Das vor kurzem im Laika Verlag erschienene Buch „Lob der Grenzen“ von  Régis Debray basiert auf einem Vortrag, den er auf einer Konferenz gehalten hat, die am 23. Marz 2010 in der“Maison franco-japonaise“ in Tokio stattfand. Debray folgt in seinem elaborierten Loblied auf die Grenze zunächst einem Paradox:

Jeder soll die Öffnung begrüßen, wahrenddessen die Verschlussindustrie (thermische Kollektoren und elektronische Systeme) ihre Verkaufszahlen verzehnfacht. Only one world summt das Show-Business, und es gibt viermal so viele Staaten in der UNO als zu ihrer Gründung. Der Horizont des Konsumenten dehnt sich aus, der des Wahlers kauert sich zusammen. Wahrend das Mantra der Deterritorialisierung, obwohl es schwer auszusprechen ist, gebieterisch auf unseren Kolloquien ertont, „territorialisiert“ das internationale Recht das Meer – das fruhere res nullius – in drei unterschiedliche Zonen (Hoheitsgewässer, Anschlusszone und Ausschließliche Wirtschaftszone). Die Ökonomie globalisiert sich, die Politik provinzialisiert sich. Durch Mobiltelefone, GPS und das Internet werden die Antipoden zur Nachbarschaft, aber die Nachbarn des Townships ziehen ihre Messer und stechen sich umso brutaler ab. Das ist der große Unterschied. Selten gab es in der langen Geschichte der abendländischen Gutgläubigkeit eine vergleichbare Kluft zwischen unserem Denken und der existierenden Realität. Zwischen dem, was wir fur wünschenswert halten, und dem, was ist.

Das Loblied auf die Deterritorialisierung haben die Deleuzianer lange gesungen, zu lange; es blieb Bifo Berardi und zuletzt Sloterdijk vorbehalten, anzumerken, dass die Bewegung der Deterritorialisierung in den globalen Geldkapitalströmen des finanziellen Kapitals zu sich selbst gekommen sei. Nicht nur sie, die Diskurse über Vielfalt, Durchlässigkeit und Vernetzung drängen auf die Aufhebung der Grenze, ja auf die Zerstörung der Haut, die am Anfang war. Und mit ihr die Grenze.

Als polemische Schnittstelle zwischen Organismus und Außenwelt ist die Haut genauso weit von einem wasserdichten Vorhang entfernt wie eine Grenze, die diesen Namen verdient, von einer Mauer. Die Mauer verbietet den Durchlass; die Grenze reguliert ihn. Einer Grenze zu sagen, sie sei durchlässig, bedeutet, ihr ihre Aufgabe vorzuhalten: sie ist da, um zu filtern. Ein lebendiges System ist ein thermodynamisches System des Austausches mit der Umgebung, terrestrisch, maritim, sozial.

Ubiquitär wird vom Transit geschwärmt, der die Welt zu einer Ansammlung von Un-Orten macht. Selbst die Finanzmärkte sind solche Un-Orte, an denen es zur Fixierung von Preisen, Erwartungen und Spekulationen kommt, zu einer quasi-autonomen Bewegungsform des Handels mit Wertpapieren, und dies als differenzielle Akkumulation von Geldkapital.

Es gibt zunehmend Un-Orte der nicht zu unterscheidenden Unpersonen, die an diese Gegenden angrenzen oder sie abstecken, nützliche und sogar unerlässliche Hafen, aber ohne Qualität oder Gesicht: Supermärkte, Flughafen, Tankstellen, Parkplätze, Autobahnen, Bahnhofe und Mautstationen. Die Leichtsinnigen leiten daraus die Vision des Planeten als Drehkreuz ab, weitläufige Flughafen ohne Menschen, die Mars und Pandora verbinden, mit schwebenden Zweifüßlern, die nie mehr ihre beiden Füße irgendwohin setzen müssen. Ein teleportierter Konsument, eine Luftstadt in den Dimensionen des Globusses: der Gedanke des Uberfliegens ist verpufft, genau wie die Wirtschaft der Schwerelosigkeit, die ihn begleitet. Auch wenn es sinnvoll erscheint, die Welt zu vernetzen, heißt das nicht, dass man dieses Netz wie die Welt bewohnen kann. Es ist unmöglich, aus einem Durchgangsort einen Aufenthaltsort zu machen, weil das Vis-a-vis fehlt. Es gibt kein Anti- auf der anderen Seite. Wie soll man sich setzen, ohne sich zu widersetzen? Eine Gesellschaft ohne ein sie anerkennendes oder belagerndes Außen hatte keinen Existenzgrund; so wie eine Nation, die allein auf der Welt wäre, sich auflösen wurde, ihre Nationalhymne, ihre Fußball- oder Kricketmannschaft, bis zu ihrer Sprache. Eine juristische Person hat einen Umriss, sonst wäre sie keine. Demzufolge ist die „Internationale Gemeinschaft“ keine. Der schlaffe Zombie bleibt eine hohle Formel, ein rhetorisches Alibi in den Händen des abendländischen Direktoriums, das bis jetzt kein Mandat beansprucht hat.

Man meint, die Zeitgenossen könnten gar nicht aufhören, das hohe Lied der Konnektivität zu singen. Es ist ein imperialistisches Diktat. Selten wurde in diesem Kontext Deleuze so missverstanden. In Wahrheit äußert sich Deleuze äußerst pessimistisch zur Konnektivität. Diese operiert durch die inklusive Disjunktion, einem Prozess, der heterogene Elemente in Kommunikation versetzt, ohne dass sie eine gemeinsame Logik besitzen müssen. Deleuze hasst die Kommunikation. Alexander Galloway spricht im gleichen Atemzug von Netzwerkpessimismus. Debray sieht die Dinge ähnlich:

Während wir auf dieses Wunder der grenzenlosen Verbrüderung im Angesicht des Außerirdischen warten, lösen wir die Siegel ab, zerschlagen wir die Codes, zerbrechen wir die Schlosser, connecten wir uns, klicken wir, twittern wir, mailen wir nach Herzenslust, aber wir glauben nicht daran, dass die Verbindung das geheime Einverständnis aufwiegt. Zu jeder zivilen oder spirituellen Offensichtlichkeit gehört eine technische Apparatur, aber es ist weit vom „Konnektiv“ zum Kollektiv.

Es gibt keine Limits mehr, heißt es. Die Inklusion schreitet durch und mit der Divergenz voran. Das ist der Sieg der Differenz, die in der Inklusion alles verschwimmen lässt. Die Macht mag die Differenz. Nietzsche ist angekommen. Mit Nietzsche lässt sich nämlich behaupten, dass die Eigenschaften eines Dings nur Effekte für andere Dinge sind. Wenn man nun den Term „anderes Ding“ eliminiert, dann hat ein Ding gar keine Eigenschaften mehr, und die Folgerung daraus lautet, dass es definitiv kein Ding ohne andere Dinge gibt, i.e. es dominieren absolut die Relationen. Oder anders gesagt, die Dinghaftigkeit löst sich in den Strom der differenziellen Ereignisse auf. Unendliche Vermischung von allem und jedem.

„Heutzutage gibt es keine Limits mehr“, hört man jeden Morgen an der Kasse, am Tresen, wohin sich in Paris die beste Philosophie geflüchtet hat. Feuerbach, Erzieher des großen Marx, wurde im Bistro seine Kinder erkennen. Keine Limits mehr, tatsächlich, angefangen beim Anstieg der Bezahlung und der Pfründe über den Firlefanz der Madame Schamlos zur Gleichgültigkeit der ungezwungenen Präsidenten. Die Schamlosigkeit der Epoche rührt von keinem Exzess, sondern einem Mangel an Grenzen her. Es gibt keine Limits von mehr, weil es keine Limits zwischen mehr gibt. Zwischen Staatsgeschäften und Privatinteressen. Zwischen Bürger und Individuum, Wir und Ich. Zwischen Sein und Schein. Zwischen Bank und Casino. Zwischen Nachrichten und Werbung. Zwischen Schule auf der einen Seite, dem Glauben und Interessen auf der anderen. Zwischen Staat und Lobbys. Zwischen Umkleide und Rasen. Schlafzimmer und Büro der Staatschefs. Und so weiter. Interessenskonflikte und gefährliche Liebschaften resultieren aus einer Vermischung der Ebenen. Das Prinzip des Laizismus hat einen Namen: die Separation. Das Gesetz ist öffentlich, das Private bleibt zuhause. Es begann im Mai 1968 in der Euphorie eines sympathischen Tohuwabohu. Es versinkt momentan in übler Geschäftemacherei und in wirrem Exhibitionismus. Es ist an der Zeit, den Gott Terminus anzuflehen, die Grenzsteine wieder aufzustellen und die gelben Linien nachzuzeichnen. Sonst sind wir nicht mehr weit vom „Untergang der Welt“ entfernt, den Feuerbach, der Autor von Das Wesen des Christentums, ausrief – jedenfalls vom Untergang der facettenreichen Welt, die noch nicht durch das Empire aus Zahlen und Bildern geglättet und formatiert wurde, weil sie bestimmte Formen einhalten musste. Das Informelle ist momentan vermurkst. Weil es sofort zur Sache kommen will, ohne Verzögerung und ohne viel Aufhebens. Es mochte spontan, frei von Komplexen sein, und das riecht nach Fertigprodukt. Die Abwesenheit der Präliminarien schadet der Lust, wie der Verfahrensfehler der gerechten Justiz. Es gibt keinen Wächter mehr im Haus, keine Schwelle zum Laden. Sie kundigen nur mehr Verdrießliches an, E-Mails ohne Höflichkeitsfloskeln, Sex ohne „Techtelmechtel an der Tür“, MacDonalds ohne Vorspeise. Das Gluck liegt auf der Wiese, meinetwegen, aber nicht auf der Brachfläche Die prominenten Soziologen, die Distinktion für Überheblichkeit hielten, haben die Geldschleusen geöffnet. Dies verärgert jede Barriere, und die kulturelle Besonderheit ertragt es nicht. Die Grenze hat eine schlechte Presse: sie verteidigt die Gegenmächte. Erwarten wir nicht von den etablierten Machthabern, die in der stärkeren Position sind, dass sie für sie werben. Noch dass die, die über die Mauer geklettert und finanziell geflüchtet sind – Mitglieder des Jet-Sets, Fußballstars, Schwarzhändler für Arbeitskräfte, fünfzigtausend Dollar-Conferenciers, multinationale Adepten der Transferpreise –, dem, was sich ihnen in den Weg stellt, ihre Liebe erklären. In der Monotonie des Geldmachens (Geld ist immer mehr oder weniger das Gleiche) wachst die Erwartung ins Unermessliche. Bis ins Unvergleichliche. Zur Verweigerung. Damit man wieder zwischen wahr und falsch unterscheiden kann. Darin liegt übrigens der Schutzschild der Untertanen vor der Ultra-Geschwindigkeit, dem Unfassbaren und der Omnipräsenz. Die Enteigneten haben ein Interesse an einer klaren und deutlichen Demarkationslinie. Das einzige Kapital, was sie haben, ist ihr Territorium, und die Grenze ist ihre Haupteinnahmequelle (je ärmer ein Land ist, desto abhängiger ist es von den Einfuhrsteuern). Die Grenze gleicht die ungleichen Kräfte aus (ein bisschen). Die Reichen gehen, wohin sie wollen, pfeilschnell; die Armen gehen, wohin sie können, sich abstrampelnd. Diejenigen, die die Vorratslager beherrschen (Nuklearsprengkopfe, Gold und Devisen, Wissen und Diplome), können mit dem Geldfluss spielen, wobei sie noch reicher werden. Diejenigen, die nichts auf Lager haben, sind die Spielbälle des Flusses. Der Starke ist flüssig. Der Schwache hat nur den Schoß der Familie, eine uneinnehmbare Religion, ein unbesetzbares Labyrinth, Reisfelder, Berge, Deltas. Asymmetrischer Krieg. Der Räuber hasst die Stadtmauer; die Beute liebt sie. Der Starke dominiert die Lüfte, was ihn übrigens dazu verleitet, seine Kräfte zu überschätzen. Widerständler, Guerilleros und „Terroristen“ haben weder Hubschrauber noch Drohnen oder Überwachungssatelliten. Nicht der Himmel ist ihr Freund, sondern der Untergrund. Sie sind eins mit dem Tunnel, der Höhle und den unterirdischen Gängen. Gut gemacht, alter Maulwurf!

Demarkationslinien ziehen. Die Nicht-Relation lobpreisen. Die Identität. Das Denken jenseits der Relation und des Relationismus verlangt ein Denken in den Termen der Singularität. Die Situation der Nicht-Relationiertheit ist für Laruelle die einer radikalen Einsamkeit. Sie kann sich nur auf die Instanz der Eins-heit beziehen. Über Laruelle hinaus entdecken wir das Konzept eines schwachen Kommunismus oder was Galloway einfach „Kollektivität“ nennt. Die Kollektivität erfordert einen anderen Umgang mit den Differenzen. Das hohe Lied auf radikale Offenheit, absolute Kontingenz und Differenz, das die Queeren singen, endet in der totalen Paranoia. MultiKulti ist das Resultat des Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen, die in Echtzeit protokolliert werden. Debray umschreibt dies mit Wald- und Wiesen-Globalisierung.

Wünschen wir uns eine andere Unterkunft als einen Bau oder eine Grotte, aber tauschen wir uns nicht darin, was uns die Globalisierung anstelle der Balkanisierung bringt. Insbesondere, was die diasporische Bombe hier und da an identitätsstiftender Energie freisetzt. Migrationsstrome, Verkehr und Vermischung der Menschen sind willkommen, aber das Harlekinkostüm der Erde birgt so viel Konfrontation wie Mischung. Der Ansturm der Immigranten schürt die Xenophobie der reichen Aufnahmeländer, und in den Megastädten im Würgegriff heben die Armutsexilanten ihren eigenen Schützengraben aus. In Die Form der Stadt erinnert Julien Gracq an den „latenten und fortwährenden Reibungszustand, der die Beziehungen elektrisiert.“ Das zivilisatorische Hin- und Herreiben führt zum Ekzem. Die religiösen Fundamentalismen sind Hautkrankheiten einer globalen Welt, in der die Kulturen auf Tuchfühlung sind. „Wenn sich der grenzenlose Raum vereint, bis er eine einzige Grenzzone ist, dann wird die ganze Welt zur Reizzone.“ Und jeder Schmerz wird ein wütender Aufschrei, jede Unstimmigkeit eine Frage der Ehre. Man stößt sich, man spioniert sich aus, man beleidigt sich, man erhitzt sich über ein Wort zu viel. Der Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen, angestachelt von der Echtzeitkommunikation, erzeugt blitzartige Paranoia. Die Überwachung der Wortwahl, die Protokollierung der kleinsten Geste, Unterstellungen innerhalb der Gemeinschaften – bitterer Effekt einer Wald- und Wiesen-Globalisierung.

Loblied auf die Negation. Mit ihr muss denjenigen ein monströses NEIN entgegengeschleudert werden, die uns sagen wollen, dass wir die Welt so hinzunehmen haben, wie sie ist.

Der Kleinbürger glaubte sich befreit, als der Zeitgeist aufhörte, zwischen den Klassen, zwischen den Geschlechtern, zwischen Werk und Produkt, zwischen Rot und Schwarz, zwischen Info und Kommerz, Geld und Schick, Bühne und Saal, der Sache und ihrer Bewerbung zu unterscheiden. Und die Langeweile entstand bald aus dem Durcheinander. Der Andere ist verschwunden und mit ihm die Geisel der Negativität. Allgemeiner Narzissmus. Ich bezweifle nicht, dass man ein Plädoyer für die Grenze nicht auf eine Verteidigungsrede zugunsten der Armbrust reduzieren kann, wenn die Arkebuse angelegt ist, oder zugunsten der Maginot-Linie, wenn Panzer auf sie zielen. Man wird mich darauf hinweisen, dass Google, das Institut Pasteur und die regierungsübergreifende Expertengruppe zum Thema Klimaveränderung – nicht zu vergessen, aber aus ganz anderen Gründen: die Hollywoodstudios – über den Horizont hinaus modellieren und kalkulieren. Sie wissen also nicht, mein armer Herr, dass die entmaterialisierten „Kulturgüter“ überall vom Himmel fallen, ohne Papier oder Celluloid oder Magnetstreifen? Geben wir es zu: all die Kulte, die technische Gadgets und Gaia-Esoterik kombinieren, geben dem Dogma ohne Grenzen einen Ausdruck von Evidenz, sonst hatte es nicht die hearts and minds der Krippen-, Putten- und Kanarienvögelliebhaber erobern können. Wahrend das Schwarzbuch über die Grenze überall herumliegt (nach dem Motto: „Nationalismus, das ist Krieg!“, tut sich der humanitäre Ohne-Grenzismus darin hervor, seine Verbrechen zu vertuschen. Besser noch: er hat den Konfusionismus zum Messianismus gewandelt. Er hat die Konter-Revolution als Revolution getarnt. Geben wir ihm seine polemische Boshaftigkeit in einem Gebrüll aus Ismen zurück (das genaue Gegenteil dieser Souveränismen, Jakobinismen, Kulturalismen, Relativismen und anderen Zynismen, die er gern selbst benutzt, wenn es darum geht, die Gegner der Gleichmacherei zu klassifizieren).

Der Ohne-Grenzismus ist Ideologie. Und mehr als das.

Vorwärts, ihr Esel! Was ist der Ohne-Grenzismus? - Ein Ökonomismus. Durch die Vermahlung mit dem global marketplace, durch die „Internalisierung“ der Skalen- und Produkt-Ökonomie, durch die freie Zirkulation von Kapital und Waren – seltsamerweise ist die Gewalt hierbei ausgenommen – verschleiert er den Multinationalismus hinter einem gutherzigen Nimbus von Schicksalsgemeinschaft und Brüderlichkeit. Und gibt der Politik, die durch die Wahlpflicht an ihrer Scholle klebt, den Rest. Er leistet sich weniger Staat und verschleiert die Konsequenz: mehr Mafia; er gibt dem Recht des Stärkeren einen Glanz von Generosität; und breitet den Mantel des Mitgefühls über Deregulierung und Privatisierung. Getragen von den mobilen Finanzen, der numerischen Schreibweise und der Universalität der Bits, lauft unseren  Off-Shore-Gesellschaften das Wasser im Munde zusammen. Sponsoren garantiert. Charity-Business on top. - Ein Technizismus. Ein Standardwerkzeug hat weder Lange noch Breite. Mein letztes Modell hat eine kurze Lebensdauer, aber es findet sich im Handumdrehen überall wieder. Der Standard Unicode, der alle Schriften codieren kann (Ihre Tausenden Kanjis16 inklusive), zwingt sich allen Computern auf. Diese roboterartige Hybris, die sich als weltweite Metakultur aufspielt, wird mit Hilfe von Numerik und Glasfaser darin enden, den Posthumanismus mit einem Irrlicht zu verwechseln.- Ein Absolutismus. Der Delinquent verinnerlicht den Gedanken des Limits nicht, noch der Prophet oder der Pseudo-Gelehrte. Diese drei Schlauberger haben gemein, dass sie sich über alle Limits erheben. Weil sie auf alles eine Antwort haben und sich überall zuhause fühlen, sind sie gefährlich. Der Missionar mit dem Stern, der Inquisitor mit dem Turban und der Scharlatan mit der weisen Weste kennen die Weisheit der endlichen Dinge nicht. So geht es den Universalreligionen, die sich in ihrer Schieflage ins Unendliche verlieren – statt sich wieder aufzurichten. Der arabisierte Andre Miquel kann im Islam noch vor der ersten Jahrtausendwende keine Grenze ausfindig machen. Es geht um die Frage der Einflussbereiche, nicht der Territorien (die natürliche, aber verschwommene Grenze der Sahara; veränderlich und in Spanien und mit Byzanz diskutiert, aber stets störend und illegitim). Nach dem Koran wäre die Welt in Dar-al-Islam und Dar-al-Harb (Land des Krieges) eingeteilt. Die Grenze zwischen beiden ware nichts als eine Zwischenstation. Die Wahrung des Absoluten? Kein laizistischer Geist kann diese Vermessenheit der globalen Allwertigkeit akzeptieren, sei es die der neo-mittelalterlichen Umma17 oder jene des neo-missionarischen Abendlandes. Der erste Wert der Grenze ist die Begrenzung der Werte. - Ein Imperialismus. Weil sich das Imperium dem Königtum nicht durch seine geografische Masse entgegenstellt, sondern weil es den Anderen Grenzen aufdruckt, nicht aber sich selbst. Das neue Rom greift die Devise des alten auf, gezeichnet Ovid: "Anderen Völkern wurde Land mit fester Grenze gegeben; der Umfang der Stadt Rom und der der Welt sind gleich."18 Die Organisation des Nord-Atlantik-Vertrages (NATO) erstreckt sich heutzutage uber den Kaukasus und Zentralasien. Und ´"Gerechtigkeit ohne Grenzen" ist der Name, den Washington zunächst der ersten Aktion im "Krieg gegen den Terrorismus" gegeben hat, der mit einer Niederlage enden wird. Die "Pflicht, einzugreifen" ist zum Rosenwasser geworden, mit dem sich die alternden Imperien des Abendlandes parfümieren. Der Westen fühlt sich nicht dazu angehalten, den Krieg zu erklären, um ihn zu führen, und mokiert sich über das Recht der Menschen genauso wie über ihre Bedürfnisse. Weil sein eigenes Recht für alle gilt, gilt das internationale Gesetz nicht für ihn. Alles Fremdartige ist ein Komplize – oder ein Klient – mit Einfluss. Und es ist vermessen, sich in die Prinzipien des urbi et orbi einzumischen, in das Kuddelmuddel zwischen Soldaten und Söldnern, Präventivkrieg und legitimen Verteidigungskrieg, unilateraler Einflussnahme und kollektiv entschiedener Assistenz, zwischen Allianz und Hegemonie. Budapest, Prag, Kabul; Vietnam, Irak, immer noch Afghanistan: gestern wie heute besteht das Unglück der Imperialisten, das zu ihrem Scheitern fuhrt, darin, dass sie die Grenzen als eine zu vernachlässigende Größe ansehen.

Erschienen im Laika Verlag   Foto: Bernhard Weber

In November 2015, Verso Books sent a copy of Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams to every member of the UK’s Labour Shadow Cabinet. The shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, at least, appeared to have read it: a few days later, he unveiled a very future-oriented economic policy. “It’s socialism,” he said, “but socialism with an iPad.” Not long afterwards, the Guardian writer Zoe Williams directly referenced the book in a column titled “The future’s at stake: the left must show it could create an iPad.” Which is on the face of it strange, because the iPad doesn’t belong to the future; it’s something that already exists, and has done so since 2010. How is it that “inventing the future” has come to be effectively synonymous with “inventing the iPad?” As soon as it’s crystallized, the future is already over. This thought is not new; few things are. In High Rise, thirty-five years before the iPad, J.G. Ballard – the only writer capable of really understanding the 21st century – saw the tide of progress carrying us into a “landscape beyond technology.” Surrounded by broken washing machines and clogged-up air vents, the productive apparatuses of society transformed into a set of symbols, his hero Robert Laing senses a “future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.” And Ballard has strange company here. For Srnicek and Williams, the same period in which he was writing, the 1970s, also marks the point where their own future died. It was in the 70s that futurity was captured by the political right; under neoliberalism it’s the right that radically reshapes the world according to its own vision, while the left has resigned itself to a series of desperate rearguard actions, trying to defend the last fragments of the welfare state, clinging to a socialist past instead of trying to imagine a socialist future. To briefly summarize the book: Srnicek and Williams argue that the left has been paralyzed by what they call “folk politics”: a cluster of practices characterized by localism, horizontalism, prefiguration, direct action, and direct experience. All these forms privilege immediate suffering and immediate struggles – folk politics isn’t getting us anywhere, they argue; it fights small battles on fractured terrains, without any master plan for a transformed society, and even there it loses. We’re trapped in nostalgia for a lost era of Maoist revolution or social-democratic comfort, and all the while the world is slipping into a digitized apocalypse. To halt the coming catastrophe, the left needs to offer an enticing vision of the future, and Srnicek and Williams have such a vision. We should demand full automation of production, a reduction or elimination of the working week, a universal basic income, and “the diminishment of the work ethic.” We should demand a future in which the pointless tedium of waged labor is eliminated entirely, and humanity is free to concentrate on something more important. There’ll be iPads. All these things, they assure us, are actually achievable, and I don’t doubt them. We are all still progressing forwards in time, many of us have our own slowly failing gadgets; what is this thing, “the future,” that we lost? In what sense do these proposals bring it back? And does a future that’s been resuscitated, dragged out of the past and into the present, have any real claim to futurity? * * * Full automation and a universal basic income are not things that belong only to some speculative science-fiction imaginary. Since the days of the postwar boom, and up until it met the grinding shabbiness of the crises of the 1970s, workers and intellectuals have fairly confidently predicted that in a short period of time human labour would be made superfluous by technological advances. (John Maynard Keynes, hardly a social revolutionary, was a major proponent of this idea.) The universal basic income has similarly long roots. After all, the idea has been toyed with several times within a capitalist society, even in the US state of Alaska. Richard Nixon, another unlikely hero for the left, proposed a Family Assistance Plan not entirely dissimilar to current UBI, which only narrowly failed to pass Congress. Neither Keynes nor Nixon had much interest in getting rid of capitalism. The future Snricek and Williams propose isn’t really all that heterogeneous to the awful present we’re inhabiting now, or its awful recent past. Something very important is missing. To their credit, the authors are careful to remind us that they are not presenting a total vision but a set of actually achievable demands that could set us on the road to a better world. These are transitional demands, but once they’re achieved we’ll be out of capitalism and into something else. On this point I disagree. (That said, there are some – such as David Graeber and McKenzie Wark – who argue that we’re already out of capitalism, and into something worse.) The book consistently refers to its future not as communism, but “postcapitalism.” It’s a world without work, but also without the commons. “The theory of the Communists,” write Marx and Engels, “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” But here, private property remains untouched. The productive apparatuses are to be fully automated, removing workers as much as possible from every stage of the production process: who, then, will own them? Who will own the commodities that these apparatuses produce? And if humanity is unburdened from the need to work and left to produce freely in the pursuit of its own self-expression, who will own that? Without anything to oppose bourgeois property, the result could be fully monstrous: a bloated, gluttonous ruling class engaged in limitless production, and recapturing any losses when the new peons come to spend their universal basic pittance. The propertied classes would fuse with an automaton that requires no human parts except for ownership to form a single apparatus; Utopia as a cyborg dictatorship. This future has, in fact, already been described – it’s E.M. Forster’s 1909 science-fiction story The Machine Stops. Here, all of humanity lives in tiny cells within the body of the vast subterranean Machine. The Machine produces all their consumer goods, it provides them with anything they might want or need at a moment’s notice, it speaks to them, and allows them to speak to each other through video-messaging. People tend not to leave their cells; it’s not forbidden, but it’s certainly not encouraged. Full automation. Universal basic income. A networked society. In the end the Machine starts to slowly disintegrate. Billions die, and Forster, who had something of a reactionary streak, can only see this as a good thing. Who owns the Machine? The Machine does. The abolition of work is a worthwhile project – and, what might be more important, an effective slogan – but depending on other factors, it could have any number of consequences. As Srnicek and Williams point out, the automation of production under neoliberalism is not liberatory but merely disposessive; without the guaranteed basic income it becomes a plague rather than a cure. But the compensatory effects of UBI might not be as great as they imagine, and the proposals in Inventing the Future are not themselves intended to amount to communism. Its authors might argue that they only place the working classes in a better position from which to dismantle the existing state of things. I’m not so sure. While the workplace was never the only place where workers have historically struggled, it has always been an important site of radical agitation – it is here that the working classes exercise tremendous power and great capacity to disrupt production. While recent struggles have demonstrated the disruptive potentials of blockades, I’m skeptical that the disappearance of longshoremen or warehouse workers will necessarily advance our position. What forms could resistance take once the workplace is safely cleared on all human flesh, yet private property still remains firmly in the hands of the capitalists? One: nihilist terrorism. Two: protest marches, boycotts, and online activism. Or, in other words, folk politics. The notion of “folk politics” is based on that of “folk psychology,” a borrowed concept from the philosophy of mind, so I’ll borrow one myself. Gilbert Ryle used the notion of a “category error” to help disentangle some of the confusion in the mind-brain problem: he gives the example of someone visiting Oxford, being shown around the colleges and libraries, and eventually turning to their host and asking, “but where is the University?” Similarly a neurologist will spend all day sticking his fingers in people’s brains, and at the end of it ask, “but where is the mind?” And Srnicek and Williams, trudging along with the rest of us in another fruitless anti-neoliberal street protest, ask: “where is the counter-hegemony?” It’s in their critique of folk politics that I have the most sympathy for Srnicek and Williams’ position. I’ve been on some of the same depressing marches, inevitably broken up by cops or (more likely) rain; I’ve seen the same witless prefigurative carnivals; I share the same exhaustion with the idea that if we all buy our milk from local sources the world will turn into a better place. They’ve touched on a very important point: the way the left does politics now is not working; we need to seek out a new organisational strategy. Finding a strategy that works is an enormously challenging task, though, and Inventing the Future doesn’t really attempt it. The folk-political dogmas of localism and horizontalism and their call for a new vision of the future do not belong to the same category; they’ve seen a deficiency in the means the left uses, and propose to correct it with a new set of aims. This is a category error – it’s like saying that we’re not walking quickly enough, so we should decide on a different destination. For all its faults, folk politics does actually give people an idea of what they can personally do to help; it has a program for the arrangement of bodies: you join the demonstration, you buy local, you express your undiminishing outrage on Twitter. The old party model was similar: you organize your workplace, you go on strike, you vote Communist. Srnicek and Williams say: you create a counter-hegemony. How? When it comes to actual, tactical suggestions, their contribution is slight. They suggest, for instance, that we should attempt to capture sections of the media to promote our message. Which comes off a little condescending, as if people weren’t already trying to do precisely that. We should also be building think tanks, establishing a “Mont Pelerin of the left.” We should imitate Syriza and Podemos. The book may have been written before the former’s total capitulation to neoliberalism last year, and it would be unfair to criticize the authors for not anticipating it. But as the example of Greece shows, our troubles go deeper than an over-reliance on placards. The call for a “Mont Pelerin of the left,” already familiar to those of us with an unhealthy exposure to social-ish wonks, might be the most troubling; a hyper-Gramscianism that treats all ideas as fundamentally equal quantities, capable of being transmitted through the same indifferent channels. The authors anticipate the argument that neoliberal institutions such as the Mont Pelerin Society could be so effective because their ideas were amenable to the ruling classes, and respond by noting that between its foundation in 1947 and the first implementations of neoliberalism in the 1970s there was a long period in which their program was seen as entirely nonsensical. This is less than convincing. The ruling classes have also always been presented with a diversity of strategic forms, and it’s historical circumstances, which are not always entirely within their control, that make one or the other more feasible. But their power to choose is greater than ours – one can’t legislate communism by an act of Parliament, or decree it in a Papal bull; it’s unlikely we could build it with think-tanks either. * * * Still, the real problem with Inventing the Future is not the deficiencies in its program – any bugs in the proposals could always be ironed out in the testing stage – but its relation to futurity as such. It’s strange that a book titled Inventing the Future doesn’t really contain any attempt to actually think through the concept of the future, rather than just its configuration. Its vision is conditioned by the assumption that what we’re urgently in need of is a future, and that we all agree on what a “future” actually means. This is not, I think, the case. Hence the occasional contradictions: will our future emerge out of our present, through sheer force of mind, or do we dredge it up from the recent past? How does one invent the future? One major machine in which the future is produced is of course culture – which Srnicek and Williams give remarkably little attention, despite their call for a new cultural counter-hegemony. Not every Marxist work needs to pepper its pages with the constant playful readings of pop-cultural texts so beloved of Slavoj Zizek et al., but there’s something eerily discomfiting about reading page after page on how there was once a future – from the Soviet conquest of space to afro-futurism to feminist cyborg theory – without a word on what any of this actually looked like. There’s not even the obligatory Star Trek reference. Over two hundred and fifty pages, we’re given precisely one diverting anecdote, about a near-riot in 1924 occasioned by rumors of a rocket voyage to the moon, and even that’s skipped over as briefly as possible, as if it were somehow shameful. This exclusion of literature is in some sense a mask. Inventing the Future is a fictional text disguised as a political manifesto. It describes a state of affairs that does not exist, and invites us to imagine. This is why literature is so essential to the political imagination: both are steeped in the unreal, but it’s an unreality that makes claims on our actual existences. And, like the literary fiction of which it is a part, this sense of the future has not always existed. It’s possible that Srnicek and Williams give such short thrift to culture because any cultural examination of the future reveals how fragile and temporary a notion it was. The future has already been invented, and it exhausted itself some time ago. But if we really want to think about why the future ended, it would make sense to look at how it began. It’s hard to find a precise date, but chances are that the future was first invented some time between 1627 and 1770. This indeterminate era, in which ordinary time ended and something very different took over, is nicely bracketed by two important books. In 1627, Francis Bacon published his New Atlantis, a vision of a Utopian society hidden somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. In 1770, Louis-Sébastien Mercier published L’An 2440 (translated into English, confusingly, as Memoirs of the Year 2500), a vision of a Utopian society hidden somewhere in the twenty-fifth century. Somewhere, space turned into time. Bacon’s text was part of a great tradition of Utopian literature, hewing closely to the original meaning of the word: a topos designates a place. (Even if the negative prefix ‘ou-’ indicates that this place isn’t really a place at all.) Campanella’s City of the Sun is set in ‘a large plane, immediately under the equator’; Moore’s Utopia is hidden somewhere on the route from Europe through the Americas to Ceylon. A 12th century Irish poem describes the land of Cokaygne, “far in the sea to the west of Spain,” where the houses are made of pies and nuns swim naked in rivers of milk. This geographical displacement isn’t just a literary device: these ideal places are represented as being fully ideal, and while Bacon would certainly have liked his own society to look a little more like the fantasy he described, it’s neither a prediction nor a regulative model. The inhabitants of his New Atlantis live under an enlightened government with just laws and wise customs, but it’s not clear that this is what makes their society so harmonious; because this is a piece of fantasy, they’re also all personally virtuous. His Bensalemites are chaste and virtuous, and these qualities grant them the favor of God Himself, who sends them the Christian gospel on a miraculous pillar of light, despite their being separated by an ocean and a continent from goings-on in the Eastern backwaters of the Roman Empire. Mercier’s is radically different. Something very important has changed: he doesn’t have opulent cities in the undiscovered tropics, but one perfectly ordinary France. His story is the dream of a contemporary Frenchman who falls asleep and finds himself transported into the far future, a world in which all the injustices of his time have been righted – not through the imagination or through divine providence, but political and scientific change. Religion has been thoroughly disestablished from the State, and what remains is decidedly Unitarian: the temple of the future has no paintings or images, being decorated only by the name of God in different languages. Worshipers pray in silence, and the priesthood claims no greater knowledge of the divine than the laity. The king, meanwhile, is a harmless tinkerer, freed from the duties of government, whose main social role is to come up with new scientific inventions. Suddenly, instead of a lateral distribution of variously perfected societies in space, we have a vertical, sequential evolution of society’s perfectibility over time: the answer to our problems isn’t here, but it’s on its way. And Mercier, who went on to serve in the National Convention as a liberal revolutionary, would try to speed its arrival. As the political force that has everywhere tried to institute change, for a long time this future belonged to the left. Early utopian socialists would busy themselves designing new machines for making ladies’ hats, to be used in the rational society of the future. But it was the Soviet Union that most strongly pulled the as yet unborn into reality. (Recall Lincoln Steffens’ report on visiting the fledgling USSR: “I have seen the future, and it works.”) Almost as soon as it was born, the Soviet Union promised to do away with the antagonism between man and nature, man and woman, man and God. Look at their Christmas cards: while the Santa of the capitalist bloc trudged about on a flimsy reindeer-powered cart, the Soviet Santa zipped through space, occasionally waving to cheerful cosmonauts through the rocket’s portholes. Throughout this period, capitalism still had its own visions of what might come – chiefly, dystopia, which is always faintly reactionary; the future formulated as a threat. “You think you have it bad now?” dystopia warns us. “Just look at what might happen later.” There’s a certain capitalist hostility to Utopianism – any new social formation might have the power to interrupt its global dominance – that’s most clearly expressed in blockbuster films: the one who tries to radically change the world, the one with plans and schemes, is always the villain; our heroes just want to keep things the way they are. But at the same time there’s a strain of leftist thought that’s also deeply suspicious of all this temporal mishmashing. It goes back to Marx and Engels: in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Engels pokes fun at the pretensions of the masterplanners. “Compared with the splendid promises of the philosophers,” he writes, “the social and political institutions born of the “triumph of reason” were bitterly disappointing caricatures.” The Marxist critique of the future came most strongly from the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, in particular from Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer. Witnessing the mechanized horrors of the Third Reich, they came to see the notion of progress as an insidious lie. For Adorno and Horkheimer, enlightenment never rids itself of barbarism; for Benjamin, we must place a “taboo on the future.” Besides, there’s something philosophically as well as politically unsound about this future: the grand social future requires a transhistorical subject, a gaze of reason that looks out from beyond time, like the four-dimensional Tralfamadorians in Kurt Vonnegut. For all its pretensions to rationality, there’s something about the progressive future that remains metaphysical, mystical, even shamanic. Why did human aspiration come to be so closely connected with this slightly spooky process?  It might be possible to sketch out a materialist critique. In the years between Bacon and Mercier, the transition of Utopia from spatial to temporal displacement accompanied the transformation of an economy based on primitive accumulation into one based on capitalism proper. By 1770, surpluses gained from spatial expansion were beginning to be replaced by surpluses that come out of labor, which adds value over time. Today, with the fictionalization of much of the economy, profits are made from the commitment to repay a debt at a future point, with those commitments themselves bought and sold as tiny tokens of the future. The future has burst through into a dizzied and decontemporalised now. It exists within the present as a saleable commodity the paradoxical promise is always for tomorrow to happen today. As Derrida writes, “our time is perhaps the time in which it is no longer so easy for us to say ‘our time.'” But the future has always been several: how could it be otherwise, when it hasn’t happened yet? The millennial or apocalyptic future, the future that abolishes time itself, is not the same as the prophetic future of a possible or desired outcome, which is not the same as speculative future of science fiction, which is not the same as the future envisaged by a calendar or a to-do list, which is not the same as the future of the high-yield bond, which is not the same as the future which will involve you reading the next sentence, or deciding not to. But what all these have in common with the phenomenological future – the one involved in the direct sensation of time passing, the thing that draws further out of reach the closer you get to it – is their slipperiness. Futures can never be touched or experienced, only imagined; this is why they’re as diverse as the human psyche, and why they tend to be so dreamlike: at turns ludic, libidinal, or monstrous. * * * I don’t think that I’m castigating the book for being about its own subject-matter rather than something that I’d prefer. Rather, I’m afraid Srnicek and Williams have not thoroughly interrogated their own terms. In an excellent interview with Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani – in which the authors do a significantly better job of outlining their ideas than they do in the book itself – they explain that Inventing the Future is intended to be a counterblast to what they regard as a dominant leftist strain of Frankfurt School-inflected pessimism, but their book makes no attempt to defend their understanding of the future from any other. We’re told from the start that the left has ceded the future to the right, that the right imagines new social forms while we’re trying only to slow the advance – as if the future is itself a terrain, a neutral substrate in which everything is set, rather than something which is continually produced by a present that is in turn transformed: in other words, something that’s been invented. If the left has lost its capacity to produce futures, what’s happened? What exactly, did we lose? For Srnicek and Williams, the future as such is strangely homogeneous and immutable; the concept never changed, we’ve just been led astray by poor organisational tactics. The failure of the party-state model led to the rise of folk politics, but if we could drop our placards and reach out a little further, we’d finally be able to grab hold of tomorrow. If we’re serious about interrogating what happened to the left, this isn’t an answer; it’s a strategic retreat from the question. The problem isn’t the placard, it’s the iPad. Inventing the Future is a serious and no doubt well-intentioned attempt to think thoroughly about the kind of future we might want, and it fails because the iPad is the future, because the future is something that’s already happened. Part of the book’s difficulties comes from its over-eagerness to accept the ego-ideal of neoliberalism, to accept it as a genuinely transformative and future-oriented movement, rather than recognize it for what it is: a tactic for accumulation, haphazardly implemented, with no real goal beyond its own entrenchment. The particular mode and configuration of the future Srnicek and Williams describe was a temporary phenomenon, lasting two-and-something centuries, and its embrace by the left was never nearly as total or enthusiastic as they suggest. It’s over now: we’re all Robert Laing, crouching in the ruins of our washing machines; we’re in something else. The real challenge for the left, if we’re to start winning again, is to find out what that something else might be.

