Memory and Intellect

     perché appressando sé al suo disire,

nostro intelletto si profonda tanto,

che dietro la memoria non può ire.

Dante, Paradiso, I.7-9

Freudo-Marxism mark 3 (or higher)

Le capitalisme, au XXè siècle, a fait de la libido sa principale énergie : l'énergie qui, canalisée sur les objets de la consommation, permet d'absorber les excédents de la production industrielle, en suscitant, par des moyens de captation de la libido, des désirs entièrement façonnés selon les besoins de la rentabilité des investissements. Or, aujourd'hui, cette captation de la libido a fini par la détruire, et ce fait majeur constitue une immense menace pour la civilisation industrielle : elle conduit inévitablement, à terme, à une crise économique mondiale sans précédent.

The work of Bernard Stiegler was recommended to me the other day. I was told that I could start with the writing available on the website of the Ars Industrialis, the organization he co-founded in 2003. Their manifesto is remarkable. The above is a chunk from its 3rd proposition that gives an idea of how they are updating Marx.

Finishing Empire

My reading of Empire is in fact something like timely. In the fall, perhaps in October, Commonwealth, the third volume in what I suppose to be a trilogy, will be published. Good to start at the beginning.

The project of the book is to delineate and argue for a particular reading of the contemporary world. Hardt and Negri argue that we have entered a phase of history they call Empire (conceptually related to previous Empires, such as the Roman Empire, but rigorously distinguished from 19th century European imperialism). The goal is to understand the particular logic of this phase in the development of capital in order to understand how it may be resisted, and where alternatives should and should not be sought. The book is organized into four parts. The first part is an introductory clearing of the ground, and presentation of the problematic, the concepts. The middle sections present, from two different angles, an interpretation of modernity and its transformation into Empire. The second section is something like an intellectual history of the idea of sovereignty from the early modern period through to the present day; the third section tells the same story from the perspective of the means and relations of production. The backstory told, the interpretive framework set up, the final section is an analysis of Empire itself. I found the last section to be written in quite a different voice from the rest of the book. Oddly more abstract, unsurprisingly more messianic. Significantly more difficult to read.

The book is enormously rich, and intervenes in any number of debates and bodies of scholarship. I plan to look over some of the reactions to and reviews of the book in the next week. At that stage, I may present some more specific arguments. At the moment, I want only to record the questions, or miniature research projects, that I want to pose and propose to and of this text.

From the perspective of late 19th century Marxism, I find the voluntarism of the text extraordinary. For Hardt and Negri, the driving force for structural innovation in capital is not competition between capitalists, as I have understood it to be for Marx, but rather resistance to capital mounted by the proletariat. This perspective—in which worker resistance is what changes the system—is of course more congenial in the 21st century. It is also, in certain respects, closer to the facts. Hardt and Negri mention the slow end of the Caribbean slave system, pointing to arguments that slavery was not abolished when it ceased to be profitable, but rather long after it had ceased to be profitable, when the tempo and tenacity of slave rebellion made it impossible to sustain. It might be pointed out that by the middle of the 19th century the slave system was no longer central to the global economy in the way that it arguably was in the 18th century. This argument about the structural changes in the capital (and, importantly, in the constitution of sovereignty) is made largely in terms of basic metaphysics and broad periodization, rather than with specific examples. Can finance capital in the 1980s really be explained by the broad rejectionism of the 1960s? From Vietnam to Berkeley? Perhaps. If I knew the Marxist tradition better, I would understand, I think, the stakes of what I call Hardt and Negri’s voluntarism. My sense is that it is a position fundamental to certain strains of Italian Marxism with which I am not familiar. It meshes well also, it seems, with the Deleuzian anti-structuralism and anti-formalism of the authors.

