Jodi Dean has a couple of absolutely chilling posts up on plutonomy (here and here). I don’t know what is more harrowing and depressing here: The fact that the document Jodi links to reads like a mad scientist version of Marxist thought that uses analysis of the structuration of our contemporary situation not as a means for emancipation and developing alternatives but to even more effectively exploit us, or the poster that responds to the Citigroup document by pointing out that it contains bad grammar, that the author is stupid, and that they’re just “wicked”. I don’t find the author of the document particularly stupid– in fact the bits Jodi cites strike me as uncanny and frightening and inverted doubles of something one might find in a “radical political theory” journal or book –rather, what is so upsetting about the document is how clear sighted the author is about the economic structuration of our moment and all the injustices it contains.
Rather than seeing this as impetus for emancipation, the author instead sees it as opportunity for even more effective exploitation. What does strike me as stupid is the idea that somehow suggesting the author of this document is stupid and wicked constitutes an adequate response to such reasoning. The author of this piece is obviously what Zizek characterized as a “knave” or someone who cynically serves the ends of dominant power. The person that denounces such reasoning on abstract normative grounds is clearly the leftist fool that believes he’s won some sort of important victory when secretly not holding the testicles of the lord that claims the right to prima nachte as he rapes the serf’s wife on the dusty road and commands her husband to hold his balls as he does so. The leftist fool thinks he’s here gotten away with some radical victory after not preventing the lord’s testicles from getting dusty as commanded. Unfortunately, his wife has still been raped.
read on for more rant!
And this situation seems precisely analogous to the leftist fool that thinks somehow normativity, somehow pointing out the wickedness of these folks, is an effective strategy that really makes a difference. Sure you’ve dirtied your lord’s testicles but nothing’s changed. You’re still being fucked. Leave it to the armchair academic (usually in the form of a white, privileged, hipster kid that has issues with his daddy) to think that the appropriate response to this sort of power and injustice consists in saying, in a sophisticated fashion with all sorts of impressive rhetorical bells and whistles, to say, with suitable transcendental armor, “you suck and are really bad!” Or perhaps it’s the Habermasian that believes he’s developing a knock down argument when he suggests that “simply through entering into discourse you’re implicitly endorsing certain norms of rationality.” Riiiighhhhtttt. I can’t say the tyrants seem very convinced. What was your point again?
Somehow I don’t think the powers that be behind abominations like “Right to Work” states are all that concerned with being bastards. Were we to flash back into the past of those who advance this sort of response, I would not be at all surprised to see scenes of them on the playground, being bullied by the stupid jock, saying “you’re mean and that’s not right!” in a whiny nasally voice. Meanwhile that bully continues to do all the things he was doing before and sleeps just fine at night. Were it not such an awful situation I would almost be inclined to say such people deserve what they get because such a mentality is absolutely pathetic and frustrating. Leave it to the armchair hipster to completely divorce these questions from any sort of real concrete engagement, any real analysis of the situations, and any real efficacious action. After all, that would require getting their hands dirty by descending to the empirical and figuring out why things really work this way. And that descension to the empirical would evoke a sort of ontological anxiety where they could no longer rely on abstract principles and rules to navigate the world to which they’re so socially maladapted. Better to feel good about being right about the assholishness of these folks than to do something about this bastardery.
