Communist Study
Youth Culture and Pedagogy in the
Twenty-First Century
Series Editors: William Reynolds, Georgia Southern University and Brad Porfilio, California State University, East Bay
This series critically investigates and informs the construction of identity through the
study of various forms of contemporary media, and will expand the notions of critical
media literacy and its implications for multiple understandings of culture and youth.
Popular culture (including media texts) is one of the primary sites of education for our
youth, so it is crucial for those scholars involved in critical media studies to discuss these
issues in book form. How do multiple interpretations of popular culture within conceptualizations of media enhance our understandings of education, and how can critical pedagogy, in the Freirean sense, be expanded to develop a student’s critical consciousness of
the works (books, films, games, social media, etc.) that surround them in popular culture?
The books in this series tackle those tough questions and others in youth pedagogy.
Titles in the Series
Baudrillard, Youth, and American Film: Fatal Theory and Education, by Kip Kline
Communist Study: Education for the Commons, by Derek R. Ford
Communist Study
Education for the Commons
Derek R. Ford
LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
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Copyright © 2016 by Lexington Books
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
The quote by Ani Difranco is from “Joyful Girl,” © 1996 Righteous Babe Music, all
rights reserved, and is used by permission.
Excerpts were reprinted in chapter 6 from Studies in Philosophy and Education, “A
Figural Education with Lyotard,” 34 (1), 2014, pp. 89–100, Derek R. Ford, with permission of Springer
Excerpts were reprinted in chapter 3 from Educational Philosophy and Theory, “A Critical Pedagogy of Ineffability: Identity, education and the secret life of whatever,” 46 (4),
March 21, 2014, Taylor and Francis Ltd., with permission of Taylor and Francis Ltd.,
http://www.tandfonline.com.
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Printed in the United States of America
“Because the world owes me nothing and we owe each other the world.”
—Ani Difranco
Contents
Foreword: Toward a Communist Philosophy of Education:
Reflections on Method and Methodology
Tyson E. Lewis
Acknowledgments
ix
xix
Introduction: A Partisan Theory of Study
1
Part I
1 Subject Formation
2 Immaterial Subjects (and the Fetish Thereof)
15
17
31
Part II
3 Studying Whatever
4 The Secret Struggle
5 The Terror of Democracy
6 Figure
43
45
61
73
85
Part III
7 In Praise of Tanks
8 Party
97
99
115
Conclusion: Architectures of Resistance
127
Afterword: It’s a Wednesday: To Be a Problem-With, a Problem-For
Ailish Hopper
131
Bibliography
139
vii
viii
Contents
Index
145
About the Author
147
Foreword
Toward a Communist Philosophy of Education:
Reflections on Method and Methodology
Tyson E. Lewis
With this book Derek R. Ford provides a much-needed paradigm for what it
means to write a communist philosophy of education. This is not only a
philosophy of communist education but also a communist philosophy of
education. Whereas a theory of communism would remain within the strictures set by the standard approaches to theory, reiterate certain tropes, confine itself to a particular canon, call upon familiar figures to help build an
edifice, reinforce codified divisions and partitions between what is acceptable and what is not, Ford redistributes the rules underlying the writing of
theory, thus allowing a new kind of theory to emerge, one that is familiar yet
also strange, one that provokes precisely because it punctures certain commonsense assumptions about what counts as “radical” or “revolutionary.” In
this sense, Ford’s very method of theorizing is as important as any of the
arguments that he develops. In this brief foreword, I would like to spend a
few moments articulating Ford’s method (as I see it), and in the process,
propose the following thesis: If we desire to write communist philosophy in
education, then our methods of writing and thinking need to be infused with
and directed by communist commitments.
Below, I will outline six dimensions of Ford’s method for writing communist philosophy of education. With each dimension, I will demonstrate
how such an approach differs from what I will refer to as liberal democratic
consensus pedagogy and critical pedagogy. Of course such a comparison
could be called reductive, but at the same time, reduction is a form of distillation or crystallization that enables new concepts to appear, new distinctions
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Tyson E. Lewis
to be drawn, and new problematics to emerge. As such, I accept the charge of
producing a “reductive” interpretation of liberal democratic consensus pedagogy and critical pedagogy . . . but only insofar as this reduction is a starting
point for further (and much more careful) theorization at a later date.
The first methodological point I would like to highlight is Ford’s insistence that communist thinking take a constellational form. The constellation
is particularly important for Ford because its form enables seemingly distant
and unrelated elements (be they concepts, practices, particular theorists who,
or entire philosophical schools of thought that, are often seen as ideologically
opposed) to hang together in a contingent yet meaningful unity. The form of
the constellation is, in part, the result of historical conditions of the moment.
Depending on the particular social, political, and economic conditions under
which we labor and struggle, the constellation and its elements will shift
slightly. In this sense, the constellation is non-dogmatic, fully historical, and
open-ended while at the same time fully partisan in the sense that the constellation will (hopefully) illuminate the contradictions of any moment on behalf
of the oppressed and exploited. On this interpretation, the constellation is not
unlike Althusser’s theory of a social formation, with which Ford begins his
book. A social formation is an articulation of all the contradictory forces,
relations, and modes of production existing at any given time. It is an unstable field of intersecting antagonisms and fault lines. A constellation is a
kind of philosophical formation that illuminates and maps this field within
the realm of theoretical concepts. But unlike ideology (which for Althusser is
a kind of imaginary resolution to the contradictions of the social formation),
the constellation resolves nothing, it rather thrusts such contradictions into
the foreground—and in this sense, a constellation has a certain nuclear halflife that decays over time.
It is also important to note how different the constellational method of
philosophical speculation is from liberal democratic consensus pedagogy and
notions of the dialectic found scattered throughout various camps of critical
pedagogy. Whereas liberal democratic consensus erases deep agonisms in
order for everyone to be counted and all possible positions to be accounted
for within the social whole, 1 constellational theory heightens the possibilities
for theoretical agonism within and across the various elements. Thus the
ambiguities and unresolved aporias that appear in Ford’s text are not mistakes or errors but rather formative aspects of constellational thinking and
writing as a communist method. And whereas the dialectic is often used to
either pit one side against another (as in Marxism against post-modernism)
or to negate the other in order to then strengthen its own position by incorporating/preserving that which remains, a communist constellation does not
erase the heterogeneous, agonistic excess. Importantly, a method for writing
philosophy grounded in a communist practice of constellational thinking
recognizes tensions as unresolvable points of contact and rupture between
Foreword
xi
concepts. Such tensions are not merely philosophical problems (which would
be an idealist interpretation) but are rather deeply influenced by concrete
economic tensions. The internal inconsistencies found within a constellation
are unsolvable and unresolvable within the current situation of which they
are a part—they are symptoms of that which they struggle against. Educational philosophy becomes communist when it produces a constellational
map for illuminating (and thus navigating) between points held together by
tension rather than by resolution (consensus) or strict identity (vulgar dialectics). The unresolvable is precisely the point where political education happens, where philosophy touches social and political practice.
Further, the very motor or engine driving constellational thinking is radically different from consensus or dialectics. For liberal democratic consensus
pedagogy, the motor driving inclusion (and exclusion) is social stability and
social functionalism. In schools, this approach often takes the form of watered-down multiculturalism where everyone is “included” but only in the
most superficial ways. For dialectical critique, the motor is negation. The
system must be destroyed so that human freedom and equality can come to
materialize themselves and thus reconcile the bifurcated pieces of a split,
alienated existence. In both, the priority is presence (everyone can be accounted for in the consensus) over absence, and identity (alienation can be
overcome and replaced with a new found wholeness or completeness of the
self) over difference. The motor driving communist constellational thinking
is not inclusion or negation but rather multiplication that leads toward an
excess that cannot be bounded, quantified, counted, accounted for, or fully
sublated into a transparent and organic whole. Such excess cannot be commodified in the form of surplus value, but is rather the surplus of the surplus.
In short, the problem with consensus and dialectical sublation is that both
leave no room for the excess (or as Ford might call it, the secret), which
withdraws from every demand to articulate itself and thus to function within
a social consensus or a dialectical teleology. A communist constellation is
inherently excessive and thus opaque in that it is open to that which cannot be
recognized (by consensus) or repurposed (by dialectics).
For those who might read Ford’s book and find it excessively theoretical, I
would argue that this is precisely the point. This excess is what makes the
book not only a communist theory, but more importantly, a communist philosophy of education. It is the excess where we find the political and educational force of communism.
Another dimension of a communist method for writing educational philosophy is the insistence on connecting philosophy to social movements.
Terry Eagleton once argued that the rise of critical theory could be attributed
to the demise of an international workers movement in Europe. 2 The result
was a kind of melancholic retreat from movement politics into the aesthetic
realm. While Paulo Freire is often cited as a key inspiration for North
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Tyson E. Lewis
American versions of critical pedagogy, could we not also make the argument that Freire’s activism and his connections to movements were lost in
this moment of appropriation? The rise of critical pedagogy is thus predicated on a similar dissolve of the important and necessary links that bind together theory and practice in Marx’s work. For Ford, a communist philosophy of
education must return to and be in constant dialogue with various movements
(local and global) in order to ground a philosophical constellation in the
objective forces, relations, and modes of production that form the ever
present horizon of all theoretical work.
Thirdly, whereas liberal democratic consensus pedagogy is always
founded on a naïve optimism that the system can fix itself and critical pedagogies are founded on rage and anger against the system of capitalist exploitation, communist philosophy of education has a different affective starting
point. In his introduction, Ford writes about a “sublime feeling of being-incommon.” Such an affect is collective in nature, and while it emerges from
what Ford calls “commonness against capital,” it is also productive of a
subjectivity that is oriented toward something new. In this sense, it is neither
merely affirmative nor merely critical of what is. Rather there is a joy in
collective struggle that is in excess of what is and that transcends the negative moment of critique. Communist philosophy of education is excessively
joyous in its militant insistence on being with and acting alongside others.
And this point is very important for educators, for it is only through the sheer
joy of being-in-common that movements can sustain themselves, that new
subjectivities can be forged with lasting power to resist that banal optimism
of liberal democratic consensus or the potential nihilism of rage and anger
found in certain articulations of critical/revolutionary pedagogies. Of course,
rage and anger (and even some optimism) are important parts of the affective
formation of a communist subject, yet these are not necessarily what will
enable such a subject to thrive as a new form of life within and against the
system of capitalism. In this sense, Ford’s work should be read with a kind of
joyful pleasure for it is infused with a desire to think through the difficult
task of forming an educational response to exploitation. Such joy is not
simply a privilege of those who have the leisure time to sit around and think
about the dangers of capitalism; rather it is a joy that emerges only when
philosophy is reconnected to social movements and to broader collective
forms of becoming.
The next dimension of Ford’s communist method is directly educational.
Indeed it shifts the parameters of dominant educational logics found within
both liberal democratic consensus and critical pedagogies. For liberal democratic reformers, education has collapsed into the dominant form of learning
prevalent throughout K-12 schooling. Learning in this context concerns the
actualization of some potentiality in order for this potentiality to be put to
work, measured, and improved upon for capitalist ends. Likewise in critical
Foreword
xiii
pedagogies, there is always some kind of essence (or what Freire often referred to as an “ontological vocation” to become “fully human” 3) that must
be actualized in order to fulfill a human telos. The problem here is precisely
that both share an underlying model of learning that is deeply entangled with
the history of Western modernization processes, including capitalist expansion. As Marx pointed out, capitalism functions through the expropriation of
labor-power, which must be put to work in order to generate profit. Thus
capitalism thrives on the logic of actualizing one’s potentiality. Indeed, under
capitalism, if one’s potentiality for labor-power is not actualized, then one’s
life is fundamentally put at risk. My point here is that liberal democratic
reformers as well as critical activists have not adequately theorized the tight
connections between learning and capitalism. Of course, reformers and critics could argue that they are appropriating alienated learning in order to
return it to the self-determining agency of the student. This is certainly an
important struggle, one that creates a division between learning for capitalist
expropriation and learning for self-determination and revolution. Not unlike
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s theory of two modernities, 4 here we find
two logics of learning (one alienating the other emancipating). But there is
another possible course that has only recently opened up, one that decisively
moves beyond learning. For the last several years my work focused on the
following question: What would it mean to theorize an alternative educational logic to learning . . . an educational logic that does not emerge with or
alongside capitalist modes of production? What is needed here is formal
innovation, real pedagogical innovation that experiments with modes of educational life beyond the subjectivity of the learner as such. Study is one such
possibility.
In agreement with this basic philosophical move back toward formal
questions of pedagogical innovation, Ford opens up an alternative educational logic, which he refers to as a figural education that negotiates between
learning and studying. This is an educational formation wherein different
modes of educational activity exist without necessary mediation or sublation.
The educational constellation that Ford produces recognizes a space of negotiation where differing logics both touch and repel one another. This is an
educational space of excess that is not reducible to either learning or studying
but to the secret life of the studier who is suspended within their oscillation.
The challenge that Ford faces is how to write studiously about the educational constellation uniting yet separating differing logics. This would be a
mode of writing that oscillates between two polar opposites: one pole says
“here is the lesson to be learned” while the other says “there is a secret here
which I cannot (or choose not) to articulate, yet it is important.” The first
pole concerns learning in order to move toward the goal of revolutionary
action (how to organize, how to mobilize, and so on) while the second
concerns studying that which remains in excess. This tension is palpably felt
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Tyson E. Lewis
throughout Ford’s text, which embodies a rhythmic back-and-forth between
the two. The overall result is an embodiment of the very educational formation that it advocates for. The reader experiences the recursive movement
between actualizing one’s potentiality to learn and remaining in a state of
suspension where this very same potential is given back to itself. Again, if
the reader might find fault with Ford’s excesses, I would argue that these
excesses serve a pedagogical function within the text, prompting the reader
to feel the secret that he describes, thus disrupting any easy and quick learning curve toward revolution.
In short, Ford’s text is neither a liberal democratic handbook nor a critical
pedagogical manifesto. It is a pensive and excessive text that interrupts the
smooth trajectory of learning facilitated by handbooks and manifestos with
moments of study that are tentative, speculative, and that hesitate in an unresolved space and time. The momentum of Ford’s argument might waver
somewhat, not because of a fault in reasoning or lack of theoretical acumen
but because of a pedagogical intent: to make the reader pause, question
assumptions, fall off track for a moment, undermine certainties, and complicate commonsense notions. While a handbook explains and a manifesto proclaims, Ford’s book is punctured with opaque whispers, asides, excesses that
could not be easily put into a list of bullet points or read as slogans at a rally.
Instead of a handbook or a manifesto, what we have here is a real philosophical text—perhaps the first communist philosophical text in the field of education.
The fifth dimension of a communist philosophy of education is an emphasis on anticipation. Once again, I can draw some distinctions between liberal
democratic consensus forms of prediction and a tendency in critical pedagogy toward prophesy. One believes that statistics can give accurate forecasts
of what is to come, and that we can adequately plan ahead to fend off a crisis.
Such is the optimism of the liberal democratic reformer. There is nothing
inherently wrong with the system as such, and because of this, all that is
necessary are minor adjustments. The other argues that the crisis cannot be
avoided; that it is a historical inevitability; and that through prophetic vision
of a future promise, communism will arise out of the ashes. The critical
pedagogue—as fortune-teller—gazes into a crystal ball in order to prophesize a radically different future possibility. This possibility is never couched
in the language of prophesy. Rather, Marxism has attempted to ground its
augury in a firm science of historical necessity. Such scientific certainty
about the future goes all the way back to Marx who wrote, “The theoretical
conclusions of the communists are in no way based on ideas that have been
invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. . . .
They merely express, in general terms, actual reflections springing from an
existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very
eyes.” 5 In order to orient the direction of the proletarian struggle, commu-
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xv
nists must know where the struggle is headed, and this knowledge is based on
an objective (and scientific) understanding of the laws of capitalism. Yet,
such science is merely a kind of prophesy in disguise. How could it be
otherwise?
Anticipation is more open-ended and uncertain than its cousins. Unlike
statistical prediction (which merely projects the present into the future) or
“scientific” prophesy (which assumes laws of historical causality can objectively predict a radical rupture with the present), anticipation is an interpretive and thus contestable approach to historical understanding that is situated
within the present but not of the present. A constellation is not a statistical
model, nor is it a prophetic vision based on presumed laws. A constellation is
implicated in the objective forces and relations of production, yet it is an
imaginative and thus ideologically mediated image that demands hermeneutic exegesis. The handbook is transparent and the manifesto is precise, yet a
philosophical text is, at times, opaque and withdrawn. In this sense, the work
of anticipation is transferred from the writer (as the one who is supposed to
know or have the proper vision) to the reader, who must learn and study, and
study and learn from a book that does not give itself completely or readily.
In this sense, anticipation is fully contemporary. The contemporary is not
merely about what is. To be contemporary means that one adheres to the
present precisely through a discontinuity with it. While the liberal democratic
consensus is in synchrony with the present (and projects it infinitely into the
future) and the critical pedagogue is in a state of diachronic overcoming
(where the history of capitalism ensures its future demise), I might argue that
the communist is in “dys-chrony” 6 with the present. It is only of the present
by being out of phase with the times. The resulting disconnection (a time
within time that is out of joint) enables anticipation to happen. A communist
philosophy of education is therefore the most contemporary kind of educational philosophy!
Finally, the last concept that Ford hangs within his constellation is restraint. This restraint might be read as the communist ethics within Ford’s
work. Ford argues, “Like studying, restraint isn’t a mode of passivity, it isn’t
a disengagement from the world.” The liberal democratic consensus continually calls for action in order to fend off the multiple crises of capitalism. “We
have to fix the system!” “We have to take action now!” These are familiar
phrases that function as pragmatic responses to injury or potential injury. But
they are merely that: pragmatic and spontaneous responses that more often
than not generate more long-term problems than actual solutions. Likewise
within critical pedagogy, the rage and anger at the system provokes a distinctive sense that something must be done NOW. Urgency, emergency, and
crisis are language games found within critical pedagogy and capitalist market logics. Missing on both sides is another political strategy that does not
result in immediate mobilization: restraint. Provocatively, Ford points to the
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Tyson E. Lewis
Chinese Communist Party’s restraint against the Tiananmen movement in
1989 as a paradigm of political inaction. Whereas the image of the lone and
anonymous man standing before a tank has come to signify the ultimate
repressive force of the state over and against a grassroots democratic movement, Ford flips the script, pointing out that the most salient political meaning of the image is right on the surface: the tank did not run the individual
over. This is a moment of restraint whereby the horrors of mass slaughter
were avoided precisely because of a power that remained in potentiality.
