a new people made true. This is especially true of the chattering pundit class who have greeted every election from Obama to Trump as a transformation not just of government but the nation. There is no small irony in this given low voter turnout, small margins, and anti-democratic institutions like the electoral college. What is often a small shift in numbers is treated as a major shift in values and ideals.
In the second election of Donald Trump one place this zietgeist shift took place was in corporate boardrooms. Dozens of corporations have abandoned or curtailed their commitment DEI. With the recent firings of Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel it seems that we have gone from Woke Capital to MAGA Capital, and given the fact that I have written about "woke" capital here, and here, I thought that I would write about this shift.
As I argued before, the backdrop of any of these questions is a simple, but unfortunately overlooked fact, capital exists to accumulate capital first and foremost. What is often presented as "woke" capital, such as movies that cast minority actors in "white" roles, the yearly Pride celebration of every corporation, and sales for every religious holiday are just attempts to expand customer bases and accumulate revenue. What is often presented as a revolution of values or an imposition of the values of elites onto a populace is just a search for profit. Sometimes the invisible hand holds a pride flag. Adam Smith recognized something similar in the way that commercial interests brought down the feudal lords by offering something to buy. As he writes, 
"A revolution of the greatest importance to the public happiness, was in this manner brought about by two different orders of people, who had not the least intention to serve the public: To gratify the most childish vanity was the sole motive of the great proprietors. The merchant and the artificers, much less ridiculous, acted merely from a view to their own interest, and in pursuit of their own pedlar principle of turning a penny wherever a penny was to be got. Neither of them had either knowledge or foresight of that great revolution which the folly of one and the industry of the other, was gradually bringing about.”
I cite Smith because it constantly frustrates me the way in which apologists for capitalism fail to understand its basic dynamics. Capital seeks profits, and in doing so it is indifferent to any norms, values, or hierarchies. Of course the locus classicus of this process comes not from Smith, capitalism’s most famous advocate, but from Marx, its most famous critic. As Marx writes, 
"Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind."
The revolutionary dimension of capitalism is something that both Smith and Marx agree on despite their other differences in terms of what this means. For Smith this revolutionary dimension is one of the many side effects of the pursuit of self-interest. It is of course possible to see this shift from woke to MAGA as driven by a similar pursuit of profit. To do so would be to put too much trust in the invisible hand, and overlook the visible hand of the state. The elimination of DEI programs follows Trump's executive order eliminating DEI. Of course such orders are not binding, and this might be just an attempt to embrace an opportunity on the part of CEOs and others who only reluctantly agreed to put on a veneer of diversity in the pursuit of profits. The cancellation of DEI programs reveals something of the difference between the woke and MAGA moments of capitalism. Woke capital was public facing, oriented to the customers, celebrating diversity to diversify the market: MAGA capital is more oriented towards the central office, promising a relief from programs that give power to workers to contest discrimination. 
Woke Capital is oriented towards the market, adding diversity to Marx's list of "freedom, equality, and Bentham. In contrast to this MAGA capital is not so much oriented towards the back room, although there is a promise of a restoration of labor discipline, of a reduction of the power of unions and the promise of equal opportunity to curtail management directives, but to the stock holders. Its promise is not so much oriented towards consumers, but to the owners and investors.


This is even more clear when we get to the big firings of the last few weeks, of Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, both were connected to parent companies that needed mergers approved by the Trump administration. It is possible to see MAGA capital as one in which capital is being reconfigured around Trump, in order to do business you have to kiss the proverbial ring. There is much to be said about this kind of crony capitalism that Trump is imposing, in which deals, tariffs, and everything depends on how much you please the king. However, what is striking is that when Trump writes about these firings he always refers to their ratings (and talent). Of course this could be an attempt to put a democratic sheen on an authoritarian action, and Trump has always couched his destruction of democracy in the terms of the pseudo-democracy of ratings, retweets, and crowd sizes. He claims popularity even as his popularity dwindles. I do not think that this is just a feint or distraction, an attempt to displace responsibility to ratings, but a veiled assertion that it is capital that is calling the shots. Trump is an authoritarian without authority, and can only ever borrow the vague authority of business and profits, after all he played a businessman on television. Trump prefers the metrics of ratings and profits in part because they are the only power he recognizes and it part because of their tendencies to reflect the preferences of the racial majorities over minorities. "Go woke, go broke" is the mantra of a particular kind of criticism that takes the market as its standard precisely because of economies of scale, at least in the US, where cultural products aimed at white heterosexual families do better than than those reflecting the viewpoints and perspectives of minorities. If woke capital was predicated on the claim that capital values diversity, that a diversification of markets was synonymous with diversity, then MAGA capital is a reminder that any values are secondary to the accumulation of value. 