In the first place, none of us needed the moralist to tell us that the whole situation royally sucks and is profoundly wrong. We’ve been living it every day and know quite well that it sucks. What we needed were effective strategies and practices to change the situation, and that requires knowledge of how the situation actually works. “You suck and are mean!” doesn’t cut mustard here and is the refrain of the pimple faced weasel that uses an inhaler a lot. We didn’t need Habermas, Kant, or Adorno to “guarantee” the suckiness of the situation and why it’s wrong. Tell us something we didn’t already know! For instance, tell us how to punch that bully and break his nose or effective strategies for kicking him in the balls. “Being right” doesn’t do a whole hell of a lot of good when everything remains intact exactly as it was before, but somehow many of our brightest minds think they’re doing something important when they establish the grounds under which one side is right while leaving situations intact exactly as they were before. It makes you want to pull your hair out with the absurdity of it all as they solemnly tell you about the is/ought distinction, the eternity of norms, their absolute status, while nonetheless kids in Africa are still having hands cut off to compel villages into slavery over diamond mines and while we’re being bilked out of jobs, healthcare, a voice, workplace protections, a cut of the pie, livable wages, etc. The fantasy here seems to be– and it is a fantasy in the proper psychoanalytic sense –that if we just firewall norms enough, if we just render them impervious to being and the world enough, then we’ll finally have norms powerful enough to triumph over tyrants and convince them to play by the rules. This way of thinking is nearly as obscene as the actions of the tyrants. Yet such a belief, a belief in the is/ought distinction, or the “non-existence” of the transcendental (this maneuver still makes me chuckle… transcendental normativity is so pure and absolute that it must be entirely situated outside of existence! what a howler!) as a means of protecting the transcendental from all worldly contamination, is dangerous superstition on par with explaining lightning by reference to Zeus. It’s a comfortable myth or fantasy with zero effect on circumstances. Seriously, this is your silver bullet? Seriously, you think this is doing something? Seriously you really think there was some huge mystery to be solved here or some question to be grounded? Really? Meanwhile, the rest of us know there’s 1% of the population that is the equivalent of a vampire sucking the blood out of everyone else (not to mention cracking our bones open and eagerly eating the marrow) and 99% of the situation filled with people trying to navigate a shitty situation without a way out or a viable means of punching back. And here all the nomo-maniacs are sitting around discussing the epistemic conditions under which we can determine whether the Titanic is really sinking. Surreal. They don’t even understand what the question or issue is.
It is an abomination and obscenity to even have the discussion by virtue of the energy, distraction, and time that it wastes. I mean, to looking all of the volumes of Habermas sitting on a bookstore shelf, all of the conference panels and articles devoted to his work, is enough to make you want to cry. Seriously people? Communicative rationality? Seriously? This is what you’re devoting your time to? No wonder you got hit on the playground. Everyone around you felt sympathetic to the bully by virtue of the absurdity of your response. And to advance such a position is already to collaborate with that 1% precisely by virtue of the manner in which it wastes so much energy and is completely inadequate. You’re busy indulging your nomo-mania or stroking it, while they’re running the field. What a sad thing for philosophers to render themselves to irrelevant. No wonder the “intelligentsia” is so distrusted. They don’t understand what the basic issue is and create a sense of desperation in which people are left with the sense that “only a god can save them”. They’re sitting there discussing how we can determine what the right or wrong political stance is, how normativity can be grounded, while jobs are being outsourced and women in sweat shops are being forced in to sex slavery. But somehow we’re supposed to figure out what merits the judgment that these things are abominations. Again, it’s surreal. In the meantime, those that point out that it’s surreal and absurd are charged with lacking rigor, not being able to ground their discourse, or with advocating “anything goes”. At the same time, these folks exercise the Hegelian counter-move of turning Marx back on his head and placing everything in the realm of the ideal completely ignoring the material. Ergo the Kantian and Hegelian priests of the state win. Terrific. Such is the sickness of anyone who’s never had to build anything and who therefore is thoroughly unacquainted with the labor, risk, and complication that goes into making something stand and therefore is idealist through and through. For them it’s the ideas that are real and all objects, bodies, and situations are ephemera and epiphenomena of the ideal. No, the non-builders can rest content with products and treat these products as more real than the process, the labor, by which they were made to stand or built. They literally believe that it was norms that drove things like the labor movement at the turn of the century, rather than seeing these norms as the product of these struggles and situations. Of course, the world becomes a mess when viewed through the prism of that sort of privilege that is completely blind to the work of building and where everything becomes inverted or turned upside down where the order of the real and what produces change is concerned. All the wrong questions get asked. As Latour would say, not Science, but science in action. And similarly, we should cease speaking of Politics or Ethics, but politics in action and ethics in action. At least the qualifier “in action” has a fighting chance of actually discerning how change is produced, norms are produced, forms of social structuration and organization are transformed, of how things are built, and of taking into account the relevant human and nonhuman actors, rather than falling into the trap of treating accomplished black boxes or actors as somehow more real than the struggle involved in these processes.
