I’m up far too late, having worked all evening on my talk for the RMMLA. Winding down I came across Anodyne Lite’s terrific post meditating on political change and engagement. Anodyne writes:
Being a materialist, to my way of thinking, has always entailed the belief that some people most definitely have it better than others; that having nicer things, a more comfortable standard of living, access to the latest in medical treatments and technologies, and being born with the privilege afforded to certain classes but routinely denied others (along with the rights that tend to come along with this) certainly does make a difference in life. Being born privileged in the mind of a materialist does make your life qualifiably and quantifiably better than the life of someone else who doesn’t have the benefit of those same privileges. Perhaps the standard unit of measure is not necessarily “happiness”, but “comfort”, in this equation.
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Otherwise, one wonders, what is the point of pushing for revolution (or mutation, or change, whatever you want to call it) at all? If there is nothing necessarily better about having things, having a nicer home, having running water, a comfortable salary, and easy access to medical care, then why buck the system at all? If even the most privileged among us might, after a revolution, end up being just genuinely as sad and depressive as everybody was before, despite being very comfortable, what exactly is supposed to be the point of ushering in a “revolution”? Why bother? If “life sucks, then you die”—even if you’re white, rich, and can get SSRIs and free visits to the shrink on your awesome state-sponsored universal health coverage—should we seriously consider waging war (revolution, whatever) with only the promise of our own unhappiness to extend to others afterward?Since I don’t add teleological/utopian nonsense to my materialism, I generally refuse to direct all of my thinking toward a future world where our political work will be accomplished, and there will be no need to push for change anymore. I’m sure there will always be a hegemonic superstructure, there will always be something to struggle against, there will always be an apparatus or power structure that needs dismantling and reconfiguring. Things can and they will get better, I’m convinced, even if they will never be perfect or entirely fixed.
Read the rest here.
One of the things I love about Anodyn’s writing on these sorts of issues is that she’s just so damned sensible. I know that “being sensible” is not generally counted as a virtue among leftists, that it’s immediately seen as being ideologically complicit or bowing to “capitalist reason”, but I do think these debates and theories could use a good dose of “sensibility”. I get the sense that what many of us are looking for is something more “sexy”, something “world historical”, something that has the sense of a secularized cosmic struggle and that therefore the “sensible” is systematically excluded because, well, it’s boring and requires attentiveness to concrete details. However, for this very reason the sensible becomes the truly radical because rather than maintaining particular structures in the manner of Hegel’s “beautiful soul“, it offers the possibility of producing real and meaningful changes.
read on!
Here at Larval Subjects I have often railed against forms of political discourse that target “capitalism” or “neoliberalism”. This is not because I am pro-capitalism or pro-neoliberalism, but because I believe these sorts of discourses turn capitalism and neoliberalism into “super-entities” against which it is impossible to struggle because they are everywhere and nowhere. Just as you cannot eat fruit as such, but only grapes, apples, oranges, etc., you can’t fight capitalism or neoliberalism as such. The point is simple, you can only act on a global system through local elements within a network. The problem with discourses centered around capitalism and neoliberalism is that they’re just too baggy and they render these local networks invisible, denying us any route of action. We fall into theoretical pessimism. In this respect, the struggle against capitalism resembles the struggle against terrorism under the last administration. By turning “terrorism” into a super-entity or an entity in its own right, we turned it into something that is everywhere and nowhere. Yet all we can act on with respect to terrorism is local networks. However, acting on these local networks can have profound effects on the larger network.
Anodyn’s points about happiness are well taken. As I observe and participate in debates surrounding normativity and political engagement, I find myself wondering why happiness, a better standard of life, etc., is not a sufficient ground for political engagement. I get the sense that happiness is seen as somehow being too “vanilla”. The more serious concern seems to be that happiness is far too idiosyncratic, far too personal, far too vascillating, to provide sufficient grounds for engagement. Situating this in a Kantian context, happiness can never provide us with categorical imperatives, with absolutes, but only with hypothetical imperatives restricted to the aims of a specific subject. As such, the argument runs, happiness is unable to provide us with binding grounds for engagement (merely giving us subjective whims and preferences) and cannot give us grounds for solidarity.