Foto: Bernhard Weber

»An diesem Abend beschließen Snaffu und Freaky Franky, die gerade einer raffiniert choreographierten rasanten Kampfszene zweier japanischer Aktionskünstler am nördlichen Ende des Bahnhofsviertels beiwohnen, endlich mal gemeinsam zum Hauptbahnhof zu schlendern, um dort zu erforschen, ob in der B-Ebene die neu eröffnete Kentucky Fried Chicken-Filiale mit dem kleinen runden, gläsernen Swimmingpool in der Mitte des rechteckigen Raums auch gegen 0:30 Uhr noch geöffnet hat. Die beiden Freunde spenden ein letztes mal stürmischen Applaus für zwei wirklich fantastische Handstandüberschläge vorwärts von zwei japanischen Aktionskünstlern, die sich gerade in der Luft beinahe vereinigten, bevor die Snaffu und Freaky Franky ... Read more

Adorno spricht davon, dass das „Nichtidentische die eigene Identität der Sache gegen ihre Identifikationen“ (Adorno, Negative Dialektik: 164) sei. Die Erkenntnis des Nichtidentischen identifiziert anders als das identifizierende Denken, sie betont zu sagen, was etwas sei, während das identifizierende Denken sich als Repräsentation des Etwas aufspielt, das nun zum Exemplar verdampft. Und je weiter sich das Identitätsdenken von der Identität des Dings entfernt, desto rücksichtsloser rückt es ihm auf den Pelz, schreibt Adorno. (Ebd.: 112) Das identifizierende Denken ist das der Majorität; sie macht das Nichtidentische zum Problem. Mithin ist der repräsentationslogische Glaube an die Macht der Sprache, welche vorhandene Phänomene wiederspiegelt oder sie gar erfasst, das metaphysische Substrat aller Philosophien. Adorno macht hingegen ein Etwas stark, das es aufseiten des Daseins gibt und das selbst der Dialektik noch äußerlich bleibt, er postuliert die Vorgängigkeit von Objekten. Dabei muss der Versuch, die Identifikationslogik des Kapitals in Form einer immanenten Kritik zu überwinden scheitern, weil diese Kritik mit der Affirmation genau der Positivität beginnen muss, die Adorno zu überwinden trachtet, indem er zeigt, wie diese Positivität immer schon am vorgängigen Nicht-Identischen gebrochen wird. Das Nicht-Identische kann gerade nicht als eine aus der immanenten Bewegung des Begriffs entstehende Grenze bestimmt werden, vielmehr stellt es so etwas wie eine Markierung dessen dar, was gerade nicht in die immanente Bewegung des Begriffes hineinfällt oder von ihr aufgesaugt wird. Adornos Negative Dialektik ist der Versuch, den Gedanken in reale Bereiche hineinzutreiben, aber nicht um das Reale/Realität zu subsumieren oder einzugemeinden, sondern um ein wie immer geartetes „Miteinander des Verschiedenen“ (das Denken und das Reale) zu erreichen. Darin berührt sie sich mit Laruelles Konzeption des Realen.

Adornos Nichtidentisches weist Ähnlichkeiten mit Laruelles Realem auf. Das Nichtidentische, das gedacht werden muss, verweist einerseits auf das Empirische im Sinne einer gelebten Erfahrung, andererseits auf einen Surplus, der der Kommensurabilität, der Statistik und der Buchführung widerstrebt. Laruelle wagt allerdings einen noch radikaleren Bruch mit der gesamten kontinentalen Philosophie, indem er ihre zwei- und dreiwertigen Konzeptionen, die sich stets auf die Relation »Realität und Diskurs« beziehen, durch die Konzentration der »philosophischen Problematik« auf das Axiom des Einen bzw. des Realen ersetzt, wobei er die beiden Terme (Eins/Real), die er meistens als Synonyme gebraucht, von jeder Determination durch das philosophische Sein befreit. Das Eine ist weder als Sein noch als Seiendes zu verstehen, es sollte auch nicht mit Existenz gleichgesetzt werden. Vielmehr ist das Eine das Resultat einer transzendentalen Setzung, es ist gegeben-ohne-Gegebenheit und zugleich als negative Möglichkeit definiert, die für jede »Greifbarkeit« von Objekten und für die Rigorosität des Denkens selbst steht. Kurz gesagt, es geht um das Eine, das nicht ist (negative Möglichkeit), aber doch real ist (gegeben-ohne-Gegebenheit). Wenn man überhaupt eine Unterscheidung zwischen dem Einem und dem Realem treffen will, dann muss sie sich auf die »Dimensionalität« der Determination-in-der-letzten-Instanz beziehen. Während das Eine auf der Ebene der Sprache erscheint, insofern hier eine nicht-philosophische Entscheidung angezeigt ist, zeigt sich das Reale keinesfalls als Teil der Sprache und ihres ontologischen Anspruchs an, der darin besteht, das Reale einzufangen, vielmehr weist das Reale sich durch seine radikale Indifferenz gegenüber der Sprache und dem Denken aus. Das Eine ist qua Immanenz sein eigener realer Grund und ist durch das Wissen von seiner eigenen Syntax determiniert. Das Reale in seiner Eigenartigkeit rechnet Laruelle der Identität zu, und dennoch besteht an dieser Stelle eine stärkere Verwandtschaft zum Nichtidentischen Adornos als bspw. bei Derrida, der das Nichtidentische ganz in der Bewegung der différance aufgehen lässt. Die poststrukturalistische Philosophie und die Nicht-Philosophie sind beide Modi des Denkens, aber während die erstere gemäß der Differenz und durch die Differenz denkt, denkt die letztere gemäß dem Einen oder in-Einem.

Laruelle konzipiert die Unterscheidung zwischen dem Realen und dem Transzendentalen (Sprache, Theorie) nicht als ein Split, der eine Dualität konstituiert, sondern er versucht sie mit dem Term der Unilateralität zu denken. Der Akt der Unilateralität beinhaltet eine non-relative und non-relationalistische Relation der Differenz. Er ist ein Akt der Singularität, der durch die Singularität produziert wird, ein radikal einsamer Akt der unilateralen Selbst-Differenziation. Es geht hier auch um die radikale Einsamkeit des Selbst im autogenerativen und autoreflexiven Prozess der Subjektproduktion, und dies ereignet sich immer parallel zum transformierbaren und multiplen Subjekt. Eine abgeschlossene Realität der schieren Arbeit, wo das Organische und das Sensuelle des Selbst fusionieren, unabhängig von der Autorität der Sprache. Eine Instanz des unüberholbaren Gefangenseins in seinem eigenen Selbst. Diese Instanz ist das Reale des Ich, das ohne Mediation vom anderen und der Sprache bleibt. Diese irreduzible Einsamkeit beschreibt die Grenzen der Mediation durch den anderen und das Andere. Der Modus der unilateralen Differenziation und die generische Forderung nach der Eins beinhalten zwei theoretische Figuren, welche die Nicht-Philosophie in Korrelation zum Realen stellen und es selbst als ein radikal nicht-dichotomisches Denken ausweisen. Es handelt sich hier um die immanente Prozedur der von Laruelle als „Dualysis” bezeichneten Denkweise, die in der radikalen Affirmation des Transzendentalen und des Realen als Dualität ohne den Versuch der Unifizierung oder der Spaltung der beiden Terme besteht, also in einer Dualität, in der jeder der Terme unilateral mit dem anderen korreliert. Die minimale Form des Relationismus ist hingegen der digitale Binarismus. Dualität impliziert immer Dualismus, sie besteht in der Vermutung, dass es keine Möglichkeit gibt, die Zwei jenseits ihrer Relation von Zweien zu denken. Wenn man jedoch bedenkt, dass die Zwei keine Teilung oder den Binarismus impliziert, dass ihr simultanes Arbeiten keine Exklusion des einen vom anderen Term impliziert, dann ist das Denken jenseits der Dualität situiert. Das Denken jenseits der Relation und des Relationismus verlangt ein Denken in den Termen der Singularität. Die Situation der Nicht-Relationiertheit ist immer auch die einer radikalen Einsamkeit. Sie kann sich nur auf die Instanz der Eins-heit beziehen. Relationen werden also jenseits eines einfachen Relationismus gedacht. Die Realität einer bestimmten Relation wird in ihrer singulären Positivität begriffen. Deshalb ist ein nicht-dichotomes Denken im Einen lokalisiert und durch es konstituiert, als Eins als einem der ersten Namen des Realen. Das Denken in Singularitäten eröffnet die Vorstellung von einer abgeschlossenen Unilateralität im Stadium einer infiniten Reiteration. Es geht hier auch um eine auf empirischer Erfahrung beruhenden Haltung, welche die selbstranszendierende Bewegung des Realen (der radikalen Immanenz) als sein eigenes Recht anerkennt, bzw. um eine Instanz des nicht-reflektierenden Empirischen, das wir in seiner Singularität sehen wollen. Somit ist das Reale keine Abstraktion oder Idee, oder etwas, das unabhängig im Draußen für sich selbst existiert, vielmehr ist das Reale ein Status, der von anderen Realitäten eingesehen werden kann Das nicht-philosophische Denken korreliert mit dem Realen, gemäß dem Realen, das eine uneinholbare Autorität in der letzten Instanz darstellt, und somit korreliert es zunächst nicht mit den Systemen des Denkens. Das Reale erzwingt das Konzept in letzter Instanz. Der nicht-philosophische Prozess des Beschreibens und des rigorosen Erklärens der Realität ist als ein Effekt des Realen zu betrachten, insofernder Prozess auf die Prozeduren des Realen achtet, die „hinter“ den diskursiven Phänomen bestehen, die es repräsentieren, und dieser Prozess bildet eine eigene Syntax heraus, die gemäß dem Realen verläuft. Dies ist nur möglich, wenn man das philosophische Material de-organisiert und auf ein transzendentales Material reduziert oder es zu einer philosophischen Chora umgestaltet, mit der das Denken arbeitet. Als radikales Konzept muss das Denken mit dem Realen in einer immanenten Weise korrelieren, eher als mit dem konzeptuellen Apparat einer Denkschule. Als Nichteinholbares oder Abwesendes erhält das Reale immer dieselbe Bedeutung, die Bedeutung identisch zu sich selbst (A=A) zu sein und somit kann qua Realem aus der Welt nichts emergieren, womit das Reale auf ewig in statischen und unveränderbaren Begriffen eingefroren bleibt. Das Reale ist somit Bedeutung per se und konsequenterweise ist es als eine Instanz des Transzendentalen zu verstehen. Die Nicht-Philosophie beschreibt das Reale ähnlich dem Prozess des wissenschaftlichen Denkens so rigoros wie möglich, indem sie anerkennt, dass das Reale durch seine eigene Immanenz affiziert bleibt. Alles andere würde nämlich implizieren, das Reale wieder einer philosophischen Entscheidung zu unterwerfen, und dies hinsichtlich einer Konformität im Kontext einer partikularen Kosmologie. Es geht also um das unkontrollierbare und ungreifbare Reale jenseits der Realität, die anstrebt es zu erklären. Es geht um das Reale, das die Generierung der Wahrheit diktiert und nicht um scholastische Axiome, die das Reale zu erfassen gedenken. Insofern ist die nicht-philosophische Geste eine leere Position, eine Nicht-Position, die sich in der Philosophie eines nicht-konzeptuellen Materials, nämlich der Chora bedient, die ultimativ häretisch und treu nur gegenüber der Spezifizität und Singularität der theoretisierten Realität ist. Das Reale und die Fiktion sollten in ihrer Singularität gedacht werden, in ihrer Spezifizität, befreit von einer sich gegenseitig bedingenden Abhängigkeit des jeweils einen Terms durch den anderen Term. „Interrelatedness“ wäre dann als eine totalisierende Einheit von Binaritäten und Multiplizitäten in einem allumfassenden Einen zu verstehen, das ein System oder ein Antisystem sein kann. Eine Kosmologie, ein philosophisches Universum, das Konsistenz mit der Doktrin angemahnt, selbst wenn es ein Antisystem sein will. Oneness und Radikalität im Sinn von Nicht-Relationiertheit und Immanenz sind hingegen die Konstitutien des nicht-philosophischen, des nicht-dichotomen Denkens. Das Eine ist eine Identität, die nicht-setzend ist, nicht-entscheidend und nicht-positionierend in sich selbst, sie bleibt ohne Existenz, ohne Topologie oder Essenz. Und die Vision-in-One ist eine Erfahrung, die nicht-entscheidend, nicht-reflexiv ist, sie fordert die vollkommen singuläre Immanenz. Die Realität des Subjekt des Denkens in Sachen Reales ist stets erfahrungsbezogen. Nichtsdestotrotz bezieht das Denken, das mit dem Realen korreliert ist, diese Realität auf seine eigenen theoretische Vision (als Vision-in-One). Dabei bleibt es singulär, und dies ist die Methode des Denkens gemäß dem Realen oder der Vision-in-One. Es erkennt sich selbst in der letzten Instanz. Im laruelleschen Sinn bleibt es jedoch nicht-reflektiert, das heißt, es ist untrennbar gegründet im Rest des undefinierten Realen, und somit bleibt es singulär und getrennt vom Netzwerk der philosophischen Entscheidungen. Die Fiktion und das Reale werden in keine Relation gesetzt, die ihre gegenseitige Bedeutung bedingen würde. Befreit vom Zwang der philosophischen Entscheidung, Fiktion als den Gegensatz zum Realen oder in eine gegenseitige binäre Beziehung zu setzen, bleibt das Reale unkonditioniert gegenüber der Fiktion oder den Prozessen des Imaginären, der Signifikation. Das Selbst wird in seiner Autotransformation durch die Regeln des Realen limitiert. Meistens wird in der Unterscheidung einer der Terme ausgeschlossen oder er wird total durch den anderen inkludiert, womit eine Aneignung oder Kolonialisierung des unterworfenen Terms stattfindet. Hierbei kommt es dann meistens zur ontologischen Möglichkeit eines kontinuierlichen Wandels (des Selbst), seiner unaufhörlichen Mobilität im Kontext eines offenen Horizonts von überwältigenden und omnipräsenten Möglichkeiten. Gerade hier überlappen sich der postmoderne Optimismus mit dem neoliberalen Optimismus, und dies bezüglich der Predigt vom Unerschöpflichen, der nicht enden wollenden Möglichkeiten der Möglichkeiten. Der futuristische Fundamentalismus ist ihnen gemeinsam, der Bann des Negativen und des Endlichen. Schon Kroker/Weinsein sprechen von der Endlosigkeit (im Gegensatz zum quantentheoretischen Unendlichen) als der postmodernen Ideologie per se. Sie schreiben: „Ich könnte für immer hier bleiben und mir dir weiter reden. Das ist die Einstellung jener Leute, die bei Mc Donald`s herumhängen: die ideale Sprechgemeinschaft, die es bereits gibt, aber von der Kritischen Theorie übersehen wurde.“ (Kroker/Weinstein, Datenmüll; 65) Gemeint ist hier natürlich Habermas. Sämtliche Überlegungen bezüglich der flexiblen und instabilen Natur des postmetaphysischen Subjekts sind als eine stabilisierende Geste im Kontext der Ungewissheit zu verstehen (die in den letzten Jahren den Aufstieg des Prekariats begleitet hat). Marx wusste dagegen um ein Nicht-Identisches, das er als nicht-aufgehenden Rest außerhalb der Arbeit bezeichnet und an die Person des Arbeiters bindet, der noch etwas außer seiner (flexiblen) Arbeit für sich ist. Um diesen unbezahlbaren, dem System sich entziehenden „Rest“ geht es auch Adorno. Schärfer formuliert es Laruelle: Das Humane-im-Humanen, das radikal Fremde im Humanen ist eine prä-linguistische Humanität, und dies als eine Erfahrung, die jeder Entscheidung vorangeht, jeder Forderung nach einem setztenden Gedanken der Philosophie oder des kapitalistischen Systems. Das Humane-im-Humanen ist eine Instanz des Realen. Das Reale ist eine Identität, die nichts als singulär ist, und eben nicht singulär und universell, sozusagen gemixt, in Relation mit einer imaginären, philosophisch oder systemisch produzierten Welt. Dies wäre präzise die Voraussetzung für die gegenseitige konzeptuelle Konstitution der zwei Oppositionen (Reale und Sprache) oder ihrer dualen konzeptuellen Bedingung, ihrer diskursiven Koexistenz, welches die Exklusion des Einen vom Territorium des anderen erst möglich und notwendig macht. Diese Art des Denkens wird durch die konstitutive Bezogenheit der Terme erzeugt, durch die notwendig binäre und oppositionelle Art des Seins, als gegenseitige Konstitution einer zweigefalteten Struktur. Unmöglich erscheint diesem Denken, dass das Vertrauen in die Realität, so wie wir sie bisher kannten, gebrochen wird, wobei doch zumindest eine traumatische Intervention das Bild der Welt brechen könnte. Die Multiplizität eines Ereignisses, das die Instanz des Realen konstituiert, ist ein Aspekt des Realen, welcher im postmodernen Denken nicht auftaucht. Dabei bleibt das Reale immer in Bezug auf das Singuläre. Eines ist einer der ersten Namen des Realen. Zugleich kämpft die Gleichung real = eins gegen den Status der absoluten Nicht-Relationiertheit des Realen an. Das Reale ist nicht einfach nur draußen oder berührt es nur als eine Grenze. In Hinblick auf die inhärente Nicht-Beziehung des Denkens und des Realen, besitzen beide Begebenheiten singuläre, unabhängige und nicht-thetische Modi der Operation. Jeder Ereignis und jedes Denken findet im Modus der Korrespondenz mit der Instanz des Realen statt, das einzigartig ist und nicht-kosmologisch. In diesem Sinn ist das Denken eine Erfahrung bzw. eine Instanz des Realen de jure: Die Erfahrung des Denkens als Ereignis und nicht als konzeptueller Inhalt, der zur Ordnung des Transzendentalen gehört. Das Reale und das Eine sind hier als Synonyme zu verstehen, welche dieselbe Instanz bezeichnen, dasselbe Ding: die Singularität der theoretisierten Realität und der Instanz der Theorie. Der Versuch die Realität in ihrer Singularität und in ihrer Korrelation mit dem Realen zu thematisieren, will das Reale nicht erfassen, um etwa die Wahrheit des Realen als real zu bezeichnen, als seine begleitende Reflexion. Vielmehr ist die Anerkennung der Singularität und der Korrelation zum Realen eine theoretische Bestätigung der radikalen Immanenz oder der Identität. Dieser Radikalismus steht für den einzigartigen Akt des Denkens, der mit der einzigartigen Instanz des Realen korreliert, der theoretisierten Realität, im Gegensatz zur Scholastik der Philosophie, als einer ultimativen Instanz der Legitimität. Das nicht-philosophische Denken ist die Operation, welche die Ontologie vermeidet, vielmehr gemäß dem Realen operiert, als eine nicht-thetische, als eine absolute Reflexion oder als eine Reflexion ohne Spiegel. Es argumentiert gegen den Divisionismus. Das Reale und das Denken können weder Gleichheiten noch Reziprozitäten bilden, da sie nicht gleichartig sind. Gegenseitige Gleichheit und eventuelle gegenseitiges Spiegeln sind unmöglich – gemäß der Nicht-Ontologie handelt es sich nicht um Zwei, die eine Relation der Reziprozität ausbilden kann. Denken partizipiert am Einen. Es ist hingegen die Interpretation oder Signifikation, welche die Dichte des unfassbaren Realen verwässert, um es mit Zeichen zu bevölkern und es belebbar zu machen, und dies mit dem Werkzeug Sprache.   Foto: Bernhard Weber

Himan P. Minsky wird gewöhnlich der post-keynesianischen ökonomischen Theorie zugeordnet, genauer gesagt der amerikanischen "Schule", zu der Autoren wie Weintraub, Moore, Eichner, Kregel etc. gehören. Diese Schule befasst sich im Gegensatz zur europäischen Schule um Kalecki, Robinson, Kaldor, Harcourt etc. stärker mit den monetären und finanziellen Prozesen der Ökonomie. Für Minsky wird das Investment durch die Profitabilität determiniert, und die sog. animal spirits sind von Variablen wie Profit- und Zinsraten abhängig. Der Schlüsselindikator ist dabei das Verhältnis von Profitrate zur Zinsrate. Mit Hilfe der Analysen von Minsky (Vgl. Minsky, Himan P. ; 2011: Instabilität und Kapitalismus) kann man zeigen, dass neben der Existenz von Spekulationsblasen an den Finanzmärkten (Phasen der Euphorie inkludieren Phasen radikaler Nachahmung und der Hyperspekulation, darauf Panikphasen, Konsolidierungsphasen und Phasen der Neuordnung) unbedingt weitere Faktoren hinzutreten müssen, damit Krisenprozesse auf der Ebene des Gesamtkapitals ausgelöst werden, die nicht nur die Schulden- und Kreditökonomie, sondern die je schon unsicheren Stabilitätsbedingungen der kapitalistischen Ökonomie insgesamt beeinträchtigen, stören und hemmen, und dies ganz entgegen der Annahmen der neoklassischen Ökonomen, denen zufolge vor allem das Spiel von Angebot und Nachfrage an den Märkten die zur Bildung von Gleichgewichten notwendigen Preissignale setzt und steuert oder etwa über kybernetische Feedbackschleifen sich selbst organisierende Systeme dem optimalen Gleichgewichtszustand zustreben. So lässt sich der Zyklus der erweiterten Reproduktion des Kapitals nach Minsky folgendermaßen darstellen: In stabilen Produktionsperioden, die positive Langzeiterwartungen der Unternehmen inkludieren, steigt sowohl deren Finanzierungsnachfrage nach Fremdkapital als auch deren Investitionsvolumen, und dies bis zu jenem Punkt, an dem die Unternehmen ihre Risikoscheu vollkommen ablegen und zugleich ihre Bereitschaft steigt, immer neue Schulden aufzunehmen, wobei die in den Unternehmen abgeschöpften Gewinne, die aus Neuinvestitionen resultieren, weniger der Kredittilgung, sondern vor allem der Reinvestition dienen, und u. U. werden fällige Kredite sogar mit neuen Kreditaufnahmen finanziert. Auch die schleichende Verschiebung des Schwankungszentrums der Marktpreise bzw. die Zeitdauer, innerhalb derer sich diese Prozesse durchsetzen (die Dauer eines Konjunkturzyklus, der selbst zu einer allgemeinen Bestimmungsgröße der Beziehung zwischen Produktionspreisen und Marktpreisen wird), ist Teil des sog. Aufschwungs, wobei es in sämtlichen Produktionssektoren zu einer Verschiebung des Gravitationszentrums der Marktpreisbewegung kommt, bis dieses Gravitationszentrum schließlich auch die Angebotspreise bestimmt, mit denen die Einzelkapitale zueinander in Konkurrenz treten. Es ist der Komplex aus zahlungsfähiger Nachfrage, Preiselastizität und Fremdfinanzierungspotenzial, der die Profitraten und -massen definiert und der über die Kapazitätsauslastung und Investition in den diversen Branchen sowie den einzelnen Unternehmen entscheidet, wobei im Laufe des Booms die Kostpreise aufgrund von Faktoren wie steigende Löhne, erhöhte Preise für Rohstoffe sowie wachsende Zinssätze deutlich anschwellen können. (Sraffa hat in diesem Zusammenhang auf das Problem hingewiesen, dass man Profitraten benötigt, um die Preise zu bestimmen, und umgekehrt wiederum Preise, um die Profitraten festzulegen, ein Problem, das sich bei Marx neu stellt.) Im Boom kreieren Banken, Hedgefonds und andere Finanzinstitutionen ständig neue Finanzinstrumente bzw. synthetische Wertpapiere, während zugleich die Verschuldung der Unternehmen wächst und auch im schon eskalierenden Aufschwung führen höhere Investitionen immer noch zu steigenden Gewinnen, die freilich ab einem bestimmten Punkt nicht mehr ausreichen, um den fälligen Teil der Gesamtschuld des Unternehmens abzutragen. Und schließlich wächst die effektive Geldmenge an, während die steigenden Preise des fiktiven und spekulativen Kapitals die Nachfrage nach Wertpapieranlagen weiter erhöhen, die von den Banken auch bedient wird, womit das Geldangebot weiter wächst und der Schuldenumlauf anschwellt, was den Versuch der Unternehmen, Schulden durch riskante Investitionen auszugleichen, immer noch weiter anheizt und den Anstieg der Fremdfinanzierung der Unternehmen forciert. Ab einem gewissen Zeitpunkt stellt die Refinanzierung der Unternehmen tatsächlich ein Problem dar, denn das kybernetische Feedbacksystem der Ökonomie bleibt trotz des hohen Wachstums der Fremdfinanzierung in den Unternehmen extrem euphorisiert, bis zu eben zu jenem kritischen Punkt, den Minsky als Ponzi-Moment definiert hat, an dem jede weitere Kreditaufnahme eines Unternehmens mit derart hohen Zinszahlungen belastet wird, dass diese aus den Cash-Flow-Gewinnen des Unternehmens nicht mehr bedient werden können, so dass es schließlich zum Verkauf von Vermögenswerten kommt oder neues Fremdkapital aufgenommen werden muss, um rein die Schulden zu bedienen, womit man weitere kaskadenartige Verflechtungen von Verschuldungsketten in Gang setzt. So erscheint die Relation von (erwarteten) Renditen und terminierten Kreditverpflichtungen ab einem bestimmten Punkt wesentlich prekär; sie erfordert entweder die Aufnahme neuer Kredite oder den weiteren Verkauf von Vermögenswerten, weil auch die Banken ihre Liquidität ständig verringern, u. a. wegen der fallenden Preise von Wertpapieren plus der steigenden Kosten ihrer eigenen Fremdfinanzierung. Zwar können Zentralbanken die instabilen & ungleichgewichtigen Märkte weiterhin mit neuer Liquidität versorgen, aber aufgrund der generell begrenzten Wirkung ihrer Geldpolitik kann Minsky zufolge nur noch über das staatliche deficit spending eine Unterstützung und Stabilisierung der effektive Nachfrage erfolgen, was wiederum auch die Unternehmenssituationen entscheidend verbessert. Es ist der »plötzliche Zusammenbruch der Grenzleistungsfähigkeit des Kapitals« (Keynes), der zu einem Stau der Kapitalakkumulation führt, und dies umso mehr, als es in der Boomphase durch die exorbitante Steigerung der Spekulationsgeschäfte und der Fremdfinanzierung zu einer künstlich Aufheizung des Wirtschaftswachstums gekommen ist, während im Abschwung dann massive Kapitalentwertungen anstehen, welche vor allem die Umschlagszeiten von Unternehmen mit sog. produktivitätssensiblen Bestandteilen des fixen Kapitals stark beeinflussen, aber gleichzeitig auch die neuen und wichtigen Rationalisierungsprozesse des gesamtwirtschaftlichen Produktionsapparates vorbereiten. Neuralgische Punkte der Theorie Minskys betreffen u. a. die vage Bestimmung des Verhältnisses von Eigen- und Fremdfinanzierung, die starke Konzentration Minskys auf Sachinvestitionen sowie die von ihm unbeachtete, seit den 1990er Jahren jedoch zunehmend stärker realisierte Möglichkeit des Kapitals, die Abhängigkeit der effektiven Nachfrage von Investitionen und dem staatlichen deficit spending durch die Ausweitung des Konsumentenkredites zu umgehen. Letztendlich stellen Minskys unbändiger Glaube an die finanzielle Souveränität des Staates sowie der Verzicht, die Einbindung des Geldkapitals in die strukturelle Bewegung der differenziellen Kapitalakkumulation stärker zu untersuchen, weitere Probleme für diesen Theorieansatz dar.   Foto: Bernhard Weber

Fig. 1: Illustration for Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1868-1869). Marco Saccaperni, 2011.   I am filthy [Je suis sale]—writes Lautréamont—I am riddled with lice. Hogs, when they look at me, vomit. My skin is encrusted with the scabs and scales of leprosy, and covered with yellowish pus.[i] Unlike dirt, easily washed from the surface of our skin, filth, like an accursed ointment or a recombinant agent of transgenesis, is susceptible of being absorbed and assimilated when entering in contact with the body. We fear that the filthy body will not be afterwards cleaned or purified because filth might freely trespass every protective screen, all security interfaces and external membranes (like viral infections in which viruses’ multiple strategies to trespass biological walls and membranes are a major concern)—and thus it must be either frantically avoided, prevented, kept away . . . or otherwise unconditionally embraced as an initial, dark-night-of-the-body stage that primes the flesh for further transformation. Filth, then, is believed to be insidious, to infiltrate the flesh to become flesh, to renew the self in a revolutionary nigredo rot. Moreover, the repugnant adherence of filth reminds us of the body’s own adhesiveness—its sticky, protoplasmic, fleshy, expellable and pleasurable condition—, evidencing that bodies are not just convoluted skin—an exteriority folded upon itself, as noted by Jean-Luc Nancy[ii]—, but a more problematic, deep wet interiority fighting against its own limits to pour itself out.   * *      *   We might fantasize about dirt-free bodies, as Michael Marder writes, by holding onto an unarticulated belief that we, too, can become pure spirits and purge ourselves of all material trappings, so dusting and cleaning provide escape routes from our rendezvous with ourselves.[iii] Cleaning, says Marder, prevents us from facing up to our desire (D 199), but filth is hardcore dirt: its presence does not just force us to face up to our otherwise unacknowledged desires, but it also places us face to face with the loathsome horrors of death, corruption and decay—And even you will come to this foul shame / This ultimate infection [Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure / À cette horrible infection], wrote Baudelaire.[iv] Dirt often appears as a solid (or solidifiable) thing. It builds up, over us and around us, in somehow quantifiable layers, as a side effect of creativity; we stain our hands from laboring, from using tools—we get dirty from our purpose-driven use of technology. Filth, however, represents a radical, “wet-waring,” flowing stream of “uncreativity”: if it comes from technology, it is technology that has started behaving “non-technically.” Nothing planned or calculated happens upon viscous contact with filth—nothing but the menace of unpredictable, ongoing transformation. Filth is a remainder of death, not as a definitive solidification into a hard fossil, but, instead, as the start of a series of quasi-redundant cycles of messy chemical reactions.[v]  

Life decomposes into filth—writes Nick Land—as it explores the vicarious death of the universe. In no case does the heterogeneous belong to any scale, since it is “exactly” the irruption of decomposability. Heterogeneous (base) matter—“blood, sperm, urine and vomit . . .” —is characterized negatively in relation to every possible stratum of elemental organization, which is why it resists the discourse on things. Vomit, excrement, and decomposing flesh do not proffer unproblematic solidity or comprehensible form, but rather quasifluid divisibility, imprecise consistency, multiple, insufficient, and evanescent patterns of cohesion. All of which are mixed with words slimed with sanctity. “To write is to investigate chance,” but the explosive excess that breaks in the black foam of poetry is not merely a risk, because risk implies the possibility of a benign outcome. It is a “ruin without limits,” “the submission of man to [blank].” Excess is venom. (TA 204)

  From the viewpoint of evolutionary psychology, filth might represent what causes disgust because it can make us sick. Disgust, then, would be a learned bodily reaction to things that are supposed to be particularly dangerous because they can infiltrate and de-compose the body. But things are not that simple. Filth does not just threaten the body with the prospective of mutation, but it starts a never ending round of transformations: it eats out identity and structure, turning the body into an amorphous fuel (the black matter of the nigredo alchemical step) of constant random change. Thus it is not surprising that filth lacks a proper form—in fact, it is often understood as the pure absence of perceivable form—, consequently resisting human mediation/technification. In his reading of Lautréamont’s Maldoror, Eugene Thacker insists several times on a certain dynamic relationship of amorphosis/metamorphsis:

In amorphosis form is pushed to its limit, becoming either the absence of all form (the evacuation of all form) or absolute form (the devouring of all possible form). In Maldoror, these instances of formlessness can exist within a single body (as in the morphogenesis of the Maldoror character as a pack of dogs and then a miasma), or it can exist pervasively throughout multiple bodies (e.g., flocks of birds, a horde of rats, a swarm of flying squids). Amorphosis functions along the axis of humanity/divinity; its operator is that of dissipation and dissolution.[vi]

It is not unthinkable that the earliest human technologies—the technification of natural resources such as fire and ice into mediators between man and nature[vii]—were directly related to preventing things (for instance, human bodies and food) from dissipating into amorphic filth. Filth, we might say, curses the flesh by acting as a non-technical object[viii] that calls for peripheral technologies of avoidance or prevention—and, differently from trash or waste, it can never be re-entered into recycling systems. Indeed, the non-technical consequences of human technology might well be described as filthy. If, for the Victorians, the archetypical representation of filth was miasma[ix]—a distributed, vaporous, infectious agent that was thought to rot the elemental components of the human body—then, for us, it is radioactive material—“unresting” residues that, instead of just sitting there threatening humans with a passive toxicity, are continuously performing their slow disintegration, turning into the mutagen par excellence that “never goes away.”  Chernobyl and Fukushima did not just become material metaphors for the filthiest places on Earth, but they are expected to stay that way for centuries, no matter how much effort we put into cleaning them. Obstinate washing, in fact, often results in a paradoxical bounce back of the residue: The Great Cleanup, initiated in the nineteenth century, as Marder notes, did nothing to stop the onslaught of dust.  As dust and dirt are banished, . . . waste and garbage multiply (D 801).     Originally understood as the “unintended” (unnatural, contra natura) outcome of nature, filth has become the haphazardous (non-technifiable) outcome of technology, including not only dangerous industrial residues and ecological catastrophes, but also the consequence of social (the “filthy rich” as a byproduct of financial technologies) and communicational (“celebrity filth” as a byproduct of media technologies) imbalance. As non-technology, then, filth might be understood as an excess of life that poses a threat to life itself.[x] Filth here behaves like the “noise” of the flesh,[xi] the formless, non-technological object that opens the way to a non-phenomenology by threatening the body with the challenge of becoming the thing:  

As this body withdraws from experience, so it produces an excess in the world, which must be now approached from beneath matter, or rather, from beyond matter.  Devoid of subjectivity, devoid of experience, silence intervenes.  In this zone, the difference in the flesh gives birth to the thing.  The thing has no identity, except that of a constantly mutating process, barren of all specificity and instead able insidiously to adapt itself to the surroundings.  Of it, we can say only that there is a thing.[xii]

  Of filth, we can only say that there is a thing, and, as Daniel Rourke explains about John Carpenter’s homonymous film, The Thing performs ontogenesis (something coming to be) rather than ontology (something that already is).[xiii] It belongs to the becoming realm, changing “the mind” and “the body” by transforming them into something filthy: a sort of tenacious vegetation, full of filthy parasites; this vegetation no longer has anything in common with other plants, nor is it flesh (Lautréamont, M 1772). Once flesh has been invaded by filth, it becomes filthy itself, returning to the dominion of the primordial swarm. Only a “clean” memory would be able to maintain the ideal, pristine image of “the body”: Speak then, my Beauty, to this dire putrescence / To the worm that shall kiss your proud estate / That I have kept the divine form and essence / Of my festered loves inviolate [Alors, ô ma beauté! dites à la vermine / Qui vous mangera de baisers, / Que j’ai gardé la forme et l’essence divine / De mes amours décomposés!] (Baudelaire, FE 39, 265). Baudelaire’s love might survive death if it succeeds in dissociating memories of the rotten corpse devoured by worms. Classical death separates the filthy flesh from the dusty body—dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return—allowing the ghost to be loved, as we read in Baudelaire and Poe, if it manages to liberate itself from the viscous grasp of the corrupting flesh, preventing the return of the real by reducing itself to pure form, pure technology. Only then does it renounce its own aesthetics and submit itself to the logic of the other’s imagination.[xiv] The filthy corpse, we might say, represents reality’s resistance to becoming technified: a rejection of the position which predominates in our contemporary techno-metaphysics, replete with fantasies of becoming virtual, consigning individual consciousness to cyberspace, or uploading the data of our memories onto a more durable disk than the gray mass inside our skulls (Marder, D 199).   * *      *   Filth cannot be washed or exorcized because it is the metaphor of the most radical of radical others: change itself—the immanent impermanence that we cannot control and that happens for neither good nor bad. Dirt, like sin, can be ignored, forgiven, extracted, separated, exorcized, washed out of the body. Saints and workers get dirty, because dirt is the remainder of the earth’s contact with the (ideally clean) body, so it can be either technologically purified (by “running” it through physical or metaphysical systems), or proudly worn as a memory-scar, as if a permanent skin-deep mark of an adventurous life. Death is technically transformed into dust and ashes because they symbolize a clear end, and this end is also the beginning of a definitive “self.” Rotting corpses, however, are unfinished and infested by swarming entities and invisible bacteria that expel dangerous and fetid gases. The rotting corpse reminds us that there is no “clean” end—just more messy transformation:  