Second, newsflash, the lord doesn’t give a damn. The lord knows damn well that the situation sucks, that he’s a heartless asshole, and that he’s exploiting the situation for his own gain. The lord is not impressed by your observation that to enter into discourse is to implicitly endorse the norms of rationality. In fact, the lord is tickled that you make this argument because now he knows that he has one more tool to exploit you, to run the field, to play you to his own advantage. You’re not hurting his feelings or changing anything by telling him this, and you’re certainly not effecting any change by pointing this out. Quite the reverse. You’re instead playing the part of the leftist fool that thinks he’s winning some sort of grand battle by dirtying the balls of the lord. Certainly those of us who live in the suckiness of this suck can come up with a better response than “they’re bad!” and the whining platitudes of the beautiful soul that believes somehow the situation is changed by guaranteeing norms. Certainly there are better ways to expend one’s energies.
Larval Subjects . 
October 18, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Fabulous rant, Levi, thank you, brings to mind the unstoppable Clara Lemlich. The situation calls for the courage and depth praxis requires, but what praxis? That’s where things get intricately complicated and fascinating.
October 18, 2009 at 3:23 pm
I have this “rant” in my head at least a dozen times a day.
Sigh.
October 18, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Efective politics in action, to work against a complex network of entrenched centers of power, requires a wide base of people who get it–who know and more or less understand what’s going on. There really is no effective way of reaching the ‘bullies,’ those whose shaping interest is only to preserve power–and to that end, are capable of manufacturing (and not seldem, believing themselves) in the wildest self-serving rationalizations (climate change, health care). The impotant targets are those caught in what Joe Bageant calls the American Hologram–and there’s where it gets maddenly, rant-generatingly frustrating.
On specific, narrowly defined issues (I’m thinking of the grass-roots effort to stop Foxwoods and Sugarhouse from imposing their box-and parking lot casinos in Philadelphia, where there is already neighborhood level understanding of what this would mean, it’s possilbe to organize a tightly focused campaign of information and direct action to good effect (I recently shared jail time with 13 others from Casino-Free Philadelphia in a civil disobediance action on this one); what is terribly difficult is offering a convining case for this being part of a much larger pattern, which, if not acknowledged, makes the rare micro-vitories next to meaningless.
If the rants and name calliing seem to be pointing out the obvious, it’s probably because they are just that–not directed at the ‘bullies,’ but at the somnolent population, Marcuse’s ‘well remunerated slaves.’ Look! See what they’re doing to us! Don’t you see what’s happening!
Ineffective and useless for sure, but the frustration that provokes that sort of thing is entirely understandable. I engage in it–a lot… mostly alone in my room shouting at the walls, but sometimes it slips out in a late night rant that I end up deleting the morning after. Human… all too human.
October 18, 2009 at 3:48 pm
No disagreement here, Jacob. I think we’re talking about very different things. You’re talking about rhetorics that are designed and that function to build alliances and coalitions and that function to motivate people. I’m talking about a certain style of political theory focused on normativity as an abstract and general problem that doesn’t even talk about things this concrete and specific.
October 18, 2009 at 4:02 pm
All I can say is that this is a great example of the straw man fallacy you were just talking about it your last post.
I’m not going to claim that everyone who is concerned with issues of normativity is also concerned with real analyses of social structures and the corresponding attempts to come up with effective strategies for political action based on them, but to claim that anyone who is concerned with normative questions (even if they’re concerned primarily with specifically rational normativity) CAN’T do this is an overstatement.
Most of us aren’t Kantian deontologists anymore. We aren’t necessarily committed to the idea that all norms of action transcendental, universal, and unrelated to real social situations (even if we don’t think that they are immanent in those situations, a la Hegel).
Since when did anyone hold that explicating the norms of rationality was not only part of a political strategy, but the entirety of it? Why can’t we have both?
You need to prove the point that anyone who holds that there are SOME transcendental norms (whatever those norms are) is thereby unable to perform ANY detailed analyses of the social and motivate strategic political action on this basis.
I’ll post up something more on this soon hopefully.
October 18, 2009 at 5:08 pm
I guess I was wondering if the abstraction itself isn’t an expression of felt-impotance and frustration, an escape into a place of mentally contructed tin ducks at which one can fire one’s bullets of blank rage.
The waste of so much intellectual energy–so emotionally charged, seems itself something in need of explanation… especially as I confess I felt a most uncomfortable tinge of indentification with the target of your complaint!
