The reviews are in. Adam Curtis’s latest documentary series, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, has been described as “dazzling” and “overwhelming” (in a good way), as well as “dazzling” and “incoherent” (in a bad way). Apart from the occasional lukewarm review, however, the critical reception has been very positive. But, as anyone on Twitter will have noticed, beyond the column inches of cultural critics, there is a curious development. Many have developed a pronounced distaste for Curtis and his style of documentary. The emergent question is, “why?”
In his latest series, which he describes as an “emotional history” of the twentieth century, Curtis tells a convincing story. He bounces around the world in a disorientating series of tales and vignettes that nonetheless, over the course of five hours, are transformed from frayed threads into a formidable rope. Indeed, there is no denying that his exploration of our peculiar misery, from the end of empires to the end of histories, is a striking tapestry of maligned battles, failures and victories from around the world, of the sort that are rarely given any oxygen in public discourse.
These stories are told with his characteristic charm and editorial prowess, and the questions they provoke resonate with our current shellshock, following the downfall of Trump. What happened to us? How did we become so trapped in this stagnant world that nonetheless fizzes and flails in its attempts to produce new spectacles? If Obama was a new era, and Trump was a new era, why does everything just feel the same? The upheaval we have experienced is nothing compared to the previous century, of course, but then how come we’re all so tired? Is it precisely the long arm of the twentieth century that has us so fatigued? Are we troubled by some sort of transhistorical PTSD?
These are urgent questions, and they’ve been urgent for some time. In fact, I’d argue Curtis has asked these questions before, each time in response to a new moment of friction, but always with the same approach. Nevertheless, his persistent has paid off. Only now does it feel like these questions are making an appearance in a more mainstream discourse. Whether we are discussing his own work or the work of others, Curtis is, in part, to thank for that. But if that’s true, why are we now so cynical about his efforts?
To anyone who has followed his career to date, the trajectory is clear. He has been transformed from the frequently-pirated BBC bad boy of the 2000s — I still have my unofficial DVD copy of his five 2000s films somewhere, bought off some dodgy eBay seller in 2009 — to unsung critical darling of the 2010s. In the 2020s, however, he seems to have become a BBC cliché — a judgement in part bolstered by his appearances on Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe and, by proxy, his association with Brooker’s other creations. (Does the cynicism around Curtis’s latest film not echo the attitude towards the most recent series of Black Mirror?) These critical evaluations of the zeitgeist, put together with an increasingly rare irreverence and intelligence, are few and far between these days. But, together, Brooker and Curtis have cornered the market. It’s not hard to see why. They’re irreverent recombinant attitudes are a form of good postmodernism ripping chunks off the bad. They may be critical, but they otherwise fit snuggly within the general order of things. They provide just the right amount of pressure and confrontation — no more, no less.
This is my problem with Curtis. As much as I enjoy the tales he tells, he has come to resemble the BBC’s last man, looking over its entire history, able to peruse its archives with impunity and use them against the present orthodoxy. And yet, whilst he is very capable of poking holes in the illusions around us, he seems incapable of breaking through and actualising his own critiques. It is a fate that has afflicted every cultural product of the 2000s — eventutally. There comes a time when your own archival mastery of the end of history becomes less an intervention in our stagnation and more a symptom of the very problem under consideration. In rooting our predicament so firmly in our past, we come to understand how things have always been this way. Capitalist realism is no longer a specific critique of a specific era — the dying years of New Labour and the Bush administration — but a predicament foreshadowed for centuries. Perhaps that’s true, but what does excavating the breadcrumb trail reveal to us? That we live in a world of diminishing returns of the same? We are left always lagging behind ourselves, applying critiques to the recent past but never to the conditions of the present.
Perhaps this is all just splitting hairs. A misdirected cynicism from the deep stagnation of lockdown. Perhaps none of this truly matters. So what if Curtis is Marmite. Who cares about that undulating, grotesque blob we call “public opinion”? Our media landscape is better off with Curtis in it. Just sit down and listen; you might learn something.
But never before have the questions Curtis asks been so relevant to his own thesis. After all, when we consider what Curtis is asking in his latest series — to quote the BBC’s promotional materials: “whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really just part of the new system of power” — surely we must consider whether his crowning as the one politically-daring documentarian at the BBC is something of a poisoned chalice? What is it about Curtis that allows him to occupy his more-or-less unique position? What is it about the new system of power he describes that precisely allows him to (continue to) exist within it? What is it that allows him to make the same kind of film about our ideological stagnation for more than twenty years? What if the thing we can’t get out of our heads is Curtis’s narrative drone over stark title cards? What if all he’s become is the personification of our own impotent political consciousness, endlessly trawling the depths of Wikipedia at the end of time, looking for a URL that will hyperlink us out of our misery?
If we want an documentary less complicit in its own critique, perhaps Framing Britney Spears offers us a more constructive and less existentially dreadful lesson. It is a new feature-length documentary, produced by the New York Times, on the #FreeBritney movement — an online activist group that began as a disparate group of online fans concerned about their favourite popstar’s domestic welfare, which ended up raising awareness around “conservatorships”, one of the most opaque legal measures deployed by the American justice system.
Beyond that, the documentary offers us something similar to Curtis’s own series: an “emotional history” of our pop-cultural development. On the one hand, it shows us how, following the age of the Celebrity, our worst tendencies have been democratised, vindicating Curtis’s cynicism — the hounding that drove Britney to a mental breakdown is also experienced, to varying degrees, by many online today. But just as many more of us are experiencing the scrutiny once reserved for the most famous amongst us, we are also able to hold many of our most opaque institutions to account in new ways. It is intriguing to contrast her story, in this regard, with that of the “cancel culture” whiners. Our inability to deal with such issues, such as the distinction between scrutiny and harassment, is perhaps indicative of that same persistent emotional immaturity.
We might note, too, that the documentary has faced many of the same criticisms as Curtis’s. It’s evocative and powerful, telling the story of our own sadism, but it supposedly lacks journalistic rigour. Nevertheless, the words of one of the paralegals echoes throughout — “We don’t know what we don’t know.” Two quests for knowledge face off against each other, separated by twenty years, each coming to fuel our best and worst tendencies.
On the one hand, the documentary frames Spears as a pop-cultural conundrum. She is both innocent and seductive, powerful and preyed-upon, hero and villain, sweetheart and succubus. One journalist notes how her initial rise and fall coincided with the Monica Lewinsky affair. (In fact, one of the documentary’s main strengths is that shows how Britney’s story intersects with some of the major political events and questions of her — and our — lifetime, albeit without labouring the point for an hour at a time.) The point is brief but it has a resounding clarity. Britney Spears became a scratching post for the American public to work through its own cultural dissonance regarding the place of women in society. Today, for better or for worse, we do much of that work on each other.
As the documentary progresses, the #FreeBritney movement becomes a lightning rod of its own. Though it may remain focussed on the prospects of an individual, it is reflective of our broader emo-cultural development. It reveals a fandom — one of those most maligned of pop-cultural communities — making a clear and positive impact on the world beyond their immediate concerns. This is the progressive side of social media’s democratisation of information technologies. It shows that, although it is not uniform in its advancements, cultural power is shifting — even if we’re still not sure how best to wield it.
In this sense, Framing Britney Spears offers some answers to the more troubling questions we have about ourselves. Can’t Get You Out of My Head shows how those very questions have encouraged their own mental health crisis. But only one documentary, in both its presentation and its content, feels truly of its time, making strides into unknown emotional territory — and, for all its strengths, it’s not Curtis’s.
Many thanks to Kabir Jhala, who interviewed Natasha Eves and I for an article about this year’s For k-punk event at the ICA. You can read it here.
This nearly five-hour-long “digital afterparty” is “part virtual club night, part lecture and an expression of collective grief”, says the writer Matt Colquhoun, who edited Postcapitalist Desire and, along with the textile artist Natasha Eves, organises For k-punk. “We debuted it at 10pm to mimic a club night and held a Discord server with all of our friends. It was the closest thing we’ll get to a gig for a while,” Eves says. Both were students of Fisher’s at the time of his death — For k-punk commemorates a teacher who “really gave a shit”, they say.
In case you missed it, the newest episode of Buddies Without Organs went live on Monday!
We read the “Geology of Morals” chapter of A Thousand Plateaus and were also joined by our new buddy Corey J. White. Go check it out over on the website here, follow us on Twitter and wherever you get your podcasts! (And if we’re not currently wherever you get your podcasts, let us know and we’ll sort it out!)