Death, in the disorder which, owing to its irruption, succeeds the idea of an individual regarded as part of the coherence of things, is the appearance that the whole natural given assumes insofar as it cannot be assimilated, cannot be incorporated into the coherent and clear world. Before our eyes, death embodied by a dead person partakes of a whole sticky horror; it is of the same nature as toads, as filth, as the most dreadful spiders. It is nature, not only the nature that we have not been able to conquer, but also the one we have not even managed to face, and against which we don’t even have the chance to struggle. Something awful and bloodless attaches itself to the body that decomposes, in the absence of the one who spoke to us and whose silence revolts us.[xv]

  As something excreted from the (technical) body, filth is, in fact, the body expelling itself: the body’s non-technical performance.  This is why mainstream “pornography” is not filthy anymore: any sexual practice that has been de-contextualized, staged, and turned into a performative workout, does not have the power to question the technical functions of the body in any way, or even to depict any function that might be understood as “disgusting.”[xvi] By regulating every kind of (human, non-human and even anti-human) behavior into technology, bodies have been re-uploaded with the capacity to go functionally through most experiences without actual transformation—avoiding or marginalizing what would be felt as a real aesthetic experience.  In this sense, contemporary mainstream culture has evolved to avoid filth—especially joyous exfilthtration—by locking it up in “experimental” art and “avant-garde” fiction.[xvii] And because of this, one of the most pervasive myths of the modern human is the nightmarish scenario of being labeled—maybe by some future machinic intelligence—as a disposable non-technology. And yet, socially, filth has been addressed in ways closely related to the mythological discourse of “addiction.” According to this discourse, a person who has become “an addict” remains one for life. And since “addiction”—understood as either an inborn or an acquired quality—means compulsively consuming one specific thing instead of the variety of products prescribed by the market, it is something that cannot be reversed. “Addicts,” then, are left with one possibility: that of substituting one repetitive, ritualistic behavior for another (socially-accepted) repetitive, ritualistic behavior, i.e., one legitimized during the mechanical process of rehabilitation. Since “addiction,” like filth, sticks to the body and might be contagious, the purpose of these socially-organized, ritualistic behaviors of rehabilitation is to cancel the body’s transformative capabilities—as if to avoid the social spread of filth.[xviii]   * *      *   The French philosopher François Laruelle has utilized the term “non-philosophy”[xix] to designate a style of thinking that would examine those aspects of philosophy that philosophy itself cannot examine, without becoming something else (Thacker, TLN 1390). Following Laruelle and Thacker, I’ve been using the term “non-technology” here to designate an assemblage of processes that perform those acts technology itself cannot perform without becoming something else, i.e., without becoming filthy. As Thacker has shown, in Maldoror (and in the majority of modern fiction) filth is indistinguishable from the horror of falling into amorphosis.[xx] By posing a challenge to the cogito—to the principle of sufficient reason, “a moral and theological principle that the world is well formed, and that the form of the world is necessary to the world” (Thacker, TLN 1422)—Maldoror opens the door for 20th-21st centuries’ experimental literatures, which, recognizing Lautréamont’s role in pioneering the negation of the bodies in the text and the auto-negation of the body of the text itself, continue the exploration of literary anti-forms. And yet, in the end, Maldoror, as a book, remains a challenge not because of its anti-human negations, but because it escapes the bounds of a supposedly “realistic” techno-narrativity. It negates all form—including literary form. It does not simply represent filth; it is filthy. Filth, however, is neither necessarily associated with metaphysical horror, nor is it a simple metaphor of the apophatic ways of the body.[xxi] Although contemporary popular culture has a tendency to represent human bodies as originally clean,[xxii] operationally-enclosed entities,[xxiii] thereby limiting inter-body relationships to the exchange of different kinds of “information,” the fact remains that filth is what the body expels—gives away without permission—outside all social rules of exchange, following an “energetic” rather than “semiotic” logic.[xxiv] The recognition of the other as a “real other” requires the acknowledgement of its filthy nature—different from the ideal image that, as in Baudelaire’s example, might remain unaffected by the passing of time and the corruption of the flesh. This acceptance of filth signifies a willingness to accept risk—to recognize that the other’s flesh might become something very different from what we were expecting it to be, and that its otherness resides in our awareness of that filthy non-identity. Identity, as currently understood, derives mainly from a technically-described operational enclosure of the self, but non-technology, as if a distorted mirror, responds to the incessant interrogation—How does it work?—with a de-formed, impossible question—How does it filth? While many current theories of the “posthuman” are based on the cyborg model, in which the human body is expected to merge with digital technology, this model of human/machine coalescence often assumes a series of “common technical purposes” shared by the human body and the (human-imagined) machines.[xxv] The problem with this assumption of the cyborg model, at least for theoretical purposes, is that it excludes all the non-technical aspects of both human bodies and digital objects, i.e., all those filthy aspects that are often overlooked in order to facilitate a proper, symbolic, human-machine communication. Even writers speculating about the possibility of a complete incommunicability between humans and future intelligent machines seem to consider that any byproduct of technology is necessarily technological. But, as I have attempted to show here, this exclusion of non-technical aspects undermines any speculation regarding the transition to a posthuman condition. Perhaps the theoretical study of “filth”—as both a non-technical “flesh-invader”/transformer, and as “the thing” that unintentionally pours out of the body—will help provoke complementary, non-technological approaches to the posthuman.   Notes [i] Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and Poems, trans. Paul Knight (London: Penguin, 1988), 1778. Kindle.  Hereafter cited in the text as M. [ii] See Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham UP, 2008), 15. There Nancy writes: “The body . . . isn’t full or empty, since it doesn’t have an outside or an inside. Yet, it is a skin, variously folded, refolded, unfolded, multiplied, invaginated, exogastrulated, orificed, evasive, invaded, stretched, relaxed, distressed, tied, untied” (15). [iii] Michael Marder, Dust (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 571. Kindle. Hereafter cited in the text as D. [iv] Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (Bilingual Edition), trans. Cyril Scott (New York: New Directions, 1989), 38 (English), 264 (French). Hereafter cited in text as FE. [v] See Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London: Routledge, 1992), 89.  Hereafter cited in the text as TA.  On the messy figure of the decomposing corpse, Land writes:

A corpse has one preeminent and historically fateful heterogeneous distribution: that between its skeletal structure and its soft tissues. This is apprehended as a difference between what is perdurant, dry, clean, formal, and what is volatile, wet, dirty, and formless. On the basis of this resource Western civilization has been not merely thanatological, but osseological, which is something reaching beyond the fascination with the skeleton—and particularly the skull—that is distributed extremely widely across cultures. Osseology, in its deep sense, is the usage of the difference between the hard and soft parts of the body as a logical operator in the discourse on matter and death. For instance, differentiation between eternal form and perishable substance, celestial purity and terrestrial filth, divine architecture and base flow. The skeleton is thus conceived of as an invisible harmonious essence, an infrastructure beneath the disturbing tides of soft pathology. It is the prototype of intelligible form, contrasted with the decaying mass of the sensible body. (89; emphasis added).

[vi] Eugene Thacker, Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror of Philosophy, Vol. 3 (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2015), 1342.  Kindle.  Hereafter cited in the text as TLN. [vii] Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects [1958], trans. Ninian Mellamphy (Ontario: University of Western Ontario, 1980). [viii] A detailed discussion of how “technology” and “technics” are defined in different disciplines—or philosophical schools—lies beyond the scope of this essay. Here, I use both terms in a transversal, “literary” context, mostly in reference to the mediation functions of technology—while not reducing them to what is commonly designated by “media technologies.” In a broad sense, “technology” and “technical objects” refer here to two phenomena: [1] the modes in which bodies—particularly human bodies—enact technics, and [2] the instructions and machines designed to expand human action. Thus, the proposal of a “non-technological understanding of filth” does not imply the existence of an ontological exteriority of technology or the possibility of a pre-technological state of matter, but the existence of some intrinsic resistance in technology itself against being “technified.” As Alexander Galloway has noted, Francois Laruelle’s use of the prefix non- in “non-philosophy” (like Marc Augé’s “non-places” or Dylan Trigg’s “non-phenomenology”) does not mean a supersession or dialectical negation of the concept that is following it. Paraphrasing Galloway, we might say that filth achieves its (in)distinction not by opposing technology, but by “demilitarizing” it. See Alexander Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 190. [ix] As Yiannis Gabriel notes: “Miasma, like toxicity, coincides with an unconscious fantasy of being polluted by toxic substances. But miasma goes beyond mere toxicity in three significant ways: First, it is highly contagious; second, miasma, unlike toxicity, cannot be metabolized or neutralized through the deployment of suitable defensive mechanisms; and third, it generates a self-reinforcing vicious cycle, where attempts at purification deepen the condition.  Thus, miasma brings about a state of moral and spiritual decay, a corruption of all values and human relations of trust, love and community—people suspect their neighbors of being the cause, scapegoating and witch hunts are rife.  Toxicity may therefore be seen as a normal, if unpleasant consequence of organizational life in general, whereas miasma should be reserved for instances that involve far more extreme symptoms [ . . . ] The concept of miasma . . . readily accounts for the absence of resistance.  External violations and threats may be resisted or fought against, but the same can hardly be said for inner violations and decay.  In fact, miasma appears to infect resistance itself, compromising it, polluting it and subverting it.”  See Yiannis Gabriel, “Organizations in a State of Darkness: Towards a Theory of Organizational Miasma,” Organization Studies 33.9 (2012): 1137-1152. [x] Thus, the life of the “filthy rich” represents the biggest threat to a teleologically-driven economy not because of their accumulation of wealth, but because of their capacity to expel vast amounts of “richness” over the market, disrupting its mechanical functioning. Similarly, on “life” in Maldoror, Thacker states:

Maldoror is a tragic type of poetry because it asserts that there is too much form in the world. This is because, as the stark, surreal scenes in the text illustrate, there is also too much life (and there is no form without life). Maldoror attempts an impossible task, which is to actively and continually un-form all form, above all that most tiring of forms, the human form. In spite of its many invectives against God, and in spite of its many absurdist descriptions of animals, the challenge posed by Maldoror is not a challenge against religion or science. The real challenge posed by Maldoror is this: what is the most adequate form of the anti-human? And yet Maldoror can only accomplish this via some form; hence its poetics of gothic misanthropy must take on the abandoned shell of the carcass of existing forms, both of literature and of life. (TLN 1367; emphasis added)

[xi] As Michel Serres writes: “Noise cannot be a phenomenon; every phenomenon is separated from it, a silhouette on a backdrop, like a beacon against the fog, as every message, every cry, every call, every signal must be separated from the hubbub that occupies silence, in order to be, to be perceived, to be known . . . . As soon as a phenomenon appears, it leaves the noise; as soon as a form looms up, or pokes through, it reveals itself by veiling the noise.  So noise is not a matter of phenomenology, but of being itself.” See Michel Serres, Genesis [1982], trans. Geneviève James, et al (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995), 13.  Hereafter cited in the text as G [xii] Dylan Trigg, The Thing (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014), 131. [xiii] Daniel Rourke, “An Ontology of Everything on the Face of the Earth,” Alluvium 2.6 (2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.6.02 [xiv] I use the word “aesthetics” here in a “discognitive” sense, i.e., as prior to cognition or symbolization. As Steven Shaviro has pointed out: “Before it is cognitive, let alone conscious, thought is primordially an affective and aesthetic phenomenon.” See Steven Shaviro, Discognition (Winchester, UK: Repeater Books, 2016), 130. Kindle. Hereafter cited in the text as D. [xv] Georges Bataille, “The Schema of Sovereignty” [1953], trans. Robert Hurley, in The Bataille Reader, eds. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1997), 315. [xvi] As Adrian West points out:

Georges Bataille argues for a chain of associations linking the anus to feces, feces to putrefaction, and putrefaction to the useless, excessive, or unproductive, which must be eschewed in societies based in accumulation. This […] line of reasoning leaves much aside, […] such as the generalized prohibition of any trace of excrement in filmed depictions of anal sex, which nominally exempts it from inclusion among those deviant cravings provoked, paradoxically, by disgust (indeed, with the exception of videos made to appeal to a small fetish market, pornography proffers an idealized concept of the anus as a sex organ, and its excretory functions are suppressed).

See Adrian West, The Aesthetics of Degradation (Winchester, UK: Repeater Books, 2016), 37. [xvii] Thus a recent example of joyous exfilthtration is found in Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel, The Small Backs of Children (New York: HarperCollins, 2015):

He presses himself against the canvas and pieces of a body smudge random chaotic forms onto white. He paints wildly, physically, with his body, his hands, brushes, oils, fluids, blood. For this is part of his claim to fame—his use of bodily fluids mixed with paint to paint giant abstract faces. He paints with the fluids of a self outside language and thought, he paints in barbaric attacks of color on the canvas of white—fight back black or blood-born Alizarin crimson, Prussian blue, burnt sienna. (Kindle 1227)

[xviii] This is particularly evident in the media phenomenon of “filthy celebrities,” where the ceremony of “celebrity rehabilitation” works to re-mediatize the meme-body previously de-mediatized by filth. [xix] François Laruelle, Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, trans. Taylor Adkins (Paris: Editions Kimé, 1998). See, in particular, Laruelle’s own idiosyncratic entry on “Non-Technology” (49-51). [xx] There is an interesting parallellism between Thacker’s Maldoror and Serres’ Proteus. For Serres:

Proteus undergoes metamorphoses: he is animal, he can be element, water, or fire. He’s inert, he’s alive . . . . He contains all information, admits no information. He’s the possible, he’s chaos, he’s cloud, he’s background noise . . . . The chain that steadies the phenomenal must be found. Chained, motionless, Proteus speaks . . . Physics is Proteus chained. Background noise is this Proteus badly bound . . . . Behold a myth, barely a myth, which grants us an epistemology . . . but through a channel full of noise. (G 14; emphasis added)

[xxi] An exception, perhaps, would be H. P. Lovecraft’s “apophatic method.”  According to David Roden, this apophatic method “discloses a dark, unknowable cosmos that is, however, devoid of transcendence.  The Azathothic other would be, in this sense, an example of ‘filthy horror,’ being not beyond or ‘higher’ than matter but intimately involved and active in a unitary, if ultimately chaotic and meaningless, universe […]  The radical alien can be encountered, then, but the encounter breaks the orderly procession of historical time and knowledge production.  It leaves its mark in irreducible affects—terror, madness and physical desolation.”  See David Roden, “Metaphor at the Edge of the Human” http://enemyindustry.net/blog/?p=6059 [xxii] In part, as a reaction to traditional Western religious representations of the body as “originally filthy” in the sense of being the bearer of sin. [xxiii] Due in part to the replacement of mythico-religious representations of the body by technological ones. [xiv] As Steven Shaviro argues:

Responsive entities are energetic before they are semiotic. This is why they cannot be adequately described in the terms of information theory and systems theory. Concepts like Maturana and Varela’s “autopoiesis” and Luhman’s “operational closure” […] are overly static. They assume that responsive entities are characterized by an underlying drive to persist in being […] And so they ignore the ways these entities, with their enormous energy flows and energy expenditures, are equally driven by a will to change, a drive to reduce energy gradients, and thereby to push at their own limits. (D 679)

[xxv] See, for example, David Roden, Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (New York: Routledge, 2015), 166-193. For critiques and complications of this cyborg model, see Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).   taken from: KEEP IT DIRTY, vol. a., "Filth":  www.keepitdirty.org/a   Foto: Bernhard Weber

Eloge des frontières wurde von Régis Debray 2010 in Tokio als Vortrag gehalten. Debray geht darin weit in die Geschichte der Menschheit zurück, beleuchtet die Bedeutung der Grenze im Spiegel der verschiedenen Weltreligionen sowie säkularen Kulturen und diskutiert ihren Sinn und Zweck. In der globalisierten Welt richtet er sich gegen das allgemein angesagte Postulat »ohne Grenzen«. Nach Debrays Beobachtung bedeutet die Abschaffung einer Grenze, diese lediglich weiter nach außen zu verschieben, was zu unterschiedlichen, problematischen Konsequenzen führe. Geschichtlich gesehen, so Debray, hat die Grenze die Menschheit vorangebracht, Kultur ermöglicht. »Ohne Grenzen« hingegen ist alles erlaubt, alles möglich, wird alles banal und beliebig. Grenzen, die es ihrerseits stets zu hinterfragen gilt, helfen, Orientierung zu geben, wo sonst ein Vakuum entstehen könnte. Dabei geht Debray von der konkreten, geographischen Grenze aus und gelangt von dort zur abstrakten, philosophischen Bedeutung der Grenze. Debray fragt gegen den Strom, fragt sich, was das gegenwärtige Postulat der Gesellschaft bringt. Und wohin es führen könnte. Dabei wehrt er sich gegen Vereinfachungen auf allen Seiten.   Erschienen 2016 im Laika Verlag   Leseprobe hier: Debray_Nester und Nischen

In dieser ersten, kurzen Besprechung des Buches „Dark Deleuze“ von Andrew Culp geht es um die Nachzeichnung der wesentlichen Argumente, die in der Einleitung vorgebracht werden. Man könnte nun sagen, Culp bemüht sich um einen Bruch mit der bisher dominanten Deleuze-Rezeption, um die Rehabilitierung eines revolutionären Deleuze oder um eine Art Hermeneutik, die bestimmte Problematiken, die in den Texten von Deleuze zwar anwesend, aber nicht genügend expliziert sind, herauskristallisiert. Dem ist zu widersprechen. Man sollte "Dark Deleuze" als eine Anstiftung lesen, aber keineswegs nur als eine Anstiftung zu einem anderen Denken, sondern als eine Anstiftung Begriffe als Werkzeuge, ja als Waffen zu benutzen, ergo keine Anstiftung zur Kreation von Welten, sondern zur Destruktion der Welt, wie sie ist.

Andrew Culp beginnt seinen Text „Dark Deleuze“ mit einer Bemerkung von Deleuze zu den Funktionen eines guten Buchs. Es muss drei Funktionen erfüllen. Der Autor muss zeigen, dass 1) andere Bewerber einen Irrtum begehen, b) dass eine essenzielle Erkenntnis fehlt, und c) muss ein neues Konzept kreiert werden. Dies nimmt Culp mit seinem Text „Dark Deleuze“ für sich selbst in Anspruch. Er argumentiert zum Ersten gegen einen Deleuze, der den Kanon der Freude singt, woraufhin eine ganze Reihe von Deleuzianern es geschafft haben, Deleuze als einen naiven affirmativen Denker der Konnektivität vorzustellen. Zum Zweiten will Culp mit Deleuze die destruktive Kraft der Negativität in Szene setzen, mit der man den Hass gegen die Welt, wie sie ist, kultiviert. Zum Dritten schlägt Culp die Konspiration von antagonistischen Termen vor, die gegenüber jeder glücklichen Kreation von Termen, die aufeinander bezogen sind, sei es, dass sie sich teilen, sei es, dass sie sich synthetisieren, de jure divergieren. Zugegebenermaßen spricht Deleuze oft von einer freudvollen Affirmation und äußerst dabei seine Ablehnung der Negativität, die er dann immer in Verbindung zum Ressentiment setzt. Im Kanon der Freude ist der Kosmos eine komplexe Kollektion von Gefügen, die durch andauernde Prozesse der Differentation/Differenzierung produziert werden. Die Kreation von Konzepten, die sagen, wie die Welt ist, erscheint hier als ein eminent genussvoller Prozess. In diesem Kontext sind es heute die Denker des Realismus (OOO, Spekulativer Realismus, De Landa etc.), die versuchen mithilfe einer deleuzianischen Metaphysik der Positivität eine neue Ontologie zu kreieren.

Für einen Moment gilt es innezuhalten, denn ein anderer, ein dunkler Deleuze wirft jetzt schon seine Schatten voraus, ein revolutionärer Deleuze, der die Negativität in die Welt der zwanghaften Freude, der dezentralisierten Kontrolle und Transparenz einbrechen lässt. In den Texten von Deleuze führt, was vielfach übersehen wurde, die Negativität auf der Ebene des Konzepts zu vielen seiner verwendeten Präfixe, die die Differenz, das Werden und die Bewegung betreffen - de-, a-, in- und nicht-. Hier findet man deutliche Parallelen zu Laruelle, dessen Präpositionen als Operatoren fungieren, mit denen die Zugehörigkeit zu der Welt, wie sie ist, tunlichst vermieden wird, man denke an ohne- (ohne-Konsistenz, ohne-Welt) und nicht- (nicht-konzeptuell, nicht-definitorisch, nicht-philosophisch). Wenn es um Konzepte geht, dann  will Andrew Culp in "Dark Deleuze" apokalyptische Science Fiction schreiben. Auf der Ebene des Affekts ist die Negativität auf die Unwahrnehmbarkeit, die Konspiration, die Scham Mensch zu sein und auf die monströse Macht des Schreis bezogen.  

Unser Zeitalter ist das der Engel, zitiert Culp Michel Serres, eine Armee von unsichtbaren Boten, die, mit der Aufgabe der Kommunikation, Transmission und Übersetzung betraut, den Himmel durchqueren. Sie fordern uns auf, alle Botschaften in Worten und Taten auszudrücken. Medien haben heute die Funktion der Engel übernommen. Im Jahr 1991, als der eiserne Vorhang endgültig fiel, gelang Deleuze/Guattari dazu eine entscheidende Bemerkung: Wir leiden an keinem Mangel von Kommunikation. Im Gegenteil, wir werden mit ihr vollgestopft, wir sind gesättigt, wir leiden am fehlenden Widerstand gegen diese Gegenwart.

»Bedeutung, immer mehr Bedeutung! Information, immer mehr Information!«, das ist das Mantra der hermeneutisch-logischen Differenz, das unaufhörlich die Terme Wahrheit und Kommunikation miteinander vermischt, das Reale und die Information. In dieser "self-inscribed world", so Laruelle im Gleichklang mit einem dunklen Deleuze, müsse tatsächlich noch das letzte Geheimnis aufgedeckt und kommuniziert werden, alles, was bisher noch nicht gesagt wurde, sei nur dazu da, damit man es endlich sage. Für Laruelle ist die kommunikative Entscheidung noch heimtückischer als die philosophische Entscheidung: Es ist eine Sache, zu sagen, dass alles, was existiert, einen zureichenden Grund besitzt, aber es ist eine andere Sache, zu fordern, dass alles, das aus irgendeinem Grund existiert, kommuniziert werden soll. Wenn die philosophische Entscheidung eine Variante des Prinzips des zureichenden Grundes ist, dann fügt die kommunikative Entscheidung die absolute Kommunizierbarkeit als heimtückisches Aperçu noch hinzu. Es sind das Kapital mit seiner Maßlosigkeit und die Politik seiner Staaten, die das Ziel der vollkommenen Kommunikation und der reinen Transparenz vor sich her schieben und ihm doch nur infinitesimal nahe kommen können, und so erklärt sich denn auch die paranoid-depressive Tendenz, die heute wie eine unerträgliche Schleimspur alles zu überziehen versucht. Nietzsche sagte irgendwo, wer dem Ziel nahe ist, der tanzt - er verstand darunter aber einen ganz anderen Tanz.

Žižek scheint Recht zu haben, wenn er Deleuze - betrachtet man ihn als Apologeten der Konnektivität - als das Vorzeigekind für die Exzesse des kulturellen postmodernen Kapitalismus bezeichnet. Culp zitiert in diesem Kontext den Google Chef Eric Schmidt, der kürzlich erklärt hat, dass das Internet verschwinden werde, da es längst untrennbar von unserem Sein sei. Das sollte uns sehr aufmerksam machen. Es geht Culp nicht um eine Kritik des Internets, deren Kernaussage darin besteht, dass die digitale Technik unsere menschlichen Kapazitäten, sie zu managen, übersteige, denn, so Culp, schon Foucault habe gesagt, dass heute der Mensch seine eigene Zukunft stärker beeinflusse als je in der Geschichte zuvor. Das Problem sei, dass die Menschen ganz genau wissen, was sie an Unerträglichem tun, aber sie tun es trotzdem.

Philosophisch gesehen bedeutet Konnektivität das Erzeugen von Welten. Das Ziel einer Prophetie der Konnektivität besteht darin, alles und jedes zum Teil einer einzigen Welt zu machen. Culp sieht dies schon bei Kant angelegt, der den ewigen Frieden will, im marxistischen Universalismus, der die Einheit von Theorie und Praxis fordert, und bei Habermas, der uns alle als Teil einer großen Konversation phantasiert. Besonders letzteren trifft die unschlagbare Kennzeichnung der heutigen Kommunikationsgemeinschaften, wie sie Kroker/Weinstein vorgenommen haben: „Ich könnte für immer hier bleiben und mir dir weiter reden. Das ist die Einstellung jener Leute, die bei Mc Donald`s herumhängen: die ideale Sprechgemeinschaft, die es bereits gibt, aber von der Kritischen Theorie übersehen wurde.“ Aber diese Art der Kommunikation wird heute noch viel stärker durch Google dirigiert, was noch einmal überzeugend Deleuzes Aussage, dass Technik sozial sei, bevor sie technisch sei, bestätigt. Wenn Konnektivität als ein Mantra gepredigt wird, dann erscheint es leicht, ihre Effekte überall zu erkennen. Jobsuchende sollen sich auf das Internet verlassen, flache Hierarchien sind gut für das Business-Management und schließlich gilt das Internet als die größte Ressource menschlichen Wissens, wobei die Information nur darauf wartet endgültig frei zugänglich zu werden. Viele Deleuzianer unterstützen dieses Konzept, das in der Promotion von transversalen Linien, rhizomatischen Verbindungen, komplexen Assemblagen, affektiven Erfahrungen und entzückten Objekten besteht. Es sei wahrlich kein Wunder, so Culp, dass Deleuze dann schlussendlich dem Camp des kalifornischen Buddhismus zugeschlagen werde, denn die Deleuzianer hätten seine Philosophie auf die Differenz, die Offenheit für Begegnungen in einer schwierigen Welt oder auf erhöhte Kapazität durch Synergie reduziert. In gewissem Maße funktioniert heute selbst das finanzielle Kapital und die Logistik des Kapitals rhizomatisch.

"Dark Deleuze" will all diese Idole killen und die erste Aufgabe dieser Aktion ist negativ, so wie Deleuze/Guattari es im Anti-Ödipus mit der Schizoanalyse vorgeschlagen haben: Sie läuft auf eine komplette Ausschabung hinaus, sie muss zeigen, dass der Optimismus für die Konnektivität endgültig am Ende ist. Die selbstverwalteten autonomen Zonen sind längst den Gesetzen der Kapitalisierung unterworfen. Zudem erleben wir den Terror der Publizität, die Diffusion der Macht und die Übersättigung durch Information. Alexander Galloway hat unlängst davon gesprochen, dass das Netzwerk zu einer totalitären Basiskategorie des Kapitals mutiert sei, inzwischen sei alles ein Netzwerk, und die beste Antwort auf Netzwerke seien noch mehr Netzwerke. Hyperkonnektivität wird heute durch das »L-Gesetz« bestimmt, das den Nutzen der Komplexität eines Netzwerks erfasst (die möglichen Verbindungen zwischen einer Anzahl von Knoten plus die Geschwindigkeit; Wachstum des Nutzens proportional zum Quadrat der Zahl der Verbindungsknoten.) So entsteht der neue „Inforg“ (Floridi), der in die Netzwerke als Modul eingebaut wird, wenn diese den Umweg über das Subjekt überhaupt noch benötigen, um operierende und kommunizierende Objekte modular zu prozessieren.

"Dark Deleuze" folgt hingegen Deleuzes Vorschlag, Vakuolen der Nicht-Kommunikation in die Netzwerke, seien sie flach oder hierarchisch angelegt, zu schlagen, und die kommunikativen Kreisläufe zu unterbrechen anstatt sie zu erweitern. Es geht nicht darum den Raum des Kapitals zu verlassen, sondern ihn zu kannibalisieren: wir sind zwar von dieser Welt, aber nicht für diese Welt.

Deleuze fordert uns oft genug dazu auf, an diese Welt zu glauben. Culp fordert hingegen an dieser Stelle dazu auf, eine andere Orientierung einzuschlagen als an etwas zu glauben, das etwa so flüchtig sei wie die Sensationen des Kinos. Anstatt die Kräfte zu unterstützen, die diese Welt produzieren, müsse man sie zerstören. Heute sprechen wir nicht mehr über den Tod Gottes oder den des Menschen, sondern wir verlangen den Tod dieser Welt, und um dies zu tun, muss man den Hass kultivieren. Deleuze zitiert häufig genug Nietzsches Aussage „Zerstören um zu kreieren“. Im "Anti-Ödipus" schreiben Deleuze/Guattari, dass das Kapital das Vorherige zerstört habe, um seine eigene irdische Existenz zu kreieren, wobei die erste Aufgabe negativ zu bewerten sei (zerstören) und beiden nächsten positiv (kreieren, kreieren).

Etwas wirklich Entwaffnendes schleppt Deleuze/Guattaris Definition der Philosophie (eine Art und Weise Konzepte zu erzeugen) mit sich, wenn es heute im Business bis hin zu allen möglichen Lebensbereichen nur noch darum geht, konstruktiv und nicht destruktiv zu sein. Wenn heute die Werbefritzen für sich proklamieren, sie seien die kreativsten aller kreativen Geschöpfe, dann wird es wirklich Zeit das Konzept der Kreativität als zentralen Mechanismus der Befreiung komplett zu verabschieden. Wie weit, so Culp, sei das doch alles von Marxens Aufforderung zur schonungslosen Kritik all dessen, was existiert, entfernt!

Konzepte sind nur dann mit dem Denken vereinbar, wenn sie den Konsens durchbrechen. Konzepte sind das Resultat von Katastrophen, sagen Deleuze/Guattari, von Not und Misstrauen. Wahre Gedanken sind rar, schmerzvoll und sie werden uns von Ereignissen aufgezwungen, die so grauenhaft sind, dass sie ohne die Mühe des Denkens nicht bestanden werden können.

Der Produktivismus ist der zweite große Gegenstand der Kritik. Er prozessiert qua einer Logik der Akkumulation und limitiert die Produktion auf die Reproduktion, sodass uns seine bloße Übernahme in diese Logik einbinden würde. Nur diejenigen Kreisläufe der Produktion, die ihre eigene Basis erweitern, werden heute anerkannt. Es mag zwar noch möglich sein das Konzept vom Produktivismus zu trennen, insofern der letztere längst zum professionellen Training von Businessleuten verkommen ist, das sich auszahlen soll. Im Zeitalter der zwanghaften Happiness erscheint die Trennung aber schwierig, insofern jede Konstruktion mit den Anforderungen des Kapitals konfrontiert wird.

Deleuze korrumpiert den Holismus durch eine alte atomistische Vorstellung: Die Relation zwischen zwei Termen produziert einen unabhängigen dritten Term. So nämlich konstruiert Deleuze laut Culp seine Metaphysik der Positivität, i.e, alle Elemente stehen allein, und dies ohne Bezug auf den hegelschen Widerspruch, auf Opposition oder Identität. Die Dinge sind niemals vollkommen abhängig von ihrem Umfeld, dem Kontext der Produktion, sie können dem Ort ihres Ursprungs entfliehen. Culp erwähnt an dieser Stelle den späten Althusser und dessen Theorie des aleatorischen Materialismus.

Foucault hatte in gewisser Weise an der Eins und Zwei nichts auszusetzen, aber eben nur insofern als die Macht sich immer in Kampf, Herrschaft und Widerstand auseinander dividiert (und nicht zusammensetzt). Anders bei Deleuze: Entgegen der landläufigen Deleuze Rezeption, die in der Figur der inklusiven Disjunktion zuweilen sogar ein libertäres Moment vernimmt, gilt es darauf hinzuweisen, dass Deleuze dieser Art der Konnektivität doch eher skeptisch gegenüberstand. Es handelt sich bei der inklusiven Disjunktion um einen Prozess, der ansonsten fremde oder gar feindliche Entitäten miteinander in Beziehung setzt, ohne dass sie eine gemeinsame »Logik« bezüglich des verhandelten Gegenstandes teilen müssen. So kann die Inklusion im Kapitalismus durchaus auch über die Prozessierung von Divergenz stattfinden, sie muss nicht unbedingt als Homogenisierung von Differenzen stattfinden.

Während sich für Laruelle angesichts der Bevorzugung der Immanenz die Frage des Dritten gar nicht erst stellt (Superposition und Idempotenz erfordern folgende Formel: 1+1=1), beharren Deleuze/Guattari, wenn man sie jenseits der logischen Figur der inklusiven Disjunktion liest, auf einer durchaus interessanten Nicht-Beziehung zwischen dem zweiten und dem dritten Term, insofern der dritte, der nomadische Term, die beiden anderen Terme nicht synthetisiert, sondern sich radikal von ihnen abtrennt. Dabei werden zunächst zwei Terme innerhalb eines einzigen Gegenstandes gedacht (beispielsweise die liberale und die autoritäre Komponente des Staates), wobei der dritte Term des widerständigen Nomadischen keineswegs die Synthesis der beiden Terme oder die Fortschreibung der Differenz, sondern die Herstellung einer Beziehung zum Außen anstrebt. Widersprüche müssen nun definitiv außerhalb der Dualität gedacht werden. Die inklusive Disjunktion (weder... noch bzw. dieses oder dieses und/oder dieses und/oder dieses) sollte man deshalb durch die radikal exklusive Disjunktion ersetzen. Es gibt jedenfalls keinen Sieg der goldene Mitte qua Synthesis zu vermelden, jedoch gilt es etwas außerhalb der bisherigen Welt des Kapitals anzustreben.

Die Macht des Außen eröffnet eine zusätzliche Fluchtlinie. Deleuze/Guattari haben im Anti-Ödipus eine Autoproduktion des Realen vorschlagen, die ein passiver Prozess ist, der vom menschlichen Bewusstsein nicht erreicht werden kann. Viele Deleuzianer begreifen jedoch, indem sie Politik mit Metaphysik vermischen, die Autoproduktion als einen positiven Prozess, der für sich selbst steht. Hingegen insistiert Culp darauf, das wir uns zwar mit den Kräften der Autoproduktion verbinden sollten, aber nicht um die jetzige Welt des Kapitals zu reproduzieren, sondern um sie zu zerstören. Das mächtigste System der Autoproduktion ist das Kapital, das Hunderte von Millionen Menschen in die Armut und Verelendung wirft, Kriege der Verwüstung anzettelt und die Subjekt einer peniblen Kontrolle unterwirft. Es kann keinerlei Kompromiss mit dem gegenwärtigen globalen System des Kapitals geben, wie dies etwa der linke Akzelerationismus anstrebt, wenn er für einen Postkapitalismus plädiert, für einen universellen Normativismus unter dem Deckmantel aufklärerischer Rhetorik.

Culp fordert hingegen einen dunklen Turn - nicht-dialektisch, nicht telisch - und plädiert für einen nicht-teleologischen Pfad der Negation und des Widerstands. Es geht einfach darum, die Welt des Kapitals zu zerstören. Gegen die Oszillationen eines Badiou oder Žižek, die sich zwischen Wahrheit-Bedingungen und Akte-Ereignisse bewegen, will Culp die barbarischen Kräfte des Außen erneuern. Im Kontext der Figur des Migranten hat kürzlich auch Thomas Nail einen neuen Barbarismus eingefordert, der auf die destruktiven Kräfte setzt, wie sie bspw. Walter Benjamin beschrieben hat. Wir sollten aufhören, das Leben zu romantisieren und wir sollten der kalkulierten Politik, den Lösungen der Technokraten und den schlechten Arten zu denken einen fröhlichen Tod wünschen.

Wir sollten schließlich, so Culp, Deleuzes Irrtum korrigieren, der darin bestünde, dass er es versäumt habe, den Hass auf diese Welt zu kultivieren. Hören wir für einen Moment wieder auf Walter Benjamin: „Der destruktive Charakter kennt nur eine Parole: Platz schaffen; nur eine Tätigkeit: räumen. Sein Bedürfnis nach frischer Luft und freiem Raum ist stärker als jeder Haß.“ Oft genug spricht Deleuze zwar von Nietzsches Grausamkeit und dessen Geschmack für die Destruktion, aber Deleuzes Bild der Zukunft ähnelt noch zu sehr der Gegenwart. Die Deleuzianer, die ihren Master nur endlos wiederholen, sie sind eine grandiose Parodie, wenn sie etwa von den rhizomatischen Gärten, von der kooperativen Selbstreproduktion und der Affirmation eines affirmativen Lebens schwärmen und schwadronieren.

Gegen diese Maximen will Culp mit Dark Deleuze den neuen Barbaren setzen, der in der Tradition Rimbauds steht. Barbarischer Hass ist nicht rücksichtslos, aber er folgt ganz und gar nicht der Wissenschaft des Urteils. Culp weist allerdings auch darauf hin, dass der Hass das ambivalente Komplement zur Liebe sei und deswegen schnell ins Ressentiment abgleiten könne.