Like studying, restraint is an action that deactualizes itself, remaining
impotential. The lesson of restraint is not that “I will do something” or that “I
will not do something” but rather that “I can/cannot” do something. Whereas
liberal democrats assume to know what to do and how to do it through
calculated prediction and the critical pedagogue assumes to know what to do
and how to do it through prophetic knowledge of historical necessity, the
communist does not necessarily know what to do and thus must study the
situation. It is key here to note, as Slavoj Žižek points out, 7 that at a crucial
point after the catastrophes of 1914, Lenin decided that he needed to retreat
from the front lines to Switzerland in order to read Hegel’s logic. While some
might see this as a privilege or luxury, we might read it differently as a
sustained attempt to make a space and a time for study within the chaos of
revolutionary emergency. Lenin’s political restraint and his educational logic
of study are inseparable. And perhaps it is such restraint that maintained
Lenin’s open anticipation toward the situation.
By the end of Ford’s book, he has drawn the outline of a communist
constellation, and in conclusion, names this constellation the Party. For Ford,
the Party is simultaneously a political and an educational form of organization. Again, the two are inseparable and define the parameters of a communist life. But to understand this claim, the Party must be theorized differently
than how it is commonly understood. An educational interpretation of the
Party has deep roots in Marxism itself. Indeed, in the Communist Manifesto,
Marx argued that there are essentially three groups struggling within the
capitalist age. The first two are well-known antagonists: the bourgeoisie and
the proletarians. But Marx adds to this mix a third group: the communists.
The Communist Party was the theoretically grounded branch of the proletarians that brought with them a philosophical, historical, and international
knowledge needed to help guide the proletarian struggle toward a seizure of
private property in the name of the commonwealth. In this way, Marx
stressed the educational force of the Communist Party to teach the proletarians how to organize and conceptualize their struggles beyond local wage
disputes. Ford has picked up on this educational dimension of Marx’s original conception and has developed it in a unique way. No longer is the Party
the holder of scientific knowledge (or prophetic vision as outlined above) so
much as the barer of a desire for that which is immanent to yet exceeds the
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current material and social relations of production. The Party is ignorant yet
militantly guards the desire for being-in-common. In this sense, the Party is
not an all-knowing and thus omniscient political entity. Rather it is a political
formation that sustains a desire for collectivity. It is not their knowledge that
enables them to anticipate so much as this desire. The struggle to study
against capitalism needs a Party formation in order to organize studiers into a
movement. Summarizing the book, Ford writes, “Just as learning has to take
place in order to study, struggle has to take place to keep studying, to spread
study throughout society” and the name for this struggle is the Party.
I would like to end this brief foreword on a personal note. I consider
Derek a friend—not in the sense that we always agree, or that we share
certain likes and dislikes, or that we have similar styles/tastes, or that we
have identical political views. Rather we share something . . . something in
common. This commonness is a struggle to define a project for philosophy of
education that matters to political life and that is against the enclosure of the
commonwealth by capitalism. Our sharing is thus not a set of predicates so
much as a kind of indeterminate question. What can educational philosophy
mean in this struggle? How can we innovate new styles of address, forms of
exposition, and theoretical constellations that do not simply help others learn
about the evils of capitalism but also promote sustained study in being otherwise than such evils demand? In this sense, we are studious friends who
share a secret desire. Come join our friendship; we embrace you, whatever
you are just so long as you are also a commonness against.
NOTES
1. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and philosophy (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999).
2. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin: Or towards a revolutionary criticism (London: Verso,
1994).
3. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2001), 74.
4. Michael Hardt and Anonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
5. Karl Marx, Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844 and the communist manifesto (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1988), 223.
6. For an analysis of the term “dys-chrony” seen Giorgio Agamben, What is an apparatus?
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 41.
7. Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008).
Acknowledgments
I wrote this book during the fall and winter of 2015–2016, while living in a
one-bedroom apartment with my dog, Felix, in the center of Philadelphia. I
would write, seated on the floor with my laptop on a coffee table, while Felix
would rotate between his usual spots—the windowsill, the rocking chair, and
the floor next to me. He would cast glances at me, growl and request some
pets, and then move to the door, where he would growl and request a walk.
He gave me some needed (but not always wanted) breaks for walking or
playing fetch. And over the last six years, Felix has taught me a lot about the
secret life and about our common alterity, about the limits of articulation, and
about how we communicate without articulation. I don’t think I would have
been able to write this book without his presence.
A lot of humans have also been helpful. I have been thinking about the
concepts in this book for just about ten years now, and this thinking has taken
on many forms: learning, studying, struggling, conspiring, teaching, organizing, playing, and loving. While I can’t recount all of my various co-thinkers
here, I do want to acknowledge some of the debts that I have taken out, and
which I have no intention of paying back. First, Tyson Lewis introduced me
to the notion of study, which—as is evidenced by my footnotes—he has
spent a fair amount of labor developing. Tyson is able to appreciate and
understand the tensions in my thinking and is consistently willing to take my
ideas on their own terms. Our friendship has helped me develop and clarify
my own take on studying and philosophy of education.
Several professors from my time at Goucher College have played foundational roles in shaping my research interests, methodological habits, and
intellectual attitudes. Margret Grebowicz taught several important classes,
including a seminar on Lyotard my senior year that, while I wasn’t always
totally present for, nonetheless deeply impacted the way that I understand the
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Acknowledgments
world. She was the first person to introduce me to Butler, Hardt, Negri, and
Freire. Steven Decaroli taught me about Agamben and Althusser in his philosophy course. Both Margret and Steven provoked my interest in philosophy and shaped the way that I engage it. Ailish Hopper taught our Peace
Studies capstone class, an experiment in self-organized study that sparked
my interest in philosophy of education. I think that this book is in many ways
a response to that class. Margret, Steve, and Ailish never gave up on me.
They put up with my self-indulgent studying (a generous phrasing) and continued to teach me regardless.
The cultural foundations of education program at Syracuse University
was a warm home for me to learn and research. I was fortunate enough to be
placed under the advisement of Barbara Applebaum, who taught a seminar
on Butler my first semester in 2011. I remember walking into Barbara’s
office one snowy winter day before that semester and feeling right at home
intellectually and, although I wouldn’t be able to articulate it for a few years,
emotionally. Barbara’s care and support, her willingness to push and disagree
with me, and her faith that my scattered thoughts and interests would one day
cohere enabled my research to unfold organically. My teaching assistantship
was under Mario Rios Perez, who continues to be a great teacher and friend.
Mario refrained from assigning his teaching assistants too many tasks, which
allowed me to devote a good deal of time to my own work. Maryann Barker,
the department secretary, performed the intellectual, emotional, and physical
labor upon which the whole program rested.
Nicolette Amsutz, Jimmy Hamill, and Kasey Beduhn at Lexington have
been attentive, responsive, and accommodating throughout the writing, review, and production process. Additional gratitude is due to Alex Means for
his careful engagement with the text prior to publication. Alex has also been
a smart friend, collaborator, and role model over the past few years. Thanks
to series editors, friends, and colleagues Brad Porfilio and Bill Reynolds for
including this book in their new series. I met Brad and Bill early in my
graduate studies, and they have both been remarkably supportive, offering
housing at conferences while I was a poor graduate student, inviting me to
present on panels, to write book chapters and articles, edit books, and providing me with more than a few laughs along the way.
In fact, Brad and Bill introduced me to a wonderful community of critical
scholars who are dedicated to critiquing the present and building a better
future—all while disagreeing with each other, sometimes quite intensely.
Sandy Grande, Michelle Gautreaux, Dave Backer, Sandra Delgado, Zane
Wubbena, and Shawgi Tell each gave my previous book critical and generous readings and responses, which in turn helped push me to pen this book. I
thank them for the public and private dialogues we have had. E. Wayne Ross
is regularly eager to support my propaganda efforts and has provided feedback for my thinking on the Party. Others, like Suzy SooHoo, Lilia Monzó,
Acknowledgments
xxi
Wayne Au, and Bill Ayers have encouraged me with their friendship and
pedagogical commitments. Conversations with fellow (critical) educational
theorists Nassim Noroozi, Chris Moffett, Sam Rocha, Eduardo Duarte, Dave
Wolken, Kelsey John, and Jason Wozniak opened up crucial lines of inquiry.
I want to give a special mention to Dennis Carlson who, up until his very last
days, offered kind and loving guidance and support. We all miss you terribly,
Dennis.
There are two others who deserve special mention. First, Peter McLaren
is an exemplary friend, colleague, and comrade whose thought in many ways
cleared the way for a work like this. Peter is incredibly busy and in demand,
but whether he is traveling to build with movements in Chiapas, Caracas,
Istanbul, or Changchun, he is without exception willing to take the time to
answer my questions, provide feedback, or just check in. Peter’s intellectual
agility and generosity of spirit provide models that I hope to replicate in my
academic and political life. Thank you, Peter.
Curry Malott, too, has been an exceptional co-thinker, friend, and comrade (in the strictest sense of that word) over the past few years. Curry has an
interminable energy and a focused discipline that are, fortunately for me,
contagious. He was also the only ally in a politically repressive work situation, and he and his wife Donna-Marie kept me sane during that period of
time. One of my favorite stories of Stalin is when a fellow comrade was
trying to teach him Kant and he broke down, screaming “what the hell does
this have to do with the class struggle!?” I think of Curry when I think of this
story, and I hope that Curry can see what the hell this book has to do with the
class struggle.
The political commitments that inform this book have been crystallizing
for some time now and have been nurtured by a range of individuals and
organizations. Preyas Roy first introduced me to communism in elementary
school, and he and Aashish Hemrajani nurtured my political investments
early on. In terms of my theoretical and organizational development, comrades in the Party for Socialism and Liberation have no doubt been the most
instrumental. The collective experience and affective structure of the Party
have profoundly influenced and disciplined my being and my commitments;
in particular, comrades Sarah Sloan, Richard and Brian Becker, Eugene Puryear, and the comrades in Baltimore, DC, New York, and of course, Syracuse
and Philly. Many allies in the struggle have also informed my outlook and
orientation, including Navid Nasr, Lizzie Phelan, Amal Saad, and Anthony
Monteiro.
My parents, Janet and Bob, have been a constant source of love and
humor. They have been amazing teachers and have bailed me out (figuratively and literally) more than a few times over the past thirty years. Friends of
Bill, and the 5:fifteen in particular, have kept me responsible to the word in
important ways, as has the DeWitt Community Church. Sarah Pfohl helped
xxii
Acknowledgments
infect my politics and thinking with imagination, kindness, and openness—
and she also taught me a lot about looking.
Finally, I’m so grateful to have found a new academic home at DePauw
University. I want to thank Jamie Stockton, Eva Weisz, Marcelle McVorran,
Rebecca Alexander, and Jodi Menke for welcoming me into the education
studies department there.
Introduction
A Partisan Theory of Study
While Margret Thatcher tends to get the credit for saying that “there is no
such thing as society,” it was none other than Karl Marx who, in The Poverty
of Philosophy, first—and for quite different reasons—contested that such a
thing as society existed. For Marx the term society was too loose and static,
too moralistic and jurisprudential; it wasn’t dialectical or historical enough to
account for the constantly changing state of things, for the complexity and
dynamism of life. In its place, Marx proposed the concept of “social formation.” 1 In the clear, careful, and patient manner that is characteristic of his
work, Althusser spells out for us just what a social formation is, and why this
concept is vital for Marx and for those of us who want to make a new world,
a world that we deserve. In each social formation there exist multiple modes
of production (at least two), one of which is always dominant, and others of
which are either going out of or struggling to come into existence. A mode of
production is, well, a way of producing things, an arrangement between the
productive forces and the relations of production, between the objects and
instruments of labor, on the one hand, and between those who relate to them
and to each other, on the other.
Under the capitalist mode of production, the relations of production are
inherently and unalterably relations of exploitation. There are those who
work on the means of production and those who own the means of production, and the latter group appropriates what is produced, returning some to
the worker in the form of wages and keeping the rest for themselves (and the
landlord, the state, and the banker). There is always a struggle over how the
value produced will be apportioned, what amount will return to the one who
produced it and what amount will be taken by the owner; wages correspond
1
2
Introduction
to the level of class struggle at any given moment and in any given place.
The relations of production under capitalism are therefore not of a technical
or legal nature, but a social one. It is, then, the whole social and economic
system that has to be overthrown: the working class has to have control over
the productive forces and new relations of production have to be established. 2
Althusser’s presentation of social formations and modes of production is
so appealing, for one, because of the way in which he makes clear that
antagonistic modes of production coexist along with the capitalist mode of
production. Thus, Althusser gives us a way to understand that the primary
contradiction at the time of his writing was not necessarily within the capitalist mode of production but rather between the capitalist mode of production
and the socialist mode of production, which in the early 1970s was a considerable portion of the globe. 3 For two, however, Althusser’s formulation is
appealing because of the way that it demonstrates the centrality of the social
relations of production. Althusser states upfront that the relations of production are determinant in the reproduction of a social formation. 4 After all, that
is why Althusser was interested in the ideological state apparatuses in the
first place: they are “the number one object of the class struggle” because of
their central role in the reproduction of the relations of production. 5
The materialist method indicates that any new production relations and
forces won’t materialize out of thin air, which seems to me an important but
fundamentally neglected insight when examining the history of the international communist movement. All too often socialist states are evaluated according to a checklist drawn up in the halls of academe by romantic, utopian
intellectuals. But I digress. 6 The theory of immanence that is fundamental to
the materialist method holds that it is only out of existing conditions that the
future emerges, that we can glimpse alternative realities within the present,
that hegemony is loosely stitched together, and composed of fabric and
thread from the past. With the right alteration the whole thing can unravel.
This is precisely why Althusser insists on the coexistence of multiple modes
of production within any given social formation: multiple sets of production
relations and forces can be blocked together, locked in struggles that are at
times latent and at other times explosive. The question is how to locate and
latch onto the germ of the future from within the present, at least that’s the
question for those of us who yearn for a different world.
That’s also the question that motives this study. What I set out to do in
this book is to locate antagonistic elements of subjectivity and modes of
being that are immanent in the present, to understand these subjectivities in
their necessary relationship to the mode of production, and to posit some
ways that these elements can be seized upon by educators and political organizers. In this way, it’s a political and intellectual book, and it’s a deeply
intimate one, too. This project embodies tensions that I have felt all of my
Introduction
3
life, tensions that Peter McLaren calls enfleshment, or “the mutually constitutive enfolding of social structure and desire . . . the dialectical relationship
between the material organization of interiority and the cultural modes of
materiality we inhabit subjectively.” 7 This phrase, “the material organization
of interiority” is a particularly profound one, for it so closely links politics to
the subject, intimating two types of interiority: the interiority of the subject
and the various forms of interiority that, together, we constantly construct
(the domus, the collective, the classroom, etc.). 8 The co-intimacies are always experienced through the reigning mode of production, which is not
external to social relations or to subjectivity itself.
The social and economic contradictions of capitalism run through us, as
do the contradictions between the capitalist mode of production and other,
ascending or descending modes of production. We can feel exploitation in
our interior, but we can also feel solidarity there, nudging its way in. We
organize with our fellow workers and students because our material conditions force us to, because we need more, want something else, but also
because organizing, in its best moments, can produce a sublime feeling of
being-in-common. While we are shoulder to shoulder with others fighting
against a common enemy we experience a mode of collectivity that capitalism can never capture, a form of subjectification that exceeds any already
existing conceptual framework. Now, anyone who has done even a quick
stint as an organizer knows that a lot of other feelings can be produced, too,
feelings that can divide us, make us anxious, cynical, and paranoid. Yet this
is nothing but another testament to the blocking together of multiple forms of
social relations that are vying for dominance.
I was an organizer and a communist before entering the field of education, and one of the reasons that I was drawn to the field was because of the
ways in which I also got these sublime feelings when reading and thinking
about, and wrestling with, ideas with others. When I harken back, the best
educational experiences for me have been indistinguishable from the best
political experiences. The research that I have done over the past several
years has given me some tools, concepts, problems, and frameworks with
which to theorize these feelings that I’ve had with others and how they relate
to the social formation. This theorization resulted in the formation of a pedagogical constellation, and this book is a journey through that constellation.
In astronomy, a constellation is a way of grouping areas of the celestial
sphere. The first constellations were determined by farmers who were looking for additional indicators of the changing of seasons, and today they are
determined by the International Astronomical Union. Constellations are a
way of framing and grouping the sky. Tyson Lewis has suggested that we
should think of educational philosophy and practice as a constellation. A
pedagogical constellation, then, “does not collapse differences between concepts, nor does it simply valorize one conceptual model over the other. Rath-
4
Introduction
er, they hang precariously together, maintaining an absent center.” 9 Lewis is
careful to note that this constellation can’t be purely subjective, but has to
“have an objective and necessary dimension.” 10 Whereas Lewis argues that
this dimension is the “exacting imagination,” I hold that it is the social
relations of production that fills the spaces and connects the relations between concepts, and the communist program that motivates the assembling
of the constellation in the first place.