By the way, we’re also now on YouTube too, if that’s your preferred way to listen. All the episodes so far are available here. Don’t forget to liKe And sUbScRiBe!?
Ed with another whopper of a comment on the last post:
I’ve found myself wondering if some of these things become clearer when we consider not only the post-2008 ‘Accelerationist debate’ not only through this subterranean Nietzschean-Maoist frame, but also through a return to what has been retroactively inscribed as the ‘accelerationist moment’ of the 1970s. When Noys used the term, it was in ref to D&G’s Anti-Oedipus, Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, Irigaray’s Speculum, Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death… but one of the problems here, from the position of intellectual history (side note: intellectual history in these contexts seems, as Vince put it, about excavating these hidden lines buried in the past for the application in the present…. this is what Deleuze described — referencing Foucault — as the work of the ‘seer’, but in a way isn’t this also part of what ‘salvagepunk’ is all about?), is that the “accelerate the process” moment in AO isn’t a one-off thing. It traces back to Nietzsche’s late manuscripts, which were salvaged by Klossowski when he was tasked with compiling and editing these manuscripts for a French edition of Nietzsche’s collected works in the 1960s (Deleuze and Foucault, incidentally, were the ones who oversaw Klossowski’s portion of the project). ‘Accelerating’ or ‘hastening the process’ became a central concern in Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, which imo should be treated, if we’re gonna roll with something like the Noys periodization, as the ur-moment for “accelerationism”. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle set the stage for Living Currency, which in turn set the stage for Anti-Oedipus and Libidinal Economy….
In 1972, around the time that AO was released, Klossowski, Deleuze, Lyotard and Derrida attended a conference on Nietzsche at Cerisy-la-Salle. Klossowski’s talk (found here) was titled “Circulus Vitiosus”. The passage from Nietzsche where “accelerate the process” appears is quoted in full, but what Klossowski draws from this is the notion of a “conspiracy” that explodes the “evolution of [the] modern economy” towards a state of “planetary planning of existence” from within. Probably taking cue from Bataille, Klossowski describes this process as engendering an “excess”—and then asks:
“In what measure would the Nietzschean description of excess not simply be an abbreviated, non-dialectical, version of the notion of class-struggle and infrastructure in Marx?… [Nietzsche’s] historical incomprehension of the master and the slave, the notion of excess deployed in opposition to the mediocrisation process leads him to a terrain similar to that which is occupied by Marx. Both meet, so to speak, back-to-back”
I guess my first question is whether or not the Nietzschean-Klossowskian “non-dialectical” form of process/class struggle reciprocal relationship conforms to, on the one hand, William’s “non-dialectical negativity” (the excess as negativity?), and then on the other, to the inverted dialectical One —> Two, the Nietzsche-Mao line that seems to be smuggled in implicitly into Williams’ approach (intentionally or not — The Badiou Question).
The second is whether or not “metaterrorism” operates along a similar logic of what Klossowski here describes as “parody”. Klossowksi himself links parody to both terror and terrorism:
“How, in any case, does the vicious circle, as a selective dilemma, become the instrument of a conspiracy? That is, do you recognise or not that your actions have no sense or purpose, other than the fact that they are always nothing but the same situations infinitely repeated? What follows from this is the following exigency: act with no remorse. The worst, if it has not yet been attained, never shall be. Here we begin to see the basis upon which Nietzsche, with all the terror alluded to earlier, introduces his experimental programme of conspiracy. And yet, the terror of the thought of eternal return, in this form, may very well be nothing other than a parody of the real terrorism of industrial modernity. The god of the vicious circle, as the pure simulation of a universal economy, is still only an appearance. Even if the thought of the circle were also merely a parody, the parody would remain, nonetheless, a deranged creation in the form of a conspiracy. If the conspiracy suggests certain acts to be accomplished, then the thought of the vicious circle demands that these acts, once accomplished, become necessarily the never-ending simulation of an action emptied by repetition of all its content, which will never be established once and for all.”
In this perspective, the very transformation of the dialectic from Two —> One into One —> Two is itself an act of (meta?)terrorism, because the movement is the subterranean one from the world of closure (the “vicious circle” that might just a parodic reflection of “industrial modernity”) into an infinite cosmos of difference (the eternal return, as a ‘parody of doctrine’ itself). I’m also reminded, on a more practical level, of the comment that Fisher made in ‘Post-Apocalypse Now’: “The war must be fought from and on the desert of the virtual-Real apocalypse. One tactic could be to explode the fantasy of unsheathed productive capacities. This involves taking the anti- of anti-capitalism seriously, as itself the sufficient condition for the emergence of a new political-economic organisation. The embrace of the anti- would become a return of a negativity which late capitalism’s compulsory positivity is compelled to suppress at many levels.” The ‘negativity which returns’ holds the exact same position within Fisher as ‘excess’ does for Klossowski, allowing him to bind Nietzsche and Marx together in infernal coupling. And operating internally to the “desert of the virtual-Real apocalypse” in order to call capitalism on its game—to make good on the promise of advanced industrial modernity that it makes, but cannot deliver — is the act of parodic terrorism.
What makes this even more interesting is that Deleuze and Lyotard both affirm the Klossowskian line on parody, defending it from Derrida and others. Lyotard: “…it is impossible to determine beforehand what the effectiveness of a parody will be, that’s why Nietzsche says it is necessary to be experimenters and artists, not people who have a plan and try to realise it — that’s old politics. Nietzsche says it’s necessary to try things out and discover which intensities produce which effects.” Deleuze: “The efficacious parody, in the sense of Nietzsche or Klossowski, does not pretend to be a copy of a model, but rather, in its parodic act overthrows, in the same blow, the model and the copy… everybody senses that what is at stake is something altogether different, which, to speak like Klossowski, pushes the simulacra so far that its product goes against, at the same time, the copy and the model. It seems to me that this is exactly the criterion of effective parody in the sense that Nietzsche understands it.”
Given that Klossowski introduces parody in relation to the question of “accelerating the process”, and Deleuze and Lyotard both affirm this, it seems vital for properly articulating the real nature of the “accelerationist moment” that Noys writes about — and perhaps allows us restage some of the stakes when these themes were revived in new contexts after the 2008 crisis.
This initial trajectory that Ed carves out is fantastic. (Does this feature in your new book, Ed?)
My first thoughts may be tangential right from the off but I’d like to include them anyway, as it might help graft what Ed’s comment has brought to mind onto a broader history of this trajectory in France in particular. I’ll also be returning to Badiou a fair bit, not to keep bending the argument to him, but at least to see, even in tracing this parallel trajectory, he has his place.
I was actually reading Living Currency the other day, alongside Althusser’s On the Reproduction of Capital. I was trying to trace the twentieth century’s problematising of the subject, which Land makes so central to his philosophy — how the process of valorisation continually abstracts not just the proletariat but, if you go as far as Land, the whole of humanity. All this “capital is the real subject of history” stuff or “capital is an autonomous entity” gets a lot of ridicule these days for its Landian proximity, but these ideas were of explicit concern to many of the most ardent Marxist in the 1950s and ’60s.
Having pondered this now in orbit of “the process” via Klossowski and co., I’m nonetheless curious as to where Althusser fits into this trajectory. He ran in very different circles to the above, of course, but there’s an intriguing overlap that may also further ground Badiou’s relation to all this. Spinoza is likely the key.
I saw someone on Reddit the other day asking about why people became so interested in Spinoza in France, and someone nodded to Deleuze. But translations of Deleuze’s works on Spinoza only really brought attention to him in the Anglosphere. In France, he was already of some interest to people. In fact, I recently discovered that Althusser ran a Spinoza reading group about a decade before Deleuze’s own reflections, which was attended by Badiou, who wrote a dissertation on him (and then apparently dropped him from his thought for the most part, despite his influence on two of his “masters” — Althusser as well as Lacan).