Biopower is a crucial concept in Empire. Having recently read Foucault’s later lectures, I am curious about the compatibility between Hardt and Negri’s account of the contemporary world and Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism. It is possible that they are simply tangential to one another. It might be argued that Empire is simply an exaggerated and developed form of the market ideology that so interested Foucault. It would, at any rate, be interesting to take careful note of how Hardt and Negri use Foucault. My sense is that they are using his work as something of a bridge between Marx and Deleuze. Indeed, in the preface, they say that Empire was inspired by two large, interdisciplinary books: Capital and Thousand Plateaus. It seems to me that the historical transformations they chronicle from modernity to postmodernity might also be that from Marx to Deleuze.

It is crucially important for Hardt and Negri’s analysis of the contemporary world that the relationship between Multitude and Empire is not mediated. The center may be reached from any point, because the center is not geographically located. There is no mediation because there are no levels between which mediation would be necessary. Everything is mixed into a smooth geometrical soup. Or at least tends to be. For me, this raises the question of the unity of the Multitude. It seems that for Hardt and Negri, every division within the Multitude (into nations or peoples or even, perhaps, classes), is a pernicious tactic of the corruption of Empire. So, indeed, is any attempt to assert a unity of all people beyond the singularity of Multitude. Yet the task for the Multitude is to assert itself as political subject. No doubt political subjecthood does not exactly require unity in any pre-poststructuralist sense, but I’m not sure that I understand how all this is supposed to work.

Finally, I was struck by the use, in the concluding section of the book in which something like concrete possible demands of the Multitude are suggested, by the use of the language of rights. Hardt and Negri clearly have a somewhat tortured relation to the so-called republican tradition. They are not definitive in their use of such words—several times they talk about postmodern republicanism, but eventually claim that the latin verb posse is to be preferred to res-publica as a description of the victory of Multitude. (If their most recent book is to be titled Commonwealth, perhaps they’ve reconsidered this). Yet it seems to me that Arendt’s observation that human rights are nothing without citizenship is applicable here. Isn’t Empire’s conception of global citizenship caught in just the same exclusionary bind as any other form of citizenship—that is, doesn’t it also implicitly exclude from humanity all those not included within Multitude? And this in a more radical way than simple nations? Is the creative being of Multitude supposed to solve this problem?

Very likely, this and other questions will be addressed in the next volume. It will also be interesting to see how well my impression of this book tallies with that of the professional reviews.

Spinoza's Ethics

I read Spinoza’s Ethics largely because I had heard so much about how a certain kind of Theory was deeply indebted to him, or claimed to be. My suspicion was (and is) that it is really Deleuze’s version of Spinoza that interests people, in the same way that people have now heard of Bergson largely because of Deleuze. There isn’t anything wrong with this, and I should admit strait off that I haven’t read very much of the relevant material on the French Spinozan revival of the 1970s. This, anyway, is how I came to Spinoza. Several months ago, I read the Theological-Political Treatise. Parts of it were very interesting, but since my interest in biblical hermeneutics and the debunking of miracles is, at best, abstract, I was not greatly moved. Since then, I have been traveling and focusing n other things, which is a shame. But I finally managed to sit down and work through the Ethics.

This was a first reading, and no doubt a superficial one. There are a few things I would like to highlight and remember. Most generally, and perhaps most superficially, I remember from long ago that much pop (or near pop) neuroscience takes its philosophical inspiration from Descartes. The way in which Spinoza thinks about the relationship between mind and body seems to me obviously far better tuned to contemporary understanding. I am generally fascinated by this aspect of the work, and would, on a second reading, pay close attention to it.

Perhaps most elusive and unexpected, for me, was Spinoza’s treatment of time (and much of this in the last pages of the book). This is bound up with the relation between mind and body. There is eternity and there is duration. The mind is able to conceive of nothing except through the body, which has duration, and is in time. However, the mind may conceive of the body under the species of eternity, but this is, I think, essentially to conceive of God. This is the preserve of reason, which always is concerned with the eternal. There is a great deal more here, and no doubt the duration/eternity dichotomy is crucial not just for Spinoza, but for the whole tradition of philosophy—perhaps it is even universal. The question is, and I might tend in this direction, is Spinoza attempting to get around this dichotomy, to present us with a way of thinking that downgrades the distinction to relative unimportance?