The communist educational program was in many ways the topic of my
first book, Marx, Capital, and Education: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of
Becoming, which I penned with my comrade and colleague Curry Malott. 11
We wrote that book in a fever, egged on by the need to locate critical education within the history of actually-existing struggles against imperialism,
exploitation, and oppression. This meant that we had to go back to Marx, and
that we especially had to do some systematic and educational readings of the
three volumes of Capital. Everywhere in education, in every other journal
article or conference paper, we encountered this term “neoliberalism.” That
was good, we thought, because there can be no doubt that we, in the United
States, are in an intense struggle over accumulation by educational dispossession. So much of this trajectory of educational research, however, left us
dissatisfied: the disconnection of neoliberalism from capitalism, the dismissal and demonization of the actually existing workers’ struggle (and the
social formations it produced), the lack of any real systemic engagement with
marxism, the emphasis on analysis at the expense of action, the reluctance to
formulate a political program, silence on imperialist war, and an embrace of
essentialist identity politics. We composed the book as an intervention into
the field. We provided an antidote to the bland critiques of neoliberalism in
education; we centered the law and logic of value, the dialectic, and negation; read the Ferguson protests through the lens of Capital and Harry Haywood—the self-proclaimed “Black Bolshevik”—and his theory of the oppressed Black nation within the United States; located neoliberalism as a
strategy within the global class war; and pushed back against the idealistic
and anti-communist critiques of actually-existing socialism.
Sending a manuscript off to press is rarely a satisfying thing, because as
soon as you click “send” you’ve already thought of too many things to add,
tweak, or test. And so writing a book or an article is less about completing
something and more about starting something, opening new lines of inquiry
or starting new political projects. Marx, Capital, and Education was no exception to this, and before it had manifested as a physical object we were
both pursuing new themes. Curry ended up writing History and Education,
which confronts the deep-seated anti-communism in critical pedagogy and
the academic Left more generally by expanding on the concept of the global
class war, which we dedicated a chapter to in our book and which was
begging for more analysis. As for me, I started contemplating a word that we
Introduction
5
had placed in Marx, Capital, and Education’s subtitle: pedagogy. “Just what
the hell is pedagogy?” I kept asking myself. I had read and written the word
countless times, had gone through a graduate program in education, but I
didn’t have a grasp on what it meant.
After some digging, I came to realize that I wasn’t alone. Sure, some
scholars and researchers used “pedagogy” in a very clear sense: to them it
was a method of teaching. But that seemed not only boring, but also definitely at odds with the critical tradition (critical pedagogy insists that it is not a
method, but a practice). 12 As I started to take the claim seriously, though, I
started to come around a bit to the position that pedagogy is a method. In the
opening pages of History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukàcs asks what
orthodox marxism is. He tells us that if all of Marx’s theses were disproven,
even then “every serious ‘orthodox’ Marxist would still be able to accept all
such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx’s
theses in toto—without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment.” 13 This, Lukàcs says, is so because “orthodoxy refers exclusively to
method,” which for a marxist is dialectical materialism. And dialectical materialism is all about processes and relations, both of which imply constant
change. 14 Indeed, the dialectic is what allowed Marx to study capital, which
he defined as a social relation. Given this, it makes little sense to institute a
binary between a method and a practice, as the marxist method is the practice
of applying dialectical materialism to understand processes and relations.
In the spirit of the dialectic, the best educational theorists use pedagogy to
name an educational relation. Paulo Freire, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, wrote at length regarding the dialogic relationship between teacher
and student, the hyphen between what he termed the teacher-student and the
student-teacher. 15 A central axiom of the book is that the teacher and the
student must relate as agents who are encountering each other and, through
dialogue, naming their world. This axiom, however, can’t be divorced from
another, which is the commitment to ending oppression and exploitation,
what Freire called the process of humanization. What makes the relationship
educational is this second axiom, for education always needs an end. 16 This
is exactly what McLaren means when he insists, “ideological paths chosen
by teachers are the fundamental stuff of Freirean pedagogy.” 17 McLaren has
been hard at work over the last two decades theorizing the ideological paths
that lead toward the ends of this pedagogy by fleshing out a revolutionary
critical pedagogy, upon which Marx, Capital, and Education was built. 18
The pedagogical relation, in this tradition, is about opening ourselves up
to the possibility that things can be otherwise than they are, that a world
without exploitation and oppression can exist, and that, through struggle, we
can create that world. As Antonia Darder writes, the purpose of pedagogy is
to “engage the world with its complexity and fullness in order to reveal the
possibilities of new ways of constructing thought and action beyond the
6
Introduction
original state.” 19 Pedagogy, for McLaren, “is the telling of the story of the
‘something more’ that can be dreamed only when domination and exploitation are named and challenged.” 20 This is a pedagogy that seeks a way out of
the present through the cultivation of imagination and the formation of dissidence and resistance. The relationship between the present and the future was
an animating theme of Marx, Capital, and Education, and it is why the book
insisted on the process of becoming. What I came to realize, however, was
that I needed something more here. As an educational theorist, I felt it was
my duty to think more carefully and experimentally about how pedagogy
bridges the gap between what is and what can be, while respecting the gap
and its uncertainty and figurality. How can pedagogy respect the gap’s ambiguity while remaining faithful to the communist project?
A PEDAGOGICAL CONSTELLATION
The pedagogical constellation constructed in the following pages is animated
by these concerns. I demonstrate some ways that pedagogy can help materialize social relations and activate subjectivities that are not just antagonistic
to capital, but conducive to the communist project. When I write about the
communist project I mean something particular and something general,
something old, something new, and something unknown. After the overthrow and dissolution of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc in 19891991, communism fell into disrepute. The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and global economic crisis of 2007-2008, however, turned the tide, and
history restarted. Communism reappeared once again as a Left sign. In response, a “new communism” has emerged as a pole to be struggled over.
There are multiple takes on this new communism, from Alain Badiou’s notion of communism as an Idea, an abstract truth procedure that synthesizes
history, politics, and the subject, to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Spinozist communism as the absolute democracy of singularities. 21 Jodi Dean’s
take is that we mustn’t equate communism with democracy. We live in the
age of democracy, and so to organize around “radical” or “absolute” democracy implies an extension of the system as it is, signals that through inclusion
democracy can be radically transformed. 22 While it is true, as Alex Means
notes, that Lenin and Marx sometimes used the term “proletarian democracy” to describe communism, the situation today is considerably different. 23
Not only do the masses in capitalist countries today have access to the mechanisms of democracy, but democracy defines the contemporary moment. One
could argue that we should struggle over the meaning of democracy, but this,
I hold, is not only a dead end pragmatically (for it only reaffirms democracy’s hegemony), but is incorrect politically. Democracy necessitates inclusion and participation and fails to name the exclusions and divisions that
Introduction
7
make politics possible. 24 Democracy names a commons; communism names
a commons against.
Not all of the cartographers that travel with me to chart this communist
constellation fit within the communist tradition, and in fact some of my cothinkers have made explicit breaks from the communist movement. While I
don’t let them off the hook so easily, neither do I attempt to force them neatly
into the communist project. There is a resulting tension that runs through the
book, a tension that I hope readers find both productive and troubling. I’m
familiar with the rash of Marxist/post-al debates that dominated so much of
academia during 1990s. To be quite honest, I’m not especially interested in
them, or in rehearsing the arguments, or in drawing up some sort of balance
sheet on the matter. It’s not so much that the categories and stakes of these
debates aren’t significant (they certainly are), but that the debates became so
narrowed and debilitated, so narrowing and debilitating. They are, if I may
say so, played out. My position is that we shouldn’t allow ideological disagreements to prevent us from communicating with, or culling insights from,
one another. It’s not to say that ideological unity and clarity aren’t important,
but that this unity is always the result of struggle and practice, not a priori
literary battles. So I chose my co-thinkers in this book because they have
helped me conceptualize the relations that pedagogy can engender, how these
relations relate to the varying kinds of social relations of production, and how
we can link the educational relation to the struggle for a new social formation.
Foundational to this project is the idea that subjectivity is historical and
material, that subjectivity changes, and that these changes have a relationship
to production relations. The predominant form of the subject today, it appears, is the individual. Dean thus writes that “our political problem differs in
a fundamental way from that of communists at the beginning of the twentieth
century—we have to organize individuals; they had to organize masses.” 25
This book begins with an inquiry into the individualized state of subjectivity
today. The first chapter brings Judith Butler’s theory of the normative and
performative constitution of the subject into the field of capital. I elaborate
the social, juridical, and economic conditions of industrial capital accumulation and, reading Butler with Marx, I argue that the norms through which the
subject comes to be constituted as an individual in the modern era are fundamentally connected with modern capitalism. In other words, the subjectivity
of the individual is required for capitalist accumulation in the industrial era.
The individual, however, is just one way in which subjectivity is produced
under capitalism, for capitalism atomizes people at the same time as it concentrates them in space, alienating people from each other while developing
sophisticated means of transportation and communication. These contradictions of capital are contradictions that are played out on the field of the
subject, which both acts on and reacts to the mode of production. As a result,
8
Introduction
when I move to an examination of recent transformations that have taken
place in capitalism, the move away from the industrial era, I pay special
attention to the interaction between subjects and the means of production,
although I also bring the economic contradictions of capitalism—overaccumulation and the falling rate of profit—into play.
These recent transformations have to do with the incorporation of subjectivity into capitalism as an element of fixed capital—what Marx labeled the
“general intellect”—and the increasing importance of subjectivity and sociality in the production and realization of value. Following Maurizio Lazzarato,
I define the contemporary phase of capitalism as the “immaterial era.” The
immaterial era of capitalism, I claim, follows from the industrial era, and it
represents a transformation within the capitalist mode of production, not a
new mode of production. I caution against fetishizing immaterial production,
a charge I level against Hardt and Negri, who recognize the corporeality of
immaterial production but still harp on its “infinite reproducibility.” This
isn’t just an esoteric distinction, for recognizing the inherently material nature of immaterial production directs our attention to the necessity of seizing
the state and other forms of power. Power is not everywhere and nowhere.
The bourgeoisie takes up specific spaces—they have names and addresses.
After articulating what I mean by immaterial production as a transformation
within the capitalist mode of production in the second chapter, I show how as
the mode of production transitions into the immaterial era the norms that
render the subject an individual become challenged. Here I return to Butler to
show that instead of sovereign, autonomous, and atomized, in immaterial
production we begin to experience ourselves and each other as dependent,
opaque, and relational. Butler’s conception of the subject becomes rooted as
part of the capitalist mode of production, providing a material basis for her
conception. While I agree with Dean that the individual is a dominant form
of subjectivity today, I take issue with its prevalence, contending instead that
it is constantly being challenged, both in the realm of production and in the
“everyday.”
Butler gives us a rich theorization of subject constitution and contemporary subject formation. Her descriptions of the ways in which we are unendingly and irretrievably bound up with each other, the ways that we are permanently dependent on each other and, as a result, forever other to ourselves,
powerfully illustrate the commonness that communism is about. These attributes of contemporary subjectivity both correspond with and trouble the capitalist mode of production. Maybe they signal the emergence of an ascendant
mode of production. But there is a primary contradiction within contemporary subject formation and between it and operations of capital: while a new
commonness is being forged through the productive networks of society,
society is increasingly polarized along lines of class and identity. Communist
pedagogy, in turn, has to offer theorizations of commonness that are rooted
Introduction
9
in the material realities of everyday life. Moreover, the rule of private property bears a particular relationship to the political form of democracy, and
taken together capitalism and democracy have a definite educational logic.
The rest of the book gets at this knot by turning to the concept of study,
which I figure as not just an alternative educational logic, but an oppositional
educational logic, a way of forging not just commonness, but commonness
against.
In the third chapter I begin developing the concept of study, the central
pedagogical concept in this book’s constellation. The philosopher who has
most richly developed study is Lewis, who takes Agamben’s notion of potentiality and positions it against biocapitalism and its educational logic: the
logic of learning. Biocapitalism is a form of capitalism that doesn’t use up
labor-power so much as it continually reinvests in it, remaking it over and
over again. This reinvestment takes place through lifelong learning, in which
we continually remake ourselves to fit the ever-changing demands of global
capitalism. “Learning is,” as Lewis formulates it at one point, “the putting to
work of potentiality in the name of self-actualization and economic viability. . . . Learning has thus become a biotechnology for managing and measuring the nebulous force, power, or will of potentiality.” 26 Potentiality, of
course, is only good for capital if it is actualized. Otherwise it is wasted
potential. Agamben provides Lewis with another notion of potentiality, a
potentiality not to be, and Lewis develops his theory of studying on this
notion.
Whereas learning is always directed by predetermined and measurable
ends, studying is about pure means, about exploring, wandering, getting lost
in thought, forgetting what one knows so that one can discover that the world
exists otherwise than the way that one knows it. Studying is, I think, the
educational equivalent of flirting. When flirting with another, I and that other
sway between “we can, we cannot.” Each gesture, touch, or phrase proposes
potential as it withdraws into impotential. We are neither committed nor uncommitted to each other; we are not not-committed. Like flirting, studying is
a contradictory feeling of exhilaration and dismay, anxiety and excitement,
the pleasure of exploration and the pain of the unfamiliar. Studying can’t be
graded or measured; it is concerned only with use and not with exchange.
Studying isn’t only a wandering about, however, it’s also a fleeing from, a
stateless state of fugitivity, as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten put it. Harney
and Moten more radically politicize studying by linking it to the undercommons, the label that they give to the spaces and relations that resist capitalist
enclosures. In the undercommons we study together, bonded by our mutual
indebtedness, or what Butler would call our mutual and inescapable dependency.
To further develop the concept of study, how studying can be in opposition to capital, and how educators can enact study, I turn to the thought of
10
Introduction
Jean-François Lyotard in chapters 4, 5, and 6. While Lyotard’s work has
ignited more than a few debates in education and in critical theory, these
debates have focused almost exclusively on his short book The Postmodern
Condition, a book that Lyotard refers to as “an occasional one,” as nothing
more than a “report.” 27 The almost exclusive focus on this book in education
has drawn our attention away from the rich body of Lyotard’s work, which is
rife with educational lessons. In chapter 4 I connect The Postmodern Condition to Lyotard’s larger philosophical endeavors, revealing why a focus on
that particular book has created misunderstandings in educational thought.
The connecting point here is Lyotard’s writing on “the system,” which for
Lyotard is the economic system of capitalism and the political system of
liberal democracy. Lyotard helps us see how certain forms of difference and
alterity can circulate quite productively within capitalism, including postmodernism itself. While many have noted that today capitalism thrives on
difference and individuality, they have missed the mark: difference and individuality—alterity—have to first be brought to signification, have to be made
public. There are very real limits to what signified subjectivities and beliefs
can be accommodated within capitalism, of course, that Lyotard and some of
his followers haven’t appreciated because of their political commitments.
But the central insight is that, like the demand for actualization, capital
demands that the subject be made public, express itself.
While the demand for actualization represses the potentiality not to be,
the demand for publicity represses the subject’s secret life. The subject’s
internal alterity, a “no-man’s land” where we can meet ourselves and others,
is the place from where thought comes. The secret is, by definition, incommunicable, but this in no way prevents it from being a common region. The
alterity that I am after here is not about individualized difference but about
solidarity, forms of togetherness that capital can’t capture, forms of collectivity that perpetually resist. The secret is a region, then, that we can’t exactly
know, that we can only encounter: it’s a place of study. The political thrust
behind the demand for constant communication and for endless articulation
is at the heart of the democratic project, and a critique of democracy is the
subject of the fifth chapter. Lyotard’s problem is not with expression itself,
but rather when the general—or public—life seeks to take hold of the secret
life. Democracy, by compelling the subject to babble endlessly, by fashioning subjects that compel themselves and others to communicate, inaugurates
what Lyotard calls terror. This is a terror to which pedagogy, as something
that necessarily involves communication, is susceptible. I spend part of this
chapter demonstrating how complicit critical pedagogy and its critics have
been in this terror.
There is an irreducible antagonism between democracy and the secret, for
the former requires transparency, dialogue and deliberation, and visibility,
while the latter is opaque, mute, and concealed. And there is a crucial link
Introduction
11
between democracy and capitalism, for the latter has an insatiable appetite
for anything that can be input into its circuits of value production and realization. It is not just that the neoliberals have succeeded in equating democracy
with capitalism; there is actually an intimate relationship between the two.
The secret, which stands in opposition to both democracy and capital, breaks
free from this nexus. Democracy is about learning; communism is about
studying.
An attentiveness to and orientation toward the secret, which is always
already present within and between us, can help open us up to the event, to
the revolutionary rupture within the existing dominant order of things and
subjects. The secret is a rearguard, always operating outside of and against
democracy and the logic of exchange-value. One question for politics is how
we can embrace the secret life and mobilize it as part of a vanguard project
against capital. Such an embrace, I suggest, can help us realize not just what
we want out of politics, but to where we are and what we have that we want
to keep. In the sixth chapter I continue my conversation with Lyotard to offer
a method of education, a way of attending to the secret, accommodating
alterity, and cultivating receptivity toward the new without abandoning history and materialism; a way of thinking through the relationship between learning and studying. Developing what I call a figural education, I present an
educational mode of engagement that has three heterogeneous and synchronous processes: reading, seeing, and blindness. This is a process of opening
the world beyond how it appears to us, and of opening ourselves to a world
that we can’t conceptually understand.
The political question, of course, is how to conduct this negotiation. For
pedagogy, the question is this: On what criteria does the negotiation process
between learning and studying pivot? When and on what basis should repression take place? When should studying itself be suspended? These are questions that haven’t been answered by the new communists. Neglecting or
refusing to answer these questions can leave education and politics permanently disoriented, a state that is altogether favorable to capitalism and imperialism. We have to develop such criteria, and in the seventh chapter I present
some evidence in support of this injunction. I refer to three key battles that
have left important marks on the Left: China in 1989, Hungary in 1956, and
Libya in 2011. The struggles within each of these countries were presented as
“the people” versus “the state,” as “rebels” versus a “dictatorship,” and each
state’s repressive measures were (almost) universally condemned. Indeed,
for Agamben the Chinese state’s response to the Tiananmen Square protests
represents the ultimate assault on whatever singularity. If we actually examine what took place in Tiananmen and elsewhere, however, if we look at the
events themselves and—perhaps more importantly—at the social forces involved in the conflicts, then we draw a different conclusion. Although each is
obviously unique, I demonstrate that in each instance the state moved to
12
Introduction
repress not a revolution but a counterrevolution. Such repression wasn’t
ideal, but that’s the whole point: history and reality are never ideal.