Following this rabbit hole, I came across a (relatively) recent essay by Caroline Williams for the LA Review of Books on Spinoza and Althusser. What is central for Althusser is precisely a rethinking of the subject, which Spinoza famously undertakes in his Ethics. Williams notes, however, that the problem for Althusser — perhaps following Spinoza’s talk of an immanent nature naturing — is that historical materialism reveals to us that history is a process without a subject. I think this section below is the most interesting bit on this. It is a bit abstruse — maybe even more so when pulled out of its wider context — but there is a fair amount of resonance here, I think:
In proposing the ideas of structural causality and history as a process without the subject, something excessive is opened up by Althusser’s thought. What had previously been the elusive ground of agency now mutates and morphs into something altogether different. When in his later writings Althusser suggests that the materialism of the encounter is “a process that has no subject,” does he not implore us to combine this image of the conjunction of elements, “raining down” like an infinity of atoms, whose singular relations and individualities constitute the subject merely as their ideological (or imaginary) effects? It is these concrete yet seemingly transitory combinations that the materialist philosopher studies. Historical materialism does not commence with an original abstract picture of man, or with a conception of human essence, as do theories of the social contract. Marx, like Spinoza, precludes essentialism by understanding the essence of any “thing” as that which corresponds to its actuality and concrete relations, and thus to a form of materialism. Social relations, economic relations of exchange (of wealth, of capital) cannot be reduced to relations merely between subjects, since they involve relationships with many different kinds of thing (in nature, technology, society, etc.), each of which reproduce and shape social relations of production, as well as the forms of struggle emerging through them and unfolding within the materiality of ideology. In this image of materialism, anything we might call “the subject” is found only within this social morphology of relation and combination where forms of struggle commence and where politics constantly reshapes itself in the process.
So, is what is being accelerated, in this sense, history? (Plausible, considering it has supposedly “ended” for us but continues for capital itself.) I tried to make a similar point in relation to accelerationism via Lukacs when writing the introduction to Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire, which felt quite bold and which I thought might be tying “the process” a little too readily to an orthodox Hegelian-Marxism, but I’m quite glad I made the connection in hindsight.
Anyway, this all seems quite commensurate with Klossowski, D+G, Lyotard — as well as Nietzsche and Mao, of course — doesn’t it? (Not necessarily a rhetorical question. I’m still puzzling this connection out.)
Perhaps, following Klossowski, the properly Nietzschean (and Bataillean) vision here — which is also proto-Landian — is that this process makes a mockery of the subject. It is a sort of Copernican humiliation. Terrorism, then — or metaterrorism — is an attempt to humiliate the process in return by parodying it. The reality of such a manoeuvre might be far-fetched, but Deleuze and Guattari certainly entertained it when they deployed Professor Challenger, the original eco-terrorist, as a conceptual persona in “The Geology of Morals”, which is itself a (post-)structuralist / materialist parody of structuralism.
So yes, I think this is a really interesting line to follow. How does it relate to post-2008 accelerationism? Perhaps its a question of what is to be done with parody, or what is to be done after it has done its work? I feel like that is the question Badiou asks post-68 with a fury that is perhaps comparable to that of the post-2008 blogosphere. However, who is to do this work if the acceleration of history is precisely without a subject? Following Althusser via Badiou, is the issue precisely that “the missing subject of accelerationism” is impossible to instantiate? Or is it in its perpetual destruction that we find the source of our tension?
Badiou’s Theory of the Subject has a strange relationship to this — and it is an incredibly difficult book that I might not be understanding very well at all. But in the chapter on “Lack and Destruction” he entertains the idea — quite common in a lot of Marxist thinking at that time I think; it reminds me again of Lukacs — that the bourgeoisie produces the proletariat. The proletariat does not exist, in any material sense, until it is organised by the bourgeoisie in “a place”.
A place, in Badiou’s terminology, is a kind of stasis or site of deadening. It is counterposed, at this stage in his thought, to the event. In the translator’s glossary to the translation I have, they make a note that there’s an echo of this concept in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, where he “describes an ethics of willing the event in terms of ‘a sort of leaping in place’, saut sur place.” When thinking about parody, this tangential note of seemingly limited significance might actually be a pretty interesting meeting point. Logic of Sense is a masterpiece of philosophical parody, surely? For Badiou, however, it’s not just about proliferating contradictions in order to produce tension (or “torsion”). For him, parody is an innately destructive act. He seems to suggest that part of the problem is that, for the proletariat to sustain itself, it must always parody the bourgeoisie. There is always a pressure to become the petit bourgeoisie. The only option, then, is to affirm the void from which they came.
I might be wrong on this but this is what I think Badiou is saying when he says:
The proletariat exists everywhere where some political outplace is produced. It is therefore by purging itself that it exists. It has no anteriority over the organisation of its political survival. To expel the bourgeois politics by compressing its own organism-support and to bring into existence the proletarian politics, are one and the same.
This seems to be its own kind of excess for Badiou. And it makes me think of Fisher and his love of Jameson’s “baroque sunbursts”. Is excess both the exaggeration of parody and the excess that the proletariat already are for capitalism, in lurking on its outside?
Maybe it’s also worth adding that the tension between exaggeration and excess isn’t just a way to deal with the bourgeoisie for Badiou but also for philosophy itself. It is his anti-philosophy. Though it’s often assumed to be some pretentious negativity, I’m left thinking about the Ccru’s sense of humour, in parodying their own academic positions and, indeed, the whole academic enterprise in order to precisely do philosophy. That is surely anti-philosophy as far as Badiou is concerned.
Whereas the Ccru’s example might be more in line with Lyotard’s sacrilegious theorising of a kind of acquiescence to excess in Libidinal Economy, Badiou takes a more destructive than generative approach. In Theory of the Subject he writes:
‘Destory, he says’: such is the necessary — and prolonged — proletarian statement. This barbarous statement forbids us to imagine the political subject in the structural modality of the heritage, the transmission, the corruption, the inversion. But also in that of the purifying cut, of the world broken in two.
Isn’t this Mao’s revolutionary dialectic? His One —> Two?
All this brings me forwards to our recent past, and your writing, again with Vince, on anti-praxis. I’m also reminded of Enrico’s definition of anti-praxis from “Applying Applied Ballardianism”:
Anti-praxis consists of two basic principles: making political action as impersonal as possible and intensifying the actually existing processes of liberation and emancipation, without situating our actions within/against capitalism, but following those political vectors which point directly towards a possible exit.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot at present precisely because Badiou makes use of the “anti-” prefix so excessively — in terms of the anti-philosophies of Lacan, Wittgenstein, Pascal, Saint Paul, Rosseau and, notably for us, Nietzsche — to the point that Laruelle’s book on him could only have been called Anti-Badiou. (It’s very good too, I might add.)
When writing on Nietzsche’s anti-philosophy, Badiou seems to be picking up on this tendency towards parodisation as well. He notes three “operations” that Nietzsche makes use of in his thought:
1. A linguistic, logical, genealogical critique of the statement of philosophy; a deposing of the category of truth, an unraveling of pretensions of philosophy to constitute itself as theory. In order to do so, antiphilosophy often delves into the resources the sophists exploit as well. In the case of Nietzsche, this operation bears the name “overturning of all values,” struggle against the Plato-disease, combatant grammar of signs and types.
2. The recognition of the fact that philosophy, in the final instance, cannot be reduced to its discursive appearance, its proportions, its fallacious theoretical exterior. Philosophy is an act, of which the fabulations about “truth” are the clothing, the propaganda, the lies…
3. The appeal made, against the philosophical act, to another, radically new act, which will either be called philosophical as well, thereby creating an equivocation (through which the little philosopher consents with delight to the spit that covers his body) or else, more honestly, supraphilosophical or even aphilosophical. This act without precedent destroys the philosophical act, all the while clarifying its noxious character…
(I’m not sure Badiou’s seminar on Nietzsche has ever been published — just the ones on Lacan and Wittgenstein — but Wanyoung Kim has a translation available on Academia.edu here.)
I hope all of this is coming together rather than spoiling the both. Suffice it to say, yes, I think this does allow us to restage part of the 2008 debate, but also our own conversations just a few years ago.
It also makes me wonder about Mark’s writings on satire too, actually. How do satire and parody function in the present? Irony was better weaponised by the other side back in 2016, surely? To weaponise parody again now is to go far beyond what would be seen as in good taste… Such is horrorism, right? A parody of terrorism. But then perhaps we’re stuck in a kind of gift logic, where parody really does just end up with us doing Joker shit. The accelerationist cliche emerges where you parody the system to the extent you burn the whole world down and say, “Top that, capitalism.” Then again, perhaps wresting parody back from that kind of politics of escalation is part of the project. Not becoming hypercapitalist but rather ridiculing capitalism into illegitimacy.
Update #1: A quick addendum from Ed:
Wonderful post, XG — gonna be uncharacteristically brief (lol) because I’m out running errands atm….
It’s really interesting that you bring up Althusser in this way. I’ve been curious about the relationship between Althusser and Deleuze; deep in D&R, there is an engagement with Marx that imo actually has more depth than most people seem to have lent it (the only person I’ve seen engage with it in any extended famous, perhaps unsurprisingly, has been Benjamin Noys). But looking through the footnotes where he mentions Marx, and it becomes clear that the Marx that is being engaged with by Deleuze is mainly Althusser’s Marx. Not sure if this iteration differs from the Marx of Capitalism & Schizophrenia at all, but this might be an interesting avenue in figuring out how this hangs together.
