I am always startled when semiotic codes surrounding style stand in stark contrast to the ideology a person espouses. For example, recently we have seen how certain movements in the Christian right have embraced counter-cultural forms of style found among skaters, punks, goth, and hard rock for very conservative ends. Where many of these movements are implicitly forms of critique of cultural hypocrisy and capitalist consummerism, these semiotic codes instead get redirected to the most normalizing, conformist, reactionary ends. Along these lines I was today depressed to read one of my goth students argue that Michael Savage and Glenn Beck are Socratic figures, speaking truth to power, and undermining the injustices of the powerful elite. How can it not be immediately evident that such figures are apologists for social and economic injustices, distorting the true nature of things through their rhetoric and constant appeal to arguments from outrage? I suppose this is one meaning of Lacan’s aphorism that the big Other does not exist. We would like there to be stable codes, for the signifier to be intrinsically attached to a particular signified, but the signifier can come to be attached to any signifier (functioning as a signified), such that we can never infer from the manifestation of a signifier what signified it is attached to. Nonetheless, I find the way in which codes are reterritorialized, the way in which deterritorializations are snatched up by various forms of capture that redirect them towards exploitation and normalization, to be deeply depressing. Or perhaps, in a more optimistic vein, it could be said that insofar as the signifier enjoys a life of its own– isn’t this the meaning of the agency of the letter? –that perhaps these mismatched codes are traces of an unconscious desire to draw a line of flight and escape such sad passions. In that case I wish such a desire could coincide with a conscious will, rather than being contrasted with the dark forces of ressentiment.
April 21, 2008
When Resistance Becomes Fashion
Posted by larvalsubjects under Appearance, Deleuze, Ideology, Lacan, pedagogy, Politics[14] Comments
April 22, 2008 at 3:13 am
Ah, such word-play!
April 23, 2008 at 12:20 am
In that case I wish such a desire could coincide with a conscious will, rather than being contrasted with the dark forces of ressentiment.
But it just doesn’t, does it now dr. Sinthome? Why can’t that get past your obsessive rationalization combined with materialist rumination and Darwinian anal rigor? Why do you need to get it from Anthonia and Adamina? People seek refuge in the Imaginary of the Goth from the rationalization that capitalism imposes everywhere, having no God to offer other than money. That rationalization is the true Hell – the attempt to turn the whole world into the Matrix.
April 23, 2008 at 3:51 am
Hey, (sorry if this is the wrong place to post this)
I read your thesis awhile ago and have kept forgetting to ask you something about it. I am writing my diss on Deleuze, Guattari and Revolution. I read a good chunk of your thesis and really liked your examples of social movements, but I have a concern. Probably you know Toscano disses Delanda pretty hard in his new book, “The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation”
“‘naturalize’ the theory of multiplicities by recasting it as an ontology of models; much as if Deleuze were the heir of Husserl’s meatatheoretical project, now applied to the theory of complex systems,” pg.86
I will have to say that so far what I have read of delanda this is the impression I have gotten as well.
From what I read in your thesis I saw no direct criticism of this kind of model theory. ie. We break out the concepts and just apply them to dynamic systems sociology.
How do you get around this criticism?
April 23, 2008 at 4:39 am
Thomas, out of curiosity, where did you come across my thesis? Are you referring to Difference and Givenness?
At the time of writing my book I had not yet engaged closely with the work of DeLanda and Toscano was completely off the rader for me. Moreover, Difference and Givenness focuses on metaphysical and epistemological issues, rather than ethical and political issues. Perhaps you can tighten up the question you’re posing with regard to the issue of the naturalization of multiplicities. I’m not quite sure what you’re asking. If I’m following you correctly, this is precisely the issue I’m working through right now (and have yet to resolve). In an article on Deleuze, Simondon, the politics of individuation, and capitalism I just put together for a Dutch anthology coming out, I pose the issue in exactly these terms. As I see it, we currently face the Charybdis and Skyla of, on the one hand, a political physics that can only explain social dynamics in sociological terms (the standard critique of Deleuze and Guattari coming from figures like Zizek and Badiou), and on the other hand, the notion of a sovereign agency bound by no constraints. In my view, Zizek and Badiou, in their desire to theorize the political, end up dehistoricizing agency in a way that departs markedly from the spirit of Marx’s own analyses in works like Capital and Grundrisse. What we need to conceive is a form of agency that is both borne of the situation but isn’t simply determined by situations. This will be something different, in Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology, from a subject of the void. Along these lines I’ve become interested in how collectives are formed which take on a life of their own, becoming something like autopoietic systems (self-regulating systems) that then impact the broader system throwing it into a state of equilibrium that throws it into a new space of attractors. I think one of the central problems with continental political thought in the french tradition– Badiou, Laclau, Zizek, Ranciere, etc –is that it carries over too many structuralist thesis that presuppose social systems in synchronic states of equilibrium, ignoring the dimension of positive feedback and the formation of new attractors. As such, they’re forced into all or nothing positions where change occurs all at once or not at all and where we have to presuppose a void or “out-of-structure” place in structures to account for change. All of this is obscure, but I’m still working through it.