This move to history is meant to counter what I call the new orthodoxy of
the new communism, an orthodoxy that, in the last instance, frames the
discussion. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek make this clear on page 2 of
their introduction to The Idea of Communism: “The left which aligned itself
with ‘actually existing socialism’ has disappeared or turned into a historical
curiosity.” 28 Dean militates against this by insisting on the continuity of
communism as a horizon that has never disappeared and by asserting “communism succeeded.” 29 Further, she writes about the necessity of repression
and “the bloody violence of revolution.” 30 Yet she doesn’t engage the historical and existing global communist struggle. There are good philosophical
reasons for such abstractions, and politically they prevent the immobilization
that can result from debates about particular policies in particular social
formations at particular moments in time. Returning to some key moments
like I do in this chapter, however, provides nuance to discussions around
repression, exclusion, division, and value production, nuance that has interestingly been relatively absent from the new communist discussions. It injects some old communism into the new communism.
Imperialism wears many masks; it transcends space, time, and identity. Its
forces and agents are highly organized, centralized, and conscious. How
many revolutions have been crushed under the weight of its reaction? How
many revolutions have been aborted or turned back by its police, its military,
its propaganda, and its agent provocateurs? The ruthlessness and savagery of
imperialism renders organization itself a political principle for communists.
As such, in the eighth chapter I move to an examination of the Party-form,
which I submit is, at base, a pedagogical project. I argue that a foundational
task of the Party is to orchestrate the educational process, to navigate the
communist pedagogical constellation developed in the book. Revolutions are
by definition radically uncertain and unpredictable events. All scripts are
thrown out the window as dynamics rapidly shift about. In the midst of this
uncertainty, the forces of capital have, historically, been quite well prepared.
Without tight, disciplined organization, revolutionary moments result in restoration (a return to before) or counterrevolution. To prepare for revolution,
the Party studies the mass movement, learns its lessons, teaches what it
doesn’t know, and produces us as new, collective subjects. Capital thrives on
diversity, complexification, and difference. All sorts of oppositional movements can be coopted, absorbed within the game of profit maximization.
When the limits to what capital can accommodate are tested, then repression
is unleashed. Studying forges a commonness against that, if organized, can
weather that repression, becoming a true political force. The following pages
propose a series of educational concepts, frameworks, and modes of engage-
Introduction
13
ment that, taken together, form a partisan educational theory: a theory of
communist study.
NOTES
1. Louis Althusser, On the reproduction of capitalism: Ideology and ideological state
apparatuses, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London and New York: Verso, 1995/2014).
2. Althusser makes this point for the social democrats, who hold that mere technical and
legal changes within the capitalist totality will usher in socialism—a critique that is just as
important today as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.
3. Thus, the contradiction was between the capitalist and the imperialist camp, the latter of
which contained the socialist states and the anti-colonial states that emerged during the socialist
and national liberation struggles of the twentieth century.
4. Louis Althusser, On the reproduction of capitalism, 21.
5. Ibid., 161. In light of just this, it is quite remarkable that the founding theorists of critical
pedagogy dismissed Althusser as an economic determinist and as a theorist who strips agency
from the subject. See, for example, Henry Giroux, Ideology, culture, and the process of schooling (Philadelphia and London: Temple University Press and Falmer Press, 1981).
6. For a brilliant and careful argument about this idealism, see Curry Malott, History and
education: Engaging the global class war (New York: Peter Lang, 2016).
7. Peter McLaren, Schooling as ritual performance: Toward a political economy of educational symbols and gestures (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1986/1999), 273-274.
8. For more on this latter type of interiotiy, see Peter Sloterdijk, The world interior of
capital, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005/2013), Spheres I: Bubbles:
Microsphereology, trans. Weiland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1998/2011); and Derek
R. Ford, “The air conditions of philosophy of education: Toward a microsphereology of the
classroom,” in In E. Duarte (Ed.), Philosophy of education 2015 (Urbana: Philosophy of Education Society, 2016).
9. Tyson E. Lewis, “Mapping the constellation of educational Marxism(s),” Educational
Philosophy and Theory 44: no. s1: 112.
10. Ibid., 113.
11. Curry S. Malott and Derek R. Ford, Marx, capital, and education: Towards a critical
pedagogy of becoming (New York: Peter Lang, 2015).
12. Henry Giroux, On critical pedagogy (New York and London: Continuum, 2011), 155.
13. Georg Lukàcs, History and class consciousness: Studies in Marxist dialectics, trans.
Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1968/1971), 1. Marx’s theses, of course,
have on the whole been repeatedly validated.
14. See, for example, parts I and II of Bertell Ollman, Dialectical investigations (New York
and London: Routledge, 1993).
15. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York and
London: Continuum, 1970/2011).
16. This is one of the primary ways that Gert Biesta distinguishes education from learning.
See Gert J. J. Biesta, Beyond learning: Democratic education for a human future (Boulder:
Paradigm Publishers, 2006); and Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics,
democracy (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2010).
17. Peter McLaren, Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations
of education, 6th ed. (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2015), 241.
18. Ibid.; Capitalists and conquerors: A critical pedagogy against empire (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005); Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the pedagogy of
revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000); Pedagogy of insurrection:
From resurrection to revolution (New York: Peter Lang, 2015).
19. Antonia Darder, A dissident voice: Essays on culture, pedagogy, and power (New York:
Peter Lang, 2011), 207.
20. Peter McLaren, Life in schools, 196.
14
Introduction
21. Alain Badiou, The communist hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London and New York: Verso, 2010); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge and
London: Harvard University Press, 2000).
22. Jodi Dean, The communist horizon (London and New York: Verso, 2012).
23. Alex J. Means, “Educational commons and the new radical democratic imaginary,”
Critical Studies in Education 55, no. 2: 132.
24. This is why Hardt and Negri “smash the state on page 361 only to resurrect it on page
380.” David Harvey, Rebel cities: From the right to the city to the urban revolution (London
and New York: Verso, 2012), 152.
25. Jodi Dean, The communist horizon, 196.
26. Tyson E. Lewis, On study: Giorgio Agamben and educational potentiality (London and
New York: Routledge, 2013), 5.
27. Jean-François Lyotard, The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
1979/1984), xxv.
28. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, “Introduction: The idea of communism,” in Costas
Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (Eds), The idea of communism (London and New York: Verso,
2010), viii.
29. Jodi Dean, The communist horizon, 58.
30. Ibid.
Part I
“I look at a window,
square of sky.”
—Ernst Meisner
15
16
Figure 0.1.
Part I
Source: Photograph by Sarah Pfohl
Chapter One
Subject Formation
Capitalism institutes a particular form of the subject, namely, the individual:
the autonomous, sovereign subject whose being is analytically, empirically,
and ontologically separable from and independent of others. 1 This is the idea
of the subject that today is everywhere, blocking forms of solidarity and
tendencies toward being-together, polluting politics and thought. From where
did this subject-form—as an idea and as a mode of being—originate? What
is its purpose and how is it legitimated? In other words: what is the correspondence between this subject-form and the mode of production? And, most
importantly, if there is today a non-correspondence between this subjectform and the mode of production, what other forms of subjectivity are
emerging, and how might they point us to a new mode of production, a new
set of social relations? How might we pedagogically embrace and harness
these forms of subjectivity to push toward a new way of being and of producing and reproducing ourselves and our world?
These are the animating questions of this inquiry. In the first part of this
book I want to begin exploring some answers to these questions while laying
something of a foundational understanding of subject formation, political
economy, and the relationship between the two. To lay this foundation I am
going to propose a particular and dialectical relationship between the production of subjectivity and the mode of production and examine how this relationship has been maintained and transformed over time, paying particular
attention to the struggles and crises within.
The work of Judith Butler provides a rich theorization of subjectivation
from which to start. Butler has, from her earliest work, troubled the ideal of
the sovereign, independent, and autonomous subject. In response, she has
formulated both a conception of the subject as radically dependent, relational, and opaque as well as an articulation of a being-in-common that is based
17
18
Chapter 1
on these attributes. What is theoretically and practically necessary for this
project, however, is to connect this subject and process of subjectivation with
political economy and economic relations, for, as Jason Read reminds us, the
subject “is inseparable from the ensemble of relations that make it possible.” 2
The subject, that is, cannot be viewed apart from these relations, from the
economic and other material conditions that enable the subject’s very materialization and reproduction. Butler focuses mostly on the normative and discursive construction of the subject and, while the subject is certainly and
intimately (and, perhaps irretrievably) bound up with the discourses that
render it intelligible, there are economic relations that structure and even
prefigure the ways in which these discourses circulate. As McLaren put it
early on, we have to connect “modes of intelligibility and economies of
affect to the commodification of labour and capitalist accumulation.” 3 Put
another way: the materiality of norms and discourse must be investigated and
accounted for. Such a view of the importance of subjectivity has a long
history in the communist movement.
To be fair, while Butler has admittedly not, so to speak, conducted a
proper “critique of the market economy,” 4 she has at times engaged with and
situated her work in relation to such critiques, primarily to clarify her work
against charges of idealism. 5 In doing so, she has made important contributions to the relationship between poststructuralism, materialism, and marxism. Of particular note here is her argument against the presupposition “that
the distinction between material and cultural life is a stable one” and her
consequent reworking of the notion of materiality. 6 Materiality, she argues,
is a never-ending socio-historical process of transformation that disrupts the
material/discursive binary, a disruption that means that we must examine
“matter as a sign” and, I would add, sign as matter. 7 Yet this ultimately
amounts to a sidestepping around the question of the economic, and Butler’s
conception of subjectivity has still not been sufficiently theorized in its relation to and role in political economy and, specifically, the capitalist mode of
production, neither by Butler nor by marxists. A thorough examination of
this relationship can be helpful for understanding both subject formation
(including contemporary forms of subjectivity) and the reproduction of the
mode of production. By reading Butler in conjunction with theorists of political economy we can gain a deeper understanding of the history and present
of capitalism, as a set of productive forces and a set of social relations. Such
a reading demonstrates the performative and dialectical nature of capitalist
subjectivity, which has necessarily changed over time, and which necessarily
carries within it possibilities and instances of conflict, struggle, rupture, and
generation.
Subject Formation
19
SUBJECT FORMATION
The norm of the subject as an individual, which I define as an autonomous
and sovereign subject that is strictly delineated from the other socially,
reigned in the modern era. Modern—or industrial—capitalism was based on
the accumulation of surplus values via the production of commodities by this
individual. Capitalism, and really, modernity in general, insisted on this individual agent for legitimation and reproduction. This particular subject-form
dominated modern political and philosophical thought to the extent that even
today it is largely accepted as a natural fact. But the body and the subject
cannot be taken for granted, nor can they been viewed apart from the social
norms and production relations that constitute them. I propose that we read
the way in which the subject-form came to predominate as the natural form
of the subject in modern capitalism as analogous to the way in which Butler
shows that one’s gender is understood as innate and immutable.
Butler has argued that gender (and sexuality), far from being natural or
fixed, is a social construction that is performatively produced. “There is no
gender identity,” Butler writes, “behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be
its results.” 8 The ways that I dress, speak, touch, gesture, move, and so on,
are not an expression of my constituted gender but, rather, as I engage in
these actions I am performing my gender. But—and this is crucial—there is
no “I” apart from or before these acts. The “I” is constituted through the
doing; the subject is the effect and not the cause of the action. Performativity,
then, is not performance, as if the subject were free each day to choose what
form to take or what identity to perform. Instead, “the one who acts . . . acts
precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor.” 9 Or, to put it
differently, “we are at once acted upon and acting.” 10 Although Butler might
recoil from the term, performativity is thus a dialectical process, as the
subject is constrained by the very social norms that constitute it as a subject.
The subject is instituted and reproduced by and through the recitation of
existing norms, norms that are always subject to transformation, and it is
through the subject’s enunciation of these very norms that produce it as
intelligible that these norms are altered.
Butler extends her critique of gender identity to all identity. It is not just
the gendered self, but the self in general, that is not natural: “There is no self
that . . . maintains ‘integrity’ prior to its entrance into this conflicted cultural
field.” 11 What Butler means here is that there is no pre-social or pre-discursive self that, upon birth, becomes socialized into ways of thinking, knowing,
and being in the world. Contrasting her position with that of Theodor Adorno, she writes,
20
Chapter 1
It is one thing to say that a subject must be able to appropriate norms, but
another to say that there must be norms that prepare a place within the ontological field for the subject. In the first instance, norms are there, at an exterior
distance, and the task is to find a way of appropriating them. . . . But did
Adorno consider that norms also decide in advance who will and will not
become a subject? Did he consider the operation of norms in the very constitution of the subject, in the stylization of its ontology and in the establishing of a
legitimate site within the realm of social ontology? 12
Because there is no “I” prior to discourse and no pre-social self to serve as a
mediator, norms and power are not merely appropriated by the subject, but
instead act immediately on the subject, enabling the subject to appear qua
subject. A norm is thus a form of power that “governs intelligibility . . .
imposing a grid of legibility on the social.” 13 Normative schemas, that is,
make the subject intelligible as a subject and, more specifically, as a certain
type of subject. Yet, just as there is no subject prior to normative power,
neither do norms exist outside of their social circulation, meaning that norms
have “no independent ontological status.” 14
SUBJECT CONSTITUTION AND INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION:
“I”-ING THE SUBJECT
Whereas Butler argues that the social construction of gender serves to legitimate and reproduce patriarchy and heteronormativity, I want to argue here
that the social construction of the individual serves to legitimate and reproduce capitalism, and that this subject-form is innately connected with the
capitalist mode of production, especially during the time when industrial
production was hegemonic. It is at this juncture that we have to read Marx
through a Butlerian lens. I contend that capitalism in the industrial era required the individual for at least three specific tasks: to legitimate the
contract, to calculate surplus value, and to prevent the unification of the
proletarian class (class subjectification). Capitalist production, through the
ideology and operation of the marketplace, the contract, and the wage, provided the norms through which the subject came to be constituted as an
individual.
The basis of capitalism is the rights-based contract and a contract implies
the equality of participants. A landscape of equality for the grounds of consent to the contract is thus necessary for the functioning of capitalism. 15 This
is in large part what sets capitalism apart from feudalism and slavery. It did
not matter, according to bourgeois ideology and practice, whether one was a
worker or a capitalist. In fact, from the standpoint of the exchange of values,
as one surveyed the bodies in the modern marketplace, it was “impossible to
find any trace of distinction, not to speak of contradiction, between them; not
Subject Formation
21
even a difference.” 16 In addition to being equal, each subject had to be
conceived of as autonomous and sovereign in order to enter into a contract to
buy or sell labor-power. Equality, autonomy, and sovereignty are prerequisites for consent. The owners of commodities (money or labor-power) “must
therefore recognize each other as owners of private property.” 17 If I am to
sell my labor through a contract for a certain amount of time for a certain
sum of money then both the buyer and I must be certain that it is really mine
to sell. The hegemony of private property, then, means that even the body
must be conceived of as the private property of the (individual) worker. This,
of course, is just the ideological presentation, for in reality “the worker
belongs to capital before he has sold himself to the capitalist.” 18
There are two different types of time under capitalism: socially necessary
labor-time and surplus labor-time, which are respectively the exchange-value
and use-value of labor-power. Socially necessary labor-time, generally
speaking, is the time that it takes the worker to reproduce their wage so that
they may reproduce themselves and their lot. Socially necessary labor-time is
the exchange-value of labor power, or the wage. 19 Surplus labor-time,
contrarily, is the time that belongs solely to the capitalist; it is synonymous
with surplus value, which is the impetus for production under capitalism. For
the capitalist, surplus labor-time is the use-value of labor-power. Marx was
careful to emphasize that there is no temporal distinction between socially
necessary labor-time and surplus labor-time, that both occur simultaneously.
In order for the capitalist to calculate surplus value and in order for the
worker to receive the wage, the individual worker must be the producer. The
origins of each commodity, that is, must be traced back to a mixture of raw
and auxiliary material, means of production, and labor-power.
Of course, it is also imperative for ensuring the continued exploitation of
labor-power under capitalism that workers be posited as individuals, lest we
begin to think of and experience ourselves as a class. Thus, Étienne Balibar
posits two different forms of historic individuality under capitalism: “In the
first case, the ability to set the means of production to work belonged to the
individual . . . in the second case, the same ability only belongs to the
‘collective laborer.’” 20 These two historic forms of individuality represent
one way that capital attempts to manage the contradiction between private
ownership and socialized production, a fundamental contradiction of capitalist accumulation whereby, on the one hand, commodities are produced socially (through direct or indirect cooperation) but, on the other hand, they are
owned privately by the capitalist. In any case, the concept of the individual
and the philosophy of individualism that followed from it remain integral in
preventing workers from uniting and confronting capital as a class.
The individual, presented by capital as the innate and natural form of the
subject, is really an abstraction of subjectivity produced through the norms of
private property, the contract, and the wage. This performatively constituted
22
Chapter 1
individual-subject, in turn, legitimates capitalism in dialectical fashion. It is
here where Butler’s understanding of how the subject is produced by and
through norms is helpful, for she gives us the means to articulate the processes whereby the social and epistemological boundaries between subjects are
produced in modern capitalism and, as we will see in the next chapter, how
today those boundaries are in crisis. The contract, which is at base a norm
that takes the form of a juridical relation, is not exterior to the subject;
instead, it comprises in part the subject’s appearance within the ontological
domain. The norms, language, and frameworks available to me to understand, explain, or express myself are not mine; they are in part the presuppositions of the contract, which declare me an individual with ownership over
my labor-power. I may unite or collaborate with other individuals, of course,
but the products of our combination will always be articulated with the
individual-subject at the base. Similarly, the wage that enables me to reproduce myself daily so that I may return to the factory, office, or university
gates in the morning reproduces me as an individual; it traces the production
of the commodity back to each individual worker, to the first of Balibar’s
historic forms of capitalist individuality.
SUBJECT STRUGGLES
It does not follow from this view of subject constitution that the subject is
determined finally or fully by norms (a point that Butler has had to repeatedly clarify for her critics) because norms, like subjects, are not cohesive or
closed. They do not stand above society as, say, the state does for Lenin.
