razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution

Category: Capital

  • Capitalism and the schizoanalytic unconscious.

    Capitalism and the schizoanalytic unconscious.

    (These notes provided the basis for a talk I gave to the A2Z group in London, March 31st 2017.  I have uploaded the fuller set of notes as a PDF here)

    Capital and the schizoanalytic unconscious website PDF October 2017Download

    “I am interested”, Guattari says, “in a totally different kind of unconscious. It is not the unconscious of specialists, but a region everyone can have access to with neither distress nor particular preparation: it is open to social and economic interactions and directly engaged with major historical currents”.  It is useful to think about Guattari’s interest by considering what he says in another essay – “molecular analysis is the will to a molecular power, to a theory and practice that refuses to dispossess the masses of their potential for desire”.  The schizoanalytic practice is thus a means by which desire is brought front and centre without it being subsumed under the priests of interpretation.

    This desire on the part of Guattari, to liberate the role of desire from the prisons of interpretation, is no doubt tricky to embrace.  As he notes in the essay ‘Everybody wants to be a fascist’, the core of this problem lies in the collective reality of desire.  At one point he reflects on the performative contradiction that might be thought to exist in the situation of an individual lecturer offering this schizoanalytic account – “in reality, everything I say tends to establish that a true political analysis cannot arise from an individuated enunciation” because “the individuated enunciation is the prisoner of the dominant meanings.  Only a subject-group can manipulate semiotic flows, shatter meanings, and open the language to other desires and forge other realities”.  

    This problem, of the individuated enunciation in relation to the group ear, becomes clearly visible when Guattari remarks, in the same essay on fascism, that “what’s the use of polemicising: the only people who will put up with listening to me any longer are those who feel the interest and urgency of the micropolitical antifascist struggle that I’m talking about”.  This acute sense of the limitations of those who will ‘put up with’ him appears to echo the actual practice of engagement with strange and psychotic discourses, no doubt reflecting Guattari’s continual concrete engagement with psychotics in institutions like La Borde.  The difficulties of dealing with the repetitions of psychotic language or behaviour often express themselves in terms of precisely this capacity to ‘put up with’ things, a capacity that the wider socius – outside of a clinical setting – generally lacks.  One of the main difficulties someone with a ‘mental health problem’ encounters is the wearing down of their personal relationships as people refuse to ‘put up with’ behaviours and language that disrupts the smooth functioning of the social machine, a difficulty that is shared by anyone who speaks, writes or thinks in a way that doesn’t conform to the easy-mode game of social cues and interactions.  Most people prefer their games set to easy-mode.  So when Guattari  – who is often identified as one of the ‘deliberately obscure’ thinkers – acknowledges that he is difficult to listen to it might be thought that he is acknowledging the idiosyncrasies of his style.  It is, however, not simply the style of his language but the content of his thought that is what becomes difficult to listen to.

    The relation between the specific enunciator and the group ear, constitute the real terms of actual enunciation.  It stands in contrast with the “universal interlocutor”, that great imaginary face of reason in front of whom every rational speaker is supposed to stand, awaiting judgement.  Analysis, reason, explanation, all operate, for the most part, inside this system of the ‘judgement of God’, in which the particularity of the statements are meant to be swept away in favour of the universality of the supposed ‘truth’ they attempt to articulate.  Yet this strange, abstract model of reason hides in plain sight a simple lie, which is that what is said is what matters.  This lie, that it is what is said that matters, removes that crucial and seemingly incontrovertible reality of the ear.  In practice the users of language constantly negotiate with the ear, constantly re-speak their words as they negotiate with the ear of their interlocutor, a negotiation that constitutes the basis of ‘personal relationships’.  The to-and-fro between one individual and another in an intimate relationship reveals the reality of the ear in the word – what the other hears matters more than what words were used and the words are highly fungible in the struggle to make oneself heard or to hear what someone means.  Anyone who fails to realise this will have many failed relationships.  What you think you said matters less than what they know they heard.