I think you’re right to relate the proletariat directly to this question of excess; as I read Klossowski’s talk, this is how I think he’s reading it too. In Nietzsche’s ‘accelerationist fragment’, the leveling process — that which is to be accelerated—generates an excess, the “strong of the future”, which becomes in D&G the “people-to-come”. He seems to be suggesting a shared identity between this and the proletariat… Funny, Land places the AI-to-come, Pythia/Mother Hellcrypt/etc in this position, but I’m not sure if his interpretation conforms to the question of excess? A middle ground perhaps: the Fisherian vision of the machinic proletariat.
There’s an aspect of Klossowski’s parody — Nietzsche’s parody? He says that he is also parodying Nietzsche, so its a tough thing to unwind lol — that is fairly esoteric, with regard to the question of agency, the thing that is excess to the process… thinking of this bit in his earlier essay “Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody”:
“Was it not necessary to appeal to conscious thought, and thus to borrow from the language of the herd (in this ease, the language of positivism), and thus to take up once again the notions of utility and goal, and direct them toward and against every utility, toward and against every goal?”
Feel like this is working alongside what you’re saying here about Badiou and the ‘anti-‘. Anti-praxis looks both familiar and strange from this vantage point.
And to answer your question at the outset: nope, this isn’t in the book! The great Obsolete Capitalism group really needs the credit for putting this history together, but maybe it can the seeds of a book-to-come…
I can’t proclaim to be that well-informed on the comings and goings of cryptocurrency. I have a wallet of my own, and prefer to invest in coins with some sort of broader utility, like Filecoin, but I cannot claim to understand the technical aspects that underline each token. A vigilant approach seems necessary. That is even more true when we become aware of cryptocurrency’s many associations. David Golumbia, perhaps most infamously, declared it to be a form of “software as right-wing extremism”. Though I’ve not read Golumbia’s book, the reasoning behind this seems to be because of its primary investors. (Capitalists are going to capitalist, I guess?)
But it seems to me that this is a superficial appraisal, and one perhaps worthy of some reconsideration — not least because NFTs intervene in interesting ways in the more recognisably-capitalist dynamics of crypto-markets, precisely because of their non-fungibility.
The fungibility of currencies is, generally speaking, pretty common-sensical. It allows a currency to be internally coherent, for instance — 100 pennies are equal to a pound — and also interchangeable, irrespective of any other currency’s vitality — GBP can be exchange for USD, et al. The fungibility of cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, allows it to function in a similar way. Bitcoin can be exchanged for other cryptocurrencies but also for traditional currencies as well.
Nick Land seized upon this innate consistency with other currencies in his unpublished work Crypto-Current, and broadly affirmed it. If capital is to be understood as a kind of “decoded money”, as Land has referred to it in his Nineties works, then Bitcoin is capital in a far more literal sense than was true according to Land’s previous cyberpunk pretensions. The way that the blockchain was being implemented to automate other processes only extends this resonance.
Land had always gone far beyond Marx’s gothic view of capital, as that autonomous and vampiric force, in order to produce not just a philosophy of capitalism but a capitalist philosophy, instituting capitalism as its own form of Kantian critique — that is, asking not what we (are able to) think about capitalism but instead asking what capitalism thinks about us. That might be a fair summary of Land’s Nineties work and it remains broadly true today. It is along these same lines that he has argued that Bitcoin is the latest capitalistic development to cause philosophical problems for the Left. For one thing, in side-stepping the trust protocols of mints and national banks, cryptocurrency allows capital a new lease of autonomy, but it also proliferates capital in itself, complexifying its self-valorisation process, with each brand of cryptocurrency effectively giving rise to a new and self-contained economic system in its own. This newly Balkanises, whilst also allowing greater access to, the global economy in its fungibility. Soon, the world becomes fungible all the way down.
As such, although some on the Left see a great deal of potential in cryptocurrency as a technological innovation, Land focuses his attentions on affirming its “techno-libertarian or crypto-anarchist” philosophical foundations. What it presents, he argues, is a further challenge to the Left’s fundamental principles, and indeed further alienates the Left from capitalism’s ever-advancing frontiers. He covers all this and more in the conclusion to Cryptocurrent‘s introduction, when he writes:
The left thus recognises its enemy [capitalism], with striking realism, as an emergent — and intrinsically fractured — agent of social dissolidarity. A crucial symmetry has to be immediately noted. The “struggle” here is not even imaginably one-on-one. Capital is essentially capitals, at war among themselves. It advances only through disintegration. If — not at all unreasonably — the basic vector of capital is identified with a tendency to social abandonment, what it abandons most originally is itself. That is why the left finds itself so commonly locked in a fight to defend what capital is from what it threatens to become. Bitcoin tells us — more clearly than any other innovation — what it is becoming next, by escaping transcendent governance in principle. Consistent “right wing-extremism”, automated governance, and unflinching critical philosophy are inter-translatable [– fungible? –] without significant discrepancy. The crypto-current is a nightmare for the left (rigorously conceived). It is other things, but that is the main one. Philosophical phase change doesn’t happen without a fight, least of all when attempting to route around one.
Against this background, aren’t NFTs precisely a challenge to this right-wing claim to the politics of cryptocurrency? Though many read about their focus on scarcity and ownership and run scared, surely they challenge cryptocurrency’s continuity with capitalism more generally? By emphasising social solidarity over dissolidarity; commitment over abandonment? Trust remains key, but that trust is constituted socially rather than the capitalist superstructure itself.
John Palmer’s experiment with $ESSAY seems like a fascinating step in this direction — and I look forward to hearing his appearance on Interdependence. I’d love to try something similar myself. That is, after all, the hardest thing about contributing to this strange world. Solidarity is a difficult thing to come by, not least the kind that lets us all earn and live and do what we do. NFTs might just allow us to build solidarity in a way that both challenges the expectations of a capitalist economy — solidarity without similarity — alongside our own cynicism regarding what is required to sustain our treasured cultures, online and off.
The folks at ŠUM have a new project, co-produced by Projekt Atol, called Plaza Protocol. It’s an amazing platform exploring an unfinished and disused shopping mall on the outskirts of Ljubljana.
Plaza Protocol is developing new formats and plots for and from an unfinished construction site of an underground shopping mall on the outskirts of the city. It happens through a series of collaborations with artists, designers, scientists, writers and engineers to create ways of engagement with this locality and accelerating economic and ecological processes of global scale that inform its transformations.
The project’s participants so far include Evelina Hägglund, Špela Petrič, Blaž Miklavčič, Domen Ograjenšek, Simon Sellars and yours truly.
I contributed an essay to the project called “The Geology of Malls” — a sort of personal history of shopping malls I’ve known, which is also a brief history of class conflict in 21st century Britain, with each mall both a product of and site for economic and political unease. Shopping malls, to my mind, are forms of capitalist cauterisation. This is an essay about holding the wounds open instead.
You can check out my essay by finding the little plot hole icon on your travels. I’d highly recommend exploring the project and having a walk around. It’s a magnificent platform, populating this disused space with a series of really fascinating digital interventions. And it is also ongoing! So check back for future additions.
The UK Home Office recently released a video advising the public that all “gatherings” are currently illegal. Parties, raves, baby showers, etc. It’s all against the law.
What’s disturbing about the video is its strange suspension between reality and fantasy. It very obviously apes the anti-piracy adverts that generations were forced to watch at the insertion of any VHS or DVD into a home media player. Whereas the original advert proceeds along a succession of obviously-staged scenarios, showing various hypothetical crimes, it feels perverse how, in this new serious-parody, the title cards and drum’n’bass soundtrack are instead interspersed between clips from police body-cam footage. There’s something very sinister about this to me — a lot more sinister than the otherwise cold, familiar gaze of an all-seeing CCTV camera that has happened to catch a crime in its vicinity. The way that this otherwise automated content-gather has been replaced by police officers storming into private houses feeling like a horrifically mundane expansion of the surveillance state. Body-cams are, as a result, in equal parts necessary for our safety from the police and for our further humiliation at their hands. This is to say that, yes, those people hanging out at a baby shower under quarantine are idiots, but that doesn’t diminish the horror of a police presence at a baby shower to me. That fact remains unnerving all on its own.
But that’s not the only concerning thing about this advert. In fact, it feels like a sort of condensed series of tensions and ironies all collapsed together. A further, perhaps more innocuous thought I had, for instance, was: I wonder how many of those currently lured in by raves and parties under lockdown are even old enough to remember the original advert being referenced?