Norms operate through subjects, discourse, and the economic genre, and
through those operations they are subject to reiteration and, consequently,
transfiguration:
And when we do act and speak, we not only disclose ourselves but act on the
schemes of intelligibility that govern who will be a speaking being, subjecting
them to rupture or revision, consolidating their norms, or contesting their
hegemony. 21
One way to think about the subject’s relations to norms, then, is through
struggle. “The subject is a battlefield,” as Paulo Virno says. 22 There are
struggles within each norm, struggles between norms, and struggles between
the subject and the norms by which the subject is constituted. Norms conceal
as much as they reveal. Norms are not homogenous; they clash with one
another and struggle with the outsides, or remainders, that they create. The
subject as an individual, then, is one norm, a dominant norm, but it is not the
only norm. Other norms are coming to the fore now, ones that hold liberatory
promise. Marx, I argue, was able to anticipate the contest over norms of
Subject Formation
23
subjectivity back in the 1850s when he wrote, “Society does not consist of
individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within
which these individuals stand.” 23
Before proceeding, I should make clear that it is not as if there is some
natural or egalitarian configuration of bodies and subjects that the capitalist
mode of production disrupts, as if the task at hand was to figure out a way
back to our origins. “The function of the concept of origin, as in original sin,”
Althusser remarks, “is to summarize in one word what has not to be thought
in order to be able to think what one wants to think.” 24 Marx, for his part,
called such a desire “ridiculous,” 25 and Butler denounces it as a “strategic
tactic” that “makes the constitution of the law appear as a historical inevitability.” 26 The possibility of the origin is also an epistemological impossibility, for there is no “outside” from which to conduct an inquiry into any
originary state of society, and any inquiry would, like Hobbes’ “state of
nature” or Rawls’ “veil of ignorance,” already be constrained and predetermined by existing social relations. 27
The idea of the origin as a mystification is a driving force in Butler’s
work and also an area of widespread misunderstanding. What Butler has
undertaken, according to Annika Theim, is a reevaluation of “the relation
between language and matter by asking us to think of them as both irreducible to each other and at the same time as not absolutely ontologically
distinct from each other.” 28 It is not the case, as some claim, that for Butler
all that is material dissipates into discourse, or that discourse makes the
material world materialize. 29 It is rather that “matter comes to matter . . . as
social practices and institutions render matter intelligible.” 30 In other words,
Butler argues that the only way in which we have access to ontology is
epistemologically, and the two modes of inquiry and their respective, common objects are irretrievably tethered together. This is why in one of Butler’s
engagements with marxism she cites Marx’s argument “that pre-capitalist
economic formations could not be fully extricated from the cultural and
symbolic worlds in which they were embedded.” 31 Butler isn’t interested in
the question of origin, and she certainly doesn’t claim that matter materializes from mere utterances. Her focus on language as discourse—her insistence that we only become subjects through language—however, does prevent her from engaging other forms of ontological inquiry and action, and I
take these up when I turn to Lyotard and Agamben later in the book.
TRANSITION: THE GENERAL INTELLECT, OVERPRODUCTION,
AND THE FALLING RATE OF PROFIT
In order to understand the normative production of subjects we have to locate
normative regulation in the economic arena, as the production of subjectivity
24
Chapter 1
doesn’t exist apart from production in general. With this in mind, let us
consider the conditions and forces of production under industrial capitalism
and how these conditions and forces led to a transformation within the mode
of production and, at the same time, a transformation in the ontology of the
subject.
The conditions of production in modern capitalism begin, Marx tells us,
with “a large number of workers working together, at the same time, in one
place.” 32 While capitalism requires the individual worker, it simultaneously
brings those bodies together, assembling them in the factory (and the city),
thereby instituting Balibar’s second form of historic individuality. The commodity thus moves from being an individual to a social product. There are
two antagonistic forms of cooperation that result from this movement: the
cooperation of workers in their own exploitation and the cooperation of
workers in resistance to their exploitation. While the convergence of working
bodies in concentrated areas can increase the rate of exploitation, this concentration also and at the same time facilitates the distribution and circulation
of propaganda and the generation of organizational resistance. The industrial
capitalist organization of labor produces an organizational excess—the trade
union and the Party—that the boundaries and disciplinary mechanisms of the
factory cannot contain.
Along with the socialization of labor there is the socialization of the
forces of production (although they are still held privately). The increasing
socialization of the forces of production—and their import for the capitalist
mode of production—was the topic of a section of Marx’s Grundrisse notebooks collectively known as “the fragment on machines.” In these pages,
Marx writes that it is machinery (objectified, dead labor), and not the worker
(subjective, living labor) that over time takes center stage in the production
process as machinery progressively incorporates the “knowledge” and “skill”
of the worker and the “general productive forces of the social brain.” 33 “General social knowledge,” Marx writes, “has become a direct force of production.” 34 Social knowledge, which Marx refers to as the general intellect (a
term that he uses in English in his notebooks), becomes objectified in machinery and is put to work. Virno extrapolates on the general intellect, detailing its forms and what it includes, such as “the epistemic models that structure social communication,” and “artificial languages, theorems of formal
logic, theories of information and systems, epistemological paradigms, certain segments of the metaphysical tradition, ‘linguistic games,’ and images of
the world.” 35
For Marx, machinery stands opposite the worker; it confronts living labor
as objectified labor, as capital. And indeed, in the nineteenth century, this
was the case. Marx, however, was able to write the dialectical relationship
between the human and the machine in an anticipatory manner that is characteristic of his investigations. He writes, for example about how labor-power
Subject Formation
25
produces machinery, transferring its knowledge and skill to it and that, in
turn, this machinery presses in on the worker, “converting the workman into
a living appendage of the machine.” 36 What Marx anticipated, in other
words, was the progressive breaking down of the barriers between the worker
and the machine. Indeed, as we have witnessed over the last few decades in
particular, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between the
human and the machine. On the one hand, there is the physical hybridization
of the worker, or subject, with machinery, whereby machinery is added to the
worker’s body, to make it more productive, comfortable, healthy, enjoyable,
durable, or to discipline it socially. Humans have become enmeshed with
machinery to the extent that, as of the end of the twentieth century, cyborgs
composed about 10 percent of the U.S. population. 37 As Donna Haraway
famously put it, “The cyborg is our ontology.” 38
On the other hand, viewing machinery through a Buterlian lens, it becomes clear that the temporality, mode, and logic of the machine have altered
the frameworks of intelligibility that govern subject constitution. Again,
Marx intuited this in Capital, detailing the ways that the “worker’s activity . . . is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the
machinery.” 39 The impact that machinery—and techno-scientific developments in general—have on subjectivity is today even more profound. Not
only do our bodies fuse with machines through implants and extensions, but
they transform the very way in which we understand and interact with ourselves and everything around us. “Do we not see the world differently,” asks
David Harvey as he elaborates on his favorite of the many footnotes in
Capital, “once we have microscopes, telescopes and satellites, X-rays and
CAT scans?” 40 It is important to remember, and Harvey to no surprise points
this out, that there is a dialectical relationship between technology and subjectivity; one does not ultimately determine the other. To say that all of
society has become an autopoetic machine, then, is neither to offer a metaphor nor to imply that all of society has been subsumed under the rule of
machinery.
Within normative social regimes there is a “compulsion to repeat,” Butler
maintains, and agency is partly to be “located within the possibility of a
variation on that repetition.” 41 The same holds true for the mode of production, and we should read the relationship between the subject and machinery
to help explain the process by which knowledge becomes a direct force of
production. 42 Workers act not only on individual machines but on the mode
of production in general, and it is in part the variations of these actions
(labor) that ushers in what today is referred to as immaterial production. It is
both the working class and the productive forces, through interaction and
antagonism, that contest the hegemony of industrial production and bring
forward the transformation to the immaterial era of capitalism. But we must
also take into account other determinants, for the dialectic is both an objec-
26
Chapter 1
tive and subjective process. 43 The transition from the industrial to the immaterial era also flows from crises of overproduction and overaccumulation and
from the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. These determinants are,
unfortunately, largely ignored or dismissed within the literature on immaterial production.
Both of these contradictions result from the anarchy and secrecy of capitalist production. Individual capitalists, eager to capture their share of market
demand and in search of high profit margins, expand their productive capacities. Eventually, the collective productive capacities of the capitalists surpass society’s demand for or capacity to consume the produced goods. As
Marx will put it in the second volume of Capital, there is a problem of the
realization of capital. The 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis in the United
States, which set off the most recent global capitalist economic crisis, is a
prime example of the absurdity of overproduction, whereby people are left
homeless not because there exist too few homes but because, on the contrary,
there exist too many homes, more homes than can be sold at a profit. This
crisis is, in part, why capitalism was from the beginning destined to be a
global system, as the saturation of the national market creates the needs for
new markets. When the world market becomes glutted, the production of the
demand for new goods and services becomes necessary. New types of commodities need to be produced, and material commodities take on new qualities, all of which demand and intimate new subjectivities and social relations.
The tendency for the rate of profit to fall, which Marx referred to as “the
most important law of modern political economy,” should also be seen as a
motor for the transition to the immaterial era of capitalism. 44 The quest on
the part of individual capitalists for immediate profits (relative surplus value)
leads them to make labor-saving advances in machinery in order to increase
productivity. This allows them to sell commodities above their individual
value but below their social value. The problem is that machines are not
productive of value. Machines are constant capital, meaning that their value
is merely transferred to the finished product. Surplus value is equal to surplus
labor-time, which is the unpaid labor-time of workers. At some point in time,
the labor-saving technology becomes adopted across an industry or service,
which renders workers “redundant” (i.e., unemployed). Because labor-power
is the source of all value, this in turn causes the rate of profit to fall.
Capital’s solution to this contradiction, as to the crisis of overproduction
and overaccumulation, is to produce new commodities and new subjectivities. As machines are not productive of value (and thus, profit) and technological advances cause a rise in unemployment, capital searches elsewhere,
and all of society is put to work. It is now not merely the cooperation of
individual workers that is consumed in the production process, but all of
sociality. In fact, “exploitation no longer simply consists in the expropriation
Subject Formation
27
of the producer, but in the most immediate sense, in the expropriation of the
producers’ community.” 45 Immaterial production moves the contradiction
between the socialized nature of production and the private nature of the
accumulation of capital to a new, higher level. Subjectivity takes on a more
productive role at the same time as exploitation increases and the capitalist
mode of production expands absolutely and relatively, and the form of the
subject—the ways in which we understand and experience ourselves—
changes.
NOTES
1. My use of the word “sovereignty” here is only in relationship to the way that we think
about and experience subjectivity: the sovereign subject is an island. I do not problematize the
notion of political sovereignty, which is absolutely fundamental to the communist movement
and to all liberation struggles.
2. Jason Read, The micro-politics of capital: Marx and the prehistory of the present (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 25.
3. Peter McLaren, Schooling as ritual performance: Toward a political economy of educational symbols and gestures (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1986/1999), 267.
4. Judith Butler, “Dynamic conclusions,” in Judith Butler, Ernest Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek,
Contingency, hegemony, universality: Contemporary dialogues on the left (London and New
York: Verso, 2000), 277.
5. Judith Butler, “Merely cultural,” Social Text 52, no. 3 (1997): 265-277; Judith Butler,
Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex,” (New York and London: Routledge,
1993/2011).
6. Judith Butler, “Merely cultural,” 267.
7. Judith Butler, Bodies that matter, 22.
8. Judith Butler, Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity (New York and
London: Routledge, 1990/2006), 34.
9. Judith Butler, Excitable speech: A politics of the performative (New York and London:
Routledge, 1997), 16.
10. Judith Butler, Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence (London and New
York: Verso, 2004), 16.
11. Butler, Gender trouble, 199.
12. Judith Butler, Giving an account of oneself (New York: Fordham University Press,
2005), 9.
13. Judith Butler, Undoing gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 42.
14. Ibid., 48.
15. “The secret of the expression of value . . . could not be deciphered until the concept of
human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion.” Karl Marx,
Capital: A critique of political economy (volume 1), trans. Ben Fowkes (London and New
York: Penguin Books, 1867/1990), 152.
16. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of a critique of political economy (rough draft),
trans. Martin Nicolaus (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1939/1993), 241.
17. Karl Marx, Capital (vol. 1), 178.
18. Ibid., 723.
19. I am speaking generally, however, for quite often the wage represents far less than what
is necessary for the worker to reproduce themselves (and any dependents).
20. Étienne Balibar, “The basic concepts of historical materialism,” in Louis Althusser and
Étienne Balibar, Reading capital (London and New York: Verso, 1968/2009), 282.
21. Judith Butler, Giving an account of oneself, 132.
28
Chapter 1
22. Paulo Virno, A grammar of the multitude: For an analysis of contemporary forms of life,
trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles and New York:
Semiotexte, 2004), 78. This is not to conflate Butler with Virno, who writes this line two pages
after detailing the pre-individual reality that is “the biological basis of the species.”
23. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 265. Marx, of course, has had no choice but to use the language
of the individual even as he was pointing beyond the limits of this language.
24. Louis Althusser, “From capital to Marx’s philosophy,” in Louis Althusser and Étienne
Balibar Reading capital, (London and New York: Verso, 1968/2009), 162.
25. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 162.
26. Judith Butler, Gender trouble, 48.
27. Nothing astounds me like the fact that these words need to be written, but alas. Even
Charles Mills’ keynote address at the 2015 Philosophy of Education Society Conference in
Memphis, Tennessee, began by stating that Rawls is the “philosopher we go to for social
justice.”
28. Annika Thiem, Unbecoming subjects: Judith Butler, moral philosophy, and critical
responsibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 28.
29. Teresa Ebert, who conducts one of the more sophisticated Marxist critiques of Butler,
still repeats this misunderstanding. See her “(Untimely) critiques for a red feminism,” in
Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Teresa L. Ebert, and Donald Morton, Post-ality: Marxism and postmodernism (Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1995), 113-149.
30. Annika Thiem, Unbecoming subjects, 36-37.
31. Judith Butler, “Merely cultural,” 274.
32. Karl Marx, Capital (vol. 1), 484. To be workers they have to first be deprived of (or
“freed from”) their means of subsistence and forced to sell their labor-power for a wage, and
the means of production have to be concentrated in the hands of the capitalist class.
33. Marx, Grundrisse, 694.
34. Ibid., p. 706.
35. Paolo Virno, “The ambivalence of disenchangtement,” trans. Michael Turits, in Paulo
Virno and Michael Hardt (Eds.), Radical thought in Italy: A potential politics (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 22.
36. Karl Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy (volume 1), trans. Samuel Moore
and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 455.
37. N. Katherine Hayles, How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 115. Hayles
writes that this figure includes “cyborgs in the technical sense, including people with electronic
pacemakers, artificial joints, drug-implant systems, implanted corneal lenses, and artificial
skin. A much higher percentage participates in occupations that make them into metaphoric
cyborgs, including the computer keyboarder joined in a cybernetic circuit with the screen, the
neurosurgeon guided by fiber-optic microscopy during an operation, and the adolescent game
player in the local video-game arcade.” (The last of these seems to be an uncommon occupation.)
38. Donna Haraway, Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature (New York
and London: Routledge, 1991).
39. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 693.
40. David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (London and New York: Verso, 2010),
195. This is in reference to the fourth footnote in chapter 15.
41. Judith Butler, Gender trouble, 198.
42. While Butler here talks about “variations,” in the passage quoted earlier from Giving an
account of oneself, she speaks about “rupture.”
43. While similar to the autonomous Marxist theory, which, to put it crudely, holds that
changes in the mode of production are caused by working-class resistance, placing the emphasis wholly on labor, I mean to emphasize the interaction between labor and capital. Furthermore, the sovereign subject is not problematized in autonomous Marxism, and in fact to the
subject is attributed a sort of hyper-agency.
44. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 748.
Subject Formation
29
45. Antonio Negri, The politics of subversion: A manifesto for the twenty-first century, trans.
James Newell (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989/2005), 116.
Chapter Two
Immaterial Subjects
(and the Fetish Thereof)
As Balibar’s two historic forms of individuality intimate, there is always
something of a non-correspondence between subjectivity and the mode of
production within capitalism. This is what we can refer to as the contradictory production of subjectivity under capitalism, for the same process that
individualizes the subject produces forms of cooperation and assemblage that
are historically unprecedented in quantity and quality. These contradictions
lead to transformations both in subject formation and within the mode of
production as we pass into what the autonomous marxists refer to as the
immaterial era. Yet before connecting the immaterial era of the capitalist
mode of production with Butler’s conception of contemporary subjectivity
and being-in-common, we have to grasp the specificities of immaterial production.
Whereas industrial production was concerned primarily with the physicality of the commodity (steel, wool, linen, rubber, etc.), immaterial production
is characterized first by the production of “the informational and cultural
content of the commodity.” 1 Immaterial production refers both to the production of immaterial products such as knowledges, images, ideas, affects, performances, and data, and to the immaterial character of the physical commodity: “Every commodity must have an image, a lifestyle, and an immaterial ‘halo’ that accompanies it to the market.” 2 Immaterial production is thus
biopolitical, investing as it does in the whole of life.
The immaterial “halo” of the commodity often subordinates the physical
character and this halo plays the determining role in its value. T-shirts, for
example, are produced not merely to protect the skin from the elements but,
more importantly, for the images or lifestyles that are conveyed on or
31
32
Chapter 2
through it. More than that, immaterial labor produces social relations, ways
of being and relating. As Michael Hardt explains,
From the standpoint of biopolitical production we can see that the production
of the refrigerator and the automobile are only midpoints for the creation of the
labour and gender relations of the nuclear family around the refrigerator and
the mass society of individuals isolated together in their cars on the freeway. 3
Similarly, regarding what is called “cultural capitalism” Slavoj Žižek has
written that “material objects are increasingly there simply to serve as props
for . . . experience.” 4 The problem with the concept of cultural capitalism is
that, by placing too much emphasis on consumption and not enough on
production, it makes it seem as though experience is somehow magically
presented by capital for consumption, as if it is capital itself that produces
culture or experience. 5
The production of subjectivity and forms of life is not unique to the
immaterial era. Indeed, Marx acknowledged the centrality of this type of
production in the Grundrisse, in specific reference to artistic production:
“Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject
for the object.” 6 There is, however, a qualitative change in the role that
subjectivities and social relations play in production and in the overall circulation of capital that takes place throughout the twentieth century. Wherewith
industrial production social relations were mediated by the commodity and
the production process, immaterial production “tends to create not the means
of social life but social life itself.” 7 The object produced and the process of
production are often indistinguishable.