October 18, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Pete,
I think the point is very simple: does one hold that norms arise from situations or not? Does one hold that norms are causes or effects? Every instance of normatively driven rule-based political thought I’ve encountered holds that 1) that norms precede the structuration of situations and are not products of that structuration, and 2) that norms function as causes of action in situations, rather than effects of how situations are structured. And because these two premises are at the heart of deontological orientations of thought, it follows that there is no need to analyze 1) production, or 2) distribution (how norms come to be distributed throughout situations). Can I prove this? No, of course not. Proof belongs to the domain of mathematics. Nonetheless, I think we need only look at the actual texts driven by deontological thought and the paucity of anything like the sort of analysis I’m talking about to see that this is more or less the case. Moreover, the truth of deontological positions is found most clearly in their standard critiques of non-deontological orientations of thought. For example, your critique of Latour where you elide trials of strength into the thesis that “might makes right”, clearly indicating a failure to understand what Latour is getting at with his assemblages of human and nonhuman actors and a priori excluding concrete analysis of situations.
Now, of course, you will tell me that “norms do not exist”, that they’re neither causes nor effects, etc. There’s nothing I can really say to this beyond if this is the case, then norms do not matter at all and we should simply cease talking about them. Additionally, this thesis seems to be clearly mistaken. We need only look at moral psychology to see that norms do produce all sorts of effects and are therefore real actors in the world. We see it in the experiences of guilt and anxiety people experience with respect to their normative codes, we see it in the impotence of a man trying to cheat on his lover when he deeply desires to have this other partner, we see it in the joy people experience in fulfilling some norm, we see it in the rage or anger one experiences when they believe they are being unjustly accused of violating some norm, we see it in neurotic symptoms that emerge as a result of the moral law, and so on. All very real effects of normativity. The thesis that norms are not real actors, that they don’t exist, just doesn’t hold water and is akin to the claim that God is absolutely transcendent to the world as a mechanism of protecting God from any sort of requirement of worldly verification.
Someone might accuse me of contradicting myself because in all of these instances I talk about causal powers of norms, whereas earlier I spoke of norms as being products and effects. This misses the point however. The point isn’t that norms aren’t real actors or objects or actors in the world capable of producing all sorts of effects. When norms come into being they are actors in a social assemblage alongside other actors. My tendency is to think they’re rather weak actors, but they’re no less real for all that. The point is that norms must have a genesis that isn’t a genesis imprisoned in a transcendental subject or the social alone, but that includes all sorts of networks of human and nonhuman actors. Once they are generated they can become actors in situations. The problem with the approach of the normo-maniacs is that they have a marked tendency to completely divorce norms from the structuration of situations, history, how actors are organized, the trendlines of situations and so on, treating these entities as the most important of all. The situation itself becomes invisible and all I describe in this post comes to follow. At most the normo-maniacs seem to think that norms can be applied to the evaluation of situations. So the closest they get to the sort of issue I’m describing is a problem of something like the “normative schematism” where it becomes an issue of how the abstraction of the norm can be applied to the concreteness of “intuition”. What they find impossible to think– they are deontologists after all –is norms arising from the is or something that is not normative and that has nothing to do with the normative at all. But this is precisely why there can be no commerce between Marxist thought and deontological thought, because a large part of Marx’s project is precisely the analysis of how these “oughts” arise from the is through a variety of historical and material processes. It is also why there can be no truck between Deleuze and deontological thought, because for Deleuze normativity is going to be a product of relations among bodies producing effects or events. No doubt what the deontologists refer to as “norms”– basically rules –would for Deleuze belong to the category of habits or the image of thought, and would therefore not even be of ethical interest just as recognition and representation, for Deleuze, are of no philosophical interest.
October 19, 2009 at 4:59 am
[…] Deep « Shackles They Make Rants October 19, 2009 This is a first class rant by Levi Bryant, which frankly reads better than most people’s serious writings. The part on Habermas is […]
October 19, 2009 at 6:34 pm
I am rather indebted to the authors of this plutonomy study. While I have doubts about many of their readings of the economy — this is a puff to garner investment — still they are bold in stating the problem as their end. While the problem is evident, this makes it “clear and distinct.” The question is what would constitute an effective response, if any? I do not think battles among academics will help since we are already, of almost every stripe, irrelevant. Personally, I do not think either party will be of much help. Though one might lean to the dems, their record is worse than spotty. So now what?