Before I’d even finished having this thought, in swept another blast from the past, as FACT — the anti-piracy organisation — suggested the Home Office might be tempted to ape another advert in their future law-and-order campaigns: their own.
Where to start… First question: Does the Home Office’s advert infringe on intellectual property at all? It is certainly surreal to see an advert created for the purposes of imposing copyright and intellectual property law to be parodied for another purpose… But if that wasn’t all, as one Twitter user pointed out, FACT’s own tongue-in-cheek reply utilises an unofficial upload of their own content… It’s almost as if the law itself is irrelevant; all that matters is the proliferation of the message, even if that message is decisively against the proliferation of other forms of media…
A few others highlighted this strange disconnect between the advert’s content and its expression. For instance, Michael Oswell tweeted: “Bewildering that they’re overtly referencing the most mocked youth-oriented PSA of the last 30 years? Which completely failed?” However, as someone else pointed out in their replies, the UK government has form in this regard:
It’s a deliberate comms strategy designed to have the video shared widely out of mockery. This is becoming more and more popular and was used a lot in the 2019 GE, for example writing ‘Get Brexit Done’ in comic sans. It doesn’t matter if it’s mocked, it gets the message through
As I was thinking about all of this, I was reminded of Louis Althusser’s On the Reproduction of Capital. I must confess I only read this recently. Althusser’s reputation for dry, rock-hard Marxism precedes him, but On the Reproduction of Capital goes to great lengths to slowly unpack its argument, and is pretty readable and tractable as a result.
However, much of his argument feels further complicated by the political uncertainties and contradictions made by the pandemic. I briefly nodded to this on Twitter, adding that I couldn’t really be arsed to unpack a load of Althusser for the sake of talking about and further spreading an insidious PSA from the consistently problematic UK Home Office.
But I’m here to tell you, reader, that I have changed my mind…
Althusser begins his thesis by defining a “mode of production”, adding an additional — but no less essential — caveat, that any mode of production must include the potential for its own reproduction. He writes that, whilst we typically understand a mode of production to be a way “to wrest from [nature] the goods required for subsistence (hunting, gathering, fishing, extraction of minerals, and so on)”, or, alternatively, as a way to “make it produce (agriculture, animal husbandry)”, we must take care not to confuse either of these forms of labour-power for “a state of mind, a behavioural style, or a mood.” This is perhaps to say that, whilst we may understand hunting and gathering or animal husbandry as things that all human societies do — capitalist or otherwise — they only become modes of production when they are put into the service of a capitalist economy. In other words, any generalised activity that ensures our own survival only becomes a mode of production when it is ideologically instantiated under capitalism. Work is not a “mood” in and of itself, but must be combined with one — capitalist ideology — for it to be useful to a wider system. In this sense, modes of production are instead “a set of labour processes that together form a system constituting the production processes of a particular mode of production.” He continues:
A labour process is a series of systematically regulated operations performed by the agents of that labour process, who ‘work on’ an object of labour (raw material, unprocessed material, domesticated animals, land, and so on), using, to that end, instruments of labour (more or less sophisticated tools, and then machines, and so on) in such a way as to ‘transform’ the object of labour into, on the one hand, products capable of satisfying immediate human needs (food, clothing, shelter, and so on) and, on the other hand, instruments of labour for the purpose of ensuring that this labour process can continue to be carried on in future.
Such is my mind under lockdown, I’m left thinking about Minecraft. When I go out mining, I do so to gather resources so that I can build houses and go out on adventures, mostly for their own sake. But all the time I’m constantly on the look out for, amongst other things, diamonds. Diamonds aren’t valuable in the same sense they’re valuable in the real world. They’re valuable because they signify the top level at which you can reproduce the Minecraft labour process. This is to say that 90% of the diamonds I find are used to make diamond pickaxes. I mine diamonds so that I can continue to mine harder, better, faster, stronger.
Minecraft aside — help me, I haven’t been outside in so long — why is Althusser going into such painstaking detail about why and for what purpose we use our labour to extract resources? Because in laying things out like this, it becomes all the more obvious that this process, whereby labour is undertaken to ensure that the labour itself can continue, isn’t just materially necessary but ideologically necessary for capitalism’s continuation. After all, for a long time now, it has arguably been a lot less necessary for us to work as much as we do.
For Althusser, this ideological instantiation works in two ways. On the one hand, it is constituted by “production-exploitation” —
proletarians and other wage-workers must, just to survive, take jobs in the production that exploits them, since none of the means of production are in their hands. That is why they show up ‘all by themselves’ at the personnel office and, after they have been given work, set out ‘all by themselves’ to take their jobs on the day-shift or night-shift.
But, on the other hand, the wage-labourer is also set to work by “the bourgeois ideology of ‘work’.” This ideology, essentially, ensures and maintains the split between those who go to work and those who provide the opportunity to do so. This relation is constituted by the bourgeoisie, who supposedly adhere to a kind of capitalist contract, which Althusser breaks down into a series of short principles: “labour is paid for at its value”; respect for one’s labour contract; and the proliferation of different job opportunities so that every person can find their place. This illusion of a fair deal, though rarely enforced, “does a great deal more to make workers ‘go’ than repression does”, so Althusser argues. In fact, this is why trade unions become a necessary part of the class struggle. It is their job to uphold the bourgeoisie to their own contract and, at the same time, build class consciousness around how much extra work must be done to ensure this is the case. This is to say that the role of a trade union in the class struggle is to ensure that the bourgeoisie upholds its side of the deal and, cunningly, in the process, raise consciousness around how reluctant they are to do this, thereby undermining the capitalist system on the bourgeoisie’s own terms.
But if that was all that was needed to overthrow the system, we’d have likely done so a long time ago. And so, the reproduction of the means of production acquires another layer. It is not enough to ensure that work leads to more work, but that the ideological imperative to work is reproduced as well. This necessitates the existence of what Althusser calls “ideological state apparatuses”. The necessity to work does not proliferate on its own basis, but rather must be supported by a wider superstructure. We know what this is made up of already — primarily, school, but also “the church or other apparatuses such as the army … to say nothing of the political parties” themselves. For Althusser, it is precisely through the reproduction of this superstructure that the base necessity of work is maintained — or, as he puts it, “it is in the forms and under the forms of ideological subjection that the reproduction of the qualification of labour-power is ensured.” As such, when we say that school prepares our children for the world of work, this is true at the level of ideology as well as at the level of self-fulfilment — and that the two can become so blurred is precisely the desired result.
Under lockdown, the desired result has come under considerable strain. School’s out, many are working from home, and the government has generally been woefully incompetent. There is a lot of fallout from this, but perhaps the most egregious example can been seen in the average Covid libertarian’s attempts to fight for false freedoms — last discussed here.
It should come as no surprise, for example, that one of the central concerns of the Covid libertarians is that they can’t send their kids to school. The reasons for this seem confused, and that’s because they are. For the Covid libertarian, repression is to be combatted at all costs. That is, it must be eradicated absolutely. But their understanding of repression is so one-dimensional that they only become useful idiots for a more familiar pre-Covid form of repression instead. As such, when I hear Covid deniers going on about schools and going back to work and going round their friends’ houses, all I hear is: These new repressive measures mean that we cannot repress ourselves in the ways we are otherwise used to, through work, school, and appeals to law and order.
Whereas Althusser, in his book, is talking about workplace dynamics, we can surely imagine his analysis applying just as well to the ways that lockdown measures disrupt the more familiar political-legal hierarchy. For instance, when talking about ideology and repression, he explains that their essential relation means, “for the workers, reproduction of labour-power’s submission to the dominant ideology and, for the agents of exploitation and repression, reproduction of its capacity to handle the dominant ideology properly”. That is what we see when conservatives — whether small-c or big-C — rail against lockdown’s changes to day-to-day life. They don’t care about social freedom for all. What scares those in power is their own inability to handle the dominant ideology with their regular ease. Similarly, what scares the self-repressing contingent that supports them is the fact that the dominant ideology they have otherwise bought into — often literally — is not functioning as it should. What they are protesting, then, is not repressive state apparatuses as such, but the ways that their extension, under such extreme circumstances, has impacted even their own, usually shielded, interests.
This may bring us, tangentially, back to the Home Office video, ironically reproducing a video about copyright infringement in order to tell you not to “gather”. It is yet another example of the dominant ideology being mishandled, due to Covid’s broader disruption to business as usual. As such, rather than being a fun way to assert authority, it only exacerbates the social relation under strain, whereby the rules do not apply in the same way to those who impose them.