We can define immaterial production by an intensified struggle between
the borders of capital (specifically the private property relation) and the
social. This struggle plays itself out on the battlefield of private property and,
as I show later, the battlefield of subjectivity via a transformation in the
norms by which subjectivity is constituted and reproduced. Private property,
while still absolutely juridically and politically sacrosanct, is regularly rendered absurd and obsolete with immaterial production.
First, who can own the general intellect, the ideas and languages that we
produce, and how can that ownership be properly regulated and enforced? In
sharp contrast with industrial products, the intangibility of the products of
immaterial labor antagonizes private property. Products in this latter category
tend to escape the boundaries of the corporation and the nation as, for instance, music, literature, films, and software are constantly transmitted both
legally and clandestinely across the globe.
Second, the value of commodities in the immaterial era is of a strictly
social character. If I purchase and wear a t-shirt in order to convey an image
or participate in a lifestyle, than I am necessarily dependent upon others to
Immaterial Subjects (and the Fetish Thereof)
33
determine if that expression is successful or not. The utility of the immaterial
commodity is actually enhanced upon its being communicated and shared in
two ways. On the one hand, these acts help to realize the use-value of the
commodity in that the utility of the shirt is to communicate something,
whether it be a lifestyle, a status, an irreverent or humorous saying, a political
slogan, and so on. On the other hand, these acts also contribute to the production of the social sphere that produces the general intellect.
Third, and as a result of the first two challenges, privatization under the
immaterial paradigm severely prohibits productivity. “In fact,” according to
Hardt, “in order to realize their maximum productivity, ideas, images and
affects must be common and shared.” 8 Affective production—which for
Hardt (and Antonio Negri) is really the production of feelings and sentiments—is by definition dependent upon encounters with others. Information
and knowledge are more productive when they are shared. When pharmaceutical companies patent medicines, for example, they restrict their productivity
insofar as they prevent other institutions and researchers from accessing the
medicines and associated data for future study and development.
It is important to emphasize that the immaterial paradigm doesn’t represent a total rupture with the industrial era; it rather flows from it. Many of the
qualities of immaterial production can be found in industrial production.
Consider the blurring of the distinction between the product and the process
of production. Marx wrote that transportation embodies precisely this characteristic, as transportation “does not exist as a thing of use distinct from this
process.” 9 Tracing these links is important because it prevents us from fetishizing the immaterial paradigm, a tendency that is present in the work of Hardt
and Negri, and results in an incorrect assessment of the present situation.
While Hardt and Negri are always careful to acknowledge that in the immaterial era “the act of producing remains both corporeal and intellectual,” 10
they nonetheless often conflate immateriality with invisibility, and this is
most evident in their analysis of immaterial commodities:
Private property is traditionally based on a logic of scarcity—material property
cannot be in two places at once; if you have it I cannot have it—but the infinite
reproducibility central to these immaterial forms of property directly undermines any such construction of scarcity. 11
There are always material limits to—or at least constraints on—the reproduction and circulation of immaterial commodities. Hardt and Negri illustrate
their thesis on the “infinite reproducibility” of immaterial products with music-sharing platforms. We can think of the finite reproducibility of that which
produces these products: the laborer. Interestingly, this is something that
Negri himself has touched on, writing that “the new face of productive labor
(intellectual, relational, linguistic, and affective, rather than physical, indi-
34
Chapter 2
vidual, muscular, instrumental) does not understate but accentuates the corporality and materiality of labor.” 12 The body—precarious, vulnerable, and
certainly not infinitely reproducible—itself becomes a decisive factor in economic, political, and social production.
Even within the realm of the circulation of commodities (besides laborpower, that is), this infinite reproducibility is difficult to buy. It is true that
there is not necessarily a limit on how often or how many times an mp3 file
may circulate, but this circulation depends on a whole host of material elements: cables, satellites, computers and monitors, and data servers. And all
of these materials draw on energy, which brings petroleum, electrical, coal,
nuclear, hydraulic, and renewable energy production processes into the picture. There are important material and environmental limitations here that are
becoming more and more pressing. As of 2013 it was estimated that “the
information-communications-technologies . . . ecosystem” that powers so
much of the immaterial economy consumed “about 10 percent of the world’s
total electricity generation . . . the same amount of electricity that was used to
light the entire planet in 1985.” 13 There are clear political implications here
for communist strategy and tactics. Hardt and Negri’s fetishization of immaterial production allows them to bypass the necessity of seizing state and
other forms and places of power. Their dismissal of and break from the
Leninist tradition is thus completely unwarranted, based as it is on a false
conceptualization of biopolitical production.
IMMATERIAL SUBJECTS AT WORK
The transformation from industrial to immaterial labor is fundamentally tied
up with transformations in social norms and forms of life. Sociality, what
Marx earlier called the “sum of interrelations,” and the general intellect
definitively escape the factory walls. The producer as autonomous and sovereign individual is consequently thrown into crisis, confronted on the one
hand by a legal and political regime that prescribes the subject as sovereign
and, on the other hand, by a social and economic system that is productive
precisely insofar as the subject is dependent upon others. This dependency,
which stands in direct conflict with the norms of autonomy, sovereignty, and
self-containment, is at the same time produced by and productive of immaterial production.
In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler articulates in a rich way what we
could refer to as the immaterial subject. For Butler, the subject is defined by
a fundamental contingency and an inescapable opacity. Whereas Butler utilizes moral philosophy and psychoanalysis to articulate this subject, I maintain that it must also be connected with contemporary and historical economic relations of production, at least if it is to be politically significant. Of
Immaterial Subjects (and the Fetish Thereof)
35
course, economic relations do not exhaustively determine social norms, but
neither do norms appear out of nowhere; they are instead rooted in materiality and in the production and reproduction of life. It is also not that the
subject was never fundamentally contingent or opaque, but rather that these
characteristics are becoming more and more explicit and harder to deny
precisely because of their central role in the production and valorization
process. It may actually be that contemporary production relations are what
enable Butler to realize and articulate her subject in the first place.
Far from being autonomous or sovereign, the subject for Butler owes its
existence to the other; it is formed in relation to and exists in a fundamental
dependency on the other. Alterity is prior to the emergence of the subject:
“The infant enters the world given over from the start to a language and to a
series of signs, broadly construed, that begin to structure an already operative
mode of receptivity and demand.” 14 This constitutes in part what Butler calls
the subject’s partial opacity to itself, for the subject is not the author of the
words, gestures, and movements available to it to communicate, nor can the
subject determine their signification in any linear manner.
The subject’s dependence on the other should not be conceived of primarily as the infant’s dependence on the parent or guardian for food or shelter.
There is certainly a founding dependency, in which one is, for example,
dependent upon an other for one’s own name so that one may enter into the
social arena in the first place. Even prior to the infant being born there exists
a normative regime including all sorts of institutions and social arrangements
within which the infant is conceived physically and socially. More importantly than this, however, is a permanent dependency. Drawing on Adriana
Cavarero, Butler writes, “I exist in an important sense for you, and by virtue
of you. If I have lost the conditions of address, if I have no ‘you’ to address,
then I have lost ‘myself.’” 15 There is a dependency, in other words, that
escapes the bounds of temporality.
The subject’s radical dependency troubles the conjectured borders that
delineate individuals, intimating a subject that is not necessarily disembodied, but is certainly not locatable within the body. Using language as both
metaphor and example, Butler writes,
I am only in the address to you . . . the “I” that I am is nothing without this
“you,” and cannot even begin to refer to itself outside the relation to the other
by which its capacity for self-reference emerges. I am mired, given over, and
even the word dependency cannot do the job here. 16
My life is unendingly and irrecoverably bound up with yours. This is one
place where the hegemony of the norm of the subject as sovereign is challenged, where it becomes difficult to finally declare where one ends and
where the other begins. It is also a place where the rigid divisions imposed by
36
Chapter 2
class society come to feel not only foreign but fundamentally antagonistic to
our very physical and social constitution.
This indeterminacy between the self and the other follows from the self’s
own incoherence. When Butler is writing about Hegelian recognition, she
concedes that, “I am, as it were, always other to myself, and there is no final
moment in which my return to myself takes place.” 17 The self is constituted
by an internal alterity. The idea, then, that one can fully know oneself is an
illusion, a mystification, for one exists in a permanent state of becoming
through the unfolding and the antagonistic production and negotiation of
social norms and frameworks of intelligibility. Subject constitution is a process without end; the solidified, permanent identity is eternally deferred.
Immaterial production, in its utilization of sociality and reliance on the
public sphere, provides new norms that challenge those norms associated
with industrial production. The employment of the general intellect—and in
particular the communicative and affective powers of society—requires the
relationality of the subject; it “fosters personal dependence.” 18 Surplus value
today is actually accumulated from the expropriation of the fundamental
dependency articulated by Butler. Because of its intense social basis, value
production today largely lacks its traditional linearity. It is not thoroughly
calculable because it has been thoroughly socialized. As a consequence, the
wage-form that reproduced the subject as an individual in modern capital is
in crisis. In fact, the financialization of capital that has taken place since
around the 1970s can be interpreted as part and parcel of this generalized
socialization of value production and reproduction.
Likewise, because of their social quality, immaterial products tend to
resist and exceed quantitative forms of measurement. This is especially true
of linguistic and affective production. Who can be the author of an emotion
or a language? All linguistic and affective acts immediately animate the
general intellect. Butler, of course, focuses on the linguistic. As Veronica
Vasterling relays Butler’s position, “speaking is rather like a borrowing, a
citing, from an already existing vocabulary.” 19 The idea of an author or
originator—and really of private property—loses its legitimacy with respect
to the production of literature, music, information, art, and affect. This serves
to illustrate the crisis of the true calculation of value well, for the words or
music produced, or the feeling elicited, cannot be traced to one individual or
even group of individuals, to a concrete mixture of raw materials. Each
immaterial commodity refers to, or cites, a convention, what Jason Read
labels an “archive.” 20 The city, Read argues, is a principle example of a
space that serves as an archive for immaterial production. Similarly, Hardt
and Negri write of a “biopolitical city” that should be considered a main site
of production, noting that workers today “produce throughout the metropolis,
in its every crack and crevice.” 21 The reliance on archives—and the general
Immaterial Subjects (and the Fetish Thereof)
37
intellect more broadly—has led Negri to argue that we need not measures of
value but cartographies of value. 22
With production taking place throughout the social, the boundaries between production time and work time and between work time and free time
become progressively blurred. Languages, ideas, and images are constantly
circulating through society and there is really no way to confine this circulation to a certain portion of the day. It is not possible to turn one’s brain off
when one leaves the office or university for the day. Christian Marazzi writes
that today the distinction between the work and worker has been overcome
and that what he calls the “new economy” has “put to work the entire lives of
workers.” 23 When work demands emotional attachments it is difficult to turn
a switch and shut down those attachments. To take an extreme example,
consider surrogate labor, in which a woman carries and births a child for a
contracting couple. Is the surrogate laborer supposed to be able to immediately disengage from the situation upon completion of delivery? 24 Developments in mobile communication technologies have allowed capital a new
entrance point into the home and the social, while biocapital industries have
gone to work not just on life, but on the reproductive processes and apparatuses of life. 25 One of the consequences of this shift is that the contract
becomes difficult to enforce ideologically, and its social legitimacy begins to
decline. Instead of work time and free time, socially necessary labor-time and
surplus labor-time, we have compensated and non-compensated time.
The changing economic relations brought about by the transition to immaterial production produce new norms through which the subject is constituted. The norms that established the subject as an individual, as an autonomous, sovereign, and self-contained body-mind, are increasingly contested
by norms that establish the subject as opaque, contingent, and radically dependent. The immaterial subject and immaterial production are categorically
contingent upon encounters with the other and the encounter lays the foundation for the creation and circulation of use-value and for exchange-value. The
immaterial commodity, production process, and subject are haunted by opacity. For Butler, the subject’s opacity is the result of “how none of us can ever
fully tell the story of our own origination and so can never account accurately
for all factors that form us from a distance.” 26 The other that is the fundamental condition for the subject’s emergence and the norms that render the
subject intelligible compose the subject’s prehistory that can never be fully
or adequately accounted for.
Any attempt to provide an account of oneself necessarily fails because of
this radical unknowability. Likewise, immaterial production takes place
across a vast plane that entails numerous producers—employed and unemployed, with papers and without papers—and the commodity that results
from this process cannot be traced back to its originators or inventors. As
opposed to the industrial commodity, whose origins could be exhaustively
38
Chapter 2
divided up into variable and constant capital, or labor, auxiliary, and raw
materials and means of production, the origins of the immaterial commodity
are social, linguistic, affective, and irrecoverable.
Contemporary productive forces also challenge the norms through which
the subject comes to be seen as an individual subject that is strictly delineated
from other subjects. The development of machinery and the general intellect
deterritorializes knowledge, defying the notion that knowledge is held within
the body or the brain. The collective composition of knowledge is today
difficult to contest, a reality that the traditional sites of knowledge production—like the school and university—are having difficulty reconciling, as
evidenced by their wallowing in contentions over intellectual property rights
and plagiarism. The proliferation of computer and virtual technologies, too,
is contesting the hegemony of the individual subject form: “Merely communicating by email or participating in a text-based MUD (multi-user dungeon)
already problematizes thinking of the body as a self-evident physicality.” 27
While the majority of the world may not have daily access to the computers
or the internet, my point is that the norms engendered by the new technologies are beginning to play a hegemonic role in the production and experience
of subjectivity. Consider, for example, the scientific and technical revolution
of the latter part of the twentieth century. Writing in 1986, at a time when the
number jobs in industries in the United States involving computers was relatively miniscule, Sam Marcy, a communist theoretician and strategist in the
United States, wrote an underappreciated book based solely on the fact that
this industry’s “influence is decisive for all sectors of the economy.” 28 The
task for communist theory, after all, is to anticipate.
I certainly do not mean to imply in any way that the social, political, or
anatomic differences between bodies are no longer important. On the
contrary, the development of the productive forces has meant an increase in
the exploitation and oppression of—and violence against—certain bodies,
those rendered deviant, redundant, unproductive, or undisciplinable. There is
still a drive by capital, for example, to super-exploit the labor of nationally
oppressed peoples. This is, perhaps, one of the greatest paradoxes of the
immaterial era: as the productive process today takes on a progressively
social character, sociality is progressively stratified along the lines of class,
race, gender, nationality, ability, and sexuality.
PRODUCING IN COMMON
Annika Thiem puts beautifully the way that the sovereign subject is challenged not only in theory but how “much more mundanely, our daily experiences often make us—sometimes painfully—aware of the limits of our
knowledge of and control over ourselves, others, and the situations in which
Immaterial Subjects (and the Fetish Thereof)
39
we have to act.” 29 These daily experiences, these encounters with alterity in
which social norms are reinforced, challenged, and transformed, cannot be
seen apart from the production process. The theory of the subject is only
useful politically if it is theorized in conjunction with a critique of the mode
of production, because bound up with normative violence is the violence of
capitalist exploitation, the expropriation of society’s productive powers and
their ownership as private property. These two forms of oppression operate
materially; even the immaterial is corporeal and material and cannot circulate
on its own, despite the illusions of Hardt and Negri. It follows from this that
the materiality of discursive and normative regimes of subject formation
must be interrogated. It is here, within the productive networks of society,
that political theory and action must be oriented.
Butler focuses on the subject as dependent, relational, and opaque in
order to elaborate a common condition that is based not on identity, but on
being together in vulnerability and a common alterity. There is perhaps nothing more common, however, than the thoroughly socialized production that
characterizes the contemporary capitalist mode of production. And because
the general intellect and its attendant norms of relationality, dependency, and
opacity are increasingly hegemonic within the production and valorization
process, the hegemony of private property and its norms are being confronted
in various aspects of daily life.
Capital today is everywhere. It’s no longer confined to the factory, the
farm, the agora; it has permeated all of society, putting to work subjectivity
and social life. Capitalism today “doesn’t depend on the commodity thing. It
directly exploits the social relation at the heart of value.” 30 Exploitation
knows no bounds. The generalization of capital is, by definition, the generalization of exploitation and violence. In this face of this, the decomposition of
the borders between the self and the other, private property and public property, and work time and free time continues by way of social, political, and
economic struggles. In order to understand this process from the point of
view of the subject, theory aimed against exploitation and normative violence must be rooted within the production and reproduction of daily—material and discursive—life.
One way that we can frame the current crisis in subjectivity is as the
conflict between our experiences of subjectivity and the legal and political
institution of individuality; between our experience of dependency, relationality, contingency, and opacity, on the one hand, and our subjection to legal
and political regimes that compel the autonomous and sovereign subject, on
the other; between subjectivity and appropriation. We have examined the
broad relationship between the mode of production and the mode of subjectivity and subject formation. We are not yet in a position, however, to develop a political and pedagogical theory—or, better, set of concepts—through
which we can understand and mobilize subjectivities and ways of being and
40
Chapter 2
relating against the rule of private property. For, while it is true that contemporary modes of subjectivity and subjectivation challenge the functional,
juridical, and ideological pillars of capitalism, this in no way means that
capitalism is not able to respond to, negotiate, and surpass this challenge.
Moreover, the rule of private property bears a particular relationship to the
political form of democracy, and taken together capitalism and democracy
have a unique educational logic. It is crucial that we understand this logic and
that we develop educational counterlogics, and it is to these twin tasks that
this book now turns.
NOTES
1. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial labor,” trans. Paul Colilli and Ed Emory, in Paulo
Virno and Michael Hardt, Radical thought in Italy: A potential politics (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133.
2. Jason Read, The micro-politics of capital: Marx and the prehistory of the present (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003),127.
3. Michael Hardt, “The common in communism,” in Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek
(Eds.), The idea of communism (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 142.