Now, given that I came to this text with Theory in my head, I was especially interested in desire as a concept. Desire is defined at one point as, “appetite together with consciousness of the appetite” (76 – I am using the Penguin Classics edition of the Curley translation). I should say in passing that, in Lukacs, consciousness appeared as the highest good, and there seemed to be no need to explain why it was good. Spinoza does a somewhat better job explaining why it is good. Later, as the first point in the definitions of the affects we find, “desire is man’s very essence, insofar as it is conceived to be determined, from any given affection of it, to do something” (104). The middle clauses, Spinoza explains, are important. Desire is man’s essence only insofar as man, and everything else, strives for self-preservation. Desire is then the conscious (as opposed to appetite) striving for something that, given an existing condition (Spinoza’s affection), tends toward the preservation of the individual. Of course, Spinoza quickly points out, desires “are not infrequently so opposed to one another than the man is pulled in different directions and knows not where to turn” (104).

Spinoza believes that if all individuals acted according to their own best interests, or what, with a clear mind, they perceived these interests to be, we would have peace, freedom, and prosperity. This is because there is nothing more useful to one individual than another individual in full possession of his own capacities. The state, however, and its power to coerce and/or legislate on matters of morality and action, is necessary because people are generally ruled by their affects rather than their reason.

I wonder how similar this is to a Smithian hand-of-God argument? Indeed, since I have been trained to pay attention to the way people talk about affect, it seems to me that a single problematic does indeed somehow unite Spinoza and, who is perhaps most interesting in this regard, the Marquis de Sade. Indeed, as an aside, I am very sorry that I could not bring myself to write about La philosophie dans le boudoir immediately after finishing it. The thing is horrible and fascinating; especially in the light of certain arguments about emotion-talk and radical forms of republicanism at the time of the French Revolution. Sade really does represent this logic pushed in a radical way to a certain limit.

A final confusion of which I want to remind myself: Spinoza several times uses the phrase “more reality,” at one point in what must be one of his famous sives, it is “more reality, or perfection” (33). What does this mean, exactly? I think this must be a significant philosophical point, in the same way that “Deus sive natura” is not just any conjunction, but a basic Spinozan contention. More perfection, I understand. The more of God’s nature one is able to understand, the more perfection one contains, or, is. But I am confused by the equation of this to reality. As opposed to confused ideas of reality? Spinoza, I would have thought, allows the reality of confusion, just not its correctness, or perfection. We can only ever have an imperfect, or mutilated (such language!) idea of evil, since it is itself a negation. It is impossible to hate God, since to know God excludes the negation necessary for hate. But does Spinoza consider such gaps, failures, and negations to be absences of reality? I am a bit confused about this.

At any rate, I rashly moved on from Spinoza some days ago, and have started reading another old and difficult book—though one I have a better excuse for tackling: the New Science of Giamattista Vico. I will need to spend some time with this text, which is more exciting than I had thought it would be, and will write more about it soon. But for now I want only to point out that there are some interesting echoes with Spinoza. For instance, here is Vico’s axiom 35, “Wonder is the daughter of ignorance. The greater the cause inspiring it, the greater the wonder.” Then here is axiom 36, “The weaker its powers of reasoning, the more vigorous the human imagination grows.” One of the more elegant moments in the Ethics is the definition of wonder as what one experiences before a singular thing. This seems to me remarkably powerful. A thing appears singular when one is ignorant of how it is connected to other things, when one has no conceptual grasp of it. (I would argue that psychologically, when a thing is really singular, it inspires not wonder so much as uncomprehending boredom—something is interesting when it speaks in a powerful and unexpected way to what one already knows. Too familiar, or too foreign, and it is impossible to think about). Perhaps having just read Spinoza, I am going too far and assimilating to him what are really pieces of Enlightenment common sense by Vico’s time. Still, the categories of wonder and imagination are clearly important—if I were more energetic, I would keep careful track of how Spinoza defines them, and then how Vico defines and uses them.

It also occurs to me, though only here, that Badiou, who certainly ought to know his Spinoza, may be doing interesting things in his Ethics, discussed a bit below, around the idea of evil as essentially a negation, a failure.