    Whilst this problem of the ear is acute in the relations people have with the ‘psychotic’ individual, it is prevalent to one degree or another in all talk, in all discourse.  It’s not a clean problem, however, not an error that can be corrected.  Rather it’s a dirty problematic, one that refuses to be washed away and which calls for other strategies, ones that cannot be prescribed but which must be acquired.  When Guattari says that the ones who will put up with him are the ones ‘who feel the interest and urgency’ of the problem he is addressing it is crucial to hear this emphasis on feeling.  The collective conversation, this coming together of mouth and ear, is grounded in this ‘vague sense’ that we ascribe to feelings.  It may be true that I feel before I think but what is forgotten is that I don’t stop feeling once I begin to think.  Thought is only ever alive and real, actual, when it is within a specific network of feelings.  There is no actual thought in the pages of a book left on the shelf, at best only virtual thought.  There is no thought without a tone of existence, without an ‘affect’ within which it is both produced and constrained.

    It’s easy to find much talk of ‘affect’ in modern philosophy and critical thought, although it is perhaps waning as the flavour of the month.  Yet the connection between ‘affect’ and the ‘schizoanalytic unconscious’ is strong and thinking them together can amplify their capacity to be useful tools in making the world thinkable.  In the contemporary world the problem of a political future distinct from the one we live in is deeply constrained by the problem of ‘thinkability’.  We hear the idea that “a radically different future is unthinkable”, a point that has been made enough times now to become almost second nature to many.  Yet the problem of the unthinkable future is best encountered not through pessimism but through a kind of joy, a joy that rests in the fact that thought is explosive.  What I mean by this is that thought operates not in a causal sequence but in terms of excessive moments, those breakthroughs, sudden glimpses, the shifts and slides of the ‘aha!’ moment, what sometimes goes under the name of ‘insight’, a term not without it’s own difficult implications.  In this situation if the problem of the moment is that the future is unthinkable then, at the same time, this blockage is deeply fragile.  All it takes is for the thought of the future to arrive for the damn to burst.

    This ‘all it takes’ is not nothing, however, it is not there to suggest an easy way to thinking the future but rather to indicate that peculiar fragility which perhaps cannot be perceived in the present but that, nevertheless, we can wager exists.  The wager becomes easier to make if the stakes are placed on the right horse and it is in this that the role of ‘affect’ and the ‘schizoanalytic unconscious’ can help, predominantly by replacing the ‘cognitive priority’ conception of consciousness.  Within this conception of consciousness thought is conceived as a series of moments,usually moving from starting point to conclusion, whereby an ‘input’ is transformed into an ‘output’.  This model of transformation is deeply delusional and massively idealistic.  It assumes some kind of autonomous module that exists within the ‘mind’ and which mediates the input/output relations, relations in the broad sense between ‘world’ as input and ‘behaviour’ as output.  Instead of such an abstractly autonomous module, consciousness is instead a kind of shape, one that exists within a network of relations and which possesses only as much autonomy as is possible within the particular state of relations.  That network of relations which places limits of the amount of autonomy possible is what can be thought with the concepts of ‘affect’ and the ‘schizoanalytic unconscious’.  The material body that thinks exists inside the social relations it is organised into, which it expresses as a particular set of affects (feelings) that in turn constitute the landscape of its possibilities, it’s ‘schizoanalytic unconscious’.