April 23, 2008 at 4:55 pm
“Along these lines I was today depressed to read one of my goth students argue that Michael Savage and Glenn Beck are Socratic figures, speaking truth to power, and undermining the injustices of the powerful elite. How can it not be immediately evident that such figures are apologists for social and economic injustices, distorting the true nature of things through their rhetoric and constant appeal to arguments from outrage?”
Your use of the phrase “immediately evident” in this context is quite peculiar, is it not?
It’s obvious what is or isn’t socratic? You don’t need to argue on behalf of your own viewpoint?
You state your Goth student gave arguments for his assertion that these commentators are socratic -what were they? Are they so beneath contempt we can’t even consider whether they have validity?
From time to time, I listen to both Savage and Beck while I’m at my cabin. Savage does from time to time have very independent views–I’ve frequently heard him call Bush a liar,an idiot, and a madman.
April 23, 2008 at 5:30 pm
No, it’s not a question of being “beneath contempt”. The reason, in my view, that commentators such as Savage, Limbaugh, Beck, Coulter, Hannity, and O’Reilly do not fit the criteria of being Socratic is that they predominantly side with those that occupy the power positions in society, portraying them as the victims, as against those are without power. For example, Savage rails against immigrants, homosexuals, and feminists, often defending big business as being the victim of a witch hunt in situations like Enron. Environmental scientists are portrayed as a powerful interest with something to gain financially from their research, while industry is portrayed as a meek victim unable to defend itself against these deceitful scientists. O’Reilly continuously stokes outrage about businesses that say “happy holiday”, portraying Christianity– the predominant religion in the states –as being a victim, treating the minority religious positions as the victimizers. In short, these sorts of shows invert the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressors, the powerful and the powerless, portraying the oppressors as the oppressed and the powerful as the powerless. It is this that makes them sophists in the Platonic sense of the word. The trick of rightwing talk radio is to create the belief that the victimizers and exploiters are themselves the victims and thereby stoke self-righteous outrage at purported injustices. Of course, this is all a way of insuring that real injustices are not righted.
April 23, 2008 at 8:58 pm
I like your student’s reading of Socrates. It’s never been clear to me that he was decisively different than the sophists – just another self-promoting gadfly, and a mooch besides. Plus if you look closely, the power dynamics of his ‘dialogues’ are really nasty. For logic used violently look no further. ;-)
I can’t listen to Savage for long enough to get a legitimate read, but I think his general drift is libertarian rather than neo-con. And sometimes he’s downright nietzschean in his rejection of the weepy politics of collective resentment, although he’s hardly risen above that. The point is that he’s a methodological individualist (in fact, virtually solipsistic), so the kinds of group and structural dynamics the left take for granted are off his radar or seem to him sinister attempts to restrict the creative power of will.
In this framework the question of who’s oppressed and who’s oppressing does, in fact, invert. Certainly you wouldn’t want to be arguing that what counts as a “real injustice” is ethic-independent, would you?
April 23, 2008 at 9:13 pm
I’d agree that there’s a legitimate criticism of Socrates to be made in terms of his language games, but I don’t think it can be made well in terms of figures like Savage given things he regularly says about immigrants, homosexuals, and feminists. I didn’t outline the student’s reading here, so I’m not sure how you can plausibly take a position on whether you like it or don’t like it. I don’t understand what you’re asking with this question:
April 23, 2008 at 9:49 pm
As I reread your remark I get a better sense of what you’re claiming; namely, that if one begins from the position of methodological individualism certain things take on the cast of injustices. I’d agree with that. On the other hand, I take it as an ontological principle that individual entities do not exist independent of relations or contexts. As such, such a position is already a transcendental illusion of sort. By a “transcendental illusion” I have in mind an illusion that isn’t a simple error or mistake in reason, but an illusion internal to thought itself. This would be similar to Marx’s understanding of fetishization.
