°Impossible
Lauren Berlant writing of potentiality, and the sense of its cut-short incompleteness, turns again around the question of optimism, remarking that the “act of ideation itself embodies the form of optimism”.
It’s difficult, almost impossible, to argue with much of what she says, and writes of more lightly than I feel capable – not least about fantasies of plenitude and completion, the ones that unfold in the form of ‘I could have been a contender’ and, as their conventional political accompaniment, the so very restrictive (actually, appallingly conservative) sense of what politics and contention amounts to, or might.
But I’m worn down and impatient with collocations of hope and intellect. Those awkwardly temporalised, but still rather Cartesian understandings of rationalism and identity. Though more so, those trenchantly Hegelian set of attachments to a capitalised, epochalised History and recognition that have ushered in the concepts of cognitive labour, cognitive capitalism and so on – at precisely the moment when the Fordist distinctions between mind and body were undergoing a profound restructuring and crisis, and not one which should so easily (and with victimising credentialism) be ascribed to the almighty powers of a neoliberalising capital.
Invocations of an optimistic intellectuality remains just a little too post-Fordist in their mourning, which is in a sense a refusal to mourn, albeit in a somewhat triumphalist-propagandistic tone. But also, in another sense, this invocation of hope in the midst of crisis seems to me an attempt to reconstitute what was always just a little bit dodgy – that is to say, contingent. And it is the question of those contingencies – something that the theories of neoliberalisation serves to obscure, to render as mere objects or assume as always-already objectified – that makes the question far less one of mourning (and therefore identity or event) than of history, or more accurately, a question of how to historicise, how to tell time. In any case, the assumption that revolutions or, more broadly, transformations of life, pivot around common temporalities that are, apparently now and disastrously, no longer available when they once were for everyone – this seems to me like an ad for viagra imagining for itself a universal appeal and legibility.
There is no necessary (or agentic) reason, neither that which might be relegated to the heavens nor one ascribed to cognition, for understandings of potentiality to have reduced down into a version of virtu, to have found measure, and therefore a kind of temporality in the ceaseless restlessness that measure implies, and the measures of cognition have amplified. That it did reduce down to this particular knot of sense is a matter of history, which is to say, the often brutal play of contingencies and desires – in a different idiom: struggle and practice. Put more bluntly: the methods of Fordist ledgering and line-production – of accumulation and accomplishment and, not least, of the complex, heteronormative attachments of an oikopolitics that situated rational calculation on its managerial podium and structured norms of arousal around the couplets of production-reproduction, public-private, etc – are not the only way to tell time, any more than their no longer shaping one’s sense of time would suggest a lack, of time, or of virtu (whether in the politicised-gendered versions as potency), among other things. Productivist vitalism, whether it fixes upon the figures of the worker, or the nation, or both as with national socialism, or some other subject which unfurls a desire to ingest the world, whole, may well be compensatory in its left-wing variants, there may well be a wager that this figure can, in dialectical fashion, be cleaved from fascistic barbarism to democratic civility - though the latter seems a no less totalitarian or violent prospect to me.
Part of me, then, wants to talk more about the small demands - in activism, but also beyond that - which accompanies this binding of hope and intellect, not just about its anthropological, cartesian renditions but also about those more hungry notions of lack which work themselves out – a little more fervently and without any sense that they might be about a specific set of desires which do not exhaust the world, or politics, or the manifold and aleatory movements of passion – as a boundless acquisitiveness that can’t abide difference unless it can be measured, equalised, reciprocated or, from another angle of the same impulse, as an urge to always fear that ’something’ might be taken away, missed, or lost, as if one had ‘it’ all along. Which means there is something far too blithe in imagining that ressentiment does not have its fascistic and democratic aspects, something too irresponsible in imagining that fascism’s attempt to eradicate what is foreign to work might be replaced, without consequence in the identification of enemies, with claims that capital is ‘parasitic’.
If the implicit question that lurks in that of potentiality is the possibility of the world being otherwise, and insofar as concepts of potentiality remains tethered to those of production, it might well be more interesting to ask the question of what might seem impossible but nevertheless is done. That, at least, would have the sense that what is presently thinkable might be more limited by teleologies (of both pessimism and optimism) and far less radical than what bodies do, that neither cognition nor reason nor management are sovereign, no matter the proliferation of (post-)Leninist, post-Fordist laments.