October 19, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Yeah Dan, I don’t know. I think you’re right about the dems though. I think that what’s become entirely clear since the dems came to power is just how much our system is either a plutocratic oligarchy or an oligarchic plutocracy. First the dems couldn’t do anything because they were a minority and had no power to shift things. Now the dems can’t do anything because they’re a majority and there’s a vocal minority that keeps thwarting their plans. What becomes entirely evident is that this isn’t about the inability to do anything, but about big money owning this form of government. Of course, we already knew this. But in away the demonstration of this point by getting a dem in the whitehouse as well as majorities in the senate and in the house of representatives is that at least it makes it clear for all to see. What to do about that, I don’t know.
October 20, 2009 at 9:38 am
Here’s more depressing news. The Washington Post, yesterday, described Virginia’s Republican candidate for attorney general in these terms: “In addition to talking up gang prevention, internet crimes and sex offenses against children, Cuccinelli promises to make defending Virginia’s ban on gay marriage a top priority. He doesn’t believe in the theory of climate change. He is ready to sue the federal government if it restricts emissions or expands union powers”.
A perfect statement of everything I find evil in politics; yet, only the last part has much to do with capitalism, and nearly half the population would endorse these themes! So, flip a coin: Heads, vote Democrat to keep these nazis from coming to power: tails, stay at home, because the Demoncrats aren’t much better and it’s comforting to be a pessimist who would rather see the disease spread..
October 20, 2009 at 12:19 pm
If your thesis is that philosophical or moral theorising is ineffective in the real world then ask yourself why you find the plutonomy writings alarming. It just puts a spin of bravado – moral knavery – on insights that lack any stunning empirical support or originality.
Obviously the world is structured through economic inequalities and people use this to get rich and the rich use it to stay rich. If it wasn’t for the rhetoric of audacity we’d be dying of boredom reading the original plutonomy material that Jodi Dean and yourself refer to.
Assuming your hostile attitude towards mere theorising I can assure you that the only possibility for this material having real world relevance is some kind of vague proposals for buying shares in luxury brand goods. This shouldn’t be terribly amazing or troubling. People do this anyway and the evil empire rumbles on.
If the plutonomy writings are intellectually significant then perhaps communicative rationality or all the rest of the philosophical activities you seem to dismiss have some significance as well. Maybe it is morally important that some people are knaves and morally important for others not to be. It is not morally irrelevant to only have moral relevance at any rate.
I agree with you that philosophy should strive for engagement but I don’t see the place of philosophy as some kind of interventionist elite of wannabe philosopher kings either. Speaking of which, as a feminist I’d like to point out that your rape analogy is an ill advised rhetorical device where the moral significance and injustice of the situation is portrayed from outside the woman’s point of view and hence incapable of grasping the the only really important aspect of the situation in terms of either its justice or morality.
October 20, 2009 at 12:56 pm
The rape analogy is a rather ugly joke Zizek tells to illustrate the difference between fools and knaves. The point of the joke is not so much the injustice– though clearly it’s a profound injustice –but the ridiculousness of the fool that believes he’s won some sort of victory in this situation. In psychoanalytic terms, the fools “victory” here is a symptom that functions to sustain this system of injustice, not change it. At any rate, there is nothing in this post that is hostile to theorizing. The post is objecting to a particular type of theorizing that I believe to be complicit with this system of injustice by virtue of being woefully inadequate to this system and that tends to function to sustain it rather than find effective means to change it.
October 21, 2009 at 6:21 pm
LS writes, “The fact that the document Jodi links to reads like a mad scientist version of Marxist thought that uses analysis of the structuration of our contemporary situation not as a means for emancipation and developing alternatives but to even more effectively exploit us.”
It’s nothing new. Trotsky, for instance, noted that Mussolini, the father of fascism, was once a socialist, who fully understood the class struggle and its implications – but used his knowledge to devise a system that would attempt to suppress the contradictions of capitalism by brute force, to ensure that the outcome of the class struggle would be the victory of imperialism. This is evident, too, from reading Mussolini’s fascist manifesto. As Trotsky said, a doctor armed with the knowledge of medical science knows not only how to heal a wound, but also how to inflict pain and damage with absolute precision.
October 25, 2009 at 10:32 pm
[…] Levi recently launched a couple new salvo’s in the debate over normativity (here, here, here and a bit earlier here), and although he hasn’t mentioned me, I think his reference to […]
June 23, 2010 at 3:06 pm
[…] becomes dependent on the fortunes of that same wealthy minority.” I tend to agree with Levi Bryant’s reading of the report as “a mad scientist version of Marxist thought that uses analysis of […]