This, however, strikes me as a rather superficial understanding of happiness. First, when we look at actual, real world, political struggles these struggles do not appear to be motivated by a set of categorical imperatives, but by very real interests and pursuits for a better life. During the last century, union solidarity was not produced out of some a priori set of norms, nor by some abstract conception of justice, but by misery in the workplace and a recognition that these conditions could not be changed without entering into relations of solidarity with fellow workers. If workers recognized their own struggle in the struggles of workers elsewhere in very different networks, then this is because they recognized the systematic nature of the problem they were attempting to overcome and that it did not simply exist with respect to their local network. The case is similar with struggles over gay rights. It is actual living conditions, lives, that lead to the formation of solidarity among gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered folk. And it is because those who don’t have this sexual orientation nonetheless have brothers and sisters that are GLBT, or because they have friends that are GLBT, and because people who don’t have family or friends that are GLBT but nonetheless who have friends who have friends and family that are GLBT, that solidarities are formed. The important point here is that since we are relational beings, self-interest is collective interest and collective interest is self-interest. It requires a great feat of abstraction to see the two as entirely separated and to believe we must appeal to some selfless altruism to ground collective interests and solidarities.
It just doesn’t seem to me that there is a big mystery here. Whether we are talking about the Manifesto or Capital, it is also noteworthy that Marx does not appeal to norms or normativity to explain the formation of “revolutionary groups”. In the Manifesto, for example, Marx discusses the manner in which the factory both led to a new form of subjectivity and generated solidarities due to working conditions and a shared plight. In Capital we get a more complex story about the extraction of surplus-value from labor, how labor is pitted against itself, and how the only way to overcome this systematic structure is through the formation of solidarities. Norms here result from shifts in material conditions, they don’t precede material conditions in an a priori fashion. Again, I have a difficult time seeing what the mystery is here.
In many respects it’s difficult to escape the impression that recourse to a discourse about norms is a symptom marking a failure or something that has broken down, rather than a condition. In communicative discourse, for example, we only evoke norms when relations among communicants threaten to break down because of some communicative move that threatens to dissolve bonds or relations between the communicants. “Your remark lacks civility!” Likewise in the case of social and moral norms. These discourses emerge when things have broken down and we are no longer able to maintain bonds or relations.
If recourse to discourses about normativity seems suspiciously symptomatic, then this is because it suggests that we are no longer able to imagine what might motivate us to have a stake in particular struggles. Unable to see how my life is directly implicated in certain struggles, I make recourse to very abstract norms like justice, the good, right, etc., to ground my engagement. In other words, these discourses seem to be more about what might motivate possibly be able to motivate us, rather than anything about the struggle itself. I strongly suspect, for example, that the gay activist, in his soliloquy to himself as to why he’s engaged in his struggle, seldom lands on abstract normativity as the reason or ground. Norms are, of course, evoked in public struggles. The gay activist will speak to the politician, the public, the boss, etc., about justice, rights, and all the rest. However, these are but one tool in the activist’s toolbox and, in my view, among the least effective tools. The worry seems to be that without being able to evoke ironclad normative principles to ground one’s cause it is impossible to engage effectively and produce change. This, however, strikes me as a ridiculously naive and abstract understanding of how change takes place. When did solemn talk about educational values ever persuade administrators and politicians not to ram through noxious educational reforms? When did talk about the profound injustice of poverty ever effectively lead to people being fed. These solemn speeches certainly play their role, but the real action, I believe, takes place elsewhere through the formation of collectivities, the short-circuiting of key points in networks through activities like strikes or shutting down highways, etc., etc., etc.
Larval Subjects . 