In any case, it’s the teleology in assertions of potentiality and its incompleteness that gives it away. What does the loss of rationality imply, if not the assumption that one indeed had it, before some impending event in which it will be lost? What would it mean to complete something without any sense of linear, additive production? Why is cognition defined as good, or the source of goodness? These specific senses of loss have a history and a desire, identities and attachments worked up and contingent. And this is to underscore that they are by no means universal or a given, let alone that the passion to write or think is not always attached to a particular valorisation of writing and thinking or comes from the same places. Loss can be more than real and concrete, to be sure – but for it to be assumed as an abstract condition implies a continuum and deferral that would deprive those particular losses of any sense save that which might be tallied and compared. It would also mean not being able to sense what is indeed lost or what might be, in any tangible way, to constantly defer decision or delegate practice. To make a dense knot of sense means to make decisions about what knots to tie and which threads to tangle up, which to cut and which to loosen, just a little - and that is in no way to suggest that decisions here are where reason or cognition (re-)acquire their purported sovereignty. Put another way: excess undoubtedly has a relation to surplus value, but as - there already is a lexicon for the experimental - subtraction, mutation, reprisal, play, intensity. These are all ways of telling time differently, precariously.
Hi! Someone forwarded your post to me, so I thought I’d respond here, because people always respond off-blog to me, and I find it frustrating to have my best conversations where it’s harder to make it collective.
Anyway, I must not have communicated my tone very well, because the final paragraph on optimism and intellection that you’re complaining about was precisely an expression of my aversion to the reduction of optimism to the mere fact of thought as evidence of survival. It was about how low the bar has become and how pathetic it is when theory or thought saturates the imaginative field of praxis, as in when a person associates his value with his capacity for thought. But under the pressure of my friend’s illness I couldn’t say, you know, “Don’t mourn, organize!” The whole writing was, though, a way of charting out an otherwise apart from mourning all of the politics that feels defeated in advance apart from the capacity for thought. Part of my resistance to potentiality talk as I work with it is indeed the liberal part (we are never saturated by the disciplines of normative power and therefore we are still free). In this you and I are in great solidarity.
Likewise, my point about potentiality talk is that it often obfuscates the solidarity-threatening discourse of alterity and demand, which is related but not identical to your interest in loss and demand. My interest is less than yours in loss perhaps because the precarious often didn’t have what they don’t have, and jeremiad logics often obfuscate how mixed the formerly better time was, and how muddled people’s attachments and interests are. Loss rhetoric often distracts from creativity about enumerating what ought to be demanded. Why use a register of recompense when the question is: what should be?
So we’re not as far apart as you thought. One more thing: who among us isn’t symptomatic of neoliberalism? This is where we live. The whole turn to sensual/structural counter-hegemonic discourse is both a refusal and an expression of the privatization of everything, in my view. We are mobilizing, I hope, a defining contradiction.
Thanks as ever for the interlocution, LB
LB [July 20, 2008 @ 3:23 pm]
I should perhaps have written that I’m much more worn down and impatient with collocations of hope and intellect than you seemed to be. I didn’t, and don’t, think we’re all that far apart at all.
Indeed. And my sense is of a deep complicity between the rhetorics of alienation, of (the labour theory of) right, and of recognition with that of recompense, calculation, and so on. But I’m leery of temporal projections, particularly to the extent that they function as a deferral and serve to reinscribe intellect with an historically specific status.
Maybe I’m more inclined to ask the question: what is? Not in a positivist sense, but in the sense of what is that is experimental. I often find myself more drawn to what’s often been referred to as the ‘class compositional’ analyses of Bologna et al than the sunny (increasingly English liberalist) projections of Negri et al. ‘Class composition analysis’ is not without problems, but I find it more interesting, not least because it doesn’t necessarily assume intellect has a managerial standing in posing the question of ‘what is to be done?’.
Maybe my question is less one of how to organise (since I assume others are quite capable of organising without me) than how to disorganise that which is not effective, or to organise against the foreclosure of what might be. A rather impolitical move, I know.
But we live neoliberalism very differently, perhaps so incommensurably as to make ‘we’ the question. I really do think that what is often placed under the heading of neoliberalisation is/was triggered not by capital but by us, assuming of course that ‘us’ is not reduced to those who benefited most under Fordism. But yes, privatisation and internalisation. Which is why I seriously doubt the language of parasitism, as if one could simply lop off capital or the state and the commons would re-assume its proper teleological unfolding, its essence. This, perhaps, is why the language of autonomy has reached a serious impasse, seeking solace in Jefferson and the Commonwealth.
s0metim3s [July 23, 2008 @ 12:40 am]