I remember a friend in graduate school saying that our task, at least when it came to writing dissertations, was to write something that a database could not produce. He was a bit ahead of the curve, this was sometime around the late nineties early two thousands. Databases could not write books then, but they are getting closer to it. Or, more to the point, a particular kind of academic monograph, the sort the traces the development of a concept in a single author oeuvre or a comparison of two thinkers, seems to be increasingly the kind of thing that a machine could write. That is the bad news. The good news, is that such monographs seemed useful to write, but never that fun to read in the first place. What if we could leave such books to the machines that generate them and consume them. What kind of writing should we do in the age of (seemingly) intelligent machines?

My answer to this question comes from a few books that I have read in the last few years, idiosyncratic books--for lack of a better word. The books that I am thinking of are Gray and Johnson's Phenomenology of Black Spirit and Renault's  Maîtres et Esclaves: Archise du Laboratoire de Mythologiques (to take books on Hegel as an example). Beyond that, and moving from Hegel onto animals, there is Leigh Claire La Berge's Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary (which I reviewed here) and Aaron Shuster's How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka's New Science (Which I should have reviewed--at least on this blog). They are all are, among other things, books that a machine could never write,  they are singular and idiosyncratic examinations of a question. 

In the interest of self promotion, this is a blog after all, I would say that my own book, The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work was an attempt to write in the idiosyncratic direction rather than a generic scholarly one (for better or worse). I didn't just want to write a book on Spinoza and Marx, partly because others had done it better than I thought that I could, or a book on Spinoza and Marx and work, but one that also reflected my own talents, I hope, in combining philosophy with an analysis of popular culture, and, more importantly, my own belief that culture and work are the two places where ideology is produced and reproduced. 

As I ask myself the question, what book comes next, and while I have contemplated more academic books, I continue to think about not just writing odd books, but about using them to expand the terrain of philosophy and politics. (The larger point here is that the university as the basis and ground for philosophy is not something that we can take for granted, and we need to invent new ways of thinking, writing, and teaching). Given my loves and passions, and given Leigh Claire's great book on cats, people keep asking me if I am going to write about dogs.

I have written about dogs a few times here, in an early post where I used this title, in a piece on my job in an animal shelter, and a two pieces on the politics of dogs under Trump and Biden. I was thinking about this idea of a book on dogs the other day when I happened to be teaching Adam Smith.  Dogs feature prominently in The Wealth of Nations. When Smith makes his famous remark about mankind's tendency to "barter, truck, and exchange," defining humanity as homo economicus, he contrast this to not just animals in particular but to dogs. To illustrate he tells the story of two greyhounds chasing a hare, as much as they run in tandem, with sometimes one, sometimes the other in the lead, but this is no cooperation or exchange. A fact that becomes clear as soon as they catch their prey; all appearances of cooperation fall apart as they growl and tear to get the biggest chunk. As Smith puts it, “Nobody every saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.” Humans exchange, animals do not. 

That is not the end of it. Smith continues to discuss dogs. Because they do not exchange, or barter, they are not only excluded from the benefits of the invisible hand, but also from the division of labor since they cannot make use of their diversity and difference. As Smith writes, 

"The strength of the mastiff is not the least supported either by the swiftness of the greyhound or by the sagacity of the spaniel, or by the docility of the shepherd’s dog. The effects of those different geniuses and talents for want of the power or disposition to barter and exchange, cannot be brought into a common stock, and do not in the least contribute to the better accommodation and convenience of the species.”