Meistens wird die Welt immer noch nur durch die Brille der Aufklärung gesehen, der Erleuchtung, aber es geht darum sie zu verdunkeln. Die wichtigste Instanz der Helligkeit, Konnektivität, ist nichts weiter als die Realisierung des techno-affirmativen Traums von der kompletten Transparenz. Culp bringt dagegen die Metapher der Gruft ins Spiel: Für Deleuze falten sich solche Räume in sich selbst, indem sie simultan die Autonomie des Innen und die Unabhängigkeit der Fassade als ein Innen ohne Außen und ein Außen ohne Innen ausdrücken, je nachdem wie man es sieht. Es geht hier keineswegs um die Gleichsetzung der Gruft mit dem Tod, sondern um die Projektion einer unterirdischen architektonischen Macht. Von der Metapher der Gruft bezieht Culp auch das Moment der Konspiration. Sie ist gesättigt mit Negativität, aber nicht im Sinn von Antinomien. Man sollte lernen entschieden Nein zu denjenigen zu sagen, die die Welt so nehmen, wie sie ist.

Der Dunkle Deleuze hat einiges mit dem Schwarzen Laruelle gemein. Für Alexander Galloway bietet Laruelle ein neues Uchromia an, eine Utopie, die auf einem generischen schwarzen Universum basiert. Als Beispiel wählt Galloway die Verfassung Haitis aus dem Jahr 1804, die alle Bürger als schwarz erklärte, und zwar unabhängig von ihrer Hautfarbe. Man forderte damals schon die Subtraktion von der Welt der Farbe und des Lichts, die vom Multikulturalismus und seiner Politik der kulturellen Differenzen bis heute so übermäßig abgefeiert wird.

Deleuze fordert die nicht-dialektische Negation, die als Distanz zwischen zwei unabhängigen Pfaden operiert. Culp zitiert Klossowski, der in seinem Nietzsche Buch „Circulus vitiosus“ die Konspiration als die Art und Weise bezeichnet, mit der institutionalisierten Moral, dem Kapitalismus und dem Staat zu brechen. Dazu gilt es eine kryptische Sprache zu verwenden, die nur denjenigen eigen ist, die wissen, wie die Kriegsmaschinen zu bedienen sind, um das Geheimnis erneut in sein Recht zu setzen. Culp fordert die Perzeption des Geheimnisses, das sich unter dem Leichentuch der Geheimhaltung viral ausbreitet. Er resümiert: Perzeption plus Geheimnis = das Geheimnis als Sekretion. Die beste Konspiration ist paradoxerweise die, bei der es nichts mehr zu verbergen gibt. Und es gibt durchaus eine affektive Dimension der Konspirativität. Der Pessimismus wird dann wieder zur Notwendigkeit, wenn man in einer Ära des generalisierten Prekariats, einer extremen Stratifikation der Klassen und des Rassismus lebt.

Das Problem mit der Metaphysik der Differenz besteht darin, dass sie zu genussvoll und zu affirmativ ist. In ihr ist kein Platz für das Marx`sche Konzept der Extraktion des Mehrwerts, den eine Klasse aus der anderen zieht. Hier muss der Widerstand in seiner strategischen Dimension labyrinthische Pfade entwickeln, um eine neue Kryptographie zu erzeugen. Der revolutionäre Traum muss in konterrevolutionären Zeiten unbedingt aufrechterhalten werden!

Die Konspiration von "Dark Deleuze" besteht aus einer Serie von Antagonismen: Antagonismen sind keine Gegensätze, die in dialektischer Opposition zueinander stehen, um sich gegenseitig zu ergänzen. Eines der zentralen Argumente von "Differenz und Wiederholung" besteht darin, dass die Philosophie das Denken auf die Äquivalenz und die logische Identität zwischen zwei Termen reduziert hat. Das Denken der Antagonismen muss dagegen jede Nachbarschaft zum Denken der Ähnlichkeit, der Analogien und der Opposition vermeiden. Und es gibt noch einen zweiten Grund Oppositionen zu vermeiden: Sie implizieren als friedliche Auflösung die goldene Mitte, sodass der optimale Platz irgendwo zwischen den Extremen zu finden ist. Der vermittelnde Kompromiss sei, so Culp, die größte Tragödie und dies hinsichtlich der Dualismen, die Deleuze/Guattari in Tausend Plateaus aufgelistet haben: glatt/gekerbt; molar/molekular; baumartig/rhizomatisch. Um dem Dualismus und der goldenen Mitte zu entkommen, muss man die konzeptuellen Paare durch einen dritten, einen komplett unabhängigen Term erweitern, der ganz aus dem Außen kommt.

Culp fordert keineswegs die Inversion der vitalistischen Philosophie des Lichts und der Freude, sondern er bemüht sich um die Konstruktion einer Serie von Antagonismen. Dazu schlägt er ein Diagramm vor, das die Aufgaben eines Dark Deleuze anzeigt, um die Pfade der Freude und der Dunkelheit neu zu entwerfen. Culp entwickelt also eine Liste, bei der die gegensätzlichen Terme nicht so gegeben sind, als würde der einen den anderen implizieren, sondern die dunklen Terme werden einzig und allein ins Spiel gebracht, um die Kapazität anzuzeigen, mit sie die gegensätzlichen Terme usurpieren können. Konträre Kontakte sollten als gegenseitig exklusiv angenommen werden, es handelt sich um voneinander unabhängige Prozesse, die mit ihren eigenen Ressourcen spielen, ohne aufeinander zu rekurrieren. Was sie dunkel macht, das ist ihre Position der Exteriorität, mit der die irregulären Gedanken den Status der Freude angreifen. Culp will den Leser dazu anstiften, mit ihm die fremden Pfade der dunklen Alternativen zu gehen. Es wäre aber am besten, wenn auch diese Pfade irrelevant würden, womit "Dark Deleuze" sein ultimatives Ziel erreicht hätte: Das Ende dieser Welt, die Zerschlagung des Staates und der Kommunismus.

Marxian Economics, John Milios & G. E. Economakis, Encyclopaedia of International Economics, Vol. 2, Routledge Publishers, 2001, pp. 995-1004

The economic theory formulated and developed by Karl *Marx (Trier, 1818 - London, 1883). By extension, ‘Marxian Economics’ refers to all theoretical approaches that are predicated on Marx’seconomic concepts (Howard and King 1989, 1992). Marx developed his economic theory, under the rubric of A Critique of Political Economy, mainly in the period 1857-1867. It is a well-defined system, structured as a logical array of original concepts and analyses of Marx’s theory of *value and *surplus-value. Marxian economics emerged from Marx’s earlier historic-sociological analyses and is formulated along with a new methodological approach. Marx’s mature economic writings contain the following works: the Manuscripts 1857-58, (first published in 1939-41 as Grundrisse, Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy - Marx 1993); the book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (first published 1859, Marx 1971); the Manuscript 1861-63 (comprising nearly 2,500 printed pages), a part of which was first published during the period 1905-10 under the title Theories of Surplus Value (Marx 1969, 1970, 1972); the Manuscripts 1863-67 (containing all drafts of the three volumes of Capital. A Critique of Political Economy); and Volume one of Capital (first published in 1867). In the second (1872-73) edition of Volume one of Capital (Marx 1990), Marx revised Part one of the book, entitled ‘Commodities and Money’. Volumes two and three of Capital were edited and first published by Engels in 1885 and 1894 respectively. The theoretical background: Marx’s Theory of History The economic theory of Marx is firmly embedded in the Theory of History, which he had formulated and developed jointly with Frederick Engels since the mid 1840s. Starting from his Theses on Feurbach (1845), Marx rejects the entire tradition of theoretical-philosophical humanism (the conception that the individual or human nature determines the form and the evolution pattern of societies). He wrote: ‘Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations’ (6th Thesis on Feuerbach). On this basis Marx formulated his concept of *class struggle as the motive force of social evolution: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ (The Communist Manifesto, Marx-Engels 1985, 79). Marx grasped the unity and coherence of *society in terms of social-class power: Power no longer constitutes the ‘right of the sovereign,’ or the ‘power of the *state’ in relation to (equal and free) individuals, but a specific form of class domination of the ruling class over the dominated classes of society. It becomes stabilised on the basis of dominant social structures, and is reproduced through class antagonisms. In the framework of this analysis, Marx regarded the economy as the actual basis of the whole class society – with property relations vis a vis the means of production the keystone of class identity. *Capitalism is thus conceived of as a social regime characterised by the complete separation of the labourers from the means of production, which are now monopolised by the ruling class of capitalists. The labourer becomes a propertyless proletarian, who has only one chance in life: to exchange his labour-power for a wage to the capitalist, who now becomes the owner of all value produced by the wage labourer: ‘*Capital [is] that kind of property which exploits wage labour, and which cannot increase except upon conditions of begetting a new supply of wage labour for fresh exploitation’ (Marx-Engels 1985, 96-7). However, until 1857 Marx’s analysis was derived from the Ricardian theory of value, as he had not yet developed his own value theory. Value, abstract labour and money According to the main postulate of the Ricardian theory of value, *commodities are exchanged with each other at relative quantities reflecting the relative quantities of labour necessary for their production. Consequently, the value of each commodity corresponds to the quantity of labour bestowed on its production. Marx revolutionised the Ricardian theory of value in two ways: a) On the analytical level, Marx conceived of value as a (historically) specific social relation: Value is the identity that the products of labour acquire under capitalism, an identity which is realised on the market through their exchangeability with all other products of labour, i.e. through their character as commodities carrying a specific money-price on the market. ‘Had we (...) inquired under what circumstances all, or even the majority of products take the form of commodities, we should have found that this can only happen with production of a very specific kind, capitalist production’ (Marx 1990, 273). Value is thus not a property which in all historical cases is infused into the products of labour by the individual labourer. Furthermore, under capitalism, it is not only the products of labour that become commodities, but also the labour-power of the working people, who in the course of history have lost all property rights over the means of production and are obliged (by the threat of starvation) to sell their labour-power to the capitalists (owners of the means of production) in order to be able to purchase the necessary means of subsistence. Marx is now able to attack the question of commensurability (general exchangeability) of commodities: Where classical political economists believed that they had given an answer (qualitatively different objects –use values– become commensurable –exchangeable– because they are all products of labour), Marx poses the question of why qualitatively different forms of labour are commensurable. ‘What appears objectively as diversity of the use values, appears, when looked at dynamically, as diversities of the activities which produce those use values’ (Marx 1971, 29). To answer the question one must comprehend the social character of labour: The capitalist division of labour and the corresponding *social organisation of the production process is based on the direct (institutional) independence of each specific producer (capitalist) from all others. However, all these individual production processes are indirectly correlated with each other through the market mechanism, as each one produces not for himself but for the others, for the rest of society (the market). This induces the social (capitalistic) homogenisation of all individual labour processes through the generalised commodity *exchange and the competition among individual producers (capitalists). Marx expounds this process of social homogenisation of the different labour and production processes by introducing the concept of abstract labour: Labour in capitalism is on the one hand concrete labour (producing a concrete use-value) and on the other abstract labour, labour of equal social quality which enables the general commensurability and exchange of commodities: ‘The labour expressed in exchange value is abstract universal social labour, which is brought about by the universal alienation of individual labour’ (Marx 1971, 56-57). b) On the methodological level Marx introduced a theory of the forms of appearance of economic and social relations, as distinct from the internal, hidden, causal regularities (or laws) governing these relations, which are not detectable on the level of the observable phenomena. As he had already explained in his first text of the period, the Introduction to the Grundrisse, the purpose of economic science is to start from these concrete forms of appearance, only in order to abstract from them and thereafter return to them by a new, theoretical, path, which would allow for the formation of the theoretical concepts of the phenomena; concepts which would reveal the internal causalities regulating the observable phenomena. Marx’s methodology thus constitutes a rupture with all forms of empiricism, since it bases itself on the thesis that empirical observation does not suffice for the comprehension of causality in economic processes. As he puts it: ‘the form of appearance (...) makes the actual relation invisible, and indeed presents to the eye the precise opposite of that relation’. ‘(...) just as the apparently motions of the heavenly bodies are intelligible only to someone who is acquainted with their real motions, which are not perceptible to the senses’ (Marx 1990, 680, 433). The implication of the above theses is that value never expresses itself as such (is therefore never directly-empirically conceivable or measurable), but only through its forms of appearance (the price of commodities). These forms of appearance refer not to the level of each individual commodity but to the level of the market: they express each commodity’s exchange relation with all other commodities; they materialise the social homogenisation of labour (as denoted by the notion abstract labour). The form of value, i.e. the directly observable quantity which expresses (executes) the general exchangeability of commodities, is *money; it is the general equivalent of the exchange process, as all commodities express in it their exchange value. Having acquired the sole function of expressing and measuring value, money (even if it is a special commodity: gold), does not possess value itself, since if the opposite were true ‘it would have to be brought into relation with itself as its own equivalent’, (Marx 1990, 189), which is obviously meaningless. As the general form of appearance of value, money is conceived by Marx as the ‘material embodiment of abstract and therefore equal human labour’ (Marx 1990, 184). Unlike the Ricardian, the Marxian theory of value is a monetary theory. The value of a commodity cannot be determined as such, but only through its form of appearance; it cannot be determined in isolation but only in relation with all other commodities in the exchange process. This exchange-value relation is materialised by money. In the Marxian system, no other ‘material embodiment’ of (abstract) labour and no other quantitatively defined form of appearance (or measure) of value can exist. Money functions as a measure of value, as the means of circulation (a special case of which is international money), as means of hoarding, and as money-capital, which is its most significant economic function in capitalism. Marx introduces his analysis of money as capital, under the sub-title ‘means of payment’, in the 3rd section of Chapter 3 of Volume one of Capital, (i.e. before defining the notion of capital or interest), only to continue it in Part Two of Volume one and in Part Five of Volume Three. When analysing the function of money as means of circulation, Marx underlines the fact that exchange of commodities is a dual process of sale and subsequent purchase, in accordance with the formula C-M-C (where C stands for commodity and M for money). This split of exchange into two sub-processes constitutes a general possibility of economic crises, which classical economists (following *Say’s law) failed to comprehend, because they eliminated money and approached exchange as if it were an act of barter. The Marxian theory of value refers simultaneously to the notion of abstract social labour (as the causal determinant or the ‘essence’ of value) and to money (as its necessary form of appearance). Value is thus a social relation accruing from the social homogenisation of labour under capitalism and manifesting itself in the general exchangeability of commodities on the market. From a quantitative point of view the value of a commodity would be the quantity of socially necessary labour (i.e. labour possessing the socially average characteristics of production technique, skill, intensity etc.) expended on its production. However, the necessarily distorted form of appearance of all causal determinations results in relative *prices of commodities which, in the general case, differ from what their relative values would be. Marx, after making clear that ‘the possibility of a quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value (...) is inherent in the price form itself’ (Marx 1990, 196), assumed though, in Volumes one and two of Capital, that commodities exchange at their values –as in those texts he was mainly concerned with the study of the causal determinations (the ‘essence’) of the capitalist economy. In Volume three of Capital he abandoned this assumption, as he concentrated on the forms of appearance of the capitalist relations of production. There he introduced the concept of production prices, as the transformed forms of value ensuring the equalisation of the profit rate of all individual capitals, which are bound together in the framework of a capitalist economy through competition (see below). Capital, surplus-value, accumulation Marx’s capital theory is based on his concept of value. Capital is value which, although created by the labouring class, has been appropriated by the capitalists. Being value, capital appears as money and commodities. It is, however, specific commodities that function as capital: means of production (constant capital) on the one hand, and labour-power (variable capital) on the other. For labour-power to be a commodity, a long historical process of social change and revolutions must have taken place, from which there emerges the free labourer: ‘free in the double sense that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, i.e. he is rid of them’ (Marx 1990, 272). The formation of the capital - wage labour relation is thus a historically specific form of class power which is inseparable from the institutional, legal and ideological edifice of the ‘free person’ and equality. Marx describes this historically specific social order as the capitalist *mode of production. Sale and purchase of labour power does not contravene the exchange of equivalents, on which every market is based: On the labour market, the capitalist and the labourer meet each other ‘on a footing of equality as owners of commodities’ (Marx 1990, 271). The labourer gets from the capitalist a real wage, i.e. an ensemble of commodities that is necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of his labour power. For Marx, the magnitude of the real wage is determined historically. However, it cannot be reduced below the physically necessary means of subsistence on the one hand, neither it can be raised to a level allowing the worker change his social position (to purchase means of production) on the other. The decay of the labouring ability of the workers determines the lower limit; overpopulation of labourers (the reserve army of labour as Marx named it) and periodically increasing unemployment, due to economic fluctuations and crises (see below) safeguard the upper limit. The nominal wage is the value of (all commodities comprising) the real wage. The use-value for the capitalist of the labour-power he purchases is that it produces (as it is consumed productively, in the labour process) commodities containing more value than its own. Let v be the value of one unit of labour power (the variable capital advanced by the capitalist), then the new (net) value produced by it would be v+s, where s is the surplus-value, the portion of the produced value which the capitalist acquires. The labour process is thus simultaneously a process of valorisation and of surplus-value production. The working day is divided into the necessary labour time (during which the labourer produces a value equal to that of his labour-power) and the surplus labour time (in which surplus-value is produced). If (c) is the (pre-existing) value of the means of production which are worn out in the production process (or the amortisation), then the (gross) value of the produced output will be c+v+s. Surplus-value production is a process of exploitation of the labourers by the capitalist. Marx defines as exploitation rate (or surplus-value rate) the quotient s/v. The aim of capitalist production is to increase surplus-value and the rate of exploitation. This is a moment inherent in the capital relation, which shapes the will of its ‘bearer’, the individual capitalist, who functions ‘as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will’ (Marx 1990, 254). Surplus-value increases accruing from a prolongation of the work-day or the intensification of labour are regarded by Marx as production of absolute surplus-labour. However, increases in s/v also result from increases in productivity of labour, which suppress the value of unit commodities and consequently reduce nominal wages if real wages remain unchanged (or even increase at rates lower than the increase rates in labour productivity). This process is defined as production of relative surplus-labour. Money acting as capital unifies the capitalist production and circulation process, in accordance with the following scheme: M—C(=Mp+Lp)[PC΄]—Μ΄ The capitalist appears on the market as the owner of money (M) purchasing commodities (C), these being means of production (Mp) and labour power (Lp). In the production process (P), he productively consumes C, to create an output of commodities (C΄), whose value exceeds that of C. He finally sells this output to gain an amount of money (Μ΄) higher than (M). So the ‘circulation of money leads to capital’ (Marx 1993, 776). Money appears to possess ‘the occult ability to add value to itself’ (Marx 1990, 255). This is most clearly the case for loan (or interest-bearing) capital, which the banker or money-capitalist lends to the industrialist. The surplus value created in the production process is then divided into industrial profit and interest, the latter apparently accruing automatically from loan-money itself. The surplus value (s=M΄-Μ) acquired by the capitalist is transformed partly into means of private consumption for himself and partly into additional constant and variable capital (i.e. additional means of production and labour power) for the expansion of production. This last process (i.e. the transformation of surplus-value into capital) is defined as *accumulation. Through accumulation, the capitalist economy is reproduced on an expanded scale. (In the special case of no accumulation, i.e. when all surplus-value goes to the capitalist’s private consumption, we have simple reproduction). In Volume two of Capital, Marx formulates the conditions of uninterrupted reproduction of a pure capitalist economy comprising two sectors, one of which produces means of production for the whole economy, and the other means of consumption for all labourers and capitalists. Let c1+v1+s1 be the output of sector 1, producing means of production. In the case of uninterrupted expanded reproduction, this output must be equal to the demand of both sectors for means of production (for amortisation and accumulation), i.e. c1+v1+s1=c1+Δc1+c2+Δc2. Considering that s1=Δc1+Δv1+pc, (where Δc1+Δv1 refers to the accumulation of constant and variable capital and pc to the personal consumption of the capitalists, of sector 1), we finally conclude that the consumption expenditure in sector 1 must be of equal value to production expenditure in sector 2: v1+Δv1+pc=c2+Δc2 (1)   Prices of production The distorted forms of appearance of economic relations do not designate a false impression in consciousness, but to a reality, which is the outcome of class power, and which precludes the apprehension of causalities behind it. In this context, labour-power appears to be incorporated in capital as variable capital. The products of labour thus appear to be products of capital. The result is the formation of such commodity prices that the profit accrued on all individual capitals tends toward the average profit, i.e. a profit corresponding to the average profit rate of the economy (see relation 4, below). Since different individual capitals generally have different relative portions of constant (C) and variable (v) capital, the relative prices of the commodities they produce are different from what their relative values would be. On the basis of this approach, Marx solves a problem that tormented *Ricardo and his school. For each individual capital, the cost price in value terms (k) is defined as the expense in constant (c) and variable capital (v), that is the sum k = c+v. Assuming a constant rate of exploitation s/v, the value of a commodity would be: w = c + v(1+s/v) (2) and for a given cost price (c+v = const.) it would increase with v (with decreasing c/v). Conversely, for a given profit rate, r, and assuming, for mathematical simplicity, that all constant capital wears out in each production process (i.e. C=c), the production price of the commodity would be: P = (c΄+v΄)(1+r) = k΄(1+r) (3) where c΄+v΄ is the cost price (k΄) in price terms. It is clear that P remains unchanged for a given cost price (c΄+v΄ = const.), irrespective of changes in the ratio c΄/v΄. Marx calculated production prices starting from values, and erroneously used the cost price in value terms (k instead of k΄) to calculate production prices (P). Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz (1906) first corrected his mathematical errors. ‘Fetishism’ Prices of production disguise exploitation relations since ‘surplus-value appears as having arisen from the total capital’ (Marx 1991, 267) and not from labour. The wage then appears then as the ‘price of labour’ (Marx 1990, 680) and not of labour power; capital appears as a self-valorising medium. Marx denotes as ‘fetishism’ the disguising effects that are inherent in the forms of appearance of capitalist relations, in all cases that they make the latter manifest themselves as relations between things. Through ‘fetishism’, social relations (capital, value) appear as material objects (means of production, gold). He especially emphasised the ‘fetishist’ character of revenue forms (rent apparently accruing from ‘land’, profit from the ‘means of production’) and of interest-bearing capital, which ‘displays the conception of the capital fetish in its consummate form’ (Marx 1991, 523), as money appears to create money. However, the introduction of the notion of *‘commodity fetishism’ before that of capital, in Volume one of Capital, gave rise to disputes over the philosophical significance of ‘fetishism’ in Marxian theory. Technological innovation and the tendential fall in the profit rate The tendency of the profit rate to fall has been part of the economists’ credo since the Classical era. Ricardo tried to present it as a result of increasing rent payments by farmers to landlords, triggering an upward surge in *wages and a corresponding fall in profits due to price increases in wage-commodities. Marx, with his *law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit, shows that technological innovation aimed at increasing labour productivity and induced through competition could be the cause of such a phenomenon. He bases his analysis on the notions technical composition of capital (designating the number of means of production per labour unit in material terms) and value (or organic) composition of capital (the ratio of constant to variable capital, in value terms). The technical composition of capital increases with accumulation and technical innovation. Marx argued that, all other factors remaining unchanged, a fall in the rate of profit may occur when the technical composition of capital increases faster than the productivity of labour induced by it. Considering the rate of profit to be the dependent variable (R) one may write: s                     s/v R = --------- = ------------- (4) C+v              (C/v)+1 where C stands for constant capital, s/v for the exploitation rate (surplus-value rate) and (C/v) for the value (organic) composition of capital. It can be shown that (C/v) is a positive function of (T/p), where T is the technical composition of capital and p the productivity of labour (or the inverse of the value of one unit of product). So if T rises faster than p, the value composition of capital increases. In all cases where this increase is faster than the increase in the exploitation rate (s/v), the tendential fall in the profit rate prevails over the counteracting tendencies. Following the logic of Marx’s analysis one may say that in all cases where technical innovation does not cause higher increases in the technical composition of capital than in labour productivity, an upswing in the profit rate takes place. The upward trend in the profit rate prevails also when the exploitation rate increases faster than the organic composition, or when the organic composition decreases more slowly than the rate of exploitation. Marx himself writes: ‘The rate of profit could even rise, if a rise in the rate of surplus-value was coupled with a significant reduction in the value of the elements of constant capital, and fixed capital in particular’ (Marx 1991, 336-37). It was Engels who added to this text the following phrase, which is not to be found in Marx’s original manuscript: ‘In practice, however, the rate of profit will fall in the long run, as we have already seen’. Economic crises Having rejected Say’s law in the light of his own monetary theory of value, Marx regarded economic crisis as a conjunctural *overproduction of commodities, having as its corollary the retardation of the able-to-pay demand (*underconsumption). There has been a lot of dispute among Marxists and non-Marxists as to which of these two simultaneously appearing elements constitutes the decisive structural relation of economic crises in capitalism. Whatever the truth of the matter, Marx considered crises not simply as a reflection of lack of equilibrium between supply and demand, but as an imbalance affecting all aspects of capitalist expanded reproduction. A crisis results in a fall in the profit rate and indicates a reduced ability of the capitalist class effectively to exploit labour. ‘Periodically, too much is produced in the way of means of labour and means of subsistence, too much to function as means for exploiting the workers at a given rate of profit’. (Marx 1991, 367). However, crises are merely temporary destabilisations of the capitalist process of expanding reproduction. Moreover they simultaneously function as mechanisms ‘that re-establish the disturbed balance for the time being’ (Marx 1991, 357). As regards the fall in the profit rate, Marx did not reduce crises to the law of the tendential fall, since he incorporated in his analysis all factors that increase the organic composition (or reduce the exploitation rate) –not only increases in the technical composition of capital due to technical change. One example might be an abrupt increase in prices of raw materials: ‘Violent fluctuations in price thus lead to interruptions, major upsets and even catastrophes in the reproduction process’ (Marx 1991, 201-202). The most important of such factors is the increase in the value of constant capital that is necessary for the production of one product unit. Let the quantitative expression of this factor be C/Y, where C is the constant capital and Y the net product, (the sum s+v, of surplus-value and value of the labour-power). The organic composition of capital (C/v) depends on (s/v) on the one hand, and on (C/Y), on the other: C     C         Y        C     (s+v)         C         s --- = ---*----- = ---*-------- = -----*  ( ---- + 1) (5) v      Y       v        Y          v             Y         v Marx studied the variety of factors determining C/Y (such as the length of the workday, the skill and education of workers, the concentration of production, technological aspects etc.) in Part one of Volume three of Capital, under the rubric ‘Economy in the use of constant capital’. Ground rent According to Marx, there exist different forms of ground rent, resulting from the concrete social relations that prevail in agriculture. Under the domination of the capitalist mode of production, ground rent is paid by capital advanced in agriculture (i.e. by the farmers) to the owners of land, as a result of the ownership-monopoly on the ground by the latter. Rent is an extra profit created by labour, over and above the average profit of capital. Marx distinguishes two forms of ground rent: differential and absolute rent. Private property on the land does not create but merely displaces differential rent from the farmer to the landowner. Differential rent springs from higher labour productivity (which creates extra-profits) either in the more fertile or better-situated lands (differential rent I) or in lands with higher capital investments (differential rent II). It is, therefore, the conversion of an extra profit into rent; this extra profit results from the difference between the (higher) market price (which is determined by the price of production of capital advanced in the marginal land, i.e. the land which does not give differential rent) and the (lower) ‘individual price of production’, of each other capital, which is advanced in better lands. Unlike West, *Malthus or Ricardo, Marx disconnected differential rent from the so-called ‘law of diminishing returns of the soil’: ‘Differential rent can arise with a progression to ever better soil (...) Its only precondition is the inequality of types of soil’ (Marx 1991, 798). Absolute rent is created exclusively by the monopoly of private property on all land. It springs from an excess of value of agricultural products over their production price. Even in the marginal land, ‘landed property has created this rent itself’ (Marx 1991, 889); however, this is a possibility depending on ‘the general state of the market’ (Marx 1991, 898), and the conjuncture of class-struggle. The precondition for value produced by an individual capital to be higher than the production price is this capital’s lower organic composition, in comparison to that of the average social capital. Consequently, the lower organic composition of capital advanced in agriculture (a reality denied by Ricardo, who thus neglected absolute rent) results in the production of a higher surplus-value in agriculture, as compared with any other sphere of production. The ownership-monopoly on the land, functioning as a barrier, blocks this extra surplus-value from entering into the process of general equalisation of the profit rate; it is therefore recovered by the landowner as absolute rent (Marx 1991, Chapter 44). Marx also analysed the pre-capitalist forms of ground rent, which appear as ‘labour rent’, ‘rent in kind’, or ‘money rent’. In the feudal mode of production, ‘labour rent’ and ‘rent in kind’ constituted the ‘dominant and normal forms (...) of surplus labour and surplus product’ (Marx 1991, 930). The form of labour rent absorbed the total of surplus-labour, whereas rent in kind might not necessarily absorb the total surplus-product. Money rent is in most cases ‘a formal transformation of the rent in kind’ (Marx 1991, 930), designating, though, the dissolution of pre-capitalist and the emergence of the capitalist forms of rent. Non-capitalist modes of production and capitalist development Marx’s conception of the capital relation as the decisive characteristic of a historically specific form of economy and society was synonymous with his effort to grasp ‘the specific characteristics which distinguish capital from all other forms of wealth - or modes in which (social) production develops’ (Marx 1993, 449). This effort led him to think about the ‘forms, which precede capitalist production’. Consequently, his concept of the capitalist mode of production as the causal nucleus of capitalist social relations presupposed the notions of non-capitalist modes of production (e.g. feudal, slave-owning etc.). In the specific form of exploitation (surplus form and its mode of appropriation and distribution) arising from the ownership relations corresponding to the means of production, Marx saw ‘the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and hence also the political form of the relationship of *sovereignty and dependence’ (Marx 1991, 927). The question now arises under what conditions pre-capitalist social structures are replaced by the capitalist mode of production, or to what extent they may constitute an impediment to capitalist *development. Many authors have portrayed Marx as an advocate of a ‘progressivist prognosis’, according to which all countries will inevitably go through the same stages of economic and social evolution, from pre-capitalist forms to developed capitalism, culminating in *socialism. Although such formulations can be found in the work of Marx and Engels (and the Introduction to the Contribution ... is an example), the ‘progressivist prognosis’ does not prevail in the economic writings of Marx’s maturity. Marx recognises mainly the possibility of capitalism emerging as a consequence of class struggle and he outlined the prerequisites for such a historical development. In a 1881 letter to the Russian socialist Vera Zasulitch he wrote: ‘I have shown in Capital that the transformation of feudal production into capitalist production has as its starting point the expropriation of producers, which mainly means that the expropriation of the peasants is the basis of this whole process (...) Surely, if capitalist production is to establish its domination in Russia, then the great majority of the peasants must be transformed into wage-earners. But the precedent of the West will prove here absolutely nothing’ (MEW, Vol. 19, 396-400). Only in the event of the capitalist mode of production becoming through class struggle fully dominant in a social formation is capitalist development established as an inherent tendency of social evolution: ‘But this inherent tendency to capitalist production does not become adequately realised –it does not become indispensable, and that also means technologically indispensable— until the specific mode of capitalist production and hence the real subsumption of labour under capital has become a reality’ (Marx 1990, 1037). Discontinuities and contradictions in Marx’s writings In the course of his writing, Marx changed the plan of his work: While in 1857-9 he planned to write six books (Capital, Landed property, Wage labour, The state, External trade, The world market and crises), later on he worked out the plan of the three books of Capital, where capital, wage labour and rent are dealt with simultaneously, in the analysis of the production and circulation process of capital. This change of plan is due mainly to a modification in notions: Initially, Marx thought of the distinction between causal determinations and forms of appearance in terms of ‘capital in general’ and the ‘competition of many capitals’ (the latter being conceived as the form of appearance of the former). However, his analysis of the formation of a general profit rate led him to comprehend competition also as an internal determinant of the capital relation. So in Capital he abandoned the notion ‘capital in general’ and formulated the concepts of social capital (involving all causalities of the capital relation on the level of the whole economy) on the one hand and individual capital on the other. Apart from this modification of ideas, which constitute a theoretical discontinuity in the work of Marx, there are discussions among Marxists as to whether some of Marx’s elaborations are consistent with his own system, or whether they incorporate theses of classical political economy, reflecting the contradictions of Marx’s rupture with Ricardian theory. Some of his theses on crises and the transformation of values into production prices raise such questions. Finally, mutually contradictory theses sometimes appear in Marx’s writings. The most characteristic example has to do with whether capital in the circulation process should be regarded as productive or unproductive. In the Grundrisse (as well as in Volume one of Capital), Marx considers all capital forms equally productive (i.e. producing surplus-value): ‘Insofar as circulation itself creates costs, itself requires surplus labour, it appears as itself included within the production process (...) Circulation can create value insofar as it requires fresh employment (...) in addition to that directly consumed in the production process’ (Marx 1993, 524, 547). However, in Volume Three of Capital, Marx defined circulation capital as unproductive: ‘Commercial capital (...) creates neither value nor surplus-value’ (Marx 1991, 395). These discontinuities or contradictions in the work of Karl Marx have only a minor effect on his theory, as they remain marginal and do not overshadow the consistency of the major notions and analyses on which it is built. Further reading K. Marx (1990) Capital, Volume one, London: Penguin Classics. Analyses the process of production of capital, on the basis of Marx’s theory of value, with an exposition of which the book starts. Together with the two other volumes, it is undoubtedly the most important work of Marx. K. Marx (1992) Capital, Volume two, London: Penguin Classics. Continues the analyses of Volume One, focusing on the process of circulation and reproduction of capital. Marx (1991) Capital, Volume three, London: Penguin Classics. Examines the process of capitalist production as a whole, focusing on the forms of appearance of value relations. However, the recently (1992) published original German Manuscript of Volume three of Capital (MEGA II, 4.2), has revealed that Engels made significant changes to the manuscript, involving not only design of headings and sub-headings, but also textual transpositions, omissions and insertions which sometimes influence the meaning of Marx’s writing. If one excluded the insertions made by Engels, the German version of Volume Three would be reduced to 580 from 860 pages. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1985) The Communist Manifesto, London: Penguin. A comprehensive illustration of the authors’ Theory of History as the history of class struggles. M.C. Howard and J.E. King (1989 & 1992) A History of Marxian Economics (Volume I, 1883-1929 & Volume II, 1929-1990), Princeton: Princeton University Press. A useful guide for further reading on the evolution of ideas and on major controversies in and around Marxian economics since Marx’s death.   taken from here