    These four elements – the material body that thinks, the social relations, the sets of affects and the landscape of possibilities – all operate to constitute a world and each is malleable to a greater or lesser degree.  A political thought which takes each seriously and which understands them to be moments of the articulated whole needs to think of causality less as a sequence of temporal moments and more as a fluid articulation of complex connections between points, as a set of vertices and edges.  The shape that is constituted by the vertices and edges is the contemporary world of the subject, it is, in effect, the shape of consciousness at any particular moment.  Within contemporary capitalism the shapes of consciousness continually undergo a set of pressures that attempt to ‘push’ such shapes into a particular mould, that attempt to fit square pegs into round holes, or more exactly that attempt to fit variable pegs into round holes.  The round hole is constituted by ‘capital’, by an abstract, non-conscious yet non-material force – a law of production – that is capable of direct effect on the points and lines that form the shape.  It’s capacity to deform the shapes of consciousness rests in the force it brings to bear on the shapes of consciousness, forces which produce, amongst others, the idea of the ‘wage labourer’, but which operates, fundamentally, as the primary force acting on contemporary consciousness.  To that extent our problematic can be stated quite clearly – capitalism and contemporary consciousness are connected, but is the connection contingent or necessary?.

  • Concrete communism & the problem of the cell and the new organism

    Concrete communism & the problem of the cell and the new organism

    workeroftheworlduniteThere is an interesting article on the The Commune website about theorising and imagining a post-capitalist society – take a peek over here. I agree with the emphasis the author has on the problem of labour, abstract labour in particular.  At the end of the piece they point out the implication – “So one of the most fundamental tasks we face today, I believe, is to work out how to create the social conditions such that each hour of labor will really count as equal – beginning on the day after the revolution” and it does seem that this is a two-fold task.

    How exactly does a system of equal concrete labour value work. In this regard I think it is worth looking to some of the experiences of people living together and trying to forge models that work.  For example, this article about the Twin Oaks community in the US has some interesting hints at the concrete practical experiments done to create an equal labour model:

    http://www.salon.com/2013/02/10/i_worked_hard_for_no_pay_and_i_dug_it_partner/

    There’s no getting away from the fact that when talking about communism one of the first questions that arises, once you get beyond complete rejection, is ‘how will it work’ and often the responses seem unsatisfactory.  It’s interesting to note, of course, how the Twin Oaks model uses B.F.Skinner as a theoretical background.

    So on the one hand we might suggest that the commune is the space in which the problem of concrete labour will be solved.  Concrete labour needs to be a human relation, a direct relation to the people and needs that make up our lives. On the other hand it seems like you don’t or can’t simply abolish abstract labour. (more…)

  • Reading Capital (notes #0–preliminaries)

    1. Some preliminary notes on the fact of the reading group and its method.paris68.jpg_5664408567216169362

    A reading group recently began in London with the aim of reading through Marx’s Capital (Vol.1), Monday nights 7pm at the Red Lion in Hoxton.  It’s part of what seems to be a contemporary revival of interest in Marx’s work driven not by the academy but by a mixture of political activists and people who want to try and find some understanding of the contemporary crisis in capitalism.  (This Facebook group, for example, has links to groups in Liverpool and Sheffield as well as the London group).  

    The first thing I note was about the inaugural meeting and this was the number of people attending.  I am used to reading groups being small in the academic world, quite often only half a dozen people, maybe a dozen or so for larger groups.  In this instance, however, some 40 people turned up to the first meeting and after four sessions the numbers are still around 25 or so.  A number of people expressed their reason for coming in terms of the practical goal of attempting to understand the world around them, the crisis in capitalism that is the contemporary horizon we all live in.  That they have turned to Marx is indicative perhaps of the centrality that he has to any criticism of capitalism.  Even if the name is not mentioned the spectre of Marx nevertheless lurks in the background every time a Banker attracts criticism for being greedy.  There’s a curious logic at work here because there’s no reason to assume Marx will ever simply disappear, anymore than there’s a reason to assume Nietzsche or Freud will disappear.  At times, no doubt, they will inform thought, culture and life in greater or lesser depth but their presence, the possibility of their return, haunts thinking, discourse. dialogue.  These three figures are mentioned because they are gathered together by Ricouer under the title ‘Masters of Suspicion’ and it is the suspicion of belief that Ricouer refers to.  Now whilst this is a problem for faith, as Ricouer himself notes, it is also a problem for trust.  Each time the system of capitalism enters one of its periodic crisis the implicit trust we that we must have in capitalism, almost of necessity, slips sideways.  The world can often seem a little screwy, off-kilter and badly organised but even then we still live as though it were capable of being less so, this active living of our lives relying upon a trust, in this case a trust that the form of life we are in has the capacity to be improved.  The trust that the masters of suspicion displace is a trust in the future within the world as it is now.  Of all the three Marx is perhaps the most radical in this displacement because he radically disrupts the role of the individual, more radically than either of the other two who remain wedded to some sort of future the individual can achieve with their own effort.  If Marx ‘works’ it is in describing the machinic operation of a system that positions the individual as a place within the machine.  It is not without reason that he was fascinated by the story of Faust.  Capitalism is not the result of individuals but results in a type of individual.  Our actions are not just unconscious and perhaps capable of becoming more conscious, or filled with resentiment and capable of becoming less so, instead they are the result of some event that occurred behind our backs and which we might be able to understand but which we will not change merely through understanding.  The machine is real in the sense that Philip K Dick gave to the term ‘reality’.  For Dick the real is what remains when we stop believing in it.  Capitalism is entirely real in this sense, perhaps the epitome of reality.  An anti-capitalism that is more than a mere intellectual dislike or dismissal faces the rather daunting task of both destroying one reality and constructing a new one.  No greater adventure can be imagined than the task facing the anti-capitalist.