At this point dog is not just a metonym for animal, for the nonhuman, but a very specific and unique figure. Dogs have the greatest interspecies variability of any mammal, greater differences of size, color, speed, strength, and temperament within the species than practically any other animal on earth. The position of dogs in Smith's thought is a unique and tragic one, they are unable to exchange or trade their abilities, but they would have the most to gain by such an exchange. Imagine if dogs could combine their different abilities, bringing together the strength of one, the speed of another, and the intelligence of a third into some kind of collective action. It is like some scene out of a cartoon where a group of dogs break out of the dog pound in some elaborate plan combining their different skills; the chihuahua sneaks and steals the guards keys because of its small size, the border collie figures out how to turn the key, and the mastiff uses its size to open the door. They are an impossible utopia figure, dogs are condemned to have their differences used for others, but never for themselves. In that way working dogs are perhaps a lot like workers. 
Lady and the Tramp 

Humans can make use of their differences, even if they are not as great as that of dogs. As Smith writes, "Among men, on the contrary, the most dissimilar geniuses are of use to one another; the different products of their respective talents, by the general disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, being brought, as it were, into a common stock, where every man may purchase whatever part of the produce of other men's talents he has occasion for."
A real life Lady and the Tramp situation


The idea of a society founded on the differences between human beings can be traced back to at least Plato's Republic. In that text Plato famously claimed that our finitude, our lack of self-sufficiency, was best addressed by everyone doing the one job that they were best suited for, by using their talents. Universal dependency and the variability of mankind are the foundation of the social order. As much as Smith keeps this idea he reverses its basis. Differences are not natural but artificial. As Smith writes, 
"The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity is not upon many occasions so much the cause, as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education."
As something of an aside, Smith's invocation of the way that philosophers and street porters become different would seem to be echoed in Marx's assertion of how it comes to be that we accept a world in which some are street porters and other philosophers, accepts the division of labor. As Marx writes in Capital, "The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education [Erziehung], tradition, and habit [Gewohneit] looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws."
The repetition of habit in both formulations is the point where two senses of training intersect. For Smith habit, the repetition brought about by the highly specialized division of labor produces and reproduces skill, while for Marx the repetition of wage labor produces and reproduces subjection. One could also open up a larger discussion of habit and character in Spinoza (nearly as close to my heart as dogs) or, even broader, the concept of second nature. One does not need to turn to Spinoza or even Marx to find more ramifications of habit, Smith has his own dialectic of habit. The Wealth of Nations is one of those books that is more cited than read (like Capital), and those who cite it the most faithfully often overlook the downside of this habit. Habit produces skill for Smith, but it also restricts and delimits imagination and understanding.  As Smith writes, (in a passage that is almost never cited by those who think the whole book is about the invisible hand), 
"But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding,or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance, in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless the government takes some pains to prevent it."