Liest man die neuesten Statistiken aus der Wirtschaftsbranche, dann ist der Ölpreis wieder gestiegen, die Aktienmärkte und Chinas Wirtschaft haben sich stabilisiert, die Beschäftigung ist zumindest in den USA angestiegen und in Mitteleuropa haben die Preise aufgehört zu fallen. Und schließlich sagt der IWF ein globales Wachstum von 3% für dieses Jahr voraus. Allerdings ist Chinas Wachstum auf eine Investitionswelle zurückzuführen, die im wesentlichen auf Krediten basiert, wobei ein immer größere Teile der Kredite aber auch in die Finanzmärkte selbst wandern. Beim Öl übersteigt nach wie vor das Angebot die Nachfrage. Und in den USA stagnieren die Reallöhne, obwohl die Beschäftigung gestiegen ist; die Lohnsteigerungen entsprechen nicht den Preissteigerungen, die sich für die Masse der Lohnabhängigen vor allem in steigenden Mieten und siegenden Kosten für die Gesundheit bemerkbar machen. Für eine Weile konnte mit niedrigen Zinsraten für Konsumentenkredite der Absatz für Automobile erhöht werden, der nun aber auch wieder fällt. Schließlich haben die Unternehmen aufgrund der Niedrigzinspolitk der FED Schulden angehäuft, die sie gar nicht benötigen. Diese Schulden fließen zurück in die Finanzmärkte, in Aktienrückkäufe und den Equity-Markt. Sie erhöhen die Aktienpreise, während die aktuelle Nachfrage weiterhin stagniert. Wenn die FED die Leitzinsen erhöht, kann es durchaus sein, dass die Aktienkurse fallen und dies in eine neue Schuldenkrise führt. Auch in Europa ist die Lage nicht so rosig. Hier sind es vor allem die Banken, wobei ein Drittel der Banken, wenn man sie weiteren Stresstest unterziehen würde, mit schweren Profitabilitätsproblemen zu kämpfen hätten. Seit 2014 halten sie circa 900 Milliarden Euro schlechter Kredite in ihren Büchern. Die stimulierenden Maßnahmen der EZB, die darauf hinauslaufen sollen, dass die Geschäftsbanken aufgrund negativer Zinsraten und der Politik des quantitive Easing mehr Geld an Unternehmen verleihen, geht bisher nicht auf, da die gewöhnlichen Kreditkanäle, auch im Interbankenverkehr, blockiert sind. Ähnlich sieht die Lage in Japan aus. Vor kurzem haben Ökonomen der Deutschen Bank ein Papier zum Helikopter-Geld veröffentlicht. Das einfachste Modell besteht darin, dass eine Zentralbank neues Geld kreiert und es an die Regierung aushändigt, damit diese dann die öffentlichen Ausgaben erhöht oder die Steuern senkt. Allerdings kann das Geld auch direkt an die Unternehmen und Haushalte ausgegeben werden, ohne dass es durch die Banken geleitet wird. Dabei gibt es dann keine Intention der Zentralbank, dass das Geld jemals zu ihr zurückfließt. Es wird jedoch eine Weile dauern, bis man das Geld in die Luft bringt, bis dahin müssen sich die Zentralbanken mit Reparaturen wie Aufkaufprogrammen, negativen Zinsraten und der Politik des QE weiter durchwursteln. Im Fall einer erneuten Abschwächung der globalen Konjunktur im Jahr 2017 wird aber die Frage nach dem Helikopter-Geld wieder auf die Tagesordnung gesetzt werden. Und es stellt sich dann auch die Frage, welche Zentralbank hier die Führungsrolle übernimmt, die EZB, die sicherlich mit dem Widerstand Deutschlands zu rechnen hat, die FED oder die japanische Zentralbank, die das Programm schon einmal während der großen Depression in den 1930er Jahren eingesetzt hat. Aus dieser Perspektive zeigt sich schon, dass es sich beim Helikopter-Geld, eine Art temporäres Grundkommen, um ein finanzialisiertes Einkommen handelt, das für eine bestimmte Dauer eine Nachfragelücke schließen soll. Man nehme nur einmal den Immobilienmarkt. Die Einkünfte aus Mieten, Verkäufen von Wohnungen/Häusern und ganz offensichtlich die Hypothekenkredite sind als Finanzanlagen zu verstehen. Heute ist das Grundeigentum vollkommen durchkapitalisiert, das heißt es nimmt die Form einer Finanzanlage an, auf die, wie bei jeder Form des fiktiven Kapitals, ein Anspruch auf zukünftige Einkommen besteht, hier als Grundrente. Dabei wird über die Finanzmärkte das Rentenniveau auf die Entwicklung der Zinsraten und der Renditen anderer Finanzanlagen bezogen. Haben die Preise im Immobiliensektor schon eine gewisse Höhe, ja ein spekulatives Niveau erreicht, und davon ist in vielen städtischen Zentren weltweit auszugehen, dann können die Renten nur noch steigen, wenn breiteren Bevölkerungsschichten Zugang zu neuen Geldern gewährt wird. Dass es sich auch beim Helikopter-Geld und anderen Formen des Grundeinkommens auch um eine Stabilisierung der Vermögenswerte bzw. des fiktiven Kapitals handelt, wird jetzt ganz offensichtlich. Es muss eben breiteren Bevölkerungsschichten Zugang zu weiteren Einkommen ermöglicht werden, ansonsten sieht man sich mit ausbleibenden Renditen konfrontiert. Fiktives Kapital impliziert Ansprüche auf künftige Renditen, die aus künftigen Geldkapitalströmen erwachsen sollen, und es kann durchaus Sinn machen, Gelder wie eben das Helikopter-Geld in die Zahlungsströme einzuspeisen, damit es am Ende zur weiteren Vermehrung von fiktivem Kapital kommt. Wird das Helikopter-Geld an arme Schichten verteilt, fließt es umgehend in den Wirtschaftskreislauf zurück und zudem kommt es noch zu einer Subventionierung der Arbeitskosten. Die Frage der Lohnkämpfe scheint sich dann nicht mehr zu stellen, die klassische Arbeiterklasse wird endgültig ausgebremst. Allerdings könnte mit bestimmten Formen des Grundeinkommens das auch in der traditionellen Arbeiterbewegung weiterhin grassierende Arbeitsethos einige Kratzer erhalten. Heidenreich/Heidenreich haben in ihrem Buch "Forderungen" eine Reihe von Gründen angeführt, warum das von der Finanzindustrie selbst initiierte Helikopter-Geld, wenn es zudem doch das Problem der strukturellen Arbeitslosigkeit mit zu lösen hilft, nicht zur Anwendung kommt. Sie führen den Ökonomen Michal Kalecki an, der den Verlust des Distinktionsgewinns der konsum- und einkommensstärkeren Schichten erwähnt, den diese bis zu einem gewissen Maß durch die Einführung des Grundeinkommens erleiden könnten. Neben einer ganze Reihe von rechtlichen und institutionellen Problemen, ist schließlich der Konsens der herrschenden Klassen zu berücksichtigen, die sich vollkommen darüber einig sind, dass es keine Geschenke an die einkommensschwachen Bevölkerungsteile zu machen gibt. Weiterhin wird befürchtet, dass es zu Preissteigerungen, inflationären Prozessen kommen könnte, wodurch Einkommen und Vermögen entwertet werden. Die zu erwartenden Zinssteigerungen führen ebenfalls zur Entwertung von fiktivem Kapital. Man kann sich das ganz einfach klarmachen: Eine Rendite, die man in zwei Jahren erhält, kann weniger Wert sein, als wenn man sie heute schon erhalten würde, und wie viel weniger, das hängt von den Zinsraten ab, sodass man die zukünftigen Renditen diskontiert oder reduziert auf das, was sie heute wert sind. Wenn die Profiterwartungen hoch und die Zinsen niedrig sind, dann kann sich der Wert des fiktiven Kapitals, bspw. von Aktien erhöhen. Gehen wir davon aus, dass man ein Wertpapier besitzt, das jedes Jahr einen Gewinn von 5 Euro abwirft. Beträgt die Zinsrate 5%, dann erhält man dieselbe Rendite, wenn man 100 Euro zu 5 % Zinsen investiert (5% von 100 ist 5). Wenn nun die Zinsrate auf 2% sinkt, dann wird der Preis des Wertpapiers auf 250 anwachsen, weil die 5 Euro Rendite jetzt äquivalent zu 250 Euro zu einer jährlichen Zinsrate von 2% ist. Steigt die Zinsrate auf 10%, dann wird der Preis des Wertpapiers auf 50 Euro fallen, weil man nur noch 50 Euro investieren muss, um 5 Euro Rendite zu bekommen. In der Praxis sind die Berechnungen komplizierter, aber im Allgemeinen werden niedrige Marktzinsen die Preise der der Wertpapiere ansteigen lassen. Heidenreich/Heidenreich xschreiben in einem Interview auf NON: "Wenn quantitative Easing und Minuszinsen nichts helfen, wird es in irgendeiner Form zum Einsatz kommen. Es geht dabei nicht in erster Linie darum, Geld an irgendwelche zufälligen Empfänger zu verteilen. Ziel ist vielmehr, es ihnen so schnell wie möglich wieder abzunehmen, um den exorbitanten Vermögen mehr Fundament durch Fake-Konsum zu geben. Es geht – wie bei allen anderen derzeitigen Notmaßnahmen – allein um die Erhaltung der Vermögen." Die Sache bleibt nichtsdestotrotz spannend: Öfters mal in den Himmel schauen, ob es vielleicht irgendwann nicht doch Geld regnet.   Foto: Bernhard Weber

#ermanoise

1 Vogelzwitschern
2 Hinterhof
3 cordon sanitaire (Stop beeing creative)
4 This is the Sound of Depression
5 This is the Sound of Negativism
6 Stadthonigbienenetat
7 Multiklasse, gestört
8 ASMRec.fieldburnout
9 Rumination
10 Die Waffen der Stille
11 Gewitte(R)
12 Nacht
13 EU-Stadion
14 Wiedergutwording - Wetterdatensonifikation
15 Café Germanoise
16 1, 2, 1234
17 Die Digitale Revolution läuft
18 Agenda 2020

Qui tacet consentire videtur et non videtur? "So far, there is no such 
genre like Germanoise". But we can not be sure about it, with the 
Agenda 2020. This is an album on asymptotics, depression and angst. 
As antinational approach in de-sounded structures, contra apocalyptic 
anthroposcenes of green ethic veganism. Can it be post-postindustrial, 
future Bach, a non-value listening? Distortions of image and acoustic 
are included as well as natura naturans, naturata and cultura–while 
considering ASMR and the needs for social stillness and privacy. Can 
"empowerment" an queer sonicism of the networked but disorganised take 
on? As psychology talks of its contrary (the burning for the job), a 
non-compliance takes place, which is no Bataillian anti-solution of 
course. The stomach rumbling maybe growling, a hard rain, a wide 
insurrection in France against the German dictation of low wages plus 
surplus work in a bastille of European economy. I will never leave 
the EU because I can't afford my cosmopolitan butterfly.

Recorded June 2016. Bended Boss Distortion, EWI5000, Tascam DR-100 
MKII, Audio Editor, Balcony, Autobahn etc. 

label(at)n0name.de
@radi0tv

n0name 2016

taken from here

Foto: Bernhard Weber

Occupy Wall Street and the dawning of worldwide anti-austerity movements have occasioned a consideration of the economic and political power of financial speculation and raised the question of how it might be resisted. This essay argues hat the ideas of both “finance” and “resistance,” while convenient, demand deeper reflection. Specifically, we cannot afford to address finance merely as a form ofeconomic discipline and power exercised “from above” and limit our understanding of financial agency to the hijinks of insufferably smug banking executives. Instead, I suggest we need to recognize financial power as intimately stitched into everyday life and embracing the entire globe. Finance relies on a highly demotic mode of agency that demands that individuals become highly competent (or, perhaps more accurately,usefully incompetent) financial actors. In understanding finance’s dynamism in thisway we can deepen our understanding of finance as a distinct social force and as anessential, if crisis-prone, aspect of capitalist accumulation. All the better to overcome it and reclaim the future from the terror of endless “speculation.”

When my daughter was little, we played a game on the way to her preschool called Count the Dog Poo. It was a game about counting, as you would play with any child, but also a game for a little New Yorker, to teach her to watch where she steps. Living in New York, pretty much every day one can expect the pleasure of watching shit extrude out of a dog’s asshole. Hence it is with a certain amusement that I learn from reading Manifestly Haraway (Minnesota 2016) that in California, Donna Haraway picks up her dogs’ poo with the blue plastic wrapper of the New York Times. Besides a different relation to dogs, I find there’s many ways my sensibility differs in interesting ways from Donna Haraway. She describes herself as a “Sputnik Catholic.” (283) While raised religious, she says, “My Catholic girl’s brain got educated, as opposed to my being a pro-Life activist mother of ten, because I became a national resource after Sputnik. My brain got valuable…” (283) I think I might describe myself as a Mercury Marxist. (While it is the Apollo rather than the Mercury space program that I remember, that’s the wrong god.) There’s something in agonistic rivalry of the cold war space race about the possibilities of the human to become something else. Being a secular Protestant to Haraway’s secular Catholic, I’m a bit less interested in mediating figures. The naked confrontation with the problem of totality is the thing I take to be what endures from the Protestant sensibility. Devotion to one’s labors was not supposed to be an end in itself, but rather a means to make bodies comfortable enough to open toward the sheer sublime alien otherness of the world. So I read Haraway’s writing from a location a little askew to some of its topics. And that’s what makes it interesting. Manifestly Haraway offers three moments from her evolving work. It takes the form of three meditations on the manifesto. The book reprints the famous ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ (originally 1985), the ‘Companion Species Manifesto’ (2003) and a fresh conversation with Cary Wolfe that can be read as notes for a ‘Chthulucene Manifesto’. I want to read these starting from the most recent, working backwards. The impulse to rename the Anthropocene something else – anything else – is a powerful one and perhaps even its own pathology. For a humanist, there’s every reason not to want to be centered again on Anthropos, after spending so long trying to decenter him. But it was biologists and earth scientists who named it, and it might sustain ongoing conversations to respect that. Haraway: “I wish that it hadn’t been their term. But it is their term… We will need to continue to operate within this discursive materiality as well as others that name our urgencies better in key respects.” (242-3) Its helpful to be able to speak with the natural sciences in language that plays there. In any case, as Haraway says, “I don’t have to choose one term.” If she did, it might with Jason Moore call this the Capitalocene: “the players in Capitalocene are, at a minimum, situated plants, animals, humans, microbes, the multiple layering of technologies in and among all this.” (240) It’s a way of naming that identifies a power at work in climate change, ocean acidification, mass extinction and other signs of living and dying very poorly. My only hesitation about the name is that were capitalism to be abolished tomorrow, nothing is really solved by that mere negation. So let’s think through another name. Let’s live also in the Chthulucene. Haraway is no great fan of Lovecraft, for whom Cthulhu is the name of the ultimate monstrosity, at the far reaches of his racist fantasies of the other. Rather, she chose the name because it was given to a species of spider local to her in California. Its curious how the languages of fantasy fiction and scientific classification can criss and cross. Here is how Haraway further roils the language: “My Chthulucene is the time of mortal compositions at stake to and with each other. This epoch is the kainos (-cene) of the ongoing powers that are terra, of the myriad tentacular ones in all their diffracted, webbed temporalities, spacialities and materialities. Kainos is the temporality of the thick, lumpy ‘now’ which is ancient and not.” (294) Let me just pick out the word diffracted here. This is a scenario populated by many earthy godlets, but whose relations to each other are neither mystically withdrawn nor a theater of representation, but more like waves breaking and ramifying against each other. It is a way of getting into the world with one’s feelers that is a bit aslant to some seemingly similar things. It isn’t a new materialism, its a quite ancient one. It isn’t posthumanism, as there never was much to say about the human here. It isn’t ecological, as there’s something a bit off about ecology’s obsession with healthy reproduction. It is not quite the Gaia of which Isabelle Stengers writes, but a wilder one, from before Hesiod made her a – more or less – respectable God. The Chthulucene is more snake-head Gorgon, one that can even shatter mirrors. “I want to cast in my lot with the ongoing, unfinished, dreadful powers of the Earth, where the risk, terror, and promise of uncategorizable mortal ongoing can still be found…” (288) Haraway is interested in practices that gather up and make worlds. “I think my proliferating words and figures are flesh and do a lot of things.” (277) But it is a non-identity of word and flesh, a resistance to the name that sticks and becomes a fetish, a stand-in, a double. It’s a version of the via negativa of religious thinkers, but not one aimed at the gesture that marks by its absence where the infinite might be, but rather where the finite might be. This via negativa is as injunction to humility that not only refuses representation but also the indexical and the holistic. “You will not come together from two, or many, into one, because that is precisely the idolatry that the negative way tries to block.” (279) This is perhaps a residue of the material semiotics of Catholicism that Haraway might share with Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour and Michel Serres. Haraway: “For me, the incarnation and sacramentalism were overwhelmingly about a shared meal, in and of the flesh. Carnality is seriously Catholic. Both cyborgs and dogs, both manifestos, bear witness to that!” (270) In the absence of the Void, the Real, or Name of the Father that might speak the final meaning of things, then there’s no end to the slippery co-presence of words and things. It is a refusal of the structural turn in semiotics, which separates the plane of signification from the plane of things and events to which language refers. In place of which, here is “the extraordinary tentacular closeness of processes of semiosis and fleshiness” (268) Its like a game of rock paper scissors: there’s no trump move over all the others; the sign and the hand are inseparable – but not one. But there’s another way to go here, and it leaves its trace in Haraway, in her alternate naming of the Capitalocene and the Chthulucene. The latter might foreground the slippery, fleshy, protean world, but the former still point towards the background, toward more abstract and disembodied figures of totality, particularly of bad totality – one that wills itself to completion and exclusion beyond the moment of disaster. Rather than pluralize the foreground particulars, it might be interesting to pluralize the background generalities. There’s the generality of capitalism – if that is still what this mess is – and it forced enclosure of thing after thing in and as the commodity form. But then there’s the generality of climate science, the passage of actual molecular flows of carbon through atmosphere and ocean. One can see the dance of particulars as twisting in the violent wind between whatever it is those two abstractions try to name. The Greeks and the Romans had a series of moon Goddesses: Selene, Phoebe, Artemis, Hecate, Luna and Trivia. Just imagine if the moon shot had been named after Trivia rather than Apollo! She was a goddess of crossroads, whose presence was known only by the barking of dogs. What might an ethics and a politics be like that was a ‘secular’ version not just of the Chthonic mud gods but also the more ambient ones? The emphasis in Haraway’s recent works has been on an ethics for the Cthulucene. But perhaps one needs both an ethics of the Cthulucene and a politics of the Capitalocene, not to mention a political tactic of working with those who call it the Anthropocene. To start with the ethics, and its questions: How are we all to live in “non-innocence?” (236) And: “How to truly love our age, and also how to somehow live and die well here, with each other?” (207) Perhaps it’s a matter of meeting across differences that don’t resolve dialectically, yet don’t return to separate enclaves either. “We must engage – must dance – ontological choreography if we are to live and die well with each other in the troubles.” (224) Haraway gives it a queer twist: “Make kin not babies!” (224) Which I would rephrase as: make kith, not kin! Haraway: “We need other nouns and pronouns for the kin genres of companion species, just as we did (and still do) for the spectrum of genders.” (187) Or kith genres, perhaps. Can an ethics of partial relations scale up to a politics? Or does a politics have to entail, maybe not as an ontology as Chantal Mouffe would have it, but just as a tactic, a agonistic relation to an other? Perhaps we’re all up against the Carbon Liberation Front and its take-over of the air and oceans. That is not how Haraway approaches politics, however. “I think an affirmative biopolitics is about finitude, and about living and dying better, living and dying well, and nurturing and killing best we can, in a kind of openness to relentless failing.” (227) But this is not so much a biopolitics after Foucault and Agamben, who focus on the politics, so much as out of Lynn Margulis and Evelyn Hutchinson, who focused on the biology. Hence it doesn’t fixate on the power to kill or the otherness of death. “Death is not the problem but cutting the tissue of ongoing-ness is the problem.” (232) In its affirmative mode, this might be a politics of pleasure lived publicly, coming from queer activism. In a less fun mode, this might be about confronting biopolitics as “the violence of making live when the possibility of living well is actively blocked.” (229) Here Haraway connects to Judith Butler’s category of that which can be grieved, but rather more broadly, extended beyond human bodies throughout the connections among the living and dying. Climate change effects various worlds very unevenly. Some things adapt slowly, some quickly, even too quickly. Questions of what ot let live or let die, make live or make die are pressing. What exactly does it mean to call something an invasive species? Haraway: “this question of ecosystem assemblages is the name of the game of life on Earth. Period.” (249) Politics might not be, or might not just be, a matter of critique of some abstract thing, but also “affirmative relations to worlding.” (265) Politics in Haraway is always connected to “… learning to compose possible ongoing-ness inside relentlessly diffracting worlds. And we need resolutely to keep cosmopolitical practices going here, focusing on those practices that can build a common-enough world.” (288) The key words here include caring and learning, but also diffracting. “All of us who care about recuperation, partial connections, and resurgence must learn to live and die in the entanglements of the tentacular without always seeking to cut and bind everything in our way.” (295) Looking back on the ‘Companion Species Manifesto’, from the point of view of the Cthulucene, it seems to me as a text structured around an allegory. It’s about love between dogs and humans, who are kith but not kin. Its not love as perfect unity, symmetry, identity, or purity – those residues of the old patriarchal sky god. “Besides, you never have a correct love, because love is always inappropriate, never proper, never clean…” (275) While others try to rethink what liberty or equality might mean today, to the extent that Haraway remains within the undead matrix of modern euro-thought, its about fraternity. Or what might possibly go in its place when not only God the father is dead, but so too are the human brothers who thought they could think the world and order it in his place. Hence the word companion: “We are companions, cum panis, at table together. We are those who are at risk to each other, who are each other’s flesh, who eat and are eaten, and who get indigestion…” (215) Companion species “make each other up, in the flesh.” (94) They are also kith, with its nebulous senses of the friend, neighbor, local, and the customary. Companion species eat together, parasite off each other, eat each other, but also collude and collaborate with each other. Species might be more nominal than real. It’s a word with several senses. In biology it means gene flow, selection, variation, population. But there’s an older sense of the word, going back to Thomas Aquinas, where a species is a generic, a series of abstract forms, through which to define differences. The two senses collide in something like the practice of dog-breeding, where the genetic is made to yield the generic, the breed. “discourses of pure blood and nobility haunt modern breeds like the undead.” (160) Species might also, after Marx and Freud, refer to something more abstract, and touching on the totality again: specie as gold and as shit, and a general economy in which the human as species-being might be multiply implicated. But Haraway always pulls the reader back from a too quick flight to the abstract. Her concepts and figures are about finitude, impurity, historicity, complexity, cohabitation, coevolution, and cross species solidarity. In a delightful détournement of Althusser, Haraway asks if maybe animals hail us as we hail them into our constructs of nature and culture. Maybe Althusser’s interpellation works not just on humans, calling them into ideological and imaginary relations to their real relations, but animals as well. If a human knows itself as itself when called, and becomes a subject of that call – maybe a dog does too. And then what about when a doggy bark calls a human? And perhaps, over a very long time, it becomes a kind of metaplasm, a remodeling of dog and human flesh, not in each other’s image, but differentially, bouncing off each other’s abilities and needs. What if that human and dog relation, including all its abuse, was an allegory for multispecies life more generally? There are both dog stories and dog histories here. The stories are about dogs Haraway knows personally; the history is about the how those kinds of dogs came to be in America. The former has some queer dog sex-pleasures and lots about how dogs and humans train each other. The dog stories are about dogs and humans training each other for the sport of agility, where the human guides the dog through a series of obstacles. These are stories about respect and trust, not ‘unconditional love’ between humans and dogs. It is about non-symmetrical relations that don’t turn the animal into a surrogate human. Its about “situated partial connection.” (140) Dog and handler reaching for excellence as concrete beings, not abstractions. The history has multiple actors, including dogs, coyotes, wolves, government departments, ranchers, scientists, and dog-breeders. Both at the particular and the historical level, species shape each other through flexible and opportunistic moves. “Relationship is multiform, at stake, unfinished, consequential.” (122) It is not just a matter of Man subordinating Nature to His will, as both techno-optimists and – weirdly – deep ecologists – both seem to believe. Haraway is resistant to seeing historical actors of any species as raw materials for capital or empire, but maybe sometimes the dense net of relations or figures in the foreground crowds out the background. One could retain the commitment to narrating history as co-history, in which the narrator is always implicated, while painting in more of scenery. “Again and again in my manifesto, I and my people need to learn to inhabit histories, not disown them, least of all through the cheap tricks of puritanical critique.” (181) I can’t really speak for the Puritans, but if I could, I might point out the irony of an inclusiveness that requires excluding us to make its point about including everything else. Not that the abstract ground is absent from Haraway. Its just that when she writes of love, its about particulars; when she writes of rage, its about the abstract. What might be interesting would be to complete the semiotic square: to find points of rage among the particular; and even a difficult love of the abstract. The abstract, and rage, come together in the figure of the cyborg. “Care, flourishing, differences in power, scale of time – these matter for cyborgs. For example, what kind of temporal scale-making could shape labor systems, investment strategies, and consumption patterns in which the generation time of information machines became compatible with the generation times of human, animal, and plant communities and ecosystems?” (113) The companion species text puts the stress on situated partial connections. The ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ leans a little more on imagined totalities. The latter are still situated, they just tune in to the background of a situation rather than the foreground. The temptation to resist is seeing the imagined totality as a ground in the sense of an ontology, as if it were something prior to the situation. It is rather something secondary and speculative. The cyborg appears as an everyday figure, an aspect of women’s experience, one might also say of the experience of labor. The more common way to imagine the cyborg is as the other, as that which infiltrates, against which the human fights a border war to preserve its essence. We are supposed to imagine we are Deckard the bladerunner, cutting the inhuman from the human, but perhaps we are all Rachel the replicant, laminated aggregates to flesh and tech: “we are all chimeras.” (7) So perhaps we could assume the pleasure and responsibility of life and love among confusing boundaries. Among other things, this is a choice between genres. It means letting go of narratives in which the decoy or the infiltrator is exposed, leading to a restoration of lost wholeness. No more Eden: “the cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.” (9) It is implicated in troubling boundaries between the human and the animal, the organic and the machinic, and between matter and information. Haraway stays close to the slippage zones between two perspectives, one about bodies, one about relations. She does not completely flip the script and subordinate bodies to relations. What if we did for a bit? Not in a moralizing or critical genre, but a speculative and ironic one? That’s one of the things going on in ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’ that is less common in Haraway’s later work, but which has its uses all the same. Haraway: “’Advanced capitalism’ is inadequate to convey the structure of this historical moment.” (27) It was a bold and prescient claim. “I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism.” (28) It has implications for both narrating the form of the bad totality and for seeding terms within which to make alliances in and against it that might tend towards a more habitable one. “From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet… From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is the will to see from both perspectives at once…” (15) Or rather four perspectives: the uninhabitable particular and general; the habitable particular and general. There’s more to it then than the good particulars against the bad totality. Particularly in an era in which the particulars themselves became the form of the bad totality itself: “we risk lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of making partial, real connection. Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. ‘Epistemology’ is about knowing the difference.” (27) One might add: some situated speculations on the totality might be part of domination; some might not. Haraway does a good job of playing across the boundaries that structure certain enervating habits of thought, but there is one terminological duality I think might be worth bringing back into the mix. “The boundary-maintaining images of base and superstructure, public and private, or material and ideal never seemed more feeble.” (36) There’s a way in which the first of these pairs is not like the others. Thinking about how one is situated in a base or an infrastructure is itself a way of refusing binaries, so long as one keeps the concept of infrastructure open as a question. Maybe we don’t even know what’s infrastructural in a world that runs on the information vector as much as it runs on coal mines and blast furnaces. Maybe we don’t even know whose labor is implicated in its workings. The ‘Cyborg’ text is actually rather good on the emerging infrastructure that I call the vectoral, which monitors boundaries, and measures flows, and manages what Alex Galloway calls protocol, which polices what can connect with what. The vectoral is not interested in the integrity of natural objects, as it reaches into objects of all kith or kin, extracts a measure of its value and authorizes connections and disconnections. The vectoral produces, as a secondary phenomenon, the appearance not only of objects, but as Lazzarato shows, also of subjects. Haraway was already saying this: “Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical.” (32) Not just bodies but situations are subordinated to the vector. Home, work, market, public, body, all are traversed by it. It is basically what the military used to call C-cubed-I: command, control, communication and information – but for civilians. Is this still capitalism, or something worse? Haraway was already grappling with a new language for it in ‘Cyborg.’ Whatever it is, it produces a new worldwide proletariat, new distributions of ethnicity and sexuality, and new forms of the family. Haraway was writing about an earlier moment in Silicon Valley, when it was still a major center for chip fabrication, using mostly women of color as an industrial workforce. As Andrew Ross shows, much of that production has moved on, leaving toxic superfund sites behind, but the global, distributed labor of making these digital means of production still exists, on an expanded and globalized scale. The word precarity had not yet been coined, but Haraway was already describing it. Work has in a paradoxical way been feminized. On the one hand, women get to work; on the other, the work is precarious, powerless, and toxic. The vector has the ability to route around any stoppage or strike that workers might deploy as leverage. “The success of the attack on relatively privileged, mostly white, men’s unionized jobs is tied to the power of the new communication technologies to integrate and control labor despite extensive dispersion and decentralization.” (39) Haraway identified some important symptoms of this world, including its “bimodal social structure” or what we now call inequality. (44) Not least for women workers. Then there’s the “permanent high-tech military establishment.” (42). Or what we now call the surveillance state. It spawns at ideology that is in part “sociobiological origin stories.” (43) Now mixed with Ayn Rand. The limited vision of this world, as Haraway already notes, could already be found best expressed in the form of the video game. In Gamer Theory I added that so too are some of its possibilities. The electric mega-church might now be the Oxycontin of the people. Haraway: “most Marxisms see domination best.” (50) They are less good about everyday life. But rather than subsume all the bad signs under the a kind of totalizing pessimism, it helps at the same time to work on a “subtle understanding of emerging pleasures, experiences and powers.” (51) Dialectics may be a dream language rather than a magic key to the Real. But perhaps if one knows it’s a dream, the speculative and totalizing vision can have its uses. Haraway mostly find this in utopian science fiction, but maybe theory can offer some of the same situated perspective on the useful and harmful, the foreground and background, without collapsing everything into one of those four quadrants of ways of thinking and feeling. Haraway opts for a cyborg politics of noise and pollution, but I think that’s only one of the tactical styles. In a world enclosed by the vector as a gamespace, a cyborg can be a player, a spoilsport, a cheat, but also a trifler. One can accept the rules and the goal. One can refuse the rules and the goal, one can accept the goal but not the rules, and one can accept the rules but not the goals. Each of those tactics can do with some shareware terms, concepts, stories, affect: “race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction.” (66) Maybe that’s just one mode. One can think ambivalent boundaries or one can think ambivalent vectors. Maybe cyborgs also write total theory butt take it lightly. A good fact is mostly true, about something in particular; a good theory is slightly true about a bunch of things. Hence when Haraway says “the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake…” one can separate totalizing from universal. (67) As Henri Lefebvre proposed, to totalize can be a situated act that knows it isn’t universal, which comes into friendly or agonistic relations with other totalizations. Relations between particulars are partly made out of particular articulations, but also out of the more or less playful encounter of broader worldviews. Everyone works outwards from where they are and what they do to toward the absolute. What Alexander Bogdanov called tektology is the sharing, comparing and testing of component parts between worldviews generated in particular situations. All we have to agree on is a shared task of making a possibly livable world. We don’t even have to agree to forego a grand confrontation with the world, which for those of us who are temperamentally ‘protestant’, isn’t going to happen anyway. It seems vital in the Chthulucene that the shared task of making a possibly livable world include those who work in the natural sciences, and who tend to have the worldviews that grow outward from those kinds of labors. Haraway: “taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology…” (67) That calls for thinking through what Haraway describes with “the odd circumlocution the social relations of science and technology…” (37) There was a time when this would not have been odd. The social relations of science was a whole movement in the 1930s, started by once-famous Marxist and leftist scientists such as JD Bernal, Joseph Needham and JBS Haldane, but which included also Dorothy Needham, Charlotte Haldane, Dorothy Hodgkin and Kathleen Lonsdale. It did not survive the cold war purges of intellectual life. Science studies has reinvented many of its themes and in many ways improved upon them. Yet perhaps, as Haraway once noted in passing, the “liberal mystification that all started with Thomas Kuhn…” has erased a little too much of its radical past. (69) We are very fortunate that Donna Haraway and her kith reinvented it.   taken from here   Foto: Bernhard Weber

Die in dem Buch "Cultures of Financialization" zusammengefassten Essays referieren immer wieder auf den letztes Jahr verstorbenen Randy Martin, der die Finanzialisierung des alltäglichen Lebens in aller Drastik beschrieben hat.

Finanzialisierung besitzt für Max Haiven zwei sich überlappende Funktionen: der Einfluss auf die Struktur der gegenwärtigen Kapital-Ökonomie und diskursive Machttechnologie, die zunehmend auch die Kultur und das alltägliche Leben dominiert. Ökonomen tendieren dazu, den Begriff insbesondere auf die steigende Macht des sog. Fire-Sektors (Banken, Investments, Spekulation, Versicherung und Real Estate) in der globalen Ökonomie zu beziehen. Dazu gehören die enorme Größe der finanziellen Unternehmen, die der neoliberalen Reregulation geschuldet ist, mit der die Trennung von Investment und kommerziellen Banken eliminiert wurde, und die „mortgage markets“, die die Märkte für neue Formen der Securitization öffneten. Finanzialisierung referiert in diesem Sinn auch auf die multinationalen Unternehmen, auf den sog. Shareholder Value. Es geht um die ökonomische Macht der Finanzmärkte, besonders der Anleihen- und Währungsmärkte, die selbst die Politiken der Regierungen zunehmend dirigieren, nicht nur die der Staaten, sondern auch die der Städte, Provinzen, Länder, und wie wir in Europa sehen, auch die der supranationalen Organisationen. Finanzialisierung referiert generell auf die steigende Mobilität der transnationalen Geldkapitalströme, auf die Art und Weise, wie diese Ströme beschleunigen und immer chaotischer werden, und dies aufgrund der sophisticated Formen der Securitization und des automatisierten High-Frequency-Tradings, einem System, in dem die Computer heute die Mehrheit der Transaktionen exekutieren. Es gibt sublime Techniken des Risikomanagements, um neue kreative, vernetzte und zusammengesetzte Derivatprodukte zu kreieren, deren Skalen und Komplexität die menschliche Imagination schlichtweg übersteigen.

Schulden und Defizite werden selbst für die Politik extrem relevant, nicht nur auf der Ebene der Nationalstaaten, sondern auch auf der Ebene der Sub-Staaten, der Städte, der Transportfirmen, Universitäten, Krankenhäuser etc. Die Finanzmärkte diktieren die Unternehmensstrukturen, globale Konzerne werden von den anonymen Superegos der Shareholder und ihren Repräsentanten dominiert. Die große Mehrheit der wichtigsten Rohstoffe und Lebensmittel (Öl, Getreide, Reis, Wasser etc.) werden, bevor man sie konsumiert, dutzendmal getradet, und dies dank der Spekulation in Futures und Derivate, wobei Geld hier wenig mit Nation, sondern mit dem transnationalen Währungstausch zu tun hat. Man muss zur Finance unbedingt die Kapitalisierung der Assets hinzuzählen, die an den digitalisierten, globalisierten und vernetzten Märkten zirkulieren. Man kann zwischen den Praktiken des High-Frequency-Tradings, dem internationalen Arbitrage, den neuen synthetischen Derivaten und den zum Teil korrupten Investments der Investmentbanken, Hedgefonds und der Schattenfinanz keine klaren Trennungslinien mehr ziehen, vor allem was die Unterscheidung zwischen einem finanziellen Imaginären und einer realen Ökonomie betrifft. Das finanzielle Kapital misst nicht nur die Geldkapitalströme und profitiert nicht nur durch die Spekulation auf die sog. Fundamentaldaten der Ökonomie, sondern gestaltet und diszipliniert als eine spezifische Machttechnologie und die Produktion und Zirkulation. Dies deckt sich in weiten Teilen mit den Analysen, wie sie John Milios schon seit längerer Zeit vorgenommen hat. (Zu einer marxistischen Kritik an Randy Martin siehe Sotiropoulos/Lapatsioras).

Die Preise der Derivate sind keine direkten Repräsentationen der unterliegenden Werte, auf die sie referieren. Im Jahr 2007 hatten die Preise der Hypothekenkredite in den USA wenig mit den Werten der Häuser zu tun, auf die sie dennoch referierten. Die Preise reflektierten auch nicht auf die Möglichkeit, dass die Kredite zurückgezahlt werden könnten. Vielmehr waren die Kredite eine Funktion ihrer Zirkulation in einer weiteren spekulativen finanziellen Ökonomie, einer konnektiven Spekulation. Während weiterhin behauptet wird, dass Assets rein eine Repräsentation der unterliegenden realen Werte darstellten (eine Aktie von VW repräsentiert einen Teil der unterliegenden Assets und der produktiven Kapazität von VW), hängt der Kurs der Aktie doch auch davon ab, dass potenzielle Investoren die kommende Zukunft von VW imaginieren. Diese ist von den geopolitischen Faktoren der Ölproduktion, der Wahrscheinlichkeit der Regulationsmöglichkeiten von sozialen Umgebungen, der politischen Instabilität von Regionen abhängig und nicht zuletzt von den Preisfluktuationen an den Märkten selbst. Die Aktien von VW werden nicht allein aufgrund der Fundamentaldaten des Unternehmens bewertet, sondern als Teil von Portfolios verstanden, innerhalb dessen sie fragmentiert und versichert sind, eingebettet in Derivatverträge und schließlich in die komplexe finanzielle Ökonomie.

Die Preisbewegungen an den Finanzmärkten implizieren per se einen a-personalen Sachverhalt, dessen Kontraperformativität je schon in den Begriffen eines objektiven Preises artikuliert wird. Die Realität der derivativen Preisgestaltung manifestiert sich innerhalb einer zweifach gefalteten Kontingenz: Kontingenz der Abstraktion (Variabilität des Derivatvertrags und generelle Fungibilität des Underlyings) und Kontingenz der Revision (indefinite Plastizität der differenziellen Preisbewegung selbst). Diese kontingenten Bedingungen des Auspreisens bleiben stets an die institutionell-materiellen Machtpraktiken, die an den Derivatmärkten aktuell vorherrschen, sowie an die monetäre Architektur der quantitativen Kapitalisierung des finanziellen Kapitals gebunden. Die Preisgestaltung der Derivate ist sui generis als immanent und als kontingent einzuschätzen, weil sie eine spekulative Dimension hinsichtlich der jetzt noch unbekannten Eventualität installiert. Diese Eventualität existiert jedoch nicht vor dem Schreiben des Derivatvertrags, vielmehr wird sie durch diesen geradezu fabriziert (Fälligkeit wird nur als eine von mehreren in Frage kommenden möglichen Realitäten aktualisiert). Als eine Beifügung zur Kontingenz der Abstraktion (universelle Fungibilität des Underlyings) ist das Derivat also dahingehend mit Kontingenz ausgestattet, dass es eine spekulative, eine heute noch nicht gewusste Eventualität in Gang setzt, die durch den Vertrag selbst mit-konstituiert wird.

(Marx behauptet über weite Strecken, dass eine Aktie oder eine Anleihe eine Forderung auf zukünftigen Mehrwert sei, der aus der Arbeitskraft extrahiert werde. Eine Aktie von VW mag einen Preis haben, der auf spekulativen Märkten konstituiert wird, aber ihre unterliegender Wert wäre dann eine Forderung auf einen Anteil am Mehrwert, der aus den Arbeitern extrahiert werden müsste. Für Marx war die Mehrheit des finanziellen Reichtums fiktiv. Der Preis der finanziellen Assets war letztendlich eine Halluzination, eine Abweichung. Für Harvey repräsentiert das fiktive Kapital nicht die Forderung auf eine existierenden Wert, sondern auf einen Teil des Mehrwerts, der in Zukunft extrahiert wird. Für Harvey ist die Finance nicht einfach ein parasitäres Rudiment, sondern eine wichtiges Set der ökonomischen Institutionen, durch die das Kapital seine immanente Tendenz zur Überproduktion fixiert und stoppt. Aus verschiedenen Gründen ist heute die Finanzindustrie profitabler als die anderen Sektoren des Kapitals und dominiert damit zunehmend die Ökonomie, insofern das Kapital in spekulative Projekte investiert, die auf der Differenz der Einkaufs- und Verkaufspreise von Sicherheiten beruhen.)