The issue here isn’t whether or not there’s a plausible frame from which the world can look this way. Clearly there is. Rather, the issue is that the persuasiveness of such frames and their persistence is deeply depressing… At least for me. In many respects, I think that this tendency internal to thought to divorce entities from their relations is one of the most basic difficulties encountered by any leftist politics. Marx begins with commodities in Capital which are encountered phenomenologically as atomistic individuals, and look at all the work he has to do to unfold all the complex network of relations underlying this seemingly self-evident thing. So maybe a better way of phrasing the spirit of this post would be in terms of the question “how can we draw thought to relational networks in a world that ineluctably draws us towards reductionism and decontextualization?” That’s not quite right either, but a little closer to what I’m trying to get at.
April 23, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Yes. That’s what I meant and I think your new phrasing of the question is terrific. Thank you.
If the answer requires guys like Savage to read and understand Capital then we’re really in trouble.
April 23, 2008 at 10:34 pm
One clue about the practicalities of this is currently being offered in the U.S. by Barack Obama. His diagnosis seems to be that the people to whom Savage, Coulter, O’Reilly et.al. appeal are frightened, angry, and “bitter.” They’re wounded dogs, not at all the figures of nefarious race and gender power they’re cracked up to be.
The quasi-solipsistic individualism is a product of the sort of foreshortening of the horizon of attention that happens to any creature under threat. Consequently, Obama has taken a soothing approach toward these folks. Pat pat, nice doggie, we don’t blame you, we know you’re hurt, we’re not going to take your bone, we’re here for you.
The gamble is that if we can get folks to relax out of the closed postures of defense, their horizons will open up to a more relational understanding. I know it works with my students.
April 23, 2008 at 10:40 pm
I think Thomas was referring to my thesis actually, considering I devote a chapter of it to social movements. I’m assuming since it was linked from here, that he accidentally attributed it to you Sinthome.
Hopefully you won’t mind if I answer him here, but I think the question he raises is correct. I didn’t have any time to grapple with it when I was writing my thesis, but Toscano’s criticism is right on the mark, I believe. If I remember correctly, Toscano is concerned with how DeLanda’s translation of Deleuze into models makes it so that the models lie at the base, and then proceed through symmetry-breaking processes of actualization. The problem is that in Deleuze (as Toscano notes), the initial movement is of symmetry-creation whereby a dark precursor establishes a relation between heterogeneous intensities. So I think one way to alter my analysis would be to push DeLanda’s presentation of models one step farther back, into something akin to Toscano’s discussion of Simondon’s ‘field’ on page 155 of Theatre of Production.
I haven’t given it much more thought since I wrote the thesis, but I do think it’s an important question in refraining from reducing Deleuze to some sort of scientific naturalism.
April 24, 2008 at 5:06 am
these lines I’ve become interested in how collectives are formed which take on a life of their own, becoming something like autopoietic systems (self-regulating systems) that then impact the broader system throwing it into a state of equilibrium that throws it into a new space of attractors.
Fascinating. I’m trying to sort through traditional thinking on this subject as well; I’m finding that hardly anything sensible has been said about it (or rather, it’s difficult to discern what is sensible amid a sea of reactionary thinking). So far, I’ve found Massumi’s account of belonging (which I understand comes out of Simondon) appealing, but everything else seems so dated. Do you bother with people like Le Bon, McDougall, Taine, Tarde, Freud, et al? Or Canetti for that matter? May I ask where one finds autopoietic(ish) crowds?
April 24, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Freud is an important thinker for me, but I have little or no familiarity with the other thinkers you mention. Protevi has been doing a lot with autopoietic theory in interesting ways lately, but I think his discussions still need tightening up. Luhmann is the one to read for an explicit account of social systems as autopoietic systems, however I think he focuses far too much on institutions to the detriment of groups and is still too close to Varela and Maturana in seeing these systems as operationally closed (thereby undermining the possibility of significant change). I think Badiou is on the right track in his understanding of group subjects that are somewhat autopoietic under my reading, though he conceives the social in terms that are too structured rather than as assemblages and multiplicities that are internally heterogeneous. Sartre’s understanding of subject-groups in Critique of Dialectical Reason is also ripe for mining in this connection.