Smith's dog society, a society of highly specialized workers all benefiting from each other's specialization resembles less a cartoon, of different dogs combining their differences and talents, than an animal shelter, where every animal is in its little cage, barking and lunging because that is all that it knows how to do.  Where every puppy lacks the socialization to play, to explore, to even walk up a flight of stairs. Or, as Smith follows the passage above, the solution to this problem, of a specialization that warps the mind and body as much as it produces things, is education which the invisible hand cannot produce. Smith, like Hegel, in his own way stumbles upon a kind of contradiction of capitalism, a contradiction which capitalist society produces but cannot resolve. For Hegel this was the rabble, the mass of unemployed, for Smith it is in some sense those whose employment has destroyed them, body and mind broken by the ravages of work. In Hegel the rabble, those cast out by the specialization, fragmentation, and automation that Smith celebrated could only be absorbed in colonies, civil society poses problems it cannot solve, while for Smith that same specialization warps minds and bodies to the point where the state, or the public, take charge of their education. To be clear, however, education for Smith is not personal improvement, nor is it job training, it is a bulwark against the violence of the masses. As Smith writes,
"The more they are instructed the less liable they are to the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition, which, among ignorant nations, frequently occasion the most dreadful disorders. An instructed and intelligent people, besides, are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one. … They are more disposed to examine, and more capable of seeing through, the interested complaints of faction and sedition, and they are, upon that account, less apt to be misled into any wanton or unnecessary opposition to the measures of government. In free countries, where the safety of government depends very much upon the favourable judgment which the people may form of its conduct, it must surely be of the highest importance that they should not be disposed to judge rashly or capriciously concerning it."
In other words, Marx's, education helps the masses look "upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws." Smith is offering a justification of the school as Ideological State Apparatus, to use Althusser's term.  Once again it is worth remembering Plato's Republic, which not only was a precursor to Smith in terms of placing the division of. labor at the base of society, it also argued that dogs were the model of guardians for this city because they could be trained. Dogs may differ from humans in their inability to exchange, but they are alike humans in that they can be formed and shaped by habit. Habit is not just in the workplace, the repetition that develops skill, it is also outside of it. The repeated encounter with people placed in different jobs, with different skills, trains us all in accepting and naturalizing a hierarchy.  Especially because unlike Plato this hierarchy is not the dictate of a philosopher king, but produced by a labor market that just seems like a fact of life. As I wrote in The Double Shift, 
"It is precisely because no one is ordered to engage in any particular kind of labor, that nothing, at least in the form of law, prevents anyone from becoming a street porter or a philosopher, that the job one ends up doing seems less a matter of the “violence of things” than an effect of natural talents and abilities. Plato’s social order returns, not as a divine myth about the order of society, but in the daily confidence that the people who end up their place did so because of their natural talents. The more freedom and equality is defined in terms of capital, as freedom to purchase things including labor power on the market, the more it necessarily carries with it its opposite, the constraint and inequality of the labor process. It is not pre-capitalist hierarchies and exclusions persist as a remnants of the past, but they are retooled, made fully functioning parts of the division of labor. Racial and ethnic hierarchies as well as the sexual division of labor are not exceptions to the interchangeability of abstract labor, but are its necessary supplement. Capitalism cannot be identified with abstract labor, but the incomplete and uneven intersection of concrete and abstract labor (and their corresponding ethics and alienations)."
At this point we are not even talking about dogs anymore, the allegory has gotten loose, but we are talking about something which I wrote about in that book and keep thinking about, and that is the way that work produces and reproduces not only differences, street porters and philosophers, but hierarchy. This is where we leave the philosopher's kennel, because the real difference between the specialization and interspecies diversity of dogs and humans, is that with humans the differences of talents and abilities at work intersect with, and are naturalized by differences of race and gender.  Which is not to say that I am drawing an analogy between breeds and races as two different forms of interspecies variation. There is a great deal of debate of how much differences of breed matter in dogs, a debate between those who think, as Donna Haraway does, that we need to take the history of breeds seriously, and it is foolish to expect a border collie to be a lapdog, and those who think breed differences, especially around such dogs as the pitbull function as alibis for differences of breeding and socialization. There is less debate about race, or, more to the point, the only reason that race is taken seriously biologically is because it is so important socially. I am more interested in the way in which breed and race intersect as figures of difference, effacing and naturalizing history. To offer something of a conclusion, albeit a hasty one, that where Smith proposed education as a way to reconcile the specialization of labor and the needs of society actually existing capitalism found a different solution, naturalizing the differences produced by and demanded by the division of labor through the concepts of race and gender. 

There was a moment in the beginning of the COVID pandemic when I thought to myself that surely this would be the end of the anti-vaccination movement. It is one thing to be against vaccines when diseases are rare, and pandemics a distant memory, but another to be against them in the midst of a pandemic in which tens of thousands were dying each week in the US alone. The anti-vax position always seemed like a luxury position, a position of privilege, an individual refusing vaccines is taking advantage of the fact that others are vaccinated around them and cases are rare. Like many things in US politics and culture, individual autonomy is made possible by the existence and occlusion of collective action. It is for that reason that I thought such a position would collapse in the face of an actual pandemic.