But, again, the application of the rule of law is, arguably, secondary. The memefication of Repressive State Apparatuses shows that, in these strange times — not necessarily restricted to the coronavirus pandemic — the message is less important than what the medium otherwise represents: the reproduction of a mode of (ideological) production in trying times. And this is the primary role of Ideological State Apparatuses: “the daily, uninterrupted reproduction of the relations of the production in the ‘consciousness’, that is, the material comportment of the agents of the various functions of capitalist social reproduction.”
That the government ironically reproduces an advert about the laws surrounding the illegal reproduction of media isn’t, then, all that ironic at all. It demonstrates how the rules have changed, or even how they have been inverted.
Let’s think about it this way: Covid-19 produces what Althusser parodically calls a “conflict of duties”, which usually contains within itself a “crisis of conscience.” These conflicts and crises arise when te “subjection-effects” of business-as-usual can no longer be adequately “‘combined’ in each subject’s own acts, which are inscribed in practices, regulated by rituals, and so on.”
And so, whilst many of us are no doubt feeling the mental strain of almost a year under lockdown in the UK, we also recognise how other forms of “subjection-effect” have been displaced and even eroded. We may not be entirely free to do as we please, but we have certainly been freed from most of the usual practices and rituals of capitalist realism. This is not to deny the impact of these conflicting repressions. It is rather to suggest that we might be better off thinking about these conflicts in depth rather than just rejecting any and all of them outright. We should think through each dissonance and the reasons for its appearing, rather than fire mindlessly at any and all Covid inconveniences.
Althusser ponders this kind of vigilance himself, albeit in his own workaday context. He writes:
How are familial, moral, religious, political, or other duties to be reconciled when ‘certain’ circumstances present themselves? One has to make a choice and, even when one does not make a choice (consciously, after the ‘crisis of conscience’ that is one of the sacred rituals to be observed in such cases), the choice makes itself.
Althusser uses the example of the contraceptive pill, and how it set various ideological standpoints in conflict with one another in the 1960s. It constituted a crisis of conscience for many in France, he suggests, particularly those faced with conflicting positions within their relevant familial and religious ideologies. Under lockdown, we see a far more damning crisis produced instead, where the tabloid press demonises those getting onto packed trains and buses in the capital, wholly eliding the conflicts of duty in play.
This is to say that going to work is, in itself, framed as a choice for the worker, and the worker who goes to work has made the wrong choice at the level of state politics. But the reality is that, for vast swathes of the working class, the choice makes itself — or rather, bosses make the choice that the government incorrectly gives to workers. Why does the government make space for this blatant oversight in their messaging? Precisely because the ideological subjection of the reproduction of labour-power must remain in place.
But must it really? In truth, the whole operation is thrown into crisis. This is not a localised conflict of duties but an absolute conflict of duties. There is no choice — related to familial, moral, religious, political or other duties — that is not in conflict with another choice to be made elsewhere. And this is surely why the British government has been so inept at handling the crisis.
This doesn’t apply everywhere, of course. There are many nation-states that are, more or less, back to normal. Coronavirus has not, then, disrupted the entire global system in the same ways. In fact, what has been most humiliated is the very outdated state infrastructure that the UK has previously exported to the world; now held up by that other floundering ideological power, the United States.
I wonder if this, in part, answers the question raised by Clare Hymer on Novara Media the other day, in her brilliant report on the rise and fall of the school-striking climate protesters:
For the best part of [2019], the youth strikers had the wind at their backs. Together with Extinction Rebellion (XR), monthly strikes forced climate breakdown onto the news agenda with a level of success not achieved by any movement previously. In September 2019, as part of a global week of action, 300,000 people participated in more than 200 events nationwide in what was the biggest climate protest the UK had ever seen.
The youth strikers’ message was clear — they wouldn’t stop striking until their demands were met. But two years on from the UK’s first strike, the movement appears to have all but fizzled out. While Covid-19 was certainly a factor — at least until Black Lives Matter broke the seal on mid-pandemic protest — youth strikers from around the country have spoken to Novara Media about tensions that fractured the movement from within. What really happened to the UK youth strikes?
Why was it Black Lives Matter that broke the seal rather than the climate crisis? Perhaps it is down to the fact that BLM can be easily connected to historical precedents. There is, of course, as Hymer points out, plenty of precedence for climate protest in the UK. However, whilst it is a movement that begins in the present, it is otherwise, by its very nature, future-oriented. BLM instead attacks a system of injustice and inequality that is foundational to classic Repressive State Apparatuses. And when the system as a whole is already floundering in the face of a new viral threat, it is arguably much easier to point out historical incompetence in the context of present incompetence. BLM’s attacks of Britain’s ideological firmament were, in their own way, shocking — as in, unexpected . But, considering how the country was barely functioning in every other sense, they were also inevitable. Coronavirus threw the entire system into the air; the government is lucky it was only a few statues that came crashing down with it.
Nevertheless, that momentum hasn’t dissipated, because the crisis hasn’t either. We remain trapped within conflicts of duty and crises of conscience, in which just about every imposition made by the establishment upon its subjects is either in conflict with itself or what uncommon-sense suggests must otherwise be done. As such, there remains a fissure between the general moral duty of staving off the infection rate as best we can as localised communities, and the utter incompetence of the government to make the case for that same choice as a political duty as well. Whereas the Covid libertarian set conflates all conflicts of duty onto one another, ensuring a rejection of one is a rejection of all, and therefore ensuring they are wholly impotent in their negativity, the more strategically-minded political subject should consider where the gaps in these duties lie, and prize them further apart to find the spaces of action still available to us that are lurking underneath.
The proliferating ironies of the UK Home Office are always — always — an easy place to start.
For all my banging on, somewhat speculatively, about a kind of conversation to come, where we can talk about cultural newness in the terms of the present and actually do justice to how pop-musical developments provide glimmers of a now we’re often too caught up in things to appreciate, this conversation held on the Acid Horizon podcast got right to the heart of things in the most brilliant way.
It’s very easy to say that we need to up our game and, instead of dwelling on clichéd readings of decades-old blog interjections, we need to focus on providing our own. But Will and Anton’s contributions here are precisely the sort of necessarily contemporary reading of hyperpop I’d felt was needed. As conversations go, it felt incredibly vital.
If you can’t already tell from my gushing, I was ecstatic listening to this. In many ways, it was vindicating. Two people who evidently know more about the musical impact of this moment than I do — theoretically speaking especially — elucidating its importance in a way I certainly couldn’t.
I do get a shout out towards the very end of this episode, when Craig mentions the “anti-hauntology” debate had around these parts explicitly, but the conversation prior to that had already moved on from the confines of that debate considerably. It’s not an addition to my calls to move the conversation along; it just does it. It is an example of where we could be at. Agree or disagree with Will and Anton, and I imagine the more academic nature of the conversation will nonetheless leave some people feeling a bit confused, they kicked the ball into a whole other court and it is thrilling to listen to them do so.
As an aside, I would like to highlight a moment towards the end, when Adam talks about a post-goth Fisher — a beautifully resonant reading that was so in tune with why this blog got called “xenogothic” in the first place — and shines a light on a tendency I’ve been trying to clarify more recently: the negation of the negation. Was SOPHIE a negation of goth? I’m not sure its that simple, but understanding her contribution more generally, as a negation of negation, feels like very fertile ground for further discussion. Again, that was the accelerationist way.[1] It made me wonder how this fits into Noys’ foundational critique, of the persistence of the negative and the affirmationism that it can otherwise produce. Which side is SOPHIE on? As the accelerationists demonstrated, it’s not such an easy judgement to make.
I haven’t had time to think on this any further for myself at the moment. Maybe this is just an opportunity to fold this episode of Acid Horizon into the mix. If you’ve been following the “anti-hauntology” debate between this blog and Blue Labyrinths in recent weeks, this really is a must listen.
[1] And, perhaps we should note, also the Ccru way — though I’m all for affirming the specificity of the 2008 moment, turning the Ccru’s post-2000s punk “nothing” into something new, they remain a generative multiplicity. Niall made a good point on Twitter I think, saying:
I want to contest the reading of the CCRU as relying on a singular mythic structure (Lovecraftian) for understanding of ‘the outside’. Doesn’t this elide the plurality of other myths also underpinning their work, like Burroughs, Drexciyan mythoi, other occult influences etc.?
In my previous post on this topic, in which Ed Berger and I basically swapped notes on Maoist dialectics in relation to Deleuze-Guattari and Badiou, I left a nod to Vince Garton.