    The second thing I note was the way the group reads, which is slowly.  By slowly I mean two to three paragraphs a session at the moment – though this is in part because the starting point for Capital contains a whole range of difficult and curious notions that need quite a lot of attention.  Slow reading is a curious thing, something I’ve mainly come across in academic situations, often with a nod to Nietzsche who is perhaps the first to make explicit the resistance to dominant culture that is involved in slow reading.  For many it’s a difficult thing because it disrupts the common focus of consuming a text, turning it into a tool or resource.  Instead slow reading draws the reader into a process that refuses to allow the reader to simply ‘understand’ the text.  The process combines the attempt to understand a text with an increasing awareness of the resistance and mis-reading we bring to a text, whereby we tend to read into the text.  In the case of most works of philosophy it is a danger to ‘read into’ a text because what happens is that the reader merely reproduces their own pre-existing concepts, overlaying them onto the text rather than reading out of the text the arrangements that exist within it.  The implicit assumption that we all speak the same language is fundamentally what is challenged by slow reading.  The arrangements of concepts within each individual have both particular idiosyncrasies but also cultural and ideological determinations.  For practically orientated work this is not necessarily a problem but for any type of critical activity it is the central difficulty in any act of actual learning.  Too often a student responds not to the text they’re reading but from the position they’re within, one that they live as though it were their own but which is more than likely part of their cultural ‘common sense’.  The resistance to slow reading appears in the need to understand, which often arises in amusing ways.  When faced with a difficult line, a strange phrase or a curious concept what is often used is the strategy of buttressing.  We grab hold of concepts that lie to hand, either from our ‘developed’ understanding or from the ‘common sense’ referred to and we buttress the difficult passage with these other concepts, stabilising it in our minds so we can move on.  What this does, however, is to buttress the difficulty within our own understanding which sounds on the face of it like a reasonable thing to do.  However if the concept we’re trying to understand is in essence hostile to our existing understanding then all we have done is, in effect, to neutralise it and assimilate it.  We de-fang difficult concepts by making them part of our everyday world.  The task is not always to assimilate but to allow the possibility that the concept will destroy our everyday world, change our understanding – what else is actual learning than to undergo a process of change.  If the change that is sought is radical – as I would suggest it is with all the masters of suspicion – then this means that the understanding will undergo some radical change, root and branch destruction to clear the land for new growth.  One of the problems of ‘understanding’ is that it tends to make us passive, it tends to make us feel like we understand rather than give us anything actual, concrete and real.  When we feel like we understand we stop learning, we begin to use words and phrases as though we knew what they meant and what they did, in the process losing the radical experimentation that can offer us new discoveries, radically new discoveries of new worlds that are possible.