Des Weiteren kann die Finanzialisierung als Spread zwischen finanziellen Narrativen, Metaphern, Tropen, Klischees, Stereotypen, Plots und Diskursen in der sozialen Fabrik verstanden werden. Wir leben in einer Zeit, in der Studentendarlehen,Hypothekenkredite, Konsumentenkredite, Kreditkarten und die Strategien der Investments das alltägliche Leben dominieren und generell das Ökonomische gestalten wie nie zuvor. Das fiktive Kapital ist längst eine wichtige Ressource, durch die das soziale Leben auf der Ebene der alltäglichen Entscheidungen, der institutionellen Kulturen, der kulturellen Narrative und Ideologien reproduziert wird. Selbst die immanente Reproduktion des fiktiven Kapitals muss auf soziale Fiktionen referieren, wie sie bspw. in den institutionellen Kulturen der Wall Street zirkulieren. Das fiktive Kapital ist immer auch eine soziale Fiktion, die sich über die Natur der Welt auslässt. Diese Fiktion besitzt eine ungeheure Macht: Die Finanzialisierung repräsentiert die Hegemonie des fiktiven Kapitals über alle anderen Mittel, die die globale Ökonomie zu erklären und zu imaginieren versuchen. Haiven schreibt: „It becomes the metanarrative that increasingly influences and shapes social fictions throughout the social fabric.“

So impliziert die ubiquitäre Metapher des Investments die tiefe Penetration der finanziellen Ideen, Tropen, Logiken und Prozesse in das alltägliche Leben. Bildung wird heute nicht einfach nur als eine individualisierte Ware verstanden, mit der Studenten erzählt wird, dass sie in sie investieren sollen, um ein stabiles Leben in der Mittelschicht zu genießen. Darüber hinaus ist sie nämlich einer der Schlüsselbegriffe, mit der die Individuen in die globale Ökonomie integriert werden. In den USA haben die Studentendarlehen die Summe von einer Billion US-Dollar erreicht. Wie die Anlagen an den „sub-prime mortgage markets“ werden diese Darlehen gebrochen, gebündelt und versichert; ihre spektrale Präsenz geistert durch die globale Finanzarchitektur und wirft ihre Schatten auf die Investment-Portfolios. Aber es sind nicht nur die Studentendarlehen, sondern auch die Hypothekenkredite und Kreditkartenschulden, die Altersversorgung und das Daytrading von Amateuren - Instrumente, die heute fast jeden Akteur in die alltäglichen Prozesse der Finanzialisierung integrieren, wobei individuelle Schulden und das Investment in einem interkonnektiven Äther der Spekulation verschwimmen. Während die reale Welt der Werte weiter existiert, sind die finanziellen Instrumente niemals eine perfekte oder unproblematische Repräsentation dieser Werte. Finanzielle Phänomene sind weniger Repräsentationen des realen Reichtums, sondern sie sind größtenteils imaginär. Imaginär bedeutet aber nicht, dass die finanziellen Assets nicht real wären

Finanzialisierung impliziert also die Art und Weise, wie finanzielle Messmethoden, Ideen, Prozesse, Techniken, Metaphern, Narrative, Werte und Themen über den finanziellen Sektor hinausgehen und andere Sektoren des Gesellschaftlichen transformieren. Die steigende ökonomische und materielle Macht des Finanzsektors, so Haiven, sei unmittelbar verbunden mit seinem wachsenden Einfluss auf bestimmte Bereiche der Kultur. Das primäre Produkt und Medium des Finanzsektors ist immateriell, spekulativ und prognostizierend: die Manipulation des Risikos, der Wahrscheinlichkeiten, der Differenziale, der Versicherungen und des Glaubens.

Haiven geht es um die rhizomatischen und diffusen Erscheinungsweisen der finanziellen Metaphern, Praktiken, Narrative, Normen, Messmethoden, Ideologien und Identitäten, die die soziale Fabrik durchziehen, und um die Art und Weise, wie die Finanzialisierung ein neues Set von Techniken und Dispositiven entwickelt, durch die die verschiedenen Elemente der sozialen Fabrik in die Ordnung der Kapitalakkumulation eingeschrieben werden, oder, um es anders zu sagen, wie die Finanzialisierung das Verständnis der Bürger, der Subjekte als kreative Akteure, als ökonomische Partizipienten und als soziale Wesen transformiert. Sie ist keine dystopische Monokultur, sondern eine kreative, konfliktuelle und ökonomische Antwort auf die materiellen Bedingungen des Lebens, die heute unter der Regie des spekulativen, neoliberalen Kapitals stehen.

Wenn wir Bereiche wie Gesundheit, Erziehung, Regierung, Software, Spiele und selbst noch das Shoppen als Investments ansehen und das Leben als Feld einer paranoiden Securitization begreifen, dann bilden wir selbst ein ideologisches Gerüst, das bestimmte Aspekte der sozialen Realität und bestimmte Zukünfte ausschließt. Die Finanzialisierung benötigt zu ihrer Stabilisierung immer auch Ideologien, Praktiken und Fiktionen des alltäglichen Lebens, in die entsprechend auch investiert wird. In einer Zeit der ubiquitären Schulden, eines eskalierenden Konsumismus, einer politischen Quietismus und einer hochvolatilen finanziellen Ökonomie können die Bereiche der Ideologie und Kultur nicht einfach dem Überbau zugerechnet werden, dem eine reale ökonomische Basis unterliegt. Haiven bezieht sich hier auf Frederic Jameson, der schreibt, dass heute das Ökonomische kulturell und das Kulturelle ökonomisch sei. Die Dialektik von Ökonomie und Kultur sei vom fiktiven kapital überschattet.

Wir sprechen hier hingegen in loser Anlehnung an Francois Laruelle von der Ökonomie als Determination-in-der-letzten Instanz, was heißt, dass Politik, Kultur, Recht, Kunst etc. der Ökonomie immanent sind. Für eine begriffliche, nicht-dialektische Bestimmung des Kapitals könnte dies heißen, das begriffliche Kapital im Kontext einer unilateralen »Logik« neu zu verstehen. Analog der Figur der »unilateralen Dualität« werden dann zwei Terme – der erste Term steht für das Kapital (Verhältnis bzw. Nicht-Relation) und der zweite Term umfasst die von jenem abgeleiteten Elemente und Relationen - nicht durch einen dritten Term, den der abstrakten Arbeit, synthetisiert, sondern der erste Term (Geld als Kapital) determiniert uni-lateral den zweiten Term und die daraus weiter entstehenden Relationen, Teilungen und Terme. Sowohl der zweite Term (dieser Term steht hier für Ware, Produktion, Arbeitskraft, Zirkulation, Formen des Kapitals etc.) als auch die Relation zwischen dem erstem Term und dem zweitem Term (Geld-Ware-Produktion-Ware`-Geld`) sind dem ersten Term immanent, das heißt sie werden von ihm inklusive der möglichen Kontingenzen, die die Relation bereithalten, in der letzten Instanz determiniert. Das Entscheidende bezüglich des ersten Terms besteht hier darin, dass seine Identität sui generis eine uni-laterale Relation oder Uni-lation enthält. Der zweite Term ist immer schon ein uni-lateraler Klon des ersten Terms, was nichts anderes bedeutet, als dass das Geld als Kapital primär ist, oder, um es anders zu sagen, dass man je schon von einer monetären Werttheorie bzw. Kapitaltheorie auszugehen hat.

Haiven bezieht sich grundlegend auf die marxistische Theorien der Reproduktion der Kapitalakkumulation inklusive der systemischen Krisen (Krieg, Imperialismus und Spekulation). Darüber hinaus mobilisiert er Texte der Cultural Studies, die untersuchen, wie die sozialen Relationen, Hegemonien und Ideologien durch kulturelle Diskurse und das alltägliche Leben reproduziert werden. Des Weiteren bezieht er sich auf feministische Texte, die auf die kapitalistische Subordination der reproduktiven Arbeit verweisen.

Hinsichtlich der Finanzialisierung muss zunächst die Reproduktion des finanziellen Sektors durch sich selbst beachtet werden, die zugleich diejenige einer Sub-Klasse von hochspezialisierten Operationen ist. Zum Zweiten gilt es zu bedenken, dass heute die Reproduktion des sozialen und kulturellen Lebens, der Identitäten und Institutionen intensiv finanzialisiert wird, und zum Dritten ist die Reproduktion des finanziellen Systems selbst von der populären Kultur und dem alltäglichen Leben abhängig. So sollte, laut Haiven, die Finanzialisierung als ein Terrain des Kampfes zwischen verschiedenen Sphären und Zyklen der Reproduktion verstanden werden. Diese dreiteilige Theorie der Reproduktion lokalisiert auch die Kultur im Herzen der Ökonomie. Wenn das Gesellschaftliche durch diverse Patterns der Reproduktion komponiert wird, dann werden diese wiederum durch unzählbare individuellen Handlungen und Transaktionen permanent transformiert, ohne dass diese die Ökonomie konstituieren, sie aber dennoch reproduzieren oder herausfordern. Reproduktion referiert nicht auf einen automatischen, unbewussten und subjektlosen Prozess, vielmehr prozessiert sie in einem Feld der Verweigerung, des Kampfes, der Kompromisse, der Verhandlungen und der Experimente. Die soziale Fabrik der Reproduktion ist sublim: Ihre Größe, Komplexität, Interkonnektivität und Totalität kann von der Imagination nicht getrennt werden. Die Finanzialiserung operiert auf allen Ebenen der Reproduktion, der ökonomischen und politischen Reproduktion des Kapitals, der Gestaltung der sozialen und kulturellen Reproduktion sowie der Verbindung der beiden Prozesse. Dies erlaubt auch eine exakte Bestimmung der Krisen des Reproduktionssystems, der Klassenkämpfe oder des Imperialismus.

Haiven interessiert zudem die metaphorische Bedeutung von Derivaten. Er zitiert in diesem Kontext Derrida, der schreibt, dass die Sprache niemals auf einer stabilen und ewigen Beziehung zwischen Signifikat und Signifikanten beruhe, vielmehr sei sie endlos metaphorisch. In MacKenzie’s Worten sind Derivate (geschriebene Forderungen) als der Motor, nicht als die Kamera (der Märkte) zu verstehen. Sie messen nicht einfach nur Marktrealitäten, sondern sie produzieren sie auch. Fiktives Kapital referiert hier auf ein Set von Prozessen, wobei die soziale Reproduktion in die Finanzialisierung eingeschrieben ist. Wir würden an dieser Stelle eher mit der a-signifikanten Semiotik eines Guattari argumentieren. i.e. die heutigen finanzielle Prozesse sind weniger sprachlich, vielmehr semiotisch und algorithmisch verfasst.

Haiven gibt einen Vielzahl von Beispielen, die den enormen Einfluss der Finance auf das kulturelle Leben nachweisen. Spiele wie Pokémon seien symptomatisch für die Finanzialisierung des Alltags und sie seien ein Mittel, mit denn junge Subjekte in der Ära der spekulativen Akkumulation kreiert werden oder sich selbst kreieren. Wie Kinder Pokémon Cards handeln, sei ein Beispiel für das Lernen von finanziellen Skills und Habiti, die auf ein kulturelles Klima der Finanzialisierung bezogen seien. Schon die Kinder etablieren damit die neoliberale Arbeit am eigenen Selbst, gestalten sich als Subjekte. Haiven untersucht den Wall Street Financier, den viel gepriesenen “risk-taker”, dessen professionelle Einstellung zum Prekären ihn zum extrem affektiven Agenten eines breiteren Prozesses der Finanzialisierung macht. Am unteren Ende untersucht er das abjektive Opfer, das auch „at risk“ ist, den rassifizierten Sub-Prime Borrower, dessen toxische Schulden das finanzielle System im Jahr 2007 vergiftete. Im Zuge der Austeritätspolitik und dem Kult des Brandings gestaltet selbst Walmart seine Kunden und Arbeiter als Risikonehmer, als neoliberale Subjekte und sophisticated finanzielle Akteure, die die Methoden und Praktiken des finanziellen Risikomanagements zu ihrer eigenen Sache machen. In einer Ära, in der alle Aspekte des Lebens gemessen, quantifiziert und spekulativ verwaltet werden, erlangt der nebulöse Term „Kreativität“ eine überragende Aktualität; er inkludiert eine neue diskursive Formation der Finanzialisierung. Und schließlich kann der finanzielle Sektor nur überleben, wenn er verschiedene Formen des Widerstands berücksichtigt. So kann man das Verleihen von Geld (zwischen den Ländern der dritten Welt und zwischen Individuen in der ersten Welt) als - wenn auch erfolglose . Versuche lesen, Ansprüche der Subalternen auf Mehrwert zu realisieren. Letztlich macht aber die Finanzialisierung, indem sie Agenten, Kreativität und Subjektivität wesentlich beeinflusst, jede „Bemerkung“ zum Widerstand problematisch. Sie repräsentiert eine Form der kapitalistischen Akkumulation, die elaborierter und nuancierter als jede andere ist, aber auch viel pathologischer und destruktiver,

Metaphern sind elementar für den Diskurs im Sinne Foucaults, dem Wahrheitsregime als Ordnung des Wissens, des Sprechens und des Verstehens - einer Ordnung, die von sozialen Machtbeziehungen abhängt und diese Beziehungen reproduziert. In diesem Sinn ist die Überstülpung der Metapher „Investment“ auf alle Lebensbereiche keineswegs harmlos, vielmehr ist sie symptomatisch und konstitutiv für den Shift der sozialen Ökonomie hin zur Finanzialisierung. Mit dieser Metapher artikulieren die Leute ihre Beziehungen und Wahlmöglichkeiten, bis sie in ein allgemeines Bewusstsein der finanziellen Ideen eintauchen.

Für Frederic Jameson ist der Aufstieg des finanziellen Kapitals untrennbar vom postmodernen Turn; die disjunktiven und hybriden kulturellen Praktiken der Postmoderne können nicht ohne den Bezug auf die „post-gold-standard world“ verstanden werden, in der das Geld keine fixe Bedeutung mehr besitzt und Schulden und Kredite regieren. Ein Ding ist heute nur ein „wertvolles“ Ding, insofern es von einer Story gestützt wird, und dies gilt für den Wert des Brots, eines Bild von Warhol, einer Stunde beim Therapeuten und dem Future Preis. Während immer wieder von dem hyperbolischen Reichtum der Finanzindustrie im Kontrast zu dem der „Realökonomie“ schwadroniert wird, sei, so Haiven, sei in der Realität jeder Wert fiktiv, i.e. eine Story über das, was in einer Ökonomie Wert besitzt und damit die sozialen Relationen gestaltet. Der Begriff „Fiktives Kapital“ beinhaltet auch, das die Finance die Produktion der sozialen Fiktionen vorantreibt als auch von ihnen abhängig ist. Finance ist nicht nur fiktiv, weil sie eine Fiktion ist, sondern weil sie die sozialen Relationen zu transformieren hilft. Sie produziert Fiktionen und wird durch Fiktionen reproduziert. Es geht Haiven um die Intensität der Relation zwischen Fiktion und Wert, wenn sie durch die Finanzialisierung dominiert wird, und um die einheitlichen und komplexen sozialen Fiktionen, die durch das finanzielle Kapital und seine Agenten selbst gestreut werden. Kultur referiert hier auf die Art und Weise, wie wir unser Leben leben und unsere sozialen Umgebungen reproduzieren, und wie dies wiederum durch Kunst, Literatur, Spiele, Bildung etc. beeinflusst wird. Die Kultur ist direkt damit verbunden, wie das Gesellschaftliche und die Individuen sich reproduzieren, sodass Reproduktion niemals einfach bewusstlose Replikation meinen kann. Vielmehr impliziert sie einen komplexen, konfliktuellen, kreativen und reflexiven Prozess.

 Die letzten vier Jahrzehnte der Finanzialisierung haben eine massive quantitative und qualitative Transformation des finanziellen Sektors und der Finanzialisierung mit sich gebracht. Die Finance wird immer stärker von den hochwissenschaftlichen Praktiken des Risikomanagements getrieben, das komplexe Formulare und Techniken auf einem interkonnektiven globalen Marktplatz hervorbringt. Wie Randy Martin schon hervorgehoben hat, ist das emblematische Konstrukt dieses Systems derivativ, gleich einem finanziellen Asset, das ein handelbares Agreement zwischen zwei Parteien beinhaltet, um einen spezifizierten Austausch zu einem zukünftigen Zeitpunkt vorzunehmen.

Die Trades sind in Portfolios eingeschrieben, und manche neuen synthetischen Derivate enthalten ein Vielzahl von Fragmenten verschiedener Assets, die mit einer ungeheuren Geschwindigkeit zwischen den großen Investmentbanken und durch die digitalisierten Weltmärkte zirkulieren. Die Finance funktioniert hier als eine Modalität der sozialen Fiktion, indem sie eine performative Story über die Welt erzählt, und zwar mit einer Vielzahl von Metaphern, die niemals in ein kohärentes oder lineares Narrativ übergleiten. In derselben Art und Weise, wie die Finance die De-Evolution des Werts qua differenzieler Preissetzung in fragmentarische Metaphoriken vorantreibt, nehmen wir in den sozialen und kulturellen Bereichen eine steigende Fragmentation, Bedeutungslosigkeit und Chaos wahr. Selbst die Strategien der Unternehmen werden zunehmend von den Aktienmärkten und den finanziellen Institutionen diszipliniert, durch kurzfristige Anforderungen gelenkt, um höhere Renditen zu sichern. Regierungspolitiken haben, wenn sie den Strategien der Anleihenmärkte unterworfen sind, keine Möglichkeiten langfristige Planungen durchzuführen und versuchen weitestgehend die potenziellen Risiken im Kontext der Profitabilität ihrer großen transnationalen Unternehmen zu managen. Sogar die Individuen, die von den Schulden und einer liquiden Welt ohne Garantien getrieben werden, haben Schwierigkeiten, ihre Zukunft als etwas anderes als die kontinuierliche Wiederholung der Gegenwart zu begreifen.

Mit der Finanzialisierung wird fast alles, von der Bildung bis hin zur Religion, unter der Linse der Finanzialität gesehen. Man soll üben und richtig essen, das heißt, selbst die Nahrung als Investment in den Körper begreifen; Fettleibigkeit, eine der heute am schnellsten zunehmenden Krankheiten, wird als das Resultat eines falschen Investments begriffen. Die Performance der Unternehmen (hinsichtlich der Flexibilität) und die der Regierungen (hinsichtlich der Effizienz) müssen in erster Linie die Märkte überzeugen und erst in zweiter Linie Kosten sparen. Dies führt unter anderem zu einer Fragmentierung der Arbeit und dem daraus resultierenden Prekariat. Die Devise lautet: Antworte auf dein prekäres Leben, indem du Risiken managst, investiere in die Krankenversicherung und die Erziehung der Kinder, antworte auf fehlende Solidarität, indem du deine Zeit in ein Hobby oder freiwillige Tätigkeit investierst. Die Finanzialisierung treibt selbst noch das Prekariat voran und bietet sich als Lösung an; Prekärsein ist nicht nur eine Norm, sondern ein Geschenk, eine Möglichkeit für das fianzialisierte Subjekt. Jede Ambition muss darauf ausgerichtet sein, im Jetzt zu leben, schnelle Entscheidungen zu treffen und die Zukunft zu privatisieren, indem man die Kosten für das Alter und die Gesundheit auf sich nimmt und schließlich alles Mögliche versichert. Im Financier finden wir die Figur des gehebelten Prekariats, dem alle Arbeiter und Angestellten nacheifern sollen. Dies führt zu einem schönen neuen Leben, das durch maximale Liquidität gekennzeichnet ist und sich schnell an die profitabelsten Situationen assimiliert.

Foto: Bernhard Weber

  We do not imagine in stasis. Consider the infant’s first steps: they are not merely some physiological twitch or automatic reaction, they depend on the ability of the infant to recall the past, consider potential futures, and coordinate that imagining with the body in movement. This is a neurological and physical feat of embodied cognition.The imagination, from the very beginning is in motion, is embodied, is a collective exercise of care. The infant’s imagination exists as she moves, learns, and feels. But also, the infant learns to walk when her caregivers are surrounding, protect and comforting her when she falls, offering support so that she can learn to move differently, again and again. What caregiver/worker has not taught their child to imagine walking by holding it up so that it can practice. So the imagination, from the very beginning is in motion, is embodied, is a collective exercise of care. Movement is the realization of the imagination, and imagination is the process of movement. In Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power I sought to argue, along with many others, that neoliberal capitalism is not only a political and economic system, it is also a cultural force, or a constellation of cultural forces. On the one hand, it has a dramatic and powerful influence on our imagination regarding who and what is valuable. On the other, it depends on this transformation of the imagination, and depends on transforming each of us into an agent or a vector of neoliberal competition, individualism and fear. Thus challenging this system will take more than just economic and political policies or movements, we also need to transform culture and the imagination. And I argued that the imagination is a collective, embodied and practiced force, not simply something we possess in our individual brains.Challenging this system will take more than just economic and political policies or movements, we also need to transform culture and the imagination. Since publishing it, I have learned from many people and struggles, and would, appropos of the question of movement, update or refine my thesis somewhat. In line with my comments above about infants, I would say that if the imagination is not only always already embodied and collective but also in movement, then control over movement is key to the shaping of the imagination. That is, how the movement of bodies is defined, shaped or controlled both shapes the imagination and depends on that shaping. Consider Toni Morrison’s phenomenal small book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, where she develops a fascinating account of the American (and in many ways global) cultural imagination by linking its development to the transatlantic slave trade and the cultures of Black enslavement in the Americas. Here a theory of the imagination is intimately tied to a history and a system based on both (A) moving and displacing bodies (across the Atlantic Ocean) and (B) controlling their movements to exploit their productive and reproductive capacities. So it is no accident that we are living in an age of mass black incarceration in the United States (and elsewhere, of other racialized populations). Indeed, as sociologists like Ruthie Gilmore and Angela Davis note, the industries of racialized incarceration are central to the reproduction of global capitalism, something also very much at work in Europe where Frontex and other companies generate massive speculative capital from controlling the movement of populations. Angela Mitropoulos has shown how technologically enmeshed the logics of surveillance, financial accumulation and the racialized policing of bodies are, taking as an example Australia’s privatized prison islands for refugees. But these patterns, as Ian Baucom argues in his fascinating history, stretch back to the transatlantic slave trade, in which human bodies were transformed not only into commodities, but into speculative assets, figments of the financial imagination to be moved about not only physically but also in the abstract. And here it is vital to grasp that the imaginative force-field forced movement is not simply the plight of the colonized – as Aime Cesaire noted, this affects the colonizer’s imagination the most. The way the colonizer defines, delimits and dominates the movement of the Other shapes the colonizer’s imaginative worlds.

Dreadnoughts of the imagination

Would this insight allow us to narrate the much-lauded history of western modernity differently? What would it change about the way we imagine its dangerous fables like the sovereign nation-state, or the free circulation of capital, or the rule of law? These are fables that still, to this day, justify the horrific movement of global systems and the brutal systems of global movement. Or let us take the writing of people including Harsha Walia, or Chandra Talpade Mohanty, or Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson. All of them have detailed how borders, which are entirely imaginary constructs with such horrifically deadly power, operate to both control movement and to shape the imagination of those inside and outside (or, as so many more of us are today, in-between). I think borders and money and the primary technologies of the state and capital, are also, at least in their current hegemonic formations, highly sophisticated dreadnoughts of the imagination. I think about the dialectics of movement on the land I inhabit now, which was for millennia called Mi’Kma’Ki, and later renamed Acadia by French settlers, and later still Nova Scotia by the British. I think about what little I know about the Indigenous Mi’Kmaq political imagination around movement here, which I have learned from historians like Daniel Paul or elders whom I have heard speak. I do not wish to romanticize this civilization, but a careful engagement can teach us many lessons, and can also highlight, by contrast, how odd and in many ways horrifically violent our own civilization has become. The Mi’Kmaq civilization was one that highly valued both community solidarity and personal autonomy. It was built around watersheds, not political borders, so there was a great fluidity of jurisdiction. The people moved often to take advantage of seasonal hunting, fishing and cultivation opportunities. The people moved often to take advantage of seasonal hunting, fishing and cultivation opportunities.There were protocols in place for travellers who, for political or personal reasons, voyaged from their community – and the archeological evidence and oral histories concur that Indigenous people in the Americas moved far and wide. Further, the Mi’Kmaq like many other Indigenous groups had (and still have) sophisticated political processes for the adoption and protection of foreigners, not based on controlling their movement in the territory or their sovereign ownership, but based on how to share responsibility for caring for “the land,” which here, as Glen Coulthard illustrates, means something much deeper and more relational than simply possession or citizenship in the brutally simplistic terms we accept today. Indeed, it is based on this worldview that Mi’Kmaq and other Indigenous groups today, both here in Canada and around the world, seek to arrest the movement of capital and of what we term “resources” in order to protest the destruction of “the land” in the name of profit as well as the continued seizure and colonization of Indigenous lands.  In fact, these two goals are one and the same. Highway blockades, pipeline shutdowns, interruptions of railways, as well as protests in city centres and in shopping malls have all characterized these forms of resistance by Indigenous people and we settlers who would imagine ourselves their allies. We might reframe this as an attempt to intervene in the movement of capital and to also confront the matrix of the colonial politics of movement, of the artificiality of borders.

Social movements

So then this perhaps brings us to another meaning of movement, which is to say social movements. Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power also tried to make some arguments about the politics and culture of contemporary activism and strategies for transforming the world, largely based on the argument that such movements need to take the imagination seriously as a terrain of struggle and also something vital to themselves. Building shared imaginary landscapes, shared utopian horizons, shared transversal understandings is a key to solidarity.Building shared imaginary landscapes, shared utopian horizons, shared transversal understandings is a key to solidarity. To the extent that neoliberal capitalism and what Walia calls border imperialism monopolize our understanding of who and what is valuable, who and what belongs, we are doomed to allow millions, billions even to be made absolutely worthless. But here I would also update my thesis. As I argued in that book, and also in my work with my colleague Alex Khasnabish, the radical imagination, which is to say our capacity to envision and struggle for better futures, depends not on static individual rumination; it is a collective process of thinking and dreaming together in movement. This has been an important lesson of the Zapatistas, and also of many Indigenous struggles in the Americas. It has also been key to many of the European movements of the last twenty years that have focused on direct democratic process rather than grand narratives of social change.

Material imagination and the derivative

But, in spite of all my efforts to the contrary, I fear that this book and this approach contributed to a romanticism around the imagination. In my work I have consistently tried to argue for the imagination as a material phenomenon and force, as something that emerges out of and that helps shape the ordering of social cooperation and productive and reproductive relationships, which is to say the political and economic system. Yet what I think we are lacking is some sense that the imagination, and its crises, emerge not only from particular times and places, but from different forms of movement.Many of the European movements of the last twenty years… have focused on direct democratic process rather than grand narratives of social change. Here I want to turn to the work of a mentor of mine, Randy Martin, who died a little over a year ago, quite tragically. Martin was one of the keenest and most expansive theorists of finance capital and financialization, which is also my area of primary academic expertise, so I was able to work with him for a few years. He was also a dancer and a theorist of movement and dance as politics. For Martin, and here I will not do justice to the beauty of his thinking (I am not sure anyone quite can, which makes his death all the more tragic), the derivative is the key technology of twenty-first century capitalism, and one that evolved to contain, harness and put borders around movement. Briefly, the derivative is a financial technique for, as he put it, commodifying the future. That is, it is a method for agreeing to buy and sell or exchange this or that thing at a future point for a certain price. For instance, a basic futures contract might compel a party to sell one ton of wheat in one year’s time for a given price. For the seller, this is a bet that the price of wheat will go down, so in a year they can make a profit because they will be selling the agreed-upon ton for a higher price. For the buyer, this is a bet that the price will go up, so they have insured themselves against a price increase. This, however, is an almost laughably simple example – other derivatives are much more complex and involve any underlying commodity or set of future conditions, including oil or government bonds or currencies or even data on the weather or consumer behaviour. Further, while signed between two original parties, most derivatives contracts circulating today can be freely bought, sold and traded, and so have their own prices and markets. They can also be bundled together and “securitized,” that is to say sold in fragments.The imagination, and its crises, emerge not only from particular times and places, but from different forms of movement. Highly conservative estimates suggest that the volume of annually circulating derivatives represent somewhere between 70-700 times the earth’s productive activity (measured by gross domestic product, at least). And it should be noted that most of this circulation is orchestrated by algorithmic computing, occurring at speeds that defy the human imagination. So let me highlight two obvious things here. The first is that derivatives are completely imaginary. They do not actually exist in the physical world, but they are real. They are real in the same ways that money and borders and the divine right of kings are real: they are extremely dangerous collective fictions that permit real people to do extremely violent things to change the world and relationships around them. We humans live by our collective fictions, whether it is the fiction of God’s power or the right of the police to exercise violence: these are imaginary relationships that shape real human activity and institutions and are held in place by violence. They might be said to be imaginative technologies for controlling movement. Likewise, the derivative is imaginary but very, very real. They shape our reality, our relationships, our world system. Indeed, for Martin and for his colleagues Dick Bryant and Michael Rafferty, derivatives are more “real” than the cash we have in our pockets and bank accounts, which, after all, only really represents about 3-7% of all the money in the world. The rest is financialized wealth; And let’s be clear: that financial wealth is controlled by a tiny handful of us.The derivative is the key technology of twenty-first century capitalism, and one that evolved to contain, harness and put borders around movement. The second observation is that this system is in constant motion, and relies on constant motion. As Martin observed, the value of a derivatives is in its circulation, not in its stasis – it gains value by being moved, by being bundled, securitized, traded and manipulated. And it is a contract for movement: the movement of commodities or securities or assets or information. It is, in other words, a creature of pure movement, of movement to its own exponential power. And one that has massive impacts on the movement of people and of goods and services. Because in reality, the great motor of movement today on this planet is money, and if Martin and his colleagues are right, and I think they are, the derivative is the form money takes in a world of relentless movement.

Infrastructures of the financialized imagination

But the derivative is also a force that requires infrastructure. And here we need to resist the idea that the movement of transnational capital has become lawless, borderless and unaccountable. Rather, we need to see the dialectic between the derivative (as the medium and the representative of financialized capitalism) and all those national, international and transnational controls that we imagine formerly regulated the global movement of money. The derivative is, in fact, a highly advanced technology for transforming borders, regulations and control, not abolishing them. The international financial architecture is not a flat space of fluid movement: it is a series of tunnels and warrens and caverns and secret lairs that can only be successfully navigated by legions of highly-paid legal and financial experts who work for the world’s most powerful financial firms. So it is a system that depends on borders and the sublime complexities of the international system to exclude the vast majority of humanity. Hence the situation that even large nation-states need to go cap-in-hand to major banks simply to float bonds or borrow necessary funds. And hence the reality that most of the world’s finance ministers and chancellors are former employees of these banks: they are the only one’s who sort of understand the complexity, and who have access to those people who do.And let’s be clear: that financial wealth is controlled by a tiny handful of us. So the derivative is a creature of pure movement. It exists to move, its value derives from movement. And I have written extensively (drawing on people like Maurizzio Lazzarato) about the way financialized capitalism has transformed our subjectivities towards everyone envisioning themselves as an investor, where every aspect of our lives, from education to our personal relationships, becomes an asset to be speculated upon or leveraged. And yet I think Martin was onto something else, something more profound: that if the derivative is the most influential and structurally significant aspect of our global capitalist system, then it recreates the world in its own image of constant movement. It might be argued that we are no longer divided primarily by wealth in terms of money in the bank, we are divided by if and how we move.The derivative is, in fact, a highly advanced technology for transforming borders, regulations and control, not abolishing them.

Decolonization and the derivative

Indeed, in one of Martin’s final essays, he speaks of the derivative as emerging as a method for controlling decolonization. He means this in two ways. On the one hand, he is speaking literally about the ways in which anti-colonial movements and independence struggles in the Global South in the post-war period were coopted and sabotaged by the politics of debt, largely brokered by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank but in actuality orchestrated by and for the benefit of former colonist and imperialist countries and their hegemonic financial institutions. Kwame Nkrumah and others rightly called this (combined with the threat of coups d’etat and military intervention) “neocolonialism” and it has had the effect, over the past six decades or so of seeing a massive transfer of wealth from formerly-colonized nations to (neo)colonial ones that rivals and even outdoes the worst forms of formal colonialism and imperialism, except without the need (or the cost) of direct political or military domination by colonial powers (this is safely franchised out to local governments, paramilitaries, gangsters). Today’s financial system is the parent and the child of this neocolonialism and, as Brian Li Puma and Benjamin Lee argue, the derivative in particular is a technology for accelerating and also hiding this vast, globe-spanning financial violence. It is a technology for transferring risk onto certain populations – the risk of financial ruin, of collapsed crop prices, of global warming, of resource wars, of disorganized violence, of hyper-exploitation, of incarceration – and indeed for that reason it is perhaps the hidden mover of the world’s populations who are fleeing their exposure to risk. But more on this in a moment.It might be argued that we are no longer divided primarily by wealth in terms of money in the bank, we are divided by if and how we move. Because when Martin talks about decolonization he is also speaking about another thing as well: the decolonization of the body and of community that emerged from the movements of the 1960s and 70s. These are movements for the liberation of queer sexualities, of women’s bodies and lives from patriarchy, of people of colour from systematic exclusion and oppression. These are also the movements that are tied to music and art and lifestyle, as well as the New Left and its struggles for radical democracy. For Martin, these are all struggles against post-war capitalism and the way it was based on the control of “bodies in movement.” That is to say, we can understand these movements as struggles to liberate and reinvent how we move together. Now here Martin joins Autonomist Marxists, as well as sociologists like Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski, as seeing this as a turning point in capitalism, that in response to these movements, capitalism transforms towards the neoliberal, flexibilized, global and diffused forms we recognize today. It internalizes and digests the artistic and the economic critiques and reorganizes from an archipelago of alienating hierarchal institutions to a network of micro-exploitations spread throughout the field of social life. For Martin, the derivative is a symptom and a cause of this transformation. While derivatives have existed in one form or another for millennia, in the 1960s and 70s new mathematical and technological advances are made that render them central to increasingly globalized markets, and when the Soviet rival to capitalism collapses in 1989, the derivative ascends.The derivative in particular is a technology for accelerating and also hiding this vast, globe-spanning financial violence. For Martin, what is special about the derivative is that it is not a single domineering institution orchestrated by some conspiracy or bureaucracy, though both conspiracies and bureaucracies are integral parts of its operations. It is, to paraphrase Deleuze’s thinking on what differentiates a society of discipline from a society of control, a vapor or a gas, an ambient, saturating presence. The financial order or the derivative is one that exerts continual, remorseless yet largely invisible pressure on all social actors and offers itself as a measurement of value. Consider the actions of nation-states today: beyond particular geopolitical interests most policy, including notably policies around borders and migrants, are shaped by the flows of credit and debt, the fate of the nation’s bond ratings, and the health of the nation’s financial institutions, all of which are measured by or pass through derivatives contracts and markets in one way or another. The same is true of major corporations, even those whose size and power rival that of nations of millions of people: they are subtly disciplined and coordinated by “shareholders” who are, in fact, financial actors in the derivative economy. Meanwhile, the rest of us too feel the impact, but cannot name it. The value of our houses, the price we pay for bread, our ability to access loans, our capacity to save for retirement, the value of the currencies we use, even the cost of a fake passport or the degree of surveillance in the migrant detention centre, all these are entangled in the movements of the derivative economy over which we have no power and yet which has, indirectly but profoundly, an unparalleled impact on how we move together. This is the form of power and control germane to what has become a highly diversified, diffused and individualistic society, where capitalism depends not on forcing all of us into factories but on harnessing our movements while retaining play or formal freedom within the system.When the Soviet rival to capitalism collapses in 1989, the derivative ascends. Thus the corollary of the derivative is the border: also a technology which is used to control and profit from movement. For those of us privileged subjects of global capitalism with desirable passports, the border is an annoying formality. Indeed crossing the border is a means to add value to ourselves: travelling abroad for work, education and opportunities to increase our human capital. My Canadian passport enables me to benefit immensely from the sorts of movement that have become obligatory for a cognitive worker today, just as it allows Canada and its financial institutions to benefit from being the hub of the movement of human and financial capital. For instance, Canada is world renowned for being the source for global exploratory mining capital and expertise, and Canadian corporations make billions of dollars each year exploiting mineral resources around the world (so too do people like me, whose pension funds and savings are unwittingly invested in these industries). Meanwhile, of course, for those who are the victims of Canadian mining corporations’ human rights and environmental abuses in countries like Papua New Guinea, Honduras or Ghana, the border is weaponized against them: their claims for justice do not pass beyond their borders (and usually fall on deafened ears within those borders) and Canadian companies cannot be held to account. Further, while they might cross a border in the hopes of finding their fortune in a wealthier country, their movement does not improve their human capital, it makes them more worthless, vulnerable, susceptible and exploitable. And here again we need to once again question the slogan, as important as it is, that we live in a world that permits the free movement of capital but controls the movement of people. It is true, but as we have already seen, capital’s movement is not free, but the complex international and transnational regulatory and institutional architecture is one that is highly useful to certain aspects of capital, notably transnational finance. Similarly, while it is clear that more and more money and resources are invested in the control of borders and populations, the global economy fundamentally depends on the free movement of bodies over and between borders for the simple reason that it creates vast exploitable pools of life. Securitized borders do not exist to keep people “out.” They exist to cheapen the lives of those who make it “in.”Securitized borders do not exist to keep people “out.” They exist to cheapen the lives of those who make it “in.”

The border and the derivative

So the border and the derivative, in their current forms, represent a binary set of mutually reinforcing technologies of a global movement-capitalism, and both are based on a logic of pathological, paranoid and technologically augmented prediction and containment of risk. It’s interesting that, for many of us, and certainly for the media, our nightmares about metadata and algorithmic computing tend to orbit questions of the anonymity and privacy of user data. But it is noteworthy that three of the industries most dedicated to the development and exploitation of metadata and algorithmic computing are (a) border security and neo-imperial warfare, (b) the financial realm of hedge funds and investment engaging high frequency trading banks, and (c) the extraction industries, which is to say petroleum and mining exploration, and the financial firms which back them. All of these depend on surveilling unfathomable numbers of data points and having the computing power to analyze and process this information to make predictions in the name of managing risks and making surgically specific investments aimed at low input and high impact. Managing risk is a matter of creating borders, whether actual or metaphoric. Borders contain and shape movement. The derivative and the border work together, we might say, on the one hand to make movement compulsory and, on the other, to unevenly distribute risk, to create and police what Ananya Roy calls “riskscapes.” And here the imagination might once again make an appearance. First of all, let us remember that for all their horrific power, both derivatives and borders are imaginary. To hold them in place requires not only raw violence, which is clearly not in short supply. It also requires a massive, textured, differentiated (and in fact contradictory) orchestration of the imagination. We are all conscripted to offer our imaginations, individually and collectively, to reproducing these forms of power. We are all conscripted to offer our imaginations, individually and collectively, to reproducing these forms of power.We do this when we take out a loan to buy a house as an object of speculation or accept that borders are legitimate. We do it when we imagine ourselves as investors (in our health, in our education, in our children’s’ future) or whenever we use a passport. We do it when we imagine that the migrant is somehow fundamentally different from some abstract “us,” that “our” futures can somehow be separated from “theirs.” It is an imagination that binds together the political, the economic and the subjective.