I could not have been more wrong. Not only has anti-vaccination sentiments increased dramatically, they have even been extended to dogs. Measles are on the rise, and even rabies is coming back. This rising sentiment is now official US policy thanks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who has ended research into mRNA vaccines, and made it difficult to even acquire current COVID boosters, soon perhaps the whole country will go the way of Florida, eliminating vaccine requirements.

Fighting for infection as if it were wellness, to twist the Spinoza line. There was a brief period where I considered writing a series of blogposts, or even essays, all with variations on that title, fighting for exploitation as if it were liberation, ignorance as if it were knowledge, etc. What held these together, beside a kind of memeing of the mind, was not so much voluntary servitude, but the topsy turvy world in which domination is actively desired and not just passively endured. Abandonment, abandonment to the demands of capital, to work more, to have less protections from the rapacious search for profit, appears as liberation. 

 Earlier I wrote that much of conspiracy thinking, and I would include anti-vax movements in that, is an attempt to make the imagination, the first kind of knowledge, in Spinoza's terms, into the only standard of knowledge. How something affects you is what it is. If vaccines seem intrusive, repressive, and unnecessary they must be those things. In his recent hearing before the Senate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that "The people at the CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving."Such a statement not only expands the suspicions beyond vaccines to any public health measures, it seems to fundamentally invert things, replacing effects for causes. The pandemic is not the bad thing, the thing that caused so much death and suffering, but the CDC is at fault for trying to contain it. The paranoid fear of the overreach of government contains a kernel of a fantasy that COVID never happened, or was never something to take seriously.  

At the level of affective composition conspiracy theories always bring together the greatest fear and the biggest hope. The fear of a government agency implanting chips through vaccines, shutting down schools, and forcing people to wear masks all in the name of some vague control is inseparable from the fantasy that pandemics do not happen, that we do not need to worry about infectious disease. In the same way that the fear of a secret cabal of people feasting on the blood of children is inseparable from the fantasy of a righteous avenger who will smite them all. Fear and hope are always intertwined, as Spinoza argues, conspiracy theories seem to bring them to their maximum point of ambivalence. It is hard to know if a conspiracy theory is the darkest fears or the greatest hopes because it is often both. 

Kennedy's statement that he intends to eliminate not just vaccines, or vaccine mandates, but also masking and social distancing is an example of fighting for servitude as if it were salvation. What appears as liberation from an excessive and intrusive state bureaucracy is subjection to the rule of capital, to employers's ability to demand work without concern for well being. The conspiracy lines up perfectly with the agenda of removing any restrictions public health would put on corporate profits. To butcher another phrase from Spinoza, the order and connection of conspiracy thinking is the same as the order and connection of the interest of capital. 

However, in making such a claim, on ascribing anti-vax and anti-masking to a first kind of knowledge, to a sort of wishful thinking, I am not sure if I am doing anything more than reacting with my own first kind of knowledge, with my own frustration and anger. In many ways anti-vax is like pro-Trump, MAHA like MAGA, as much as I struggle to understand it I am confronted with something so alien, so outside of my thinking that I cannot make sense of it. As much as I have tried to theorize Trump, to understand his appeal at the level of ideology and affects, I still cannot get past the fact that he just seems to me to be transparently a horrible person. I do not understand how others just do not see that. It doesn't help that the most ardent Trump supporters seem to project so many qualities onto him that are simply not there, like strength, bravery, even the ablity (and inclination) to teach someone how to fish. It is hard to see Trump not as a person, or even an agent, but as a weird screen that people can project their fantasies onto.

How is this supposed to be the same person 

In a similar way,  vaccines seem to be a kind of anchor point for so many fantasies and fears about government and health. Fears of government control, of the prevalence of chemicals in our lives, and of surveillance, and so on. The anti-vax position seems more like a series of overlapping nightmares about the modern world than an actual stance or position. Refusing one of the most successful forms of modern medicine, something that has saved millions of lives and eliminated many diseases, just seems absurd, especially when what is offered in its place is raw milk or cooking fries in beef tallow. (Which is not to say that we should not fetishize modern science, especially as such fetishization comes with a fetishization of the corporations that profit off of it). 