October 7, 2009 at 4:01 pm
This is excellent work – I don’t think it would be much of an extension to say that politics articulated as something other than actions will usually result in incomprehensibility (I say usually because talk of ‘norms’ does have a powerful effect when voiced by established actors – norms are very powerful when you already have police, corporate structures, and trade agreements enforcing them)
I’m already using ANT vocabulary, but I want to bring one of Harman’s words into play with marx (there seem to be a few people excited about this game, I don’t think it’s been done perfectly yet) – I’m wondering if this rewording might work:
“Marx discusses the manner in which the factory both led to a new form of intentionality and generated solidarities due to working conditions and a shared plight.”
(I suppose ‘solidarities’ could be come ‘alliances’ as well, but that’s latour)
‘the factory gave birth to new intentions [for the workers]’ sound right, but the way GH uses the word would tie it to a sincere sensual experience, not a goal? If the ‘better life’ you point out is the real intention, then what happens to the object as a collective?
(in terms of contemporary labor struggles, it is waaaaay to early to be asking that question, I know, but my current job gives me enough free internet time to ask it)
October 7, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Hugh,
Right on! And honestly I think the Marxist perspective would be significantly improved by adopting the ANT vocabulary or conceptual space. One of my favorite books by Latour is Pandora’s Hope. Chapter 6, “A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans” is particularly relevant here. There Latour argues against our standard notions of agency, attempting to demonstrate that when actors enter into assemblages with other actors they actually become new actors. The man with a gun is an entirely different actor than the man without a gun or a man with a knife. One of the points Latour tries to make is that these assemblages among actors also transform intentionality, generating new goals and ends. I didn’t start using the internet in the late 90s to become a blogger. The technology itself transformed my ends and a good deal of my conception of intellectual work and engagement. The birth control pill is created to solve a very simple problem, but when the body enters into an assemblage with the pill, new intentions, aims, ways of relating, etc., are generated at the level of both personal aims and social relations insofar as the woman now relates to her body differently and does not live under the constant threat of pregnancy that can both limit the aims she posits for herself, but also the aims the broader social world is willing to open to the woman (i.e., the obnoxious argument that women should not be allowed to advance in the business because management claims that they might quit to have a child). Part of the reason that these arguments came to appear obnoxious was because of changes in birth control that then led to shifts in the rights of women regardless of whether or not they used birth control. In other words, because women could now control when or if they get pregnant and because norms already existed prohibiting whether or not a woman could ask whether or not a woman is using birth control, the argument that a woman is a less valued worker because it makes no sense to invest time and money in her training when she might get pregnant and just leave her job was deflated altogether, generating new norms relating to gender relations. I’m not, of course, suggesting this is the only reason these changes took place, only citing an example of a human/nonhuman relation that played a role in normative shifts.
I think you’re right on the mark when you talk about the role that established actors play in the maintenance of norms. It is not as if these norms float around in some non-existing space, exercising normative force of their own accord. They require work and this work is all those concrete institutions and history that hold them in place. This, I think, is something entirely overlooked by deontological approaches: the work it takes to maintain reasoning in a particular form, norms in a particular form, etc. There’s a whole army of human and nonhuman actors that norms “ally” themselves with in order to increase their strength or ability to stand within a collective. Deontological approaches begin at the end of the line, treating the abstract formulation or result as if it were the cause, ignoring all these micronetworks and their work through which these things maintain themselves.
October 7, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Thanks for the kind words, LS. I’ll definitely take “sensible” as a compliment.
You’re exactly right about happiness being considered by many leftists to be too vanilla. I’d even go so far as to say it’s considered gauche or tacky by some to admit that you’ve attained a reasonable level of comfort and satisfaction in your workaday life. If you’re not suffering, it’s only because you’re insensitive to the horrors Kapital is perpetrating on humanity. (Reminds me a little of some religious folks I’ve known who think that persecution is the truest measure of one’s sainthood.)