The danger and the sadness

And here is the danger, because to the extent that the border and the derivative come to preoccupy our imaginations, we are increasingly unable to imagine different futures together. Indeed, the future can only be imagined in terms of creating new borders and making better investments. Is this not the unquestionable rhetoric of practically all governments today, whether they declare themselves right or left? How shall we invest? Where shall we place the border? How much should be spent now for future returns? How many of them should we accept to secure our future? Shall we build a wall? Polities are left using borders to escape the violence of the derivative, or using the derivative to escape the violence of borders. In the first case, we are encouraged to imagine that the only way to escape the vicissitudes of precarious life in financialized times, in times of unknowable, mounting risks (of climate change, of disease, of terrorism) is to close the borders, to create zones of protection where risks can be known and managed. In the second case, we imagine that investing in wealth, education and human capital will allow us to avoid the violence of the border, will allow us to enjoy global cosmopolitanism without fear. And perhaps for some of us, for some time, it will.  But not for many, and not for ever. The saddest part is this: the border and the derivative each in their own logic encourage us to imagine we move alone. Yet they depend on us moving together. But let us disabuse ourselves of the notion this is new. The passcard, the camp, the obsessive control over populations, the hypochondriac concern with racialized contagion, these are all the dark legacies of colonialism and are always, without fail, organized around race. Let’s face the fact that this horrific world system is the culmination of 500 years of colonial barbarism that began with the free movement of Europeans around the world, notably Columbus and his sons, the conquistadors, but also including the merchants and missionaries who followed. Let’s remember that the border as such is an invention of Europe and of capitalism, one calibrated to create zones of competitive imperialist accumulation, and to externalize the violence of European capitalism to its extremities and frontiers. This is how Europe and its chosen children, like Canada, became rich. Polities are left using borders to escape the violence of the derivative, or using the derivative to escape the violence of borders. Other methods of defining jurisdiction have existed. As I mentioned earlier, on the lands I inhabit as a settler, the indigenous Mi’Kmaq people used to practice (and still do, to the extent they can) a set of territorial understandings within their nation and with other Indigenous nations that are based less on a theory of private ownership and sovereign control and more around questions of responsibility and reciprocity to and with “the land.” This was based in a notion of political community grounded in a web of human and non-human relationships. I say this because we tend to imagine borders to be the highest articulation of a history of the territory that stretches back to time immemorial, in the same way mainstream economists imagine money and even the derivative as really just a more sophisticated form of barter. But today’s borders, like today’s money, are in fact the product of colonial, racialized violence. Because let’s be honest: if we look globally, whiteness remains key to the movement of both bodies and money today. Consider the complexion of those who control the hedge-funds and investment banks and transnational institutions. Consider the complexion of those whose bodies pass, as mine does, in the streets or in the airports without comment or suspicion or dirty looks. Consider now the complexion of those who amass on the border. Consider the complexion of those who clean the airport or the hedge-fund offices, or pleasure the bodies or care for the children of the border guards, bureaucrats or investment bankers. This is why it is essential to always speak of racial capitalism and border imperialism. This is why it is essential to always speak of racial capitalism and border imperialism. If we speak of movement and do not speak of race, we are making something invisible. Indeed, if we speak of finance or the derivative and do not speak of race we are making something invisible. Because as Denise Ferrara da Silva and Paula Chakravvarty note, the history of speculative accumulation has always been predicated on the creation of a normative white financial subject, and the sabotaging of racialized financial subjects. For these authors, race is a structuring element of the global flows of money, and one that has the effect of trapping the racialized subject within their subjecthood, as when Black and Latinos in the US were sold sabotaged mortgages that trapped them in their own homes, which became the source of an unpayable debt. So too might we see neocolonialism as a similar maneuver on a global scale. Finance as it intersects with race turns walls that protect into walls that encase or entrap, into borders within which risk is let loose. So here we come to the question of the democratization of movement. For me, the question of democratization has very little to do with this or that policy or even with the farce of elections, where the most anti-democratic of forces are being voted into power and which in any case are rendered largely moot given the power of global financialized capitalism on government policy (as we saw so tragically in Greece). Rather, I am with Rancière: democracy is created in the seizing of it. Those who are democratizing movement are those who, in their actions, are implicitly or explicitly demanding the abolition of borders. So migrants are democratizing movement when they, in their very actions, refuse to accept the border as imagined. Hackers are democratizing movement insofar as they are actively undermining the borders established to confine and financialize knowledge, data and information. Those who struggle to build commons within, against and beyond capitalism are democratizing movement because they are insisting and experimenting with new ways we can move together, as Martin would put it. The democratization of movement, to my mind, is in developing new forms of collective power that disrupt or destroy older imaginaries, that insist that the future is more than a series of risks to be managed and borders to be erected as the world descends into chaos. It is the real movement of the imagination overcoming its own calcified forms. This is what Cornelius Castoriadis referred to as the radical imagination. And for Castoriadis, this radical imagination was intimately linked to the question of democracy not as a system or a horizon for politics, but a set of acts, a terrain of struggle. And a final word on this, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty has argued, a struggle for the abolition of borders is not one that rallies under the banner of a false universalism, as if simply declaring ourselves citizens of the world would be enough. We have to acknowledge ourselves as situated beings. My Canadian passport makes a huge difference to my material life, even if I seek to become a traitor to the nation that claims me and a patriot to life and peace and knowledge and love and justice, and indeed we all should commit ourselves to these values. Yet there is no outside of financialized border capitalism, and how we are permitted or compelled to move within it will affect our imaginations. As a straight white middle class cis-man with Canadian citizenship, my imagination of what is possible, even of what is important, is fundamentally constrained, even while my movement in this world is extremely blessed. So when we imagine the democratization of movement, which is perhaps, as Angela Davis says, the great struggle of our century, we need to begin and also end with those to whom the border and whom finance is most cruel, and who, in their actions and in their very being, are refusing to be made worthless by taking their movement into their own hands.   taken from here

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  Foto: Bernhard Weber

 

Alexander R. Galloway: You have a new book called Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). I particularly like the expression “canon of joy” that guides your investigation. Can you explain what canon of joy means and why it makes sense to use it when talking about Deleuze? Andrew Culp: My opening is cribbed from a letter Gilles Deleuze wrote to philosopher and literary critic Arnaud Villani in the early 1980s. Deleuze suggests that any worthwhile book must have three things: a polemic against an error, a recovery of something forgotten, and an innovation. Proceeding along those three lines, I first argue against those who worship Deleuze as the patron saint of affirmation, second I rehabilitate the negative that already saturates his work, and third I propose something he himself was not capable of proposing, a “hatred for this world.” So in an odd twist of Marx on history, I begin with those who hold up Deleuze as an eternal optimist, yet not to stand on their shoulders but to topple the church of affirmation. The canon portion of “canon of joy” is not unimportant. Perhaps more than any other recent thinker, Deleuze queered philosophy’s line of succession. A large portion of his books were commentaries on outcast thinkers that he brought back from exile. Deleuze was unwilling to discard Nietzsche as a fascist, Bergson as a spiritualist, or Spinoza as a rationalist. Apparently this led to lots of teasing by fellow agrégation students at the Sorbonne in the late ’40s. Further showing his strange journey through the history of philosophy, his only published monograph for nearly a decade was an anti-transcendental reading of Hume at a time in France when phenomenology reigned. Such an itinerant path made it easy to take Deleuze at his word as a self-professed practitioner of “minor philosophy.” Yet look at Deleuze’s outcasts now! His initiation into the pantheon even bought admission for relatively forgotten figures such as sociologist Gabriel Tarde. Deleuze’s popularity thus raises a thorny question for us today: how do we continue the minor Deleuzian line when Deleuze has become a “major thinker”? For me, the first step is to separate Deleuze (and Guattari) from his commentators. I see two popular joyous interpretations of Deleuze in the canon: unreconstructed Deleuzians committed to liberating flows, and realists committed to belief in this world. The first position repeats the language of molecular revolution, becoming, schizos, transversality, and the like. Some even use the terms without transforming them! The resulting monotony seals Deleuze and Guattari’s fate as a wooden tongue used by people still living in the ’80s. Such calcification of their concepts is an especially grave injustice because Deleuze quite consciously shifted terminology from book to book to avoid this very outcome. Don’t get me wrong, I am deeply indebted to the early work on Deleuze! I take my insistence on the Marxo-Freudian core of Deleuze and Guattari from one of their earliest Anglophone commentators, Eugene Holland, who I sought out to direct my dissertation. But for me, the Tiqqun line “the revolution was molecular, and so was the counter-revolution” perfectly depicts the problem of advocating molecular politics. Why? Today’s techniques of control are now molecular. The result is that control societies have emptied the molecular thinker’s only bag of tricks (Bifo is a good test case here), which leaves us with a revolution that only goes one direction: backward. I am equally dissatisfied by realist Deleuzians who delve deep into the early strata of A Thousand Plateaus and away from the “infinite speed of thought” that motivates What is Philosophy? I’m thinking of the early incorporations of dynamical systems theory, the ’90s astonishment over everything serendipitously looking like a rhizome, the mid-00s emergence of Speculative Realism, and the ongoing “ontological” turn. Anyone who has readManuel DeLanda will know this exact dilemma of materiality versus thought. He uses examples that slow down Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts to something easily graspable. In his first book, he narrates history as a “robot historian,” and in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, he literally traces the last thousand years of economics, biology, and language back to clearly identifiable technological inventions. Such accounts are dangerously compelling due to their lucidity, but they come at a steep cost: android realism dispenses with Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring subject, which is necessary for a theory of revolution by way of the psychoanalytic insistence on the human ability to overcome biological instincts (e.g. Freud’sInstincts and their Vicissitudes and Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Realist interpretations of Deleuze conceive of the subject as fully of this world. And with it, thought all but evaporates under the weight of this world. Deleuze’s Hume book is an early version of this criticism, but the realists have not taken heed. Whether emergent, entangled, or actant, strong realists ignore Deleuze and Guattari’s point in What is Philosophy? that thought always comes from the outside at a moment when we are confronted by something so intolerable that the only thing remaining is to think. Galloway: The left has always been ambivalent about media and technology, sometimes decrying its corrosive influence (Frankfurt School), sometimes embracing its revolutionary potential (hippy cyberculture). Still, you ditch technical “acceleration” in favor of “escape.” Can you expand your position on media and technology, by way of Deleuze’s notion of the machinic? Culp: Foucault says that an episteme can be grasped as we are leaving it. Maybe we can finally catalogue all of the contemporary positions on technology? The romantic (computer will never capture my soul), the paranoiac (there is an unknown force pulling the strings), the fascist-pessimist (computers will control everything)… Deleuze and Guattari are certainly not allergic to technology. My favorite quote actually comes from the Foucault book in which Deleuze says that “technology is social before it is technical” (6). The lesson we can draw from this is that every social formation draws out different capacities from any given technology. An easy example is from the nomads Deleuze loved so much. Anarcho-primitivists speculate that humans learn oppression with the domestication of animals and settled agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution. Diverging from the narrative, Deleuze celebrates the horse people of the Eurasian steppe described by Arnold Toynbee. Threatened by forces that would require them to change their habitat, Toynbee says, they instead chose to change their habits. The subsequent domestication of the horse did not sew the seeds of the state, which was actually done by those who migrated from the steppes after the last Ice Age to begin wet rice cultivation in alluvial valleys (for more, see James C Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed). On the contrary, the new relationship between men and horses allowed nomadism to achieve a higher speed, which was necessary to evade the raiding-and-trading used by padi-states to secure the massive foreign labor needed for rice farming. This is why the nomad is “he who does not move” and not a migrant (A Thousand Plateaus, 381). Accelerationism attempts to overcome the capitalist opposition of human and machine through the demand for full automation. As such, it peddles in technological Proudhonism that believes one can select what is good about technology and just delete what is bad. The Marxist retort is that development proceeds by its bad side. So instead of flashy things like self-driving cars, the real dot-communist question is: how will Amazon automate the tedious, low-paying jobs that computers are no good at? What happens to the data entry clerks, abusive-content managers, or help desk technicians? Until it figures out who will empty the recycle bin, accelerationism is only a socialism of the creative class. The machinic is more than just machines–it approaches technology as a question of organization. The term is first used by Guattari in a 1968 paper titled “Machine and Structure” that he presented to Lacan’s Freudian School of Paris, a paper that would jumpstart his collaboration with Deleuze. He argues for favoring machine to structure. Structures transform parts of a whole by exchanging or substituting particularities so that every part shares in a general form (in other words, the production of isomorphism). An easy political example is the Leninist Party, which mediates the particularized private interests to form them into the general will of a class. Machines instead treat the relationship between things as a problem of communication. The result is the “control and communication” of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, which connects distinct things in a circuit instead of implanting a general logic. The word “machine” never really caught on but the concept has made inroads in the social sciences, where actor-network theory, game theory, behaviorism, systems theory, and other cybernetic approaches have gained acceptance. Structure or machine, each engenders a different type of subjectivity, and each realizes a different model of communication. The two are found in A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari note two different types of state subject formation: social subjection and machinic enslavement (456-460). While it only takes up a few short pages, the distinction is essential to Bernard Stiegler’s work and has been expertly elaborated by Maurizio Lazzarato in the book Signs and Machines. We are all familiar with molar social subjection synonymous with “agency”–it is the power that results from individuals bridging the gap between themselves and broader structures of representation, social roles, and institutional demands. This subjectivity is well outlined by Lacanians and other theorists of the linguistic turn (Virno, Rancière, Butler, Agamben). Missing from their accounts is machinic enslavement, which treats people as simply cogs in the machine. Such subjectivity is largely overlooked because it bypasses existential questions of recognition or self-identity. This is because machinic enslavement operates at the level of the infra-social or pre-individual through the molecular operators of unindividuated affects, sensations, desires not assigned to a subject. Offering a concrete example, Deleuze and Guattari reference Mumford’s megamachines of surplus societies that create huge landworks by treating humans as mere constituent parts. Capitalism revived the megamachine in the sixteenth century, and more recently, we have entered the “third age” of enslavement marked by the development of cybernetic and informational machines. In place of the pyramids are technical machines that use humans at places in technical circuits where computers are incapable or too costly, e.g. Amazon’sMechanical Turk. I should also clarify that not all machines are bad. Rather, Dark Deleuze only trusts one kind of machine, the war machine. And war machines follow a single trajectory–a line of flight out of this world. A major task of the war machine conveniently aligns with my politics of techno-anarchism: to blow apart the networks of communication created by the state. Galloway: I can’t resist a silly pun, cannon of joy. Part of your project is about resisting a certain masculinist tendency. Is that a fair assessment? How do feminism and queer theory influence your project? Culp: Feminism is hardwired into the tagline for Dark Deleuze through a critique of emotional labor and the exhibition of bodies–“A revolutionary Deleuze for today’s digital world of compulsory happiness, decentralized control, and overexposure.” The major thread I pull through the book is a materialist feminist one: something intolerable about this world is that it demands we participate in its accumulation and reproduction. So how about a different play on words: Sara Ahmed’s feminist killjoy, who refuses the sexual contract that requires women to appear outwardly grateful and agreeable? Or better yet, Joy Division? The name would associate the project with post-punk, its conceptual attack on the mainstream, and the band’s nod to the sexual labor depicted in the novella House of Dolls. My critique of accumulation is also a media argument about connection. The most popular critics of ‘net culture are worried that we are losing ourselves. So on the one hand, we have Sherry Turkle who is worried that humans are becoming isolated in a state of being “alone-together”; and on the other, there is Bernard Stiegler, who thinks that the network supplants important parts of what it means to be human. I find this kind of critique socially conservative. It also victim-blames those who use social media the most. Recall the countless articles attacking women who take selfies as part of self-care regimen or teens who creatively evade parental authority. I’m more interested in the critique of early ’90s ‘net culture and its enthusiasm for the network. In general, I argue that network-centric approaches are now the dominant form of power. As such, I am much more interested in how the rhizome prefigures the digitally-coordinated networks of exploitation that have made Apple, Amazon, and Google into the world’s most powerful corporations. While not a feminist issue on its face, it’s easy to see feminism’s relevance when we consider the gendered division of labor that usually makes women the employees of choice for low-paying jobs in electronics manufacturing, call centers, and other digital industries. Lastly, feminism and queer theory explicitly meet in my critique of reproduction. A key argument of Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus is the auto-production of the real, which is to say, we already live in a “world without us.” My argument is that we need to learn how to hate some of the things it produces. Of course, this is a reworked critique of capitalist alienation and exploitation, which is a system that gives to us (goods and the wage) only because it already stole them behind our back (restriction from the means of subsistence and surplus value). Such ambivalence is the everyday reality of the maquiladora worker who needs her job but may secretly hope that all the factories burn to the ground. Such degrading feelings are the result of the compromises we make to reproduce ourselves. In the book, I give voice to them by fusing together David Halperin and Valerie Traub’s notion of gay shame acting as a solvent to whatever binds us to identity and Deleuze’s shame at not being able to prevent the intolerable. But feeling shame is not enough. To complete the argument, we need to draw out the queer feminist critique of reproduction latent in Marx and Freud. Détourning an old phrase: direct action begins at the point of reproduction. My first impulse is to rely on the punk rock attitude of Lee Edelman and Paul Preciado’s indictment of reproduction. But you are right that they have their masculinist moments, so what we need is something more post-punk–a little less aggressive and a lot more experimental. HopefullyDark Deleuze is that. Galloway: Edelman’s “fuck Annie” is one of the best lines in recent theory. “Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop” (No Future, 29). Your book claims, in essence, that the Fuck Annies are more interesting than the Aleatory Materialists. But how can we escape the long arm of Lucretius? Culp: My feeling is that the politics of aleatory materialism remains ambiguous. Beyond the literal meaning of “joy,” there are important feminist takes on the materialist Spinoza of the encounter that deserve our attention. Isabelle Stengers’s work is among the most comprehensive, though the two most famous are probably Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism and Karen Barad’s agential realism. Curiously, while New Materialism has been quite a boon for the art and design world, its socio-political stakes have never been more uncertain. One would hope that appeals to matter would lend philosophical credence to topical events such as #blacklivesmatter. Yet for many, New Materialism has simply led to a new formalism focused on material forms or realist accounts of physical systems meant to eclipse the “epistemological excesses” of post-structuralism. This divergence was not lost on commentators in the most recent issue of of October, which functioned as a sort of referendum on New Materialism. On the hand, the issue included a generous accounting of the many avenues artists have taken in exploring various “new materialist” directions. Of those, I most appreciated Mel Chen’s reminder that materialism cannot serve as a “get out of jail free card” on the history of racism, sexism, ablism, and speciesism. While on the other, it included the first sustained attack on New Materialism by fellow travelers. Certainly the New Materialist stance of seeing the world from the perspective of “real objects” can be valuable, but only if it does not exclude old materialism’s politics of labor. I draw from Deleuzian New Materialist feminists in my critique of accumulation and reproduction, but only after short-circuiting their world-building. This is a move I learned from Sue Ruddick, whoseTheory, Culture & Society article on the affect of the philosopher’s scream is an absolute tour de force. And then there is Graham Burnett’s remark that recent materialisms are like “Etsy kissed by philosophy.” The phrase perfectly crystallizes the controversy, but it might be too hot to touch for at least a decade… Galloway: Let’s focus more on the theme of affirmation and negation, since the tide seems to be changing. In recent years, a number of theorists have turned away from affirmation toward a different set of vectors such as negation, eclipse, extinction, or pessimism. Have we reached peak affirmation? Culp: We should first nail down what affirmation means in this context. There is the metaphysical version of affirmation, such as Foucault’s proud title as a “happy positivist.” In this declaration in Archaeology of Knowledge and “The Order of Discourse,” he is not claiming to be a logical positivist. Rather, Foucault is distinguishing his approach from Sartrean totality, transcendentalism, and genetic origins (his secondary target being the reading-between-the-lines method of Althusserian symptomatic reading). He goes on to formalize this disagreement in his famous statement on the genealogical method, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Despite being an admirer of Sartre, Deleuze shares this affirmative metaphysics with Foucault, which commentators usually describe as an alternative to the Hegelian system of identity, contradiction, determinate negation, and sublation. Nothing about this “happily positivist” system forces us to be optimists. In fact, it only raises the stakes for locating how all the non-metaphysical senses of the negative persist. Affirmation could be taken to imply a simple “more is better” logic as seen in Assemblage Theory and Latourian Compositionalism. Behind this logic is a principle of accumulation that lacks a theory of exploitation and fails to consider the power of disconnection. The Spinozist definition of joy does little to dispel this myth, but it is not like either project has revolutionary political aspirations. I think we would be better served to follow the currents of radical political developments over the last twenty years, which have been following an increasingly negative path. One part of the story is a history of failure. The February 15, 2003 global demonstration against the Iraq War was the largest protest in history but had no effect on the course of the war. More recently, the election of democratic socialist governments in Europe has done little to stave off austerity, even as economists publicly describe it as a bankrupt model destined to deepen the crisis. I actually find hope in the current circuit of struggle and think that its lack of alter-globalization world-building aspirations might be a plus. My cues come from the anarchist black bloc and those of the post-Occupy generation who would rather not pose any demands. This is why I return to the late Deleuze of the “control societies” essay and his advice to scramble the codes, to seek out spaces where nothing needs to be said, and to establish vacuoles of non-communication. Those actions feed the subterranean source of Dark Deleuze‘s darkness and the well from which comes hatred, cruelty, interruption, un-becoming, escape, cataclysm, and the destruction of worlds. Galloway: Does hatred for the world do a similar work for you that judgment or moralism does in other writers? How do we avoid the more violent and corrosive forms of hate? Culp: Writer Antonin Artaud’s attempt “to have done with the judgment of God” plays a crucial role in Dark Deleuze. Not just any specific authority but whatever gods are left. The easiest way to summarize this is “the three deaths.” Deleuze already makes note of these deaths in the preface to Difference and Repetition, but it only became clear to me after I read Gregg Flaxman’s Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy. We all know of Nietzsche’s Death of God. With it, Nietzsche notes that God no longer serves as the central organizing principle for us moderns. Important to Dark Deleuze is Pierre Klossowski’s Nietzsche, who is part of a conspiracy against all of humanity. Why? Because even as God is dead, humanity has replaced him with itself. Next comes the Death of Man, which we can lay at the feet of Foucault. More than any other text, The Order of Things demonstrates how the birth of modern man was an invention doomed to fail. So if that death is already written in sand about to be washed away, then what comes next? Here I turn to the world, worlding, and world-building. It seems obvious when looking at the problems that plague our world: global climate change, integrated world capitalism, and other planet-scale catastrophes. We could try to deal with each problem one by one. But why not pose an even more radical proposition? What if we gave up on trying to save this world? We are already awash in sci-fithat tries to do this, though most of it is incredibly socially conservative. Perhaps now is the time for thinkers like us to catch up. Fragments of Deleuze already lay out the terms of the project. He ends the preface to Different and Repetition by assigning philosophy the task of writing apocalyptic science fiction. Deleuze’s book opens with lightning across the black sky and ends with the world swelling into a single ocean of excess. Dark Deleuze collects those moments and names it the Death of This World. Galloway: Speaking of climate change, I’m reminded how ecological thinkers can be very religious, if not in word then in deed. Ecologists like to critique “nature” and tout their anti-essentialist credentials, while at the same time promulgating tellurian “change” as necessary, even beneficial. Have they simply replaced one irresistible force with another? But your “hatred of the world” follows a different logic… Culp: Irresistible indeed! Yet it is very dangerous to let the earth have the final say. Not only does psychoanalysis teach us that it is necessary to buck the judgment of nature, the is/ought distinction at the philosophical core of most ethical thought refuses to let natural fact define the good. I introduce hatred to develop a critical distance from what is, and, as such, hatred is also a reclamation of the future in that it is a refusal to allow what-is to prevail over what-could-be. Such an orientation to the future is already in Deleuze and Guattari. What else is de-territorialization? I just give it a name. They have another name for what I call hatred: utopia. Speaking of utopia, Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of utopia in What is Philosophy? as simultaneously now-here and no-where is often used by commentators to justify odd compromise positions with the present state of affairs. The immediate reference is Samuel Butler’s 1872 book Erewhon, a backward spelling of nowhere, which Deleuze also references across his other work. I would imagine most people would assume it is a utopian novel in the vein of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. And Erewhon does borrow from the conventions of utopian literature, but only to skewer them with satire. A closer examination reveals that the book is really a jab at religion, Victorian values, and the British colonization of New Zealand! So if there is anything that the now-here of Erewhon has to contribute to utopia, it is that the present deserves our ruthless criticism. So instead of being a simultaneous now-here and no-where, hatred follows from Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion in A Thousand Plateaus to “overthrow ontology” (25). Therefore, utopia is only found in Erewhon by taking leave of the now-here to get to no-where. Galloway: In Dark Deleuze you talk about avoiding “the liberal trap of tolerance, compassion, and respect.” And you conclude by saying that the “greatest crime of joyousness is tolerance.” Can you explain what you mean, particularly for those who might value tolerance as a virtue? Culp: Among the many followers of Deleuze today, there are a number of liberal Deleuzians. Perhaps the biggest stronghold is in political science, where there is a committed group of self-professed radical liberals. Another strain bridges Deleuze with the liberalism of John Rawls. I was a bit shocked to discover both of these approaches, but I suppose it was inevitable given liberalism’s ability to assimilate nearly any form of thought. Hubert Marcuse recognized “repressive tolerance” as the incredible power of liberalism to justify the violence of positions clothed as neutral. The examples Marcuse cites are governments who say they respect democratic liberties because they allow political protest although they ignore protesters by labeling them a special interest group. For those of us who have seen university administrations calmly collect student demands, set up dead-end committees, and slap pictures of protestors on promotional materials as a badge of diversity, it should be no surprise that Marcuse dedicated the essay to his students. An important elaboration on repressive tolerance is Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion. She argues that imperialist US foreign policy drapes itself in tolerance discourse. This helps diagnose why liberal feminist groups lined up behind the US invasion of Afghanistan (the Taliban is patriarchal) and explains how a mere utterance of ISIS inspires even the most progressive liberals to support outrageous war budgets. Because of their commitment to democracy, Brown and Marcuse can only qualify liberalism’s universal procedures for an ethical subject. Each criticizes certain uses of tolerance but does not want to dispense with it completely. Deleuze’s hatred of democracy makes it much easier for me. Instead, I embrace the perspective of a communist partisan because communists fight from a different structural position than that of the capitalist. Galloway: Speaking of structure and position, you have a section in the book on asymmetry. Most authors avoid asymmetry, instead favoring concepts like exchange or reciprocity. I’m thinking of texts on “the encounter” or “the gift,” not to mention dialectics itself as a system of exchange. Still you want to embrace irreversibility, incommensurability, and formal inoperability–why? Culp: There are a lot of reasons to prefer asymmetry, but for me, it comes down to a question of political strategy. First, a little background. Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of exchange is important to Anti-Oedipus, which was staged through a challenge to Claude Lévi-Strauss. This is why they shift from the traditional Marxist analysis of mode of production to an anthropological study of anti-production, for which they use the work of Pierre Clastres and Georges Bataille to outline non-economic forms of power that prevented the emergence of capitalism. Contemporary anthropologists have renewed this line of inquiry, for instance, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who argues in Cannibal Metaphysics that cosmologies differ radically enough between peoples that they essentially live in different worlds. The cannibal, he shows, is not the subject of a mode of production but a mode of predation. Those are not the stakes that interest me the most. Consider instead the consequence of ethical systems built on the gift and political systems of incommensurability. The ethical approach is exemplified by Derrida, whose responsibility to the other draws from the liberal theological tradition of accepting the stranger. While there is distance between self and other, it is a difference that is bridged through the democratic project of radical inclusion, even if such incorporation can only be aporetically described as a necessary-impossibility. In contrast, the politics of asymmetry uses incommensurability to widen the chasm opened by difference. It offers a strategy for generating antagonism without the formal equivalence of dialectics and provides an image of revolution based on fundamental transformation. The former can be seen in the inherent difference between the perspective of labor and the perspective of capital, whereas the latter is a way out of what Guy Debord calls “a perpetual present.” Galloway: You are exploring a “dark” Deleuze, and I’m reminded how the concepts of darkness and blackness have expanded and interwoven in recent years in everything from afro-pessimism to black metal theory (which we know is frighteningly white). How do you differentiate between darkness and blackness? Or perhaps that’s not the point? Culp: The writing on Deleuze and race is uneven. A lot of it can be blamed on the imprecise definition of becoming. The most vulgar version of becoming is embodied by neoliberal subjects who undergo an always-incomplete process of coming more into being (finding themselves, identifying their capacities, commanding their abilities). The molecular version is a bit better in that it theorizes subjectivity as developing outside of or in tension with identity. Yet the prominent uses of becoming and race rarely escaped the postmodern orbit of hybridity, difference, and inclusive disjunction–the White Man’s face as master signifier, miscegenation as anti-racist practice, “I am all the names of history.” You are right to mention afro-pessimism, as it cuts a new way through the problem. As I’ve written elsewhere, Frantz Fanon describes being caught between “infinity and nothingness” in his famous chapter on the fact of blackness in Black Skin White Masks. The position of infinity is best championed by Fred Moten, whose black fugitive is the effect of an excessive vitality that has survived five hundred years of captivity. He catches fleeting moments of it in performances of jazz, art, and poetry. This position fits well with the familiar figures of Deleuzo-Guattarian politics: the itinerant nomad, the foreigner speaking in a minor tongue, the virtuoso trapped in-between lands. In short: the bastard combination of two or more distinct worlds. In contrast, afro-pessimism is not the opposite of the black radical tradition but its outside. According to afro-pessimism, the definition of blackness is nothing but the social death of captivity. Remember the scene of subjection mentioned by Fanon? During that nauseating moment he is assailed by a whole series of cultural associations attached to him by strangers on the street. “I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin”” (112). The lesson that afro-pessimism draws from this scene is that cultural representations of blackness only reflect back the interior of white civil society. The conclusion is that combining social death with a culture of resistance, such as the one embodied by Fanon’s mentor Aimé Césaire, is a trap that leads only back to whiteness. Afro-pessimism thus follows the alternate route of darkness. It casts a line to the outside through an un-becoming that dissolves the identity we are give as a token for the shame of being a survivor. Galloway: In a recent interview the filmmaker Haile Gerima spoke about whiteness as “realization.” By this he meant both realization as such–self-realization, the realization of the self, the ability to realize the self–but also the more nefarious version as “realization through the other.” What’s astounding is that one can replace “through” with almost any other preposition–for, against, with, without, etc.–and the dynamic still holds. Whiteness is the thing that turns everything else, including black bodies, into fodder for its own realization. Is this why you turn away from realization toward something like profanation? And is darkness just another kind of whiteness? Culp: Perhaps blackness is to the profane as darkness is to the outside. What is black metal if not a project of political-aesthetic profanation? But as other commentators have pointed out, the politics of black metal is ultimately telluric (e.g. Benjamin Noys’s “‘Remain True to the Earth!’: Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal”). The left wing of black metal is anarchist anti-civ and the right is fascist-nativist. Both trace authority back to the earth that they treat as an ultimate judge usurped by false idols. The process follows what Badiou calls “the passion for the real,” his diagnosis of the Twentieth Century’s obsession with true identity, false copies, and inauthentic fakes. His critique equally applies to Deleuzian realists. This is why I think it is essential to return to Deleuze’s work on cinema and the powers of the false. One key example is Orson Welles’s F for Fake. Yet my favorite is the noir novel, which he praises in “The Philosophy of Crime Novels.” The noir protagonist never follows in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes or other classical detectives’s search for the real, which happens by sniffing out the truth through a scientific attunement of the senses. Rather, the dirty streets lead the detective down enough dead ends that he proceeds by way of a series of errors. What noir reveals is that crime and the police have “nothing to do with a metaphysical or scientific search for truth” (82). The truth is rarely decisive in noir because breakthroughs only come by way of “the great trinity of falsehood”: informant-corruption-torture. The ultimate gift of noir is a new vision of the world whereby honest people are just dupes of the police because society is fueled by falsehood all the way down. To specify the descent to darkness, I use darkness to signify the outside. The outside has many names: the contingent, the void, the unexpected, the accidental, the crack-up, the catastrophe. The dominant affects associated with it are anticipation, foreboding, and terror. To give a few examples, H. P. Lovecraft’s scariest monsters are those so alien that characters cannot describe them with any clarity, Maurice Blanchot’s disaster is the Holocaust as well as any other event so terrible that it interrupts thinking, and Don DeLillo’s “airborne toxic event” is an incident so foreign that it can only be described in the most banal terms. Of Deleuze and Guattari’s many different bodies without organs, one of the conservative varieties comes from a Freudian model of the psyche as a shell meant to protect the ego from outside perturbations. We all have these protective barriers made up of habits that help us navigate an uncertain world–that is the purpose of Guattari’s ritornello, that little ditty we whistle to remind us of the familiar even when we travel to strange lands. There are two parts that work together, the refrain and the strange land. The refrains have only grown yet the journeys seem to have ended. I’ll end with an example close to my own heart. Deleuze and Guattari are being used to support new anarchist “pre-figurative politics,” which is defined as seeking to build a new society within the constraints of the now. The consequence is that the political horizon of the future gets collapsed into the present. This is frustrating for someone like me, who holds out hope for a revolutionary future that ceases the million tiny humiliations that make up everyday life. I like J. K. Gibson-Graham’s feminist critique of political economy, but community currencies, labor time banks, and worker’s coops are not my image of communism. This is why I have drawn on the gothic for inspiration. A revolution that emerges from the darkness holds the apocalyptic potential of ending the world as we know it. Works Cited

• Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
• Artaud, Antonin. To Have Done With The Judgment of God. 1947. Live play, Boston: Exploding Envelope, c1985. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHtrY1UtwNs.
• Badiou, Alain. The Century. 2005. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007.
• Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
• Bataille, Georges. “The Notion of Expenditure.” 1933. In Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, translated by Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovin, and Donald M. Leslie Jr., 167-81. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
• Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887. Boston: Ticknor & co., 1888.
• Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. 1980. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
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  taken from boundary2org

It has become fashionable to declare that the age of post-structuralism is at an end, and many a meditation has been proposed on our possibly living in a “post-deleuzian” epoch. Such talk seems to be situating Deleuze in a chronology where citing Deleuze 20 years ago had a certain meaning and value, that it can no longer have today. Typically, various good or not so good options are envisaged (speculative realism, transcendental materialism, or even object-oriented ontology) as trying to go beyond the language of the classical subject but to retain some of its pathos, preserving a closeness to experiential narratives invoking the philosophical affects of wonder, fascination, and enchantment. Some thinkers advocate the figure of the cyborg, not in the sense of a naive or scientistic phantasm of technological positivity, but in that of a self-reflexive cyborg incarnating the negative dialectics of the non-All. This figure sometimes seems to be the best solution as it embodies not just the material hybridity of human and machine, but also the ontological hybridity of virtual and actual. Contrary to a popular misconception, negativity is not a problem for Deleuze, and is omnipresent in his work, being concentrated especially in the prefix “de-” (decoding, desubjectivating, destratifying, deterritorialising, etc. ), even to the point of him saying that “deterritorialisation comes first”. This solution closely resembles Deleuze’s own in NEGOTIATIONS, where he says about writing, but it is also applicable to to thinking, “Writing is a flux among other fluxes, and which has no privilege in relaton to the others” (my translation). “Cyborg” belongs to the same register as “desiring-machine”, an ambiguous overcoming of the dualism between life and machine, that corresponds to the time (to the conceptual time, and not necessarily to the chronologically situated time) of ANTI-OEDIPUS. As Deleuze tells us, there is no such thing as a mono-flux, all fluxes are necessarily hybrid. Note: Deleuze always claimed that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with dualism as long as it constitutes a preliminary step towards a more encompassing pluralism. François Zourabichvili defends rather an “ahistorical” or “untimely” approach to Deleuze, that avoids the trap of the dictatorship of chronology:

If our approach was resolutely ahistorical, it’s because we wanted to bring forth the systematics of Deleuze while avoiding the overly coarse chronological traps (in many respects, for example, the turn of ANTI-OEDIPUS is a trompe l’oeil, since the true renewal of concepts – becoming-animal, refrain, war-machine, etc. , takes place only later). LA PHILOSOPHIE DE DELEUZE, (6, my translation).

My provisional conclusion is that there is no reason to suppose that we are necessarily in a post-deleuzian epoch simply because we come after Deleuze. Historical chronology does not always coincide with the time of the concept. Deleuze’s thought was already “post-deleuzian”, and I am very wary of neat little chronological schemas that weaken a thought such as that of Deleuze by tying it too closely to a specific historical context. The figure of the cyborg seems to be one possible exemplification of Deleuze’s figure of the “spiritual automaton”. This is a concept that appears in the cinema books, but in fact these books are not primarily about the cinema at all. They constitute, according to Deleuze, “a taxonomy, an essay in the classification of images and signs”. At one point in his lectures Deleuze remarks that you can assign all sorts of things, for example the people you meet, their personalities and their lives, to the different categories of his taxonomy. So there is an application to situations lived in the real world. The taxonomy has existential import and force, serving to interrupt the stereotypes of our habitual narratives and to re-conceptualise the situations that we are presented with. The concept is one mode of the intervention of the power of the false, in the disruption of the sensory-motor schema and of its chronological time. The advent and proliferation of what William Connolly calls “durational” (as opposed to chronological) time, of becomings, and of incommensurable cuts and leaps, are only some of the consequences. One of Deleuze’s durational categories is the “spiritual automaton”. The apparent contradiction in terms is explained by the attempt to describe an action (and a thought) that takes place outside the clichés and stereotypes that regiment our actions in the familiar situations of habitual experience, inside the sensori-motor scheme. The spiritual automaton is a type of awareness and action that awakes in us at the disruption of our routines and the interruption of our ordinary sensori-motor schemas, when a different sort of automaticity is needed to respond to the new situation and not just react to it. It proceeds, if you will, by an inventive upsurge of automaticity – that is to say of affects and actions ungoverned by (or even unstructured by) the category of the autonomous subject. Donna Haraway’s cyborg is one figuration of this creative or visionary automaticity, as is Ted Friedman’s centaur, or Dreyfus and Kelly’s skilful master, and William Connolly’s seer. It is interesting to see that Zourabichvili’s chronology is the reverse of that propounded by the advocates of “after post-stucturalism”. For these new philosophers, espousing Deleuze 20 years ago had a certain relevance that it no longer has today. On the contrary, for Zourabichvili, his book DELEUZE, A PHILOSOPHY OF THE EVENT (1994) was published in a period:

when it did not go without saying that Deleuze should be regarded as a thinker in his own right, a major thinker of 20th Century philosophy

(cited from the Preface to the re-edition of the book in 2004). He goes on to analyse the various confusions that led to this underestimation of Deleuze: in particular the naive ontological reading that ignores Deleuze’s pluralist subordination of the notion of Being (EST) to AND (ET), and the phenomenological reading that ignores the overflowing not only of the subject but of Being itself by the transcendental field. For Zourabichvili there is no ambiguity in Deleuze’s anti-phenomenological and anti-structuralist stance and Deleuze is totally coherent in carrying through his transcendental project:

his programme: substitution of AND for IS; or, which amounts to the same thing, substitution of becoming for being (7).