Critique, like knowledge, needs to move beyond this tendency to imagine the other in its own image. One such failure is various criticisms of hypocrisy. For example the hypocrisy of opposing vaccines in the name of bodily autonomy while still denying women the right to choose. Or the hypocrisy of being opposed to vaccines because "we do not know what is in it" amongst a population that ingests a variety of chemicals in Mountain Dew or seems to have no problem with injecting Ozempic. Such assertions of hypocrisy imagine the position of the other, deriding rather than understanding. 

I did get some insight when I learned that RFK jr is not only opposed to vaccines, and masking and other forms of mitigation, but that he subscribes to a version of miasma theory. Such a theory, the idea that disease stems from exposure to contaminants, to lifestyle choices, not viruses, would seem to reveal what it at stake in the assault on public health. It is the public part, the fundamental idea that health is not a private concern, something that I do with my own body, drinking raw milk, etc., but is part of my relation to not only other people, to intersubjectivity, but to the preindividual and supraindividual conditions of existence. As Etienne Balibar writes in a piece on the human species as a biopolitical concept. 

"What I submit is that, in this case, ‘humankind’ or the human ‘species’ as an ensemble, in its great majority if not in its totality, becomes materially unified in a ‘passive’ manner. Borrowing a formula from Husserl and Deleuze, I am tempted to speak here of a ‘passive synthesis’ of the human species. This is a phenomenon of trans-individuation of the human, whose specific conditions lie both at the pre-individual level of the pathogenic circulation of viruses, which connect bodies and cross every frontier despite the prophylactic obstacles, and at the supra–individual level, formed by the ‘global’ system of production and communications, the institutional circulation of persons and things. But to describe the emergence of the ‘specific transindividual’ as construction of an ontological unity, even if negatively linked to illness and death, would be utterly insufficient. It is equally important to indicate that, right away, the process of unification is also a process of radical divisions, which I propose to call ‘anthropological fractures’, because they generate rifts and oppose the human to the other human within what we may call their common ‘species-being’ (Gattungswesen), an expression borrowed from Feuerbach and the young Marx.  This is of course the political dimension that official discourses carefully put aside, or minimise, when they refer to the ‘universal’ character of the problems created by the pandemic and the crisis, invoking common interests of mankind and the necessity of addressing them in a collective manner, arguing that ‘we are all in the same boat’.
Or as Balibar puts it elsewhere, "At the moment at which humankind becomes economically and, to some extent, culturally “united,” it is violently divided “biopolitically.” The pandemic as a common condition for the species of humanity cannot be separated from the way that it traces or even deepens the divisions of that species, exacerbating the rifts and divisions. To assume that we would experience it as a collective condition, as something that unites us, is a failure to recognize the world we live in, one in which the common human species is always already divided. Many people argue that we are seeing with RFK Jr. is just eugenics pure and simple, an attempt to privilege the well being of the healthy over the sick, the former should not have to sacrifice their enjoyment, have to deal with vaccines, masks, or the frustration of closed schools and businesses, to protect the latter, who should be left to die. Given that most of these restrictions were short lived, existing more in the fantasy or fears of some than in reality, we can see a repeat of one of the persistent threads in contemporary fascism, the imagined fears of one group are taken more seriously than the real threats to another less powerful group. If it is eugenics it is a strange one. While all eugenics are in some sense predicated on the fiction of race, and the idea of races as distinct genetic groups, the eugenics we have seen emerge post-COVID is one in which there is a division of the sick and healthy that is more imagined than anything else. There are many who believe themselves on the side of the healthy, believe that their lifestyle and genetics will protect them from illness who are wrong. In fact, we could argue that they are all wrong, because increased vulnerability to disease is everyone's fate as they get older.
There are thus multiple ways to think of the anti-vax movement. It can be understood as eugenics, as a refusal of the excesses of modern medicine, or resistance to  the arrogance of a techno-scientific elite, but it seems to me that the post-COVID anti-vax hegemony is predicated on a violent refusal of the  fundamental relational and dependent nature of our existence, what Balibar calls species being.  Of course modern society, modern social relations are on a whole predicated on such a refusal, on the fantasy of individuality and individual self interest. As Naomi Klein argued, the entire COVID response, from renaming all of those faceless people that make our lives possible and we prefer not to think of as "essential workers" to the half-hearted imposition of measures to mask and social distance to protect others, was itself a weird break in the governing logic of our society. There is no wonder that many people could not process it. It is easier to imagine vaccines as an attempt to control society with microchips than it is to imagine that "we are all in this together," that suddenly a society predicated on individual competition would foreground collective well being. 
The COVID-19 pandemic was a socialism or barbarism moment. We could have either recognized, on some level, the fundamentally transindividual nature of our existence, our dependence on each other and the natural world, or we could have doubled down on the fiction that we are all "kingdoms within a kingdom." As a society we picked the latter, and RFK Jr. is just the culmination of that process, as ugly as it it is. 