After recently reading a book on Mao’s philosophical influences that Vince recommended at the end of last year, I imagined he might have something to say about the things we were discussing. And he did! Below is Vince’s comment in full:
Some excellent quotes from Badiou here — particularly love the one on “the contemporary theory of evil” towards the end.
I suspect that today the points of contact between Badiou and Deleuze (etc.) should be emphasised above the grand disputes. It’s notable that Badiou’s intellectual exclusivism on certain points contrasts with Mao’s own eclecticism, as sketched by Allinson. On one point in particular I would be inclined to go further than Allinson — the influence of Nietzsche. He demonstrates Nietzsche’s formative influence on Mao as one of his earliest encounters with Western philosophy, but Allinson declines the conclusion that Mao was “Nietzschean” because of his own analysis of Nietzsche. I don’t find this analysis convincing, but more importantly it’s one that is shaped by Nietzsche’s post-WWII reception in the West and so cannot have been Mao’s own perception.
We may recall that Lu Xun, one of Mao’s immediate influences, was an out-and-out Nietzschean for a time and remained in close dialogue with Nietzsche throughout his life. There is much more to be said about Nietzsche’s presence in Mao and his subterranean influence on modern China, and indeed since the 1980s various Chinese intellectuals have gestured towards him in more or less open ways.
The intellectual determinants of Maoism and modern China would need a book — or several dozen — to discuss properly, so I will leave it as flagging a useful contrast. “Badiou with Deleuze”, “Badiou with Nietzsche” might be more helpful than “Badiou contra …”, and certainly produce more useful lines of inquiry than the favoured turf wars of academics, which usually devolve into personal grudges only superficially litigated through philosophy.
Badiou’s fascinating gloss on the “one divides into two” as “the divided essence of the movement as One” comes off, to me, as more “Deleuzo-Guattarian” than D&G’s own summary dismissal of the formula in ATP. Ed’s caution on D&G’s treatment of that point seems fully warranted to me. The principle of contradiction-in-tension is essential. It’s sketched not just by Badiou and Mao, but crucially by Nietzsche and in various forms in premodern Chinese philosophy and certain undercurrents of Western theology.
What I would add, though, is that in my admittedly relatively limited readings of him Badiou’s particular interlinking of mathematics and philosophy with politics, his return to the material world, never quite comes off as convincing to me. His concrete political analyses, such as his history of the Cultural Revolution, tend to be quite superficial, to my mind. In our end-of-history universe it is (genuinely) more important than ever to think rigorously about the mechanisms and determinants of meaningful political action.
Badiou, then, could probably benefit from some correction in his own right — first from an ur-Marxian focus on the machinery of political economy in detail; secondly from a closer reading of Chinese intellectual contributions on their own terms, not just because of Mao but also because China is the most important and (in the West) least understood factor in great politics today and one of the few remaining sources of genuinely novel recombinations of philosophical analysis; and thirdly, in groping towards the determinants of political action, from those various much-maligned sources — like D&G and (!) Sorel.
As I began writing this post, Ed already responded to Vince himself too, focussing on Vince’s comments regarding Nietzche. The influence of Nietzsche here is definitely interesting, but Vince is right that Allinson’s book only deals with Nietzsche in brief. The short sub-chapter in The Philosophical Influences of Mao Zedong only focuses on Nietzsche’s striving to go beyond good and evil rather than explicitly dealing with how something like the eternal return (or whatever else) factors into his dialectical thinking. On this point, Ed writes:
Vince — your comment, especially your foregrounding of Nietzsche in Mao’s intellectual development, resonates with some stuff I was looking at yesterday after my initial response to XG. Namely, Alenka Zupančič’s book “The Shortest Shadow”. Zupančič’s focus is on Nietzsche’s comments that noon is not a moment of pure unity, but the moment that “one turns into two”. I’m wondering if this influenced Mao’s own take-up of Lenin’s momentary re-assessment of the dialectic in this manner. She foregrounds the generation of tension through this formula, and makes the important point that the Two that the One splits into simply isn’t two Ones (as D&G read Mao in ATP), but signals the emergence of difference, as the impossibility of a fixed relationship between two elements. “Dionysus the Crucified” is read through this lenses is the drawing of a dynamic relation that is unfixed between two elements, Dionysus and Christ. (Or in Williams-mode: Marxist-Leninism and Neoliberal Capitalism?)
This makes the D&G simplistic rejection of the One —> Two even more puzzling, as this is precisely the same dynamic that runs through the whole of ATP. I’m also wondering if this widens the lenses for the contact between Deleuze and Badiou happening here: Zupančič reads this as Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Event, and is the Event not both the germ and the gulf between Badiou and Deleuze?
On the other hand, I’m having difficulties thinking this in relation to the question of “metaterrorism”, unless metaterrorism is likened to Nietzschean parody, which takes affirmation and negation together and carries them beyond themselves (which fwiw seems to be how Klossowski treated “accelerate the process” itself).
I’d like to add my own two cents by trying to pick up on a few things in each comment simultaneously.
I’m glad, personally, that it’s not just me who is a little confused as to the precise nature of the disagreement between Badiou and Deleuze-Guattari here. I think Vince is right that the disagreements seem to be academic rather than explicitly political. Badiou’s animosity seems rooted in the fact that, as a student in ’68 when Deleuze was a lecturer, he was supposedly part of a student organisation that forced Deleuze to retract his Bolshevism(?). Sounds like classic student hijinks.
Either way, it seems there’s certainly some interpersonal drama that overshadows the actual philosophical disagreements. But that is also something that works both ways. Whereas Badiou had an axe to grind with Deleuze over his political activities (or apparent lack thereof) in ’68, Guattari had an axe to grind with Badiou over his uncritical Lacanianism. (Peter Barker has a funny line on this, when introducing Badiou’s 1982 Theory of the Subject: “Badiou’s reliance on Lacanian psychoanalysis was strongly at odds with the Deleuzo-Guattarian construction of a political unconscious. Unlike the anti-psychiatrist Felix Guattari, Badiou never underwent analysis with Lacan, and so crucially had no axe to grind with the institutional arrangements of Lacan’s Ecole Freudienne.”)
Beyond this, I am in total agreement with Vince’s overall point here. Something percolating alongside this discussion for me is the influence of American political and literary thought on Deleuze and Guattari at that time. One of the other books I’m drowning in at the minute as I attempt to haphazardly constructed an intellectual patchwork of influences on this topic is Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, which explores the influence of “Third World Marxism” on the various revolutionary Communist groups active stateside from the ’60s to the collapse of the Soviet Union. But it also asks what Lenin, Mao and Che can teach political movements today that have been defanged by what Badiou might call the “ethical” turn in modern politics.
The edition I have has a preface by Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, which bigs up the book, but does more to paint a picture of the present impasse than make any comment on how to deal with it. It is, again, superficial rather than asking perhaps the most interesting and difficult of questions: what might Lenin, Mao and Che mean to Black Lives Matter or Extinction Rebellion, et al., today, in the aftermath of the twentieth century? I think that, broadly speaking, regardless of his style of presentation, penchant for maths, etc., this is the question that Badiou brings to the fore in the 2000s. For better or for worse, he attempts to update it to mirror the other “conditions” of our moment, reading this kind of thinking through the science or mathematics of the present, and this is perhaps his biggest influence on contemporary continental theory, and perhaps in part responsible for dissolving the Continental-Analytic divide, albeit monstrously. Žižek’s most recent book really takes up this kind of project, for instance. In Sex and the Failed Absolute, which I’m yet to properly dive into, he addresses the problem mentioned last time, around zero and sexuation, and considers it through the lens of speculative realism and quantum physics. Why? Because he takes up Badiou’s Althusserian streak, through which he suggests that new philosophies are always made possible by simultaneous advances in art, politics and science — Kantian philosophy would not have be possible without Newtonian physics and the French revolution, for instance.
That’s what I find interesting, personally, and accelerationism seems to be a similar attempt at this. It feels like its kind theory of the subject, which tries to formulate a new philosophy that properly responds to capitalism’s current crises. I find a reappraisal of the early accelerationist blogosphere especially interesting on those grounds too. I wholly agree with Vince, basically. My current obsession with Badiou is fuelled less by a belief in his project — and even less by an understanding of his mathematical arguments, which I do not possess — and more by an interest in how his inclusion in the development of accelerationism asks precisely these sorts of questions. “In our end-of-history universe it is (genuinely) more important than ever to think rigorously about the mechanisms and determinants of meaningful political action.” I don’t think I could have said it any better myself. I think that’s precisely what lurks under the surface of many of those early accelerationist blogposts that frame Deleuze with Badiou, and vice versa. It’s about the production of the new, on the one hand, but also how we can produce a “philosophy of action”, as Fisher called it, to appropriately respond to the new and even help fortify the conditions of its emergence. And I don’t think anyone in the accelerationist blogosphere, whether that’s yourselves or the first cohort, takes that task flippantly at all — despite frequent accusations to the contrary.