We are faced with an interesting terminological choice here. If one thinks that the primacy of Being is constitutive of the very notion of ontology, one will have todeclare that there is no “ontology of Deleuze”. If one sees nothing problematic in the notion of an “ontology of becoming” where Being has no primacy, one may retain the word “ontology”, as Deleuze does, to describe his project. This project is unfinished, but still productive, and its “end” is not in sight.   taken form Agent Swarm  

Music is an un-differentiated language.

Michel Serresⁱ

Nevertheless, and even more clearly, what general economy defines first is the explosive character of this world, carried to the extreme of explosive tension in the present time.

George Batailleⁱⁱ

A theory is self-destroying, in this logico-objective respect, if its content offends against the laws without which theory as such can have no rational, no coherent sense.

Edmund Husserlⁱⁱⁱ

The theoretical reduction is a specular reduction. An old secret heritage of Platonism: the voice, diction, the audible in general (and music) are attainable only by speculation.

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe^iv

Not to be dead and yet no longer alive? … It seems as if the noise here has led me into fantasies. All great noise leads us to move happiness into some quiet distant. When a man stands in the midst of his own noise, in the midst of his own surf of plans and projects then he is apt also to see quiet, magical beings gliding past him and to long for their happiness and seclusion: women. He almost thinks that his better self dwells there among the women, and that in these quiet regions even the loudest surf turns into deathly quiet, and life itself into a dream about life. Yet! Yet! Noble enthusiast, even on the most beautiful sailboat there is a lot of noise, and unfortunately much small and petty noise. The magic and the most powerful effect of women is, in philosophical language, action at a distance, actio in distans; but this requires first of all and above all – distance.

Friedrich Nietzsche^v

0.

Five strong claims which might otherwise constitute the five stars of a constellation, namely, the constellation of desonance where the stars would be cancelling each other so as not to shine, therefore an invisible or a mute constellation. Otherwise – because whatever one does with it, desonance always manages to escape from the specular, and/or also from the audible, when theorized following the lines of the specular. One can suggest a dialectical/speculative schema for it, such as that it is the third term between resonance and dissonance; or one can reproduce the Kantian argument on the thing-in-itself with an intention of redrawing the boundaries of the knowable (as Schopenhauer did once) where desonance can become the secret realm hidden behind everything, which, despite its being unknowable, can be taken over gradually; or one can claim that it is measurable, and scientifically be given a truth and a value; or, finally it can be disguised under different forms, such as noise, yet still discussed within formed/unformed opposition. But one can also and still ask: what is desonance?

Desonance, if it accepts a failure of theorization, is what I would be desonating, or, rather what I would be desonating with. That it has relationships with resonance and dissonance, and therefore with ‘sound’, with the absence or presence of sound is obvious but desonance is first and foremost not related to a crystallisation of a constellation, or to something which is audible or visible, and it cannot be appropriated into resonance-dissonance opposition in a speculative/reductionist schema. For all these reasons above, I think, one can only desonate with desonance, without knowing anything about desonance, and also without knowing whether one is in or out of desonance with desonance. It is so because it is a case of the pre-specular, and also the pre-audible as the quotation from Nietzsche above invites us to a consideration of the question of distance in at least two possible ways: 1) one should keep one’s distance from noise so that the scene becomes specular and therefore is opened to specularization, and/or theorization; 2) one should consider the distance from noise not because of a concern for the specular but because ‘to be standing in the midst of one’s own noise’ brings along such a distancing for, one, being neither dead nor alive, is both in the midst of it and also, the impossibility of experiencing it as such, interrupts both any attempt of speculating about, and also an absolute identification with, it. In other words, noise as Nietzsche puts it, is such a tantalizing force which one is both driven to and thrown back from, in a move which does not allow any figure to assume form.

1. Deleuze

My special interest in The Logic of Sense is related to the ways in which Deleuze gives an account in the last chapters of the book – between twenty-fourth and twenty-sixth series – of a certain passage, ‘a passage from noise to voice’, which he maintains by a special remix of his own philosophy with a particular reading of Leibniz. As I will argue, it is with this remix, marked by an insertion of a ‘continuity’ between the possible and the compossible worlds that Deleuze moves towards positing ‘a passage from noise to voice’, thereby pushing also his concept of ‘paradoxical entity’ towards a certain notion of ‘distance’ (contra what Nietzsche call actio in distans), raising doubts about the non-localizability of the ‘occupant without a place’. This critique will also be important when I will offer a reconsideration of Deleuze’s use of the concept of resonance with respect to the constitution of series, paradoxical entity, and the question of ‘Univocity’.

My guiding questions will therefore be related to the question of the mimetic reformulated on Deleuze’s particular notion of ‘distance’: Is mimesis that which acts as a crypt – in the sense that Abraham and Torok^vi used it – in Deleuzian theory? And, if this is so, is it this crypto-mimetological problem that leads to the upsurging of a situation which I describe as specularization without mimesis, or, mimesis without specularization.

2. The Jump and the Crypt

For Deleuze, the duality of denotation and expression – that which pertains to the sense – is layered on the duality of eating and speaking. As he picks it up from Lewis Carroll, the eating/speaking duality is an either/or situation where eating is ‘the operational model of bodies’, which are corporeal entities, and speaking is ‘the movement of the surface, and of ideational attributes or incorporeal events’^vii. Therefore, this duality brings along its own questions, such as: ‘What is more serious: to speak of food or to eat words’? However, such a question, for Deleuze, also bears witness to the insufficiency of this duality because ‘Things and propositions are less in a situation of radical duality and more on the two sides of a frontier represented by sense. This frontier does not mingle or reunite them (for there is no more monism here than dualism); it is rather something along the line of an articulation of their difference: body/language’^viii. Foregrounding sense as that frontier between things and propositions enables Deleuze to shift the eating/speaking duality to a less sharp distinction between denotation and expression. If denotation is related to the edible nature of things, expression is related to the impassibility of events, or to the impenetrability of incorporeal entities^ix. Therefore, the duality is not between things and language, or whether we eat or speak, but between two dimensions of the proposition: ‘denotation of things and the expression of sense’^x.

As the readers of Deleuze know it too well, sometimes Deleuze proceeds at a maddening speed that it becomes almost impossible to observe how quickly things develop. Just as it is the case in this series – ‘The Fourth Series of Dualities’ – we do not follow the jump, the shift; and all of a sudden, without given reason, this duality is forgotten, swallowed, or eaten, consumed, or simply disappeared. What is forgotten in this case is something which has been utterly important for the discussion – the philosophical duality of bodies and language, or things and propositions which is directly related to the question of mimesis and representation.

The jump first takes place almost invisibly and only when Deleuze realises the jump he gives us some explanation, or a reason for that:

It is to reach a region where language no longer has any relation to that which it denotes, but only to that which it expresses, that is, to sense. This is the final displacement of the duality: it has now moved inside the proposition^xi.

So that the question is no more between things and language, or between things and how we represent them in language, but between denotation and expression, which are separated from each other with sense acting as a frontier between the two. When in the former series, sense was described as that which ‘turns one side toward things and one side toward propositions’^xii, now it assumes the same function between denotation and expression.

Without doubt, this is a displacement and Deleuze acknowledges it so that we cannot conclude that he oversees the jump. However, despite the jump’s acknowledgement as displacement, one thing still remains and disturbs. As the readers of it know, The Logic of Sense is through and through a book about representation and an attempt at devising new ways to look at it from the viewpoint of ‘sense’ through an overturning of Platonism, which Deleuze concentrates on only at the end of the book, in ‘Appendix 1: Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy’. Such moments of ‘displacement’ take place also in other series in the book, and especially when the question of mimesis creates problems for Deleuze’s theory of sense. But particularly in this case, since it takes place early in the book, this displacement is utterly important for it points to a privileging of one question over the other: How does language represent on the basis of mimesis? How does language represent on the basis of simulacra? As the ‘Simulacrum’ chapter bears witness to, what I mean here with privileging is the privileging of the latter over the former question.

Yet despite all the effort that goes into the constitution of such means of privileging, I would like to argue that this always-already swallowed, consumed, eaten question – how does language represent on the basis of mimesis? – remains intact, and more than a displacement, it acts as a crypt especially when questions flare up with respect to the ‘relationship’ between series which assumes a form of ‘resonance’; with respect to the ‘paradoxical entity’, and to the ‘topology’ of sense. The incorporation, if we follow Abraham and Torok, once it takes place, will disappear without a trace and will resist any effort of determination^xiii. While on the one hand it can be argued that this is actually what also happens in The Logic of Sense on the level of the duality of the proposition, the duality of expression and denotation, on the other, the crypt, or rather the crypt of all crypts, once incorporated, will remain nonlocalizable (atopological), and will disturb the momentary resonances between the series, and the determinations of sense as being topological^xiv. In other words, to say that there was a ‘displacement’ will not actually stop that which is incorporated from acting as a crypt, for, as I discussed it elsewhere^xv, even simulacrum is what obeys the rule of mimesis, that is, a certain model/copy relationship (and, hence, it is a ‘specularization’).

3. ‘occupant without a place’

To understand paradoxical entity we should dwell a bit more on sense and serialization. In the ‘Fifth Series of Sense’ Deleuze gives a detailed account of sense as being that which is ‘always presupposed as soon as I begin to speak’^xvi. However, the sense of what I say is not what I am able to state due to my impotence ‘to say at the same time something and its meaning’^xvii. Hence, whenever I want to state the sense of what I say I get into an infinite regress which yields to the infinite proliferation of two series: ‘the name which denotes something and the name which denotes the sense of this name’^xviii. If this defines the first paradox related to sense, the second finds its expression in the attempt at devising ‘a way of avoiding this infinite regress. It is to fix the proposition, to immobilise it, just long enough to extract from it its sense’^xix. Yet, when we do that we are face to face with one of the main characteristics of sense: ‘the suspension of both affirmation and negation’^xx. Thus, the sterility or the neutrality of sense does not allow one to isolate it from being that which is expressed by the proposition, and hence, as that which does not exist outside the proposition: therefore sense is an aliquid, not being but non-being. Sense is the double of proposition which escapes determination whenever one stops denoting it with another name and tries to isolate it. The third paradox of the sense, which is already mentioned, is its neutrality, or its not being affected by affirmation or negation.

As all the three paradoxes bear witness to, ‘sense’ is that which precedes all categorization, and all the determinations because a determination is that which can be layered on a simple logic of binarism, or opposition. Despite all the three situations that go into the constitution of sense as paradox, sense is also that which has a way of being outside that which the classical logic defines as contradiction: sense is not that which ‘is’ and ‘is not’ at the same time. And this brings us to the fourth paradox of the sense for here we are confronted with its state of being ‘absurd’, or an ‘impossible object’. Sense, like those impossible objects, is outside of being, it is an extra-being; it precedes all signification and denotation and has the capacity of taking part in every proposition ‘with its power of genesis in relation to the dimensions of the proposition’^xxi. Sense, therefore, is the origin, the generator of each duality and it acts as a frontier which separates two series which are heterogeneous in themselves.

It is right here in this context, in the context of serialization and the question of the relationship between the signifier and the signified that Deleuze, by referring to Lacan’s reading of Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter’ offers a special notion of a paradoxical entity as an occupant without a place ^xxii. According to his theorization, any two series do not have any priority over one another, they are simultaneous, but they can be ‘originary and derived in relation to one another’^xxiii, which means series get into a model-copy relationship, but no sooner they are put into this relationship than they shift positions due to the principle of displacement. Then, the question arises: does it mean that there is at least not one single moment of mimesis? Answer: Yes, they converge but only to diverge the next moment again on the principle of displacement. Question: So, isn’t there, then, at least a momentary synthesis between two series? Answer: Yes, but this is a synthesis of two types at the same time: conjunctive and disjunctive syntheses which are again organized by the principle of displacement.

However, even this definition, the ‘occupant without a place’, cannot suppress the doubts whether it is a topological determination or not because although it works on the principle of displacement it does not make the signifier and the signifier ultimately unattainable. Since one of the two is bound to be the first in this scheme, they are at least momentarily localizable for otherwise it would be impossible to talk about the signifier and the signified on the basis of conjunctive and disjunctive synthesis.

4. Paradoxical Entity and the ‘Step-back’

‘Twelfth Series of the Paradox’ is where Deleuze puts forward the ‘paradox’ as an originary point which thought should be capable of thinking if it is going to be recreational: ‘Paradoxes are recreational only when they are considered as initiatives of thought’^xxiv.

I would like to offer that we should read this paragraph together with another one from Difference and Repetition. This is where Deleuze is discussing the doxa and the unthought with a reference to Heidegger in the chapter ‘The Image of Thought’:

We recall Heidegger’s profound texts showing that as long as thought continues to presuppose its own good nature and good will, in the form of a common sense, a ratio, a Cogitatio nature universalis, it will think nothing at all but remain a prisoner to opinion, frozen in an abstract possibility …: “Man can think in the sense that he possesses the possibility to do so. This possibility alone, however, is no guarantee to us that we are capable of thinking”^xxv.

The text that Deleuze refers to is Heidegger’s What is called Thinking?, and in a footnote he also adds:

It is true that Heidegger retains the theme of a desire or a philia, of an analogy – or rather, a homology – between thought and that which is to be thought. The point is that he retains the primacy of the Same, even if this is supposed to include and comprehend difference as such – whence the metaphors of gift which are substituted for those of violence. In all these senses, Heidegger does not abandon what we called above the subjective presuppositions. As can be seen in Being and Time, there is in effect a pre-ontological and implicit understanding of being, even though, Heidegger specifies, the explicit conception must not follow from it^xxvi.

In the first paragraph, there is obviously a claim to approach the unthought but at the same time, in face of its being ‘ineffable and unthinkable’, there is also a drawback from it. In other words, if the ‘initiative of thought’ is paradoxical, it should remain tantalizing, without producing a determinable origin, or, say, a fixed image of thought. In the second and third quotations, Deleuze is quite aware of the parallels he draws between Heidegger’s and his own position on the question of the thought and the unthought, so that he makes it clear that what he calls the initiative of thought should not be understood as that which can be thought: for Deleuze it is a paradox, an impossible object, which cannot be thought. On the level of the mimetic, this is what I define as ‘specularization without mimesis’, or, ‘mimesis without specularization’, which has no moment of ‘appearance’.

As is well known, Heidegger’s programme is determined by an attempt at distancing thought from Hegelian dialectics, or to put it briefly, from a moment of aufhebung which has determined the relationship between the thought and the unthought in a dialectical, speculative scheme. Heidegger’s approach to the question whether thought can think of that which has not been thought differs from Hegel in the way he produces the difference between Being and beings^xxvii. After quoting Heidegger at length, Lacoue-Labarthe questions in his ‘Obliteration’^xxviii the difference between the aufhebung and the ‘step-back’ – the Schritt zurück : a certain notion of aufhebung in reverse, a Hegelianism backwards – on the grounds that if the step-back presupposes a separation between the thought and the unthought, ‘How can one make sure that the unthought will not be the same thing as what absolute thinking – despite the presence “next to us” already of the Absolute, despite the will to parousia of the Absolute – must gather “in the end,” after having waited’^xxix? And as one follows Lacoue-Labarthe’s tracing of Heidegger’s shifts between deciding and not deciding about such a moment of appearance, the appearance of the difference as such – in the absence of which ‘thinking itself runs the risk of being “nothing”’^xxx – one unavoidably is reminded of how Deleuze in the three succeeding paragraphs above follows a similar route, or how he, as he corrects himself in the footnote, battles for not being defeated by a surrender to such a moment of reconciliation which reverts Heidegger’s step-back to aufhebung once again..

Lacoue-Labarthe locates the result of such a moment of ‘appearance’, in Identity and Difference:

There is thus always also, in spite of everything, a decisive ‘moment’ – and this does not fail to occur in Identity and Difference – where it becomes necessary, in order to mark the separation, to envision and to posit difference as such, to place difference itself in a confrontation from which it can present itself^xxxi.

And hence, difference becomes localizable, something which marks a passage from non-being to being, or rather, a passage from absence to presence. The passage, the abyss is thus jumped over at the cost of a reappropriation of what is supposed to have disappropriated by the step-back.

5. ‘from noise to voice’

Up to now in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze has told us the relationship between the series, the resonance between them, the constitution of events, actualization and counter-actualization of the events, the disjunctive synthesis, and its affirmation, etc., and now the question is how to theorize the person (if it is not going to be an ‘individual’) with respect to his theory of the event. The twenty-fifth series is thus called ‘Univocity’, and univocity in Deleuze helps to give freedom to all the compossible worlds so that the ‘individual’ would reorganise his/her relationship not only with this world, but with all the compossible ones. Therefore, it is purely a question of form, that is, how to transcend the question of the form, known as the ‘individual’^xxxii. Such a transcendence, if it is possible, requires in the first place, radicalizing the ‘image of thought’ so that there will no more be a form on which the constitution of the individual as such is based. In other words, what is known as individual will now be constituted on the basis of simulacra and thus the individual will be freed from being shaped by any predetermined model. On the other hand, if such a project means to open up the individual to multiplicities it will also have to deal with the question of ontology because even if Deleuze explains it with positing pre-individual singularities, they will nevertheless require, an appearance, a moment of being, or, rather, a passage from absence to presence. Therefore, as Deleuze puts it:

Philosophy merges with ontology, but ontology merges with the univocity of Being. … The univocity of Being signifies that Being is Voice that it is said, and that it is said in one and the same ‘sense’ of everything about which it is said. It occurs, therefore, as a unique event for everything that happens to the most diverse things, Eventum tantum for all events, the ultimate form of all the forms which remain disjointed in it, but which bring about the resonance and the ramification of their disjunction^xxxiii.

In The Logic of Sense we are somehow familiar with the concept of ‘resonance’, because whenever Deleuze writes about the relationship between the series, he always refers to it, and resonance is explained only in the thirty-fourth series, as follows: ‘Let us call the resonance “intrinsic beginning”’^xxxiv. Although, Deleuze gives resonance such a function, that is, a function which almost verges on ontology in an obscure fashion, it is still difficult to see why ontology should be explained by accounting for a Voice. However, it remains as a difficulty only until when one thinks of resonance, its being an ‘intrinsic beginning’ in relationship to Voice, and, basically, with respect to the question of ‘voice’ in the univocity of Being. In other words, if univocity signifies an event, an event of all events, it also points to a concern for genesis, where resonance can be rethought as ‘intrinsic beginning’, a generic force, which makes genesis itself possible by triggering a passage between ‘that which comes before voice’ and voice. Yes, that’s true, if one explains Being by Voice – which is not something specular but audible – one can, to a certain extent, overcome the difficulties that will be posed by an attempt at answering the question of ontology in a specular scheme. Even so, this does not prevent this discourse from being populated by questions such as: if the coming-into-being of resonance, and its necessity is explained by Deleuze as ‘intrinsic beginning’, doesn’t such a beginning also require a passage from ‘that which comes before voice’ to voice (no matter if one defines it also as ‘neutral’ or ‘extra-Being’^xxxv)? Can one be saved from a specular scheme, and from ontology, even when one is dealing with the problem of Being or unity not in a specular but an ‘aural’ scheme?

Similar questions culminate in the ‘Twenty-Sixth Series of Language’, for here all the questions which have been actually gravitating towards the possibility of such a passage find an origin which they have been pointing to. Therefore, Deleuze opens this series with a conviction that ‘events make language possible’^xxxvi, and he immediately adds:

But making possible does not mean causing to begin. … To render language possible thus signifies assuring that sounds are not confused with the sonorous qualities of things, with the sound effects of bodies, or with their actions and passions. What renders language possible is that which separates sounds from bodies and organizes them into propositions, freeing them for the expressive function. It is always a mouth which speaks, but the sound is no longer the noise of a body which eats – a pure orality – in order to become the manifestation of a subject expressing itself. … And in truth, without the event all of this would be only noise – and an indistinct noise^xxxvii.

And, in the next series, ‘Twenty-Seventh Series of Orality’, he also adds:

We constantly relive in our dreams the passage from noise to voice.^xxxviii

So, obviously, for Deleuze, there is such a moment of absolute separation, a passage, between sounds and sonorous elements (noise), made possible by the events. And events, not only make possible the language, but also the subject. From now on, a decision which was there, and suspending since the beginning of The Logic of Sense is thus given an ‘appearance’; ‘specularization without mimesis’, or ‘mimesis without specularization’ returns to a moment of appearance, making possible also the history of the psyche, which Deleuze reconstructs by reading his own theory of the sense and the event into psychoanalysis, basically into the works of Melanie Klein, and Jacques Lacan.

6. Distance

I would like to stop here, and think about what might probably have led to such a passage in Deleuze. Not because it is thinkable, or locatable with an exact clarity of thought but at least, this can be shown without making appear what cannot appear, considering the ‘distance’ we referred to in Nietzsche in the beginning. But at the same time we should also be reminded of the crypt that we mentioned at various junctures in this essay.

This is the twenty-fourth series, and the series is about the ‘communication of the events’. Here, we find Deleuze celebrating Leibniz as the ‘first theoretician of the event’, for it was him who saw for the first time that ‘ “compossible” and “incompossible” cannot be reduced to the identical and contradictory, which govern only the possible and the impossible’^xxxix. If compossibility is defined, on a pre-individual level, by the convergence of the series, the incompossibility is defined by the divergence of the series. Yet Leibniz made use of these definitions only to the extent that the compossible worlds, being incompossible with the best possible of all the worlds (our world), should therefore diverge from it. Hence, ‘He made a negative use of divergence of disjunction – one of exclusion’^xl. So, Deleuze’s critique of Leibniz is directed to the negative use of divergence by Leibniz, and therefore he is concerned with a Nietzschean affirmation of divergences where the God, being dead, does not chose anymore the best possible world. Deleuze asks: ‘But what does it mean to make divergence and disjunction the objects of affirmation’^xli? Of course, it means the irreducibility of the difference to the same and identical:

We are no longer faced with an identity of contraries, which would still be inseparable as such from a movement of the negative and of exclusion. We are rather faced with a positive distance of different elements: no longer to identify two contraries with the same, but to affirm their distance as that which relates one to the other insofar as they are ‘different’. The idea of a positive distance (and not as an annulled or overcome distance) appears to us essential, since it permits the measuring of contraries through their finite difference instead of equating difference with a measureless contrariety, and contrariety with an identity which is itself infinite. It is not difference which must ‘go as far as’ contradiction, as Hegel thought in his desire to accommodate the negative; it is the contradiction which must reveal the nature of its difference as it follows the distance corresponding to it. The idea of positive distance belongs to topology and to the surface^xlii.

The positive distance, therefore, is finite, but its finitude, instead of foregrounding a contradiction which can be overcome by means of a dialectical synthesis (for which measure gains importance insofar as the distance can be overcome so that the contradiction can be resolved) puts forward distance as distance where the difference between two things is preserved, and, made open to topological determination, so that it can appear and be measured. And, hence, Deleuze’s illustration of the matter with Nietzsche’s perspectivism, or his capacity to reverse the perspectives: health in sickness and sickness in health, where the two states are not seen as contraries in a dialectical scheme, but as a means of preserving distance as distance, as a measurable distance between two states, not only in order to observe their convergence but also their divergence, and thus affirm their difference. So, having a perspective and a capacity to reverse it is a matter of the irreducibility of the two different divergent elements as a result of which one gains a point of view, in Leibnizean fashion, not from the point of view of oneself, but from the point of views of things themselves. All this, of course, with one radical difference from Leibniz where one observes only the affirmation of those that converge whereas in Nietzsche ‘the point of view is opened onto a divergence which it affirms . … Each term becomes the means of going all the way to the end of another, by following the entire distance. Nietzsche’s perspective – his perspectivism – is a much more profound art than Leibniz’s point of view, for divergence is no longer a principle of exclusion, an disjunction no longer a means of separation. Incompossibility is now a means of communication’^xliii. And also, one should add, opening the point of view onto divergence erases the discontinuity between the possible and the incompossible, and therefore a maximum continuity is maintained not only between things in the most possible world but between all the worlds be it possible and/or incompossible.

When one considers this discussion on distance with respect to the actio in distans we quoted from Nietzsche in the beginning of this essay, all is fine, except one thing that we skipped when we were reading Deleuze’s comment on distance. In the same paragraph, after celebrating Nietzsche’s perspectivism on health and illness, Deleuze also comments on what happens to this perspectivism after Nietzsche goes mad:

Conversely, Nietzsche does not lose his health when he is sick, but when he can no longer affirm the distance, when he is no longer able, by means of his health, to establish sickness as a point of view on health (then, as the Stoic say, the role is over, the play has ended)^xliv.

In contrast to the situation I defined at the opening of this essay with regard to actio in distans, doesn’t Deleuze seem to be preferring here positive distance where even paradoxical entity becomes localizable to ‘“to be standing in the midst of one’s own noise” which brings along such a distancing for, one, being neither dead nor alive, is both in the midst of it and also, the impossibility of experiencing it as such, interrupts both any attempt of speculating about, and also an absolute identification with, it’? We will argue that it is actually the concept of positive distance, maintained by inserting a maximum continuity between possible and compossible worlds, which endows Deleuzian passages with a moment of appearance, and paradoxical entity with localisibility, deconstructing at the same time the claim to ‘specularization without mimesis’ or ‘mimesis without specularization’, with all the force of the crypto-mimetologic. Affirmation? Of only ‘the occupant without a place’, the purely localizable?

On the other hand: Not to be dead and yet no longer alive.

Can this be the legacy for us?

Can it be a matter of not knowing anymore whether one is sick or healthy rather than having a perspective? Can it be a matter of desonance where one can no longer measure neither distance nor sickness and health?

But can one preserve the actio in distans when one posits a passage from ‘noise to voice’?

7. Resonance/Desonance

Now, let’s go back to Deleuze, and pay attention to this term: ‘resonance’ once again. Why do Deleuze employ this word whenever it is a matter of theorising the relationship between series and the paradoxical entity^xlv?

As will be remembered, there were several occasions before where we could have raised the following question: is there in the concept of resonance, as it is used by Deleuze, a presumption of a passage from noise to sound/voice? In such occasions, we have also observed that the univocity of being, the event of all the events, is determined by a passage from noise to voice, and the resonance is that which establishes itself by distributing this passage to all the different series. One conclusion to be drawn here is therefore as follows: without resonance there will be no passage, and hence, without resonance, there will be no Univocity either. Or, from a different perspective, since, whenever Deleuze mentions resonance it is also used as a force of the paradoxical entity – that is, the paradoxical entity, by ‘traversing’ the series, ‘causes them to resonate’ – resonance, always-already marked by this passage is, therefore, always too late to arrive the scene.

So my question can be reformulated as follows: Doesn’t the event, the event of all the events – the Univocity – come only after the event, that is after this passage from noise to voice? And isn’t this event, this passage, in Deleuze, actually the event of all events?

What I would like to do with this question is to problematise this passage between noise and sound/voice, but also another passage between a ‘?’ on the one hand, and noise, sound, and voice on the other. I will not call this realm which I point to with a ‘question mark’ the ‘sonorous qualities of things’. What I am alluding to here is of course the difference between a ‘?’, or the difference itself as a ‘question mark’ on the one hand, and noise and sound on the other, which was taken by all the western philosophy of music as a gap which can be surpassed within a specular scheme, or within a ‘metaphysics of presence’, as Derrida would have called it. If this abyss, this difference, is where all specularization falls into a crisis – in other words, if there is always such an appearance, appearance of sound and noise as distinct from this ‘?’ – it is because the speculative thought, although it considers sound to be non-mimetic, which does not represent anything, cannot deal with sound without reducing it to the specular, or rather, to the metaphysics of presence. And, hence the proliferation of passages between this ‘?’ and noise, sound and vocal; and also the passages between ‘noise and song’, ‘noise and sound’, ‘noise and vocal’, ‘sound and vocal’, and so on, in a supplementary scheme.

(Without doubt, this question mark can be given different names. However, the main difficulty here lies exactly at this point: Is that which we have named with a question mark something nameable, something which can be represented with a name, even with a question mark (for we cannot even be sure whether it presents itself as a question … It is, in other words, what behaves like ‘trace’ in Derridaean sense of the term, only assuming here a rhythmical trait – a vibrace? But what is a vibrace?)?

In such a framework, I would like to offer ‘desonance’ not as a concept nor as a name which stands for what comes before the passage from the inaudible to the audible but as that which, acting as a border between the audible and the inaudible is observable only in its effects such as, noise and voice; resonance and dissonance not as couples in binary oppositions but as that which should be thought in a complementary^xlvi relationship. In other words, to ask what makes us capable of distinguishing such passages will probably enable us to look at noise, voice, resonance and dissonance as the effects of desonance which eludestheorization, and as that which can be ‘theorised’ only after the event, only if we take it for granted that such a passage, or all passages, are reducible.

If we can ask this question it is because desonance is not something which can betheorized either as an absolute ‘unknowable’, ‘the thing-in-itself’, or as that which can be appropriated in an Hegelian moment of aufhebung, but something which can only be pointed to, actio in distance, not to its presence, but, by looking at its effects, to the ways in which it constructs and deconstructs any discourse on sound, voice, vocal, resonance and dissonance.

Dissonance and resonance would then be the ‘efficacies’^xlvii of this process, desonance, which is always yet-to-come and is held back at the same time, and which, being the generator of the complementary relationship between the two, does not lend itself to representation in a decidable, localizable, specular fashion. Therefore, if noise, sound, and voice are the sonorous elements which an ear responds to via vibration, desonance cannot be heard, known or measured, but can only be sensed (?) as a vibrace?

I have tried to point to ‘desonance’, and its effects under the light a radical sense of actio in distans, all with an humble intention of opening Deleuzian theory to what I call desonance (of course, with the same question: can desonance be called?).

As a final remark, I would like to quote Michel Serres of Genesis:

What the narrative of Proteus does not tell is the relationship between chaos and form. Who is Proteus when he is no longer water and not yet a panther or a boar? What the narrative says, on the contrary, is that each metamorphosis or phenomenon is an answer to questions, an answer and the absence of an answer to the questioning^xlviii.

What and when is the most disturbing moment then, when one is desonating wildly?

Notes

This essay was first published in Resonances: Deleuze and Guattari, Parallax, ed. Zafer Aracagök, Vol 18, no.1, issue 62, Routledge, 2012, London: United Kingdom.

Foto: Bernhard Weber

Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc's Politique et État chez Deleuze et Guattari: Essai sur le matérialism historico-machinic has been translated into English as State and Politics: Deleuze and Guattari on Marx. In the past twenty years since I first discovered Deleuze and Guattari I have gone from avidly reading everything that came out on them, at first it was a slow trickle, but as the trickle gave way to a gusher of canonization, I have become much more selective, even falling behind on some of the better books. I have a longer review of Sibertin-Blanc's book coming out with Historical Materialism, but I thought that I would post one of my responses to the book in order to mark its translation, just to suggest that it is definitely not one to skip. It is perhaps no surprise that Sibertin-Blanc argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of social relations, or assemblages, must be understood in terms of its fundamental Spinozism. First, and foremost there is the affirmative nature, social relations or social formations, are defined not by their contradictions but by their creative movements of transformation. Gilles Deleuze’s earlier work on Spinoza argued that the relationship between bodies and ideas, the order and connection of ideas and things, was best characterized as parallelism, as the identical order of two different attributes, the order and connection of things and ideas. It is precisely this same process that defines Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of what constitutes social relations, or in their terms, an assemblage. An assemblage is both a collective assemblage of enunciation and a machinic assemblage of bodies, it is both an intermingling of bodies and an organization of acts or statements. These two aspects, bodies and statements, actions and events, do not determine or affect each other, but are each affected or determined by their relative deterritorialization or reterritorialization, by their processes of abstraction and concretization. It is this process of differentiation and transformation that constitutes the order and connection of bodies and ideas, actions and statements. As Deleuze and Guattari define an assemblages,

"On the first, horizontal, axis, an assemblage comprises two segments one of content and one of expression. On the one hand it is a machinc assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reaction to one another, on the other hand it is a collective assemblange of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies. Then on a vertical axis, the assemblage has both territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization which carry it away."

Bodies and enunciations, acts and statements, do not determine or affect each other, but are each expressions of the same process of reterritorialization and deterritorialization. Everything that has made Proposition Seven of Part Two of the Ethics a metaphysical riddle is maintained. Bodies and things are at once two different perspectives on the same thing, the same substance, while remaining causally distinct. Between Spinoza’s substance and Deleuze and Guattari’s deterritorialization there Marx’s theorization of a mode of production, the latter makes it possible to shift the problem of “order and connection” from metaphysics to social relation, to capitalism as simultaneous an organization of bodes and a structuring of statements. Spinoza’s ontology, the ontology of substance grasped in terms of two different attributes is marshaled into the solution of a problem of political, economic, and social theory, the Marxist problem of determinism, of the base and superstructure. Bodies and enunciations, forms of content and expression, must be seen as distinct, as having their own specific causalities and effects. They are connected not by a causal relation, by their effects on each other, but by the general process of deterritorialization, of abstraction and displacement. This last point is where Deleuze and Guattari differ from both Spinoza and Marx; it is not a matter of substance, or even of something seen as a mode of production with its problem of stability and transformation, reproduction and crises, but of the process of transformation itself, deterritorialization. Sibertin-Blanc’s reading stresses this innovation, but pushes it in a different direction, one influenced by a different reading of Spinoza. For Sibertin Blanc it is not the parallelism, but the overdetermination of the different assemblages, of the different conceptual oppositions, that defines Deleuze and Guattari’s account of social relations. In doing so Sibertin[Blanc proliferates the various oppositions and dualisms rather than reducing them to a central ethical opposition. Instead of seeing everything reduced to a Manichean opposition between the war machine and the state, the state and its nomads, Sibertin-Blanc argues that it is necessary to grasp the way in which this opposition, an opposition over territory, necessarily intersects with the different strategies and assemblages, with the state as an apparatus of capture, and with the conflict of smooth and striated space all of which have their own tensions and oppositions. That the state is both a spatial logic, a domination of space according to the striation of space, the subordination of space to lines, and an apparatus of capture, as well as being an image of thought means that any concrete state, any existing state can only be thought as the overdetermination of different assemblages. Given that Sibertin-Blanc’s book on Deleuze and Guattari is the product of a thesis written under the direction of Pierre Macherey, it is possible to see this as a conflict of different Spinozisms. Deleuze’s parallelism versus Althusser’s overdetermination (even if overdetermination is a concept defined more through references to Freud and Marx than Spinoza). In the first what is stressed is the identity and difference of things and ideas, machinic assemblages of bodies and collective assemblages of enunciation, which must be grasped as simultaneously distinct and two different perspectives on the same substance, or in Deleuze and Guattari’s case, on the same process of deterritorialization. Causal autonomy is maintained along with mutual implication. While in the second, what is stressed is the sheer multiplicity of different causal series, different assemblages, the state must be thought as simultaneous an apparatus of capture, and a phenomena of overcoding, as both an organization of political space and the constitution of an image of thought. These multiple assemblages, multiple strategies, must be thought of in terms of their specific articulation, their specific actualization in a given historical situation. Sibertin-Blanc stresses the conjunctural definition of the different assemblages, shifting their opposition from not only any “ethical” opposition of good and bad, but also from the residue of base and superstructure or its idealist inversion. There are not just two different orders, bodies and enunciations, machines and discourses, but multiple effects of different assemblages. Without making this an entirely intra-Spinozist affair, with all of the corresponding endo-violence that entails, I think that an overdetermined reading of Deleuze and Guattari, a reading that stresses overdetermination in the different assemblages and machines, offers a way out of two of the problems burdening their thought. The first is the periodization, a periodization, more rigid than even Marx's, that understands society as passing from barbarism to capital, or, more to the point, discipline to control. Deleuze and Guattari's statements regarding archaisms with a current function need to be expanded to posit the differential, rather than linear dimension of transformation. On this point it might be worth rereading that new edition of Reading Capital. What is perhaps most untenable in their work is the opposition between codes, qualitative, embodied, and indirect, and axioms, quantitative, abstract, and direct. Or, more to the point, their failure to think reproduction, to see reproduction as simply a matter of axioms reproducing themselves. Deleuze and Guattari bend the stick too far in dispensing with the family, throwing the social reproduction of domestic labor baby out with the psychoanalytic bathwater. Sibertin Blanc has done an excellent job of arguing for the overdetermination of their concept of the state, seeing it as made up of both material and ideal dimensions, of multiple assemblages constituting power, space, and identity. What perhaps remains to be done is an overdetermination of their concept of capital, of the economy, the economy cannot be simply identified with production, or with purely quantitative axioms of labor and money; it must be thought of in terms of its material and ideal aspects, its affective and subjective dimension. Of course this is exactly what Deleuze and Guattari offer, their thought has the conditions for such a theorization, micropolitics, assemblages, major/minor, all open up alternative ways of conceptualizing power, politics, and collective belonging. What remains to be done is overcoming the divide that leaves affect out of the economy and social reproduction out of production. In this task Sibertin Blanc’s book provides an immense guide, showing how a rigorous reading of Deleuze and Guattari, can produce not just new concepts, but new relations between concepts. taken from Unemployed Negativity   Foto: Bernhard Weber

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