 

The titles of Zach Cregger's films are more riddles and interpretations than descriptions. One could conclude that the "barbarian" of the first film's title refers to the character of the mother, after all she is the one that smashes heads, but, as I said earlier, I think that misses the point that the film is a far deeper reflection on barbarians and civilization. In a similar way, we could conclude that the word "weapons" in the title of the recent film refers to the weaponization of the hypnotized individuals, as is stated in the dialogue.  (Oh, yeah, spoiler alert)

The term "weaponize" is a curious word. Apparently it was first coined in 1957, during the the cold war, referring to the overlap between the space race and the arms race. It seems me that the term really took off later, during the war on terror, when everything from viruses (both living and computer) and chemical reactions could be weaponized. Chemical fertilizers could become a car bomb, power plants could become weapons of mass destruction. The term always suggest that there is the potential for harm, for violence, underlying the most mundane chemical and biological processes. To weaponize is to take advantage of a potential for destruction and death that is already there, waiting.

I am tempted to read Weapons through this hermeneutic of latent danger, and ask the question not what physical objects are being weaponized, although we do see what happens when a vegetable peeler is used on human flesh, but what social relations and institutions are turned into weapons, and how this might reveal something of the social conflicts and tensions. I have to admit that when I first saw Weapons I thought it had less of the social criticism that I immediately saw in Barbarian, and saw it more as a conventional horror movie with even a more conventional monster, but the more I thought about it, and the more I thought about the question of weapons and weaponization the more my perspective changed. 

The film  concerns a small town somewhere in Pennsylvania. One Wednesday night at 2:17 in the morning, seventeen kids, all but one of one third grade class, got out of bed, walked out of their houses, and disappeared into the night. The action of the film really begins a month later when the school reopens and the town struggles to return to normal. The story is told through five intersecting perspectives: one from the teacher of the class of missing children, Justine (Julia Garner); one from a cop in the town, Paul (Alden Ehrenreich); one from a father of one of the missing children, Archer (Josh Brolin); one from James (Austin Abrams), a homeless man at the margins of the community; one from the school's principal, Marcus (Benedict Wong); and one from Alex (Cary Christopher), the one boy from the third grade class who did not disappear that night.