So, if I can do the same as last time and build around this a little, I’d like to firstly affirm again Vince’s comment that it is better to emphasise Deleuze and Badiou’s points of contact than their points of disconnection. That’s actually where this interest in Badiou has emerged for me, and which seems of particular importance to the early accelerationist blogosphere. Accelerationism was, for Williams, an initial rebuke of hauntology because he contrasted the Badiouian view on change with the Deleuzo-Guattarian view. Or, rather, as Deleuze-Guattari might put it, their subtly different conceptions of “the production of the new”.
I think I wrote on this in a post recently but I can’t remember where. I’ve been working on it for a book so I’ll re-rehearse my spiel below just for the opportunity to exercise my faculties, lol, and maybe this is a further pole to prop up this Nietzschean view of the Event with too.
Sam Gillespie demonstrates in his 2008 book The Mathematics of Novelty that there was a fissure between a Badiouian understanding of the production of the new and a more Deleuzian example. He notes how, for Deleuze, “the aim of philosophy is not to rediscover the eternal or universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced.” Gillespie notes that Deleuze’s “principal adversary” in this regard was not Hegel but Plato; “a Platonism of eternal, unchanging forms, existing independently of a world that is continually in a state of change.” It is philosophy’s responsibility, as far as Deleuze is concerned, to uncover “the conditions under which that change occurs.” (This contrasts with Badiou’s Platonism, but he believes less in forms than Platonic “truths”, or maybe “mathematical forms” which amount to the same thing — equations that exist independently of a world that is constantly in a state of ideological change.)
The conditions under which the new is produced are, in one sense, the conditions of being itself. To jettison creativity into some outside is, in a sense, disastrously theological. Deleuze does not believe that all of life emerges from a Oneness — be that one God or the Oneness of the universe – but from a pure multiplicity. “The ‘lines of flight’ that should be familiar to even the most casual reader of Deleuze find their convergence not in a singular point,” Gillespie notes, “but in the various ‘bifurcations’ and ‘divergences’ they assume in the course of their own movement.” Be that the evolution of life itself or the movement of cultural production, the New will generate itself.
Badiou, however, does not assume “that being exists as a creative power, but rather that to think being we need nothing more than a formal assertion that nothing … exists.” Gillespie asserts that these two positions are not so different — “contemporary mathematics attests to the fact that zero” — as Badiou’s starting point — “and infinity” — or Deleuze’s notion of multiplicity — “are coextensive.” But when we consider the production of the New, the difference between these two positions becomes quite stark. We can imagine, perhaps, a generative infinity, but what is it to create ex nihilo? (Numogrammatic senses tingling.)
This tension at the heart of contemporary philosophy is arguably mirrored by tensions within cultural thought at the same time. Badiou positions himself as a militant revolutionary, believing, as Gillespie summarises, that “it is from the inconsistency of the void that something new can appear within the realm of human experience as such: ruptures or breaks within knowledge that force us to redefine our general categories and standards of determination.” Badiou’s thought emerges as a newly-rationalist punk sensibility within contemporary philosophy. This may not be explicitly contra Deleuze, but we might argue it is contra the Deleuzian orthodoxy of the neoliberal academy. In this sense, might we say that Deleuze’s conception of an infinite multiplicity begins to sour against the false meritocracy of centrist progressivism? Is a deferral to the innate creativity of being now seen as the philosophical equivalent of gradualist reformism and market vitalism?
It must be said that this flattening of philosophical and capitalist conceptions of novelty have not gone away. In fact, the two have only become more entangled. Many of those thinkers associated with “speculative realism”, whilst paying heed to Badiou’s various challenges, nonetheless found gaps in his framework. In particular, there is the question of “who is doing the counting?” Badiou’s philosophical deployment of zero and set theory from mathematics produces — as Graham Harman once wrote (in a since-deleted blogpost) — “a militant human subject” that is capable of “disrupting given states-of-situations in truth events.” The problem, however, is that it is precisely that human subject that has been occupied by a parasitic capitalism. As Ray Brassier once argued, it is not simply mathematics that makes an imperative of understanding being as a void but capitalism itself. Indeed, as Brassier notes, this is precisely the argument made by Deleuze and Guattari. He writes: “If capitalism is the name for that curiously pathological social formation in which ‘everything that is bound testifies that it is unbound in its being, that the reign of the multiple is the groundless ground of what is presented, without exception’, it is because it liquidates everything substantial through the law of universal exchangeability, simultaneously exposing and staving off the inconsistent void underlying every consistent presentation through apparatuses of ‘statist’ regularization.” Un-Brassiered, the argument here is that Badiou gives too much numerical agency to the human subject; in a way that we might say is politically contra but philosophically resonant with Land. It can be militant in its counting but it can never be more militant than capitalism itself. In trying to ontologise mathematics, Badiou is only doing capitalism’s work for it.
And yet, this is not to proclaim victory for Deleuze and Guattari either. In fact, the goal is perhaps to synthesise their positions. Deleuze and Guattari, after all, also deploy zero and mathematics in their philosophy, but they speak of zero as intensity rather than as an innately generative extensity. This position has its own problems in the present too, but maybe that’s why their conjuncture is so generative. As Fisher suggested, they help us keep an eye on the other’s blind spots.
Intriguingly, I only just found another Brassier essay on Deleuze and Badiou’s coming together this morning — notably taken from a 2000 issue of Warwick’s philosophy journal Pli; mid Ccru era — which may help attach this brief overview of the production of the new in Deleuze and Badiou to the questions regarding Nietzsche. It’s an essay in which Brassier compares Deleuze and Badiou’s thinking of the dice-throw. The whole essay is worth reading but it has a very nice conclusion, which I’ll also end on, that knits Deleuze and Badiou together in a way that might be particularly generative for this conversation:
Let’s conclude by recapitulating the basic philosophical parameters of the disagreement between Deleuze and Badiou on the question of the dicethrow. Badiou himself sums up the opposition by reinvoking Mallarme, with whom he aligns himself here against the Nietzsche-Deleuze tandem. For Nietzsche-Deleuze ‘Chance comes forth from the Infinite, which has been affirmed’; whereas for Mallarme-Badiou, ‘the Infinite issues forth from Chance, which has been denied’. What then are the philosophical consequences of this slight, yet nevertheless crucial alternation? On the one hand we have the Deleuzean dice-throw as instance of anorganic vitalism. This dice-throw affirms the whole of chance in a single throw; it is the auto-affirmation of cosmic Chance as One-All in which the affirming ‘I’ is cracked and the thrower’s identity dissolved. This is the dice-throw as vital figuration of the great cosmic animal. On the other hand, we have Badiou’s dice-throw as index of the stellar matheme. This dice-throw is an undecidable subtraction separating an irreducibly singular configuration of the alea, and dissolving the cosmic unity of Chance in a gesture that simultaneously reaccentuates the void’s untotalizable dispersion and crystallizes the Subject. This is the dicethrow as mathematical quantification of the stellar void.
So we seem to be confronted with an insuperable conflict of philosophical interest: the event as subjective destitution versus the event as subjective constitution; the event as auto-affirmation of the One-All versus the event as puncturing subtraction from the One and dissemination of the All; a manifold of actual chances coinciding in the sovereign necessity of Chance as a virtual whole versus a plurality of separate and incommensurable chances subtended by the hazard of an infinitely empty void. And the conflict effectively remains insuperable or undecidable until a decision is forced. But perhaps the ability to decide in favour of the undecidable is precisely what separates subtractive intervention from purified affirmation; in which case the quantification of the stellar void punctures the qualitative unity of the cosmic animal.
It’s at this point in the Badiou-Deleuze discourse that my own “I” is cracked and dissolved, but understanding how this is relevant to accelerationism, and how it can be regrounded upon that question of thinking “rigorously about the mechanisms and determinants of meaningful political action” is my main concern here. It might be a fool’s errand, although I think not, especially in light of the conversations we’ve all had over the last few years. This is what I find carried forwards in “unconditional accelerationism” from Williams’ initial accelerationist gesture: “a more strategic examination of precisely where … evental sites and historical situations exist within our current time: those regions which appear, from the in-situational point of view, to be marginal, and properly undecideable.“