4. Slavoj Žižek, “Afterword: Lenin’s choice,” in Slavoj Žižek (Ed.), Revolution at the
gates (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 286.
5. Tellingly, Žižek doesn’t make this criticism of cultural capitalism.
6. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of a critique of political economy (rough draft),
trans. Martin Nicolaus (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1939/1993), 92.
7. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: The Belnap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2009), 146.
8. Hardt, “The common in communism,” 136.
9. “But what the transport industry sells is the actual change of place itself. The useful
effect produced is inseparably connected with the transport process. . . . People and commodities travel together with the means of transport, and this journeying, the spatial movement of
the means of transport, is precisely the production process accomplished by the transport
industry. The useful effect can only be consumed during this production process.” Karl Marx,
Capital: A critique of political economy (volume 2), trans. David Fernbach (New York and
London: Penguin Books, 1885/1992), 135.
10. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, 132.
11. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire
(New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 180.
12. Antonio Negri, “Antonio Negri: Response to Pierre Macherey,” trans. El Kilombo
Intergaláctico, May 1, 2006, http://www.elkilombo.org/antonio-negri-response-to-pierre-macherey (accessed November 19, 2015).
13. Bryan Walsh, “The surprisingly large energy footprint of the digital economy [update],”
Time, Aug. 14, 2013, http://www.science.time.com/2013/08/14/power-drain-the-digital-cloudis-using-more-energy-than-you-think (accessed October 09, 2015).
14. Judith Butler, Giving an account of oneself (New York: Fordham University Press), 77.
15. Ibid., 32.
16. Ibid., 82.
17. Ibid., 27.
18. Paulo Virno, A grammar of the multitude: For an analysis of contemporary forms of life,
trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles and New York:
Semiotexte, 2004), 41.
19. Veronica Vasterling, “Butler’s sophisticated constructivism: A critical assessment,” Hypatia 14, no. 3 (1999): 27.
Immaterial Subjects (and the Fetish Thereof)
41
20. Jason Read, The micropolitics of capital.
21. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, 251.
22. Antonio Negri, The politics of subversion: A manifesto for the twenty-first century, trans.
James Newell (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989/2005).
23. Christian Marazzi, Capital and language: From the new economy to the war economy
trans. Gregory Conti (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2002/2008), 50. Marazzi falls into the same
trap that Hardt and Negri do, writing that “Communication support systems . . . allow knowledge to circulate on its own, independently of fixed capital and legal ownership.” It is true that
legal ownership doesn’t supervise the circulation of knowledge, but fixed capital is, in capitalism, paramount to this circulation.
24. For a detailed account of the politico-ethical problems posed by reproductive technology, see Rosemarie Tong, Feminist approaches to bioethics: Theoretical reflections and practical applications (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997).
25. See Clayton Pierce, Education in the age of biocapitalism: Optimizing educational life
for a flat world (New York: Palgrave Macmillon, 2013).
26. Annika Thiem, Unbecoming subjects: Judith Butler, moral philosophy, and critical
responsibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 96.
27. N. Katherine Hayles, How we became posthuman, 27.
28. Sam Marcy, High tech, low pay: A Marxist analysis of the changing character of the
working class (New York: World View Forum, 1986/2009), xxxv.
29. Annika Thiem, Unbecoming subjects, 51.
30. Jodi Dean, The communist horizon (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 129.
Part II
“Thought doesn’t graduate.”
—Margret Grebowicz
43
44
Figure 2.1.
Part II
Source: Photograph by Sarah Pfohl
Chapter Three
Studying Whatever
Attention to commonness can help us militate against the ways in which
capital seeks to prevent us from being together against capital, from feeling
our power to produce and reproduce our world as we would desire it, without
the fetters of private property. While the norms of the autonomous and delineated individual are regularly contested in our daily experiences, as we produce and reproduce our world and interact with each other, there are still
powerful forces that atomize and isolate us from one another, blocking forms
of solidarity and togetherness that could antagonize the rule of capital. It is
within the need for a commonness against capital that communist pedagogy
must be located. This is, necessarily, a divisive commonness, for not everyone can be included in a struggle against. In this chapter I want to introduce
the concept of study, which has been theorized as a way of forging commonness, but which can and must, I hold, generate commonness against.
To make this introduction, I turn to the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben
and his figure of whatever singularity, a form of life that is different while
common, separate from while standing in for all others. Agamben’s thought
has made important headway in educational scholarship recently, and it gives
us both a way of conceptualizing and critiquing contemporary relations of
production and, with the help of pedagogy, a way of enacting modes of being
that can be posed against these relations. While Agamben’s work holds a lot
of promise (if it is read through a historical materialist lens), it’s a difficult
realm to enter. For this reason, I spend some time situating Agamben’s
philosophy in the beginning of this chapter, and pivot to pedagogy and political economy later in the chapter.
Agamben introduces the figure of whatever singularity in The Coming
Community, one of his earliest works to be translated into English. Like most
of Agamben’s books, it is short in length and profound in substance, consist45
46
Chapter 3
ing of punctuated meditations on politics, philosophy, and theology. It is, I
submit, impossible to investigate or explain any one of Agamben’s ideas in
isolation; one can really only begin to understand them through a relation to
his other work and his overall philosophical project. Indeed, this is one of the
difficulties of engaging Agamben. Not only are his writings thick and concentrated, but they can also come across as detached and even random. His
books are not written linearly or methodically, in which an idea is introduced, contextualized, developed or extended, and then applied. And there is
a reason beyond stylistic idiosyncrasy that will be revealed as we dig into his
work in this chapter.
As a result, in order to begin to grasp what Agamben means by whatever
singularity we have to situate the idea within The Coming Community and
within Agamben’s overall oeuvre, which Catherine Mills appropriately labels as “a densely interconnected conceptual web.” 1 Agamben originally
published The Coming Community in 1990, in the middle of the overthrow
and dissolution of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc of countries in
Eastern Europe. The book should be regarded as a response to these developments, and the grounds for this claim—and the problems with this response—will soon, I hope, become apparent. Academically, the book was
Agamben’s contribution to a series of debates taking place, since the early
1980s, around the idea of community and the writings of Georges Bataille.
The crux of this debate concerned the criteria of belonging that are necessary for acceptance into a community. The question was: how to conceive of
and how to enact a community that would resist processes of totalization and
homogenization? Bataille answered this question with a radical negativity,
with a theory and a life committed “to inactivity and excess, a refusal to
contribute to the work . . . of his society.” 2 There are clear linkages to
Bataille’s formulation and the Italian autonomous marxist tradition in which
Negri and Virno are central figures and thinkers. Agamben, for his part,
thinks that Bataille’s formulation is limited by its concern for civil society
and the principles of “sovereignty or the sacred.” 3 Agamben thus extends
Bataille’s “désoeuvrement,” which is roughly translated as idleness or inertia
and is politically oriented, into a theory of inoperativity that concerns “an
ontological reflection on the modalities of being.” 4 Whatever singularity is
part of this ontology. A community, traditionally thought, is defined by the
common experiences or identities of its members, and often experience and
identity are closely linked. The inverse of this formulation means that a
community is defined not only by who or what it includes, but also by who or
what it excludes. This necessary flipside entails a tendency toward totalization, homogenization, terror, and totalitarianism.
The most obvious example of such totalitarianism, which becomes central
to Agamben’s later work on homo sacer, is Nazi Germany. In Nazi Germany
the parameters for inclusion were rigidly defined and enforced, so much so
Studying Whatever
47
that exclusion became the operative organizing principle. A more recent
example is the attacks on ethnic studies programs in high schools and colleges in the United States. In 2009–2010 reactionary forces in Arizona
launched an attack on the ethnic studies program in the Tucson Unified
School District of Tucson, Arizona. School administrators and local and state
politicians argued that these classes promoted “ethnic solidarity” and “antiAmerican values.” The content of these arguments and the resulting bill that
banned ethnic studies concerned the definition of the educational and political community. What is at issue, both in Nazi Germany and in the attacks on
ethnic studies, is the desire to purify the community by redefining and enforcing the criteria for inclusions and, therefore, the criteria for exclusion.
The language of the “lost” or “broken” community has animated political
projects based on such a notion of the common, from humanism to fascism.
As another of Agamben’s interlocutors, Jean-Luc Nancy, claims, each of
these projects has, in their own way, pined for a return to an imaginary “lost
age in which community was woven of tight, harmonious, and infrangible
bonds and in which above all it played back to itself, through its institutions,
its rituals, and its symbols, the representation, indeed the living offering, of
its own immanent unity, intimacy, and autonomy.” 5 This ideological nexus
was certainly not a topic inaugurated by this exact conversation. Marx, for
example, made a similar argument in the Grundrisse, in which he repeatedly
denounced as “romantic” the bourgeois economists’ “Natural Individual,” 6
calling the desire to return to such a harmonious community “ridiculous.” 7
The point, however, is that communities have tended to be built upon ideals
that, as Butler reminds us, always founder.
The debate about community, then, is centered on the exclusive and marginalizing nature of identity. And the problem that Agamben set out to answer in The Coming Community was how to conceive of a community without any criteria for exclusion and, thus, without any criteria for inclusion.
Agamben introduces his notion of “whatever” and his figure of “whatever
singularity” in order to begin to think of community in such a way, for this
radical rethinking necessarily entails, explicitly or implicitly, a radical rethinking of subjectivity.
Agamben begins The Coming Community with the sentence, “The coming being is whatever being.” 8 “Whatever” is the English translation of the
Latin quodlibet, which Agamben translates as “being such that it always
matters,” instead of the traditional translation, “being, it does not matter
which.” 9 As the translator (Hardt) makes clear in a footnote, whatever for
Agamben “refers precisely to that which is neither particular nor general,
neither individual nor generic.” 10 “The Whatever in question here,” Agamben says, “relates to singularity not in its indifference with respect to a
common property (to a concept, for example: being red, being French, being
Muslim), but only in its being such as it is.” 11 It is this formulation of the
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Chapter 3
subject and this conception of singularity such as it is that is at the heart of
whatever and the coming community. Thinking of the subject such as it is is
to think of the singular not in its identity or difference, but in all of its
singularity, in its indifference; it is to conceive of the singular subject without, or in its indifference, to its predicates (its being x or having y) without
being reduced to a universal subject. “Whatever singularity is,” as Leland de
la Durantaye helpfully writes, “singularity seen from an unfamiliar side—
that of the singular. . . . This is an idea of singularity not of indifferent
importance but, on the contrary, conceived of in all its rich difference from
other singularities—whatever they may be.” 12 The figure of whatever singularity thus points beyond the binary of the particular/universal—which in
pedagogical literature has been written as “you know me/I know you . . . you
can’t know me/I can’t know you” 13—in that, in its “pure singularity” it is
only its relationship to “the totality of possibilities.” 14
How exactly does whatever singularity escape the binary between the
particular and the universal? One way that Agamben answers this question is
by turning to linguistics. He offers “the example” as a way in which to
understand the radical singularity of whatever singularity and its location
outside of the particular/universal dialectic:
In any context where it exerts its force, the example is characterized by the fact
that it holds for all cases of the same type and, at the same time, it is included
among these. It is one singularity among others, which, however, stands for
each of them and serves for all. 15
The example “is at once set apart as an example—a singularly representative
instance—as well as included as an integral part of that of which it is an
example.” 16 The example is, in this line of thinking, an “empty space” in
which whatever singularities can communicate with each other without surrendering to the totalizing force of identity. This empty space, though, is not
properly a physical or conceptual location or place, but is instead the experience of a taking-place. And to begin to understand what Agamben means by
this formulation, and to continue to flesh out whatever singularity, it may be
helpful to retreat from the work at hand and consider what we might, reluctantly, and likely even against Agamben’s wishes, call his project.
THE TAKING-PLACE OF LANGUAGE
Those who come to Agamben from deconstruction and poststructuralism
may be initially—and maybe permanently—struck by his unqualified use of
adjectives and adverbs such as “pure,” “true,” and “absolute,” words that are
almost always circumscribed, historicized, contested, or rejected. This difference, which is almost visceral, speaks to the uniqueness of Agamben’s ap-
Studying Whatever
49
proach to philosophy and politics, and it is illustrated concisely in his 1984
essay, “The Idea of Language.”
Toward the end of this essay, Agamben turns to Wittgenstein’s image of
the fly trapped in the bottle. He uses this image to highlight the limits of
some iterations of critical theory:
We can say that contemporary thought has finally recognized the inevitability,
for the fly, of the glass in which it is imprisoned. The preexistence and anonymity of the signifying function constitute the insuperable presupposition that
always already anticipates speaking beings. Human beings are condemned to
understand each other in language. But, once again, what is left aside is precisely the original project assigned to this image: the possibility that the fly
might leave the glass. 17
In the first part of this quote, Agamben is almost surely taking aim at Jacques
Derrida. Agamben is highly critical of Derrida and his project of deconstruction, which Agamben accuses of remaining hopelessly trapped in nihilism; in
Homo Sacer, Agamben implies that deconstruction’s obsession with language “threatens thinking.” 18 Deconstruction is obsessed with the bottle that
the fly is in and, as de la Durantaye puts it, “has set up shop in this place of
exile and is content to remain there.” 19 Of course, Agamben does not want to
restore a metaphysics of presence in political philosophy. Philosophy, for
him, “concerns itself with what is at issue not in this or that meaningful
statement but in the very fact that human being speak, that there is language
and opening to sense, beyond, before, or, rather, in every determinate event
of signification.” 20 This is the taking-place of language, an experience of
pure language that escapes representation: the event of language.
In a more recent essay, Agamben offers an interesting corporeal example
of the taking-place of language: the friend. The friend “belongs to the class of
terms that linguistics define as nonpredicative.” 21 Put differently, “calling
someone ‘friend’ is not the same as calling him ‘white,’ Italian,’ or ‘hot,’
since friendship is neither a property nor a quality of a subject.” 22 The example of the friend is not just linguistic and neither is the taking-place of
language. This might be a helpful way to distinguish Agamben from Derrida:
Derrida emphasizes language, while Agamben explores the process of taking-place. Thus, the experience of taking-place is carnal: “Friends do not
share something (birth, law, place, taste): they are shared by the experience
of friendship. Friendship is the con-division that precedes every division,
since what has to be shared is the very fact of existence, life itself.” 23 To put
all of this in language that we have been using so far in this book, when we
call someone “friend” we are referring not to an attribute of subjectivity but
to the relationality of subjectivity itself.
The communication of whatever singularities through the empty space of
the example is the (anti)foundation of the coming community. Whatever
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Chapter 3
singularity is neither about a shared identity (predicative belonging), nor is it
about pure vacuity. 24 The coming community is constituted by the beingtogether of whatever singularities, by a nonpredicative (but not predicateless) being-in-common. Conjuring Spinoza’s conception of the common,
Agamben writes that the taking-place of singularities “does not unite them in
essence, but scatters them in existence.” 25 In this sense, the coming community of whatever singularities is not held together by some glue, which
pushes us to think and experience community radically otherwise.
To take seriously Agamben’s response to the problems of identity, we
have to ask ourselves if and how communist pedagogy can call for and
facilitate the taking-place of whatever singularities. There is a teleological
difficulty here, for the whatever is not properly a “project.” In the translation
of “the coming community” there is an ambiguity with the verb tense of
“coming.” Alex Murray has suggested that “a more accurate, if clumsy,
English title is ‘the community which/that comes,’ capturing the present
tense and avoiding any futural connotations.” 26 This is similar to the way that
Nancy wrote about “community without community” or “communism without community,” which is “to come, in the sense that it is always coming.” 27
The coming community and whatever singularity, therefore, do not constitute an end for which we should strive. For Agamben, “there is no historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that humans must enact or
realize,” and it is precisely this premise that allows for the possibility for
politics and ethics. 28 This is why Agamben has said that he “avoid[s] conclusions in general, even if the investigation is, so to speak, finished.” 29 Agamben is concerned with means and not ends. The whatever cannot somehow be
constructed or made to come; it is instead the excavation of the present. 30
This project has important educational implications (and limitations), which
are best examined by turning to Agamben’s ontology of im-potentiality.
BARTLEBY’S DOUBLE REFUSAL
We know now what whatever is, but what does it do? What is whatever’s
potential? What is its relationship to possibility? If the whatever is a form of
subjectivity and a form of belonging, what is its ontology? How might the
whatever act in the struggle against the contemporary mode of production?
What pedagogical possibilities does whatever open for revolutionary movements? By turning to these questions we not only gain insights into latent
antagonistic subjectivities operating within the contradictions of capitalism
and capitalist subject formation, but we are also able to highlight another
motor of capitalist exploitation: the demand to actualize potential.
To discover what whatever does—and, more importantly, what it doesn’t
do—Agamben gives us Bartleby, the (anti)protagonist of Herman Melville’s
Studying Whatever
51
short tale “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” which appeared
in Putnam’s Magazine in 1853. 31 A Manhattan lawyer tells the tale. The
lawyer has a business on Wall Street and he hires on Bartleby as a scrivener,
what today we would call a legal secretary. Bartleby is tasked with reading,
proofing, and copying legal papers, which he does at first with skill, alacrity,
and speed, impressing the narrator and pleasing the business’ clients. Bartleby’s productivity decreases however, and, when asked to perform work, he
responds, “I would prefer not to.” Eventually Bartleby completely stops
working. Our benevolent petit-bourgeois narrator doesn’t have to heart to fire
him, even though his other employees and his clients are frustrated with
Bartleby’s presence, which exceeds the length of the working day when
Bartleby starts sleeping in the office. Instead of firing and evicting Bartleby,
the narrator moves his business elsewhere. Bartleby then takes to sleeping in
the office building. The narrator returns at the behest of the building’s tenants
and invites Bartleby to live with him, to which he responds, “I would prefer
not to.” Bartleby is eventually evicted from the building and imprisoned in
the Manhattan Tombs. The good-hearted business owner continues to visit
Bartleby even in prison, and bribes a prison guard to ensure that Bartleby is
well fed. A few days later, Bartleby is found dead as a result of “preferring
not” to eat.