You’re also absolutely right to point out that this way of thinking lends itself to a trivializing, superficial understanding of what happiness is or can mean to different actors in a network, or to the overall functioning of that network.
It baffled me somewhat that the same people who have been telling me that individuals don’t exist (or at least, that they don’t matter much politically)suddenly started to care a whole bunch about the sadness of individuals. You’ve helped me to understand where they’re coming from. Apparently, they believe happiness is an emotion or mood that’s subject to individual whim, and ultimately too easily co-opted by our Enemy Capitalism. Sadness, on the other hand, is something we can all have in “common”. This is, imo, overly simplistic from beginning to end. I think corporations, cultural producers, and commercial interest groups have done an equally fine job of co-opting depression/displeasure as they have happiness/pleasure. It also seems obvious that most people move freely between these states at various points along a (quite broad) continuum.
Your points about norms are excellent and really bring out my inner dweeb. The comment about things like norm-building requiring “work”, instead of existing a priori in a network, happen to line up very well with the electrochemical dynamics of “work” within biological systems. Perhaps when I get a few moments I’ll write a post about this in extended metaphor…
October 7, 2009 at 7:32 pm
What I find strikingly absent from discussion of the politics of happiness is a central element of the Nietzschean philosophical project: the effort to imagine a new kind of happiness (in the form of the great health which allows us to affirm becoming). Absent such discussion, the left ends up claiming rather weakly that the measure of success “is not necessarily ‘happiness,’ but ‘comfort'”– in other words, that there is nothing really beautiful to be desired in revolution, that we can hope merely to raise the poor to the level of neurotic concern about their dissertations and very-long-term psychoanalysis that we ourselves enjoy. And one is left to wonder whether, if the goal is indeed “comfort,” capitalism might not be a perfectly adequate machine for achieving it.
I take it that the political engagement of many privileged leftists is based neither on personal desire for a bit more material security nor on having cousins or acquaintances who are not privileged but on an inarticulate utopianism– a belief that, given the opportunity of modernity, there must be something beautiful we can do with it, something better than what we have. If this ambiguous desire gets pressed into the service of normativity, it is not because the language of happiness must necessarily sound too “vanilla,” but because it certainly does now– because we do not have a rhetoric of happiness with the breadth, scale and power of our rhetoric of justice, a language for being Utopian. (Although, once again, I think Nietzsche opens the way to such a rhetoric.) Of course you’re right that leftists enjoy their “secularized cosmic struggles” far too much, I think the kind of sensibleness you seem to be suggesting– a sensibleness where leftists look around at the American upper class, the most “comfortable” class that has ever existed, and agree amongst themselves that this is just about the best humanity can hope for– would be an admission of defeat.
I’m all for delivering politics from a normative rhetoric which fails entirely to honestly express its goals, but the replacement for all that isn’t a quotidian politics of comfort; it’s something much more exciting, or nothing at all.
October 7, 2009 at 7:58 pm
Michael,
I think you make a number of good points here. However, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. While I’m certainly not on board with your utopianism– as a good Marxist I reject utopian socialism in favor of historical materialist socialism –I’m fully on board with your observations about happiness. However, this line of criticism only follows if one begins from the premise that affects are hard wired or innate. There’s a rich tradition that argues that affects are produced and generated, that new affects can and are invented, etc., beginning with the Stoics and their theory of the relation between affect, desire, and judgment, Spinoza and his geometry of affects, Nietzsche and his theory of the creation of affects, Bergson and his idea of the creation of new forms of affect, Deleuze and so on. Negri and Hardt, for example, make the creation or production of affects one of the centerpieces of their political theory. In this vein, I don’t see the question of happiness as a question of living like the privileged. It seems to me that every living political movement involves the production, the imagining, the formation of new forms of happiness, new ways of feeling, new ways of living and so on. Massumi and Protevi are really good on this. At any rate, given that so many people appear to be deeply uncomfortable under capitalism at all levels (just look at how rates of depression and anxiety disorders have skyrocketed in the last century) I think it’s hard to make the case that capitalism is a perfectly adequate machine for achieving comfort.