These are not so much Rashomon-esque perspectives, with radically irreconcilable perspectives on what happened, just partial and fragmentary perspectives, each with different insights and different limitations. In watching the film I was reminded of Franck Fischbach's assertion that in a capitalist society, a society defined by isolation, fragmentation, and class hierarchy, that knowledge, including our knowledge of society, can only be fragmented as well. As Fischbach writes, "It is not that consciousness expresses social being or that consciousness is determined by social being: it is that social being and consciousness are two expressions, two figures of the same reality." 
In watching the different perspectives and point of view, I kept thinking of this assertion, the way in which the order and connection of knowledge was the same as the order and connection of social relations. First, only a few of the characters are actively seeking knowledge about what really happened. Justine, the teacher, is trying to find out what happened that night, however, she is limited by not only the fact that she is under a cloud of suspicion, many parents think that she must have something to do with the kids in her classroom disappearing, but also because of a hierarchy which places parents above teachers. We learn that she has crossed the line in the past, hugging a student, and offering another a ride home. Archer, the father of one of the kids, is also trying to find out what happened, but he is hampered less by external constraints than by his own obsession with Justine as the source of what happened. 
Each works with the fragment of knowledge they have, Justine is convinced that Alex must know something. When she is forbidden to speak with him, or continue teaching, she tries to get Marcus, the principal to pursue her inquiry. The fragmentary nature of Archer's knowledge is more literal. Thanks to the omnipresence of Ring home surveillance, he has video of his son leaving the house showing the direction he is headed in. The video is only one point, one line actually, and he needs more data to be able to figure out where all of the kids are going. (Zach Cregger has made two horror films and both involve extended scenes of people using tape measurers--I honestly do not know what to make of that) He eventually gets access to video from another home showing the trajectory of another kid, and two lines converge on a point, but it is not until he talks to Justine, gives up his distrust, that he begins to understand the significance of the point where the lines converge. Knowledge is a relation, and it depends on a relation, to know is to escape the limitations of one's perspective. 
The limitations also affect the people who know, or come to find out, what really happened. James stumbles upon the truth when he breaks into Alex's house and finds Alex parents, and the kids all in some kind of catatonic hypnotized state. He eventually figures out that this entitles him to the fifty thousand dollar reward of any information leading up to finding the kids. Collecting the reward involves going to the police and, thanks to a previous interaction with Paul the cop, and not to mention the fact that he is homeless and struggling with addiction, he is not welcome there. Nor would they believe him. It should be mentioned that Paul, the cop, is not seeking the truth. He is, as he says, "not a detective." He spends his time harassing the homeless. The person who first knows what is going on is a homeless person, but being without a home, without property, means that what he knows  (This is another plot point that connects Cregger's two films). 
Alex is the only one who knows exactly what happens. His Aunt Gladys has come to live with his mother because she is sick (or so we are told). There is a great deal we do not know about Aunt Gladys. Is she really even his Aunt, really even related to her mother, or is she something that is masquerading as a relative. What we do know is that she is the reason the kids all disappeared that night. She is, for lack of a better word, a witch. She is capable of putting people under her spell with a lock of hair or a personal item. She has moved into his house, hypnotized his parents, and kidnapped his classroom, all supposedly to help her get better. Alex knows what has happened, but he dare not tell anyone.
This is the real point where Cregger's two films converge, on the home. What goes on behind closed doors is nobody's business. The police make a brief visit to Alex's home, but Glady's is able to spirit the children away, and as long as the house is clean, and makeup is used to cover the wounds on Alex's parents faces, the cops are satisfied. Barbarian focused on the power over physical space, to own a home is to be able build as many sub-basements as you needed to conceal the horrors going on there, but Weapons focuses on the psychic space, on the ability to weaponize your kids with any belief you impose on them. 




One of the most enigmatic images of the film occurs during Archer's dream. He sees the floating image of a gun, an AR-15, the weapon of choice of mass shooters. The gun has the clock numbers 2:17 on it. Some online have come up with a theory connecting the film to a bill to ban assault rifles. That is interesting, but I am wary of such a search for easter eggs, especially when the thematic points are already there. What is ultimately weaponized is the absolute authority parents, (and an occasional visiting aunt), have over children. Throughout the film people try to enter Alex's house, peering through the windows, but what keeps them out is not a witch's spell. They are kept out by the power of property and the authority of parents. This point is driven home in the final scenes of the film. The children are freed from Gladys' spell, or put under a new spell, sent to avenge themselves on the witch who held them captive. As they chase Gladys they break through windows and doors, traversing living rooms and yards, breaking apart the private homes that are castles for some, prisons for others, violently forcing a community founded on separation and isolation to confront what such isolation makes possible.