October 7, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Hi Levi,
For me, it isn’t so much a question of being happy as making some space for projects. This sounds like a modest goal, but it does presuppose some wealth and a degree of security, both of which require a good deal of time and struggle, as well as some luck. It also requires the development of conducive workplaces not dominated the priorities of capital. A society built to encourage projects. That really would require a major change.
Apologies for my outburst the other day.
October 7, 2009 at 9:02 pm
Thanks Levi, but I’m not Hugh (unless that’s a noise you make while blogging!). Should have said: I’m will – I’ve been reading for awhile and not commenting. I’ve been sniffing into ANT along with a poetry collective in seattle called Subtext (Shaviro participated in some stuff before I was here, in 02/03) – our reading group met to discuss Harman’s Latour book over the summer.
(which is why I’m so curious about what the terms that emerge from Harman’s OOO project might do to the Marxism/ANT link you’re making. As you’ve pointed out, this kind of link goes entirely against Harman’s disposition, but remains a curiosity of mine. It is easy to label Latour and Harman’s projects as sociologies/metaphysics of accumulation, yet this is also a very lazy move that senselessly reduces the actor (in this I’m more with Harman than Latour, if only because reading Harman gives me the sense that philosophy has a ton of work to do, and reading Latour gives me the sense that there is so much work being done that philosophy could do – this is just an impression, and I can’t quite pin it down right now))
I’m also curious what would happen if we re-frame the question of the strength of affects in negotiating/creating social bonds in contrast to Spinoza’s affects which must be neutralized in order to unite an actor (not changing vocabulary!) with the unique substance (gawed), rather than Kant’s categorical imperative. Spinoza’s ethics are far closer to metaphysics than Kant’s are, but I think he’s making a related misapprehension – for an alliance to be made or strengthened, something must be overcome, but that something doesn’t necessarily have to be an affect…
anyway – incomplete thought. I’ll be back for more later.
October 7, 2009 at 9:04 pm
gah – levi, you beat me to it.
October 7, 2009 at 9:04 pm
‘it’ being the philosophy/ethics of affects.
October 8, 2009 at 2:25 am
“I think the kind of sensibleness you seem to be suggesting– a sensibleness where leftists look around at the American upper class, the most “comfortable” class that has ever existed, and agree amongst themselves that this is just about the best humanity can hope for”
This is not what Levi was suggesting, though, Michael, unless I’ve missed something. It wasn’t what I was suggesting either.
My point about “comfort” was simply that, as things stand now, there are people who live much more comfortably than others. As a materialist, I think that people who have all the material things they need in life have less to be stressed or depressed about than others, in general. There are other immaterial things people can be stressed or depressed about, but these usually come second to any sort of anxiety over meeting one’s basic material needs.
Of course, this isn’t to say that material comfort is the only criteria for what a “good” life would be. It’s simply a very important part of it. A livelihood and a home to live in– important. A community that you feel safe in– important. Access to antibiotics– important. Clean water to drink– important. Antiretrovirals if you have AIDS– important. Etc.
Most of us agree that we who lead very comfortable lives should focus more on using our privilege to help extend better lives to others. This is no easy task, however, and it’s not self-evident how this would be best accomplished.
Wallowing in self-pity seems to me like a waste of time, in light of all that could be done to begin helping others right now, even if “revolution” isn’t the immediate outcome of our short-term goals. I think it’s best if privileged people with access to health care treat their psychiatric problems so they can be more productive in the political ambitions, rather than valorizing and romanticizing withdrawal from public life. It’s high time the left stopped allowing people to convince others that seeking treatment for mental health issues is somehow tantamount to being in cahoots with Kapital under its banner.
Perhaps others disagree with me on this, but I feel very strongly about this.