While it would be tempting to read the story as one of a lazy worker
wasting his potential, Agamben insists that we read a radical kind of potentiality in Bartleby. Agamben identifies two types of potentiality for Aristotle:
generic and existing. Generic potentiality is about the actualization of potential, in which the subject who is capable of x performs x. This is the commonsense meaning of the term potential; it is the potentiality to be. Existing
potential, by contrast, is the potentiality to not be, and this is what Agamben
calls “the secret of the Aristotelian doctrine of potentiality.” 32 Potentiality is
always more than the passage to the act, and this is actually what defines
potential, for without the potentiality to not be, potentiality would be identical with actuality. This potentiality is what defines the ontology of whatever
being, its being “capable of its own impotence.” 33 In a short essay on potentiality, Agamben says it like this: “the architect is potential insofar as he has
the potential to not-build, the poet the potential to not-write poems.” 34
Bartleby exemplifies this Aristotelian double potential, which possesses
radical possibilities for political action. That is, Bartleby’s resistance is so
powerful because it defies resistance. Bartleby does not say “I will not!”
Neither does Bartleby offer any justification for his preference. The “I prefer
not to” exists “between acceptance and refusal, negation and position.” 35 If
we are to call this refusal, it will be a double refusal: he refuses to refuse, and
he refuses to explain his refusal, and it is this double refusal that makes
Bartleby’s inactivity so frustrating, for Bartleby poses nothing to oppose.
Bartleby is not impotent in that he possesses the ability to perform the re-
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quested actions and in that his preference not to perform those actions ultimately causes the petit-bourgeois business owner to relocate his enterprise, a
costly and time-consuming effort. Bartleby’s repetition of his formula has a
quite profound impact.
STUDYING WHATEVER
At one point in The Idea of Prose, Agamben refers to Bartleby as an “example of study.” 36 Although Agamben never examines education, Tyson Lewis
has taken to examining the educational implications of Agamben’s thought,
and has developed a rich, compelling and, I would argue, politically important theory of studying. The political site of intervention is the neoliberalization of education, which is broadly defined as the economic takeover of
education. This takeover includes not only the actual privatization of schools,
textbooks, teacher training programs, curricula, and so on, but also the privatization of the purpose of education, the process by which deliberations
about what purpose education should serve are completely eclipsed by market forces. 37 The only purpose of education is to serve the demands of global
capital, whatever those may be at a given time. Because these needs are
perpetually changing, education becomes a lifelong process. Or, rather,
learning becomes a lifelong process. The name given to this reality is the
“learning society,” and it is on the lips of politicians and economists everywhere. 38
Lewis ties the learning society to biocapitalism, the current stage of capitalism that isn’t interested in depleting or using up labor-power and the
laborer and is rather concerned with continually reproducing labor-power
through lifelong learning. 39 The primary problem with this paradigm “is not
that it views the child or the student as a lack but rather that it views the child
as an infinite potentiality that can and must be actualized through constant
performance testing.” 40 The problem is not that children and students are
treated as receptacles that must be filled with knowledge (which was Paulo
Freire’s concern) but that children and students are viewed as not yets that
absolutely must be. The learning society thus “sacrifices not equality or
potentiality but rather our impotentiality, our ability not to be.” 41 Capitalism
insists on the actualization of the subject, which forces the subject into an
already-existing identity, into being x or y, or into the production of a new
identity that can then be captured within the capitalist production and circulation of value.
Lewis demonstrates that learning is the educational logic of biocapitalism
and that this logic is paramount to the reproduction of this system. More than
leveling a critique, he proposes a theory of study and im-potentiality that
seeks to disrupt this educational logic, with the idea that from within this
Studying Whatever
53
disruption an alternative logic and world might emerge. Whereas learning is
always concerned with and determined by ends (learning goals, outcomes,
etc.), studying is about means: it is definitional of studying that when one
engages in the act one does not have an end in mind. When one sets out to
study there may be an end in sight (a dissertation or a book, or a piece of
information or a theoretical development), but as one begins to study the end
retreats. When we roam in the archives, follow link after link after link on the
internet until we end up watching obscure YouTube videos, the ends of our
project are distanced or, more accurately, they are suspended. In the learning
society, such wandering is interpreted as procrastination. We tend of think of
what is studying as getting distracted and sidetracked. This interpretation
follows directly from the obsession with actualizing potential and from the
demand that learning contribute directly and immediately to the functioning
of capitalism.
Studying is antagonistic to the learning society and capitalism because it
in incommensurable with the obsession with ends and outcomes and the
necessary measurability these entail. There is no outcome to studying, and
neither are there any benchmarks to be located or progress reports to be
issued. Studying radically resists computability, quantifiability and, I would
add, exchangeability. Studying is about use whereas learning is about exchange. 42 But Lewis doesn’t fetishize studying in order to honor the hyphen
in im-potentiality. “Studying,” Lewis writes, “suspends ends yet does not
retreat into pure potentiality. It is the ambiguous state of recessive sway that
holds within itself this and that without choosing either.” 43
Like Bartleby, the studier is not lazy or inactive; it is just that the studier’s
actions are not ordered to meet a predetermined objective. What Agamben
misses about Bartleby, however, is that in order to “prefer not to,” Bartleby
had to have the option of preferring to, of actualizing potential, which has the
process of learning as a prerequisite: “In a sense, Agamben takes for granted
the existence of in-capabilities and propensities as the necessary background
for the appearance of capabilities. He assumes that one can.” 44 Thus, when
Agamben reads the generic and existing potential in Aristotle, he distinguishes them as follows: “The child . . . is potential in the sense that he must
suffer an alteration (a becoming other) through learning. Whoever already
possesses knowledge, by contrast, is not obliged to suffer an alteration.” 45
For Agamben there is a radical separation between the two types of potentiality, but Lewis reveals how they are, in fact, dialectically related. To
make this development, Lewis turns to Israel Scheffler’s writing on potential.
Scheffler sees potential as fluid, dynamic, and open, and he doesn’t insist that
all potential be realized. He conceptualizes three distinct but interrelated
potentials: capacity, propensity, and capability. Capacity is one’s ability to
gain or perform; propensity is one’s willingness to undertake the task of
developing a capacity; and capability is one’s ability to reliably perform.
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Scheffler misses the notion of radical im-potentiality, but he gives Lewis’
theory of studying an initial way to broach the relationship between learning
and studying. In order to “prefer not” one must be able to do something and
to not do that thing.
Lewis comes closest to addressing the relationship between whatever and
identity when he examines the rhythm of studying. The rhythm of study beats
within poetic, and not linear or chronological, temporality; a time of immanent disruption and unfolding; it is a time that “exceeds chronological time
by introducing future eternity as an internal surplus to the everyday.” 46 Poetry performs this time in two ways. First, as each line of the poem unfolds it
gestures toward what is to come at the same time as it anticipates what has
already come. Second, the immanent disruption of the poem takes place
through its decompleting unitary structure, including the poem’s sudden ending, an ending that is always abrupt and never conclusive.
Reading poetry has a peculiar effect on subjectivity. We never really
finish reading a poem; poetry never leaves one satisfied or complete. Dwelling within the poem we remain fragmentary or, as Butler would say, within
the poem we experience our self-opacity. But we are not incompetent within
the poem. Instead, we oscillate between subjectificaiton and desubjectification, suspended in the time and space between the two poles. We dance to the
rhythm of “I can, I cannot,” moving from retreat to advance and back again.
This cadence detaches us from prescribed moves and we are free to experience time and being otherwise, opening up the possibility of new subjectivities, relations, and arrangements that are within and beyond the current
order. Within the poem we glimpse the suture between identity and whatever, our ability to be an identity and to not be an identity: the hesitation of
being. Studying institutes a mood of hesitation in the face of capitalism’s
demand that we be subjectified and ordered according to identities and other
social categories. To return to Butler’s language of norms that we talked
about in part one, we could say that the realm of study is the space between
the norm and its iteration. Virno articulates this space in relationship to
nature and civil society, writing, “between the norm and its concrete realization there exists a lasting hiatus, a real and true incommensurability.” 47 There
is nothing that determines how a norm will be executed and how it will be
received. This ambivalent space is the irreducible resistance of study.
The act of reading poetry, which helps us enter into a state of ontological
ambivalence, can be given a methodology by turning to the archive and the
library. Here the studier is most appropriately placed, at least according to
dominant ways of thinking about studying. The method of studying can be
understood as the collecting of signatures, which is about “the generative and
creative relay between elements that slips, undiscovered, beneath the much
more frequently cited pair of signifier and signified, langue and parole.” 48
That is to say, collecting signatures reveals the dense, complex, contradicto-
Studying Whatever
55
ry, and changing assemblage of structures that undergird the production,
distribution, and use of signs. Signatures are prior to the relationship between
the signifier and the signified and are that which give the relationship its
efficacy, yet they importantly exceed that particular relationship. Through
this collecting, then, we not only discover that things can be radically otherwise, but we experience the potentiality of signs themselves. The studier
does not march down a forward path toward progress but alternatively wanders sideways in the labyrinth, picking up ideas and concepts along the way.
And these signatures are “not collect[ed] for personal ownership but rather
because of a certain call placed upon him or her by the signatures.” 49
An example of such a labyrinth is the library and collection of Aby
Warburg, a German art and cultural theorist who arranged and rearranged his
library according to his evolving interests. The library “was alive through
Warburg’s constant tinkering, which created new constellations of books that
defied scientific, standardized cataloguing procedures.” 50 After his death, the
library became an institute where Agamben studied during 1974 and 1975, a
period of study that was actualized in his 1977 book, Stanzas. Crucially, the
library remains catalogued in the original manner. If the collection had been
rearranged according to a standardized bibliographic system, the signatures
would have been normalized and captured in the name of a pre-established
signifier-signified relation. The library stands as a witness to a moment of
one studier’s time of collecting signatures, and when others engage the library they engage with and study this moment. It is with this methodological
examination that Lewis clarifies most efficiently the difference between the
learner and the studier:
The method of the learner is to collect signs and things in order to reproduce
them (always in measurable amounts) as evidence of the potentiality to be or
do, whereas the method of the studier is to collect signatures in order to get
lost, wander, and thus experience the im-potentiality to be and not to be, do
and not do simultaneously. 51
The difference and the relationship between learning and studying becomes a
bit clearer here. I found these ideas about learning and studying rather helpful
in understanding the writing process.
I think back, for example, to when I was writing and rewriting (and
rewriting) my dissertation last year. At times I was writing, reading, and
thinking to prove to others that I have the potential to be a PhD, a professor,
scholar, and so on. I had arguments to make, critiques to refute, points to
prove, gaps to reveal, a politics to present. At other times, I experienced
something different on another end of the spectrum. I found myself seized by
the ideas themselves, held by concepts in abeyance for reasons that were
beyond my comprehension. I was not seeking out concepts but drawn to
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Chapter 3
them—a book on a shelf, a line from an article, an experience from a protest,
a thought I had in the shower that one time. I would find myself immersed in
a problem, preoccupied with an issue or tension, and relief would come to me
from the strangest place at unexpected times.
But the dissertation got done, the articles get written. Seized and held by
concepts and problems, I incorporate them into my fibers and outlook, into
the way that I understand myself, others, the world, and all of the relations
therein. My political commitments are still there, and they come out from the
state of suspension and my wandering and tinkering around is actualized, pen
is put to paper, theories are developed, authors are synthesized. And most
importantly for me, politics are proposed. It is similar with this process,
writing this book, right here, right now. I estimate that I’m about halfway
through writing this book. I started out with a grand idea that, as usually
happens, fell apart fairly early on (if not right away!). Annie Dillard puts this
early part of the writing process brilliantly: “Here is how it happens,” she
writes, “The vision is, sub specie aeternitatis, a set of mental relationships, a
coherent series of formal possibilities. In the actual rooms of time, however,
it is a page or two of legal paper filled with words and questions; it is a
terrible diagram, a few books’ names in a margin, an ambiguous doodle, a
corner folded down in a library book. These are memos from the thinking
brain to witless hope.” 52 There was sadness and joy with the wavering between the sign and that which undergirds the sign, and there still is. But I
embrace the wandering and open myself up to the calling of signs, scraps of
signs, and random bits of knowledge and experience. As I look out on my
table on which I write, there is a collection of ideas (communicated through
books, notebooks, scribbles on paper, articles, and Post-it notes) and the
connections within this collection seem opaque; I am stupefied. They emerge
nonetheless—and they often do so as I write—and this emergence brings
forth a feeling: that of potentiality, the existing potentiality of thought itself.
This is, simply, why I write, for the paradoxical experience of potentiality
and actualization.
FUGITIVE STUDYING IN THE UNDERCOMMONS
Study is a contradictory, endless, and generative undertaking that takes place
in a state of suspension and permanent sway. In this way, it resists the
capitalist command to actualize being, to put it into practice. Stefano Harney
and Fred Moten add their own inflection to the process of studying by linking
it to the fugitivity of being in the undercommons. The undercommons is what
exists and persists around and within all capitalist enclosures, whether they
be spatial enclosures of property, temporal enclosures of production, or identitarian enclosures of subjectivity. A political project arising from an em-
Studying Whatever
57
brace of the undercommons is a process of “self-defense of the surround in
the face of repeated, targeted dispossessions through the settler’s armed incursion.” 53 The undercommons is itself a power, the generative power of
sociality that produces that which capitalism captures again and again, that
which actually ensures the regeneration of capitalism.
To resist this capture Harney and Moten give us the figure of the fugitive
and the act of fugitive study. The one who studies—the student—is always
on the run. Today, students are on the run from their creditors. To build and
defend the undercommons in a studious way is to flee credit and to embrace
debt. Credit is a one-way street; it’s a predetermined flow of money (as a
claim on future value) that doesn’t build any reciprocity. “Debt,” on the other
hand, “is mutual . . . debt runs every direction, scatters, escapes, seeks refuge.” 54 To study is to take one’s place in a permanently indebted collectivity,
an assembly of people who don’t want their debt forgiven, because forgiven
debt only opens up a new line of credit. We have to forget our creditors, but
never our fellow debtors. We can’t forget our debtors, but our debts can add
up and we can lose track of some of them, letting the identity of the particular
debt dissolve into the undercommons, focusing instead on creating new debts
for others.
One doesn’t need to be enrolled in any credits to study. Study is always
taking place, even for the student who happens to be matriculating credits,
studying is taking place before the credit hours begin. The professor walks
into the classroom. Students are thinking, communicating, being. There is
dissonance. This is when the professor calls the class to order. “All right,
let’s get started,” or, “Welcome to class, today we are talking about . . . ”
What would happen, they suggest, if we refused to call the class to order,
allowing the study to continue? This is nothing more than a gesture. “What if
I just say, ‘Well, we’re here. Here we are now.’ Rather than announcing that
class has begun, just acknowledge that class began.” 55 This is a small gesture—likely a hard one for a professor—but in this refusal to call the class to
order, what new things and forms might come about, what new connections
might be established and unordered? The professor enters the class and decompletes the lesson.
Harney and Moten thus present us with a radical form of being together in
radical dependency and relationality, but one that, unlike Butler, is infected
with class relations from the beginning. We need our fellow debtors, and our
creditors need us—but we don’t need them. That’s why we don’t forgive our
general debts: they keep us bonded, responsible to and for each other, susceptible to being taken hold of—possessed—by others. Indebtedness is the
binding ontology of studying, it’s that which scatters us as it unites us. Of
course, antagonism, contradiction, and hierarchy, in two words, identity and
capital, structure all of sociality. Thus, there is an important critique to be
leveled at whatever singularity, namely that the concept “begs the question of
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what significance race, gender, sexuality, class and other determinants of
political subjectivity and power have within the context of global biopolitics.” 56 The act of studying within capitalism will always be cut across by
power dynamics and structured by one’s relationship to the means of production. Studying demands things like time and space, things that are not equally
available to everyone.
This does not mean that studying is not always possible, just that the
experience of study will always be different, that capital and identity are
always at play. The whatever has to be thought in relationship to political
economy, capitalism, and colonialism. It is this need that Negri identifies in
Agamben: “Missing in Agamben,” he writes, “is a value that might distinguish between the anarchic lure of the void and the loving construction of the
social.” 57 In their theory of studying, Harney and Moten also lack this value,
leaving studying as an entirely self-organizing and autonomous process. Yet
we have to theorize the act of study within the world as it exists, not as we
wish it to be. We have to, in other words, think through the relationship
between learning, studying, and teaching, and I address this later in the book.
Because there are some debts that we have to keep a close eye on, at least for
the time being, until something changes, at least something like reparations,
at most something like revolution.
NOTES
1. Catherine Mills, The philosophy of Agamben (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 2008), 2.
2. Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A critical introduction (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2009), 19.
3. Giorgio Agamben, Means without end: Notes on politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and
Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996/2000), 7.
4. Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 19.
5. Jean-Luc Nancy, The inoperative community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael
Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
1991), 9.
6. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of a critique of political economy (rough draft),
trans. Martin Nicolaus (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1939/1993), 83.
7. Ibid., 162.
8. Giorgio Agamben, The coming community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1990/1993), 1.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 107.
11. Ibid., 1.
12. Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 162.
13. Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy,” Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 3: 321-322.
14. Giorgio Agamben, The coming community, 67.
15. Ibid., 9-10.
16. Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 163.
17. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected essays in philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller
Rozen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 46.
Studying Whatever
59
18. Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life, trans. Daniel HellerRozen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995/1998), 54.
19. Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 190. For a comprehensive analysis of Agamben’s philosophical relationship to Derrida and deconstruction, see pages 184-191, in which
Durantaye shows how Agamben’s critiques of Derrida appear consistently throughout his
writing.
20. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities, 104.
21. Giorgio Agamben, What is an apparatus? And other essays, trans. David Kishik and
Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 29.
22. Ibid., 31.
23. Ibid., 36.
24. Through The coming community Agamben stresses a positive formulation of whatever
instead of the negative formulations of his other interlocutress (e.g., Nancy’s “community
without community” and Blanchot’s “unavowable” or “negative” community).
25. Giorgio Agamben, The coming community, 19.
26. Alex Murray, Giorgio Agamben (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), 50-51.
27. Jean-Luc Nancy, The inoperative community, 71.
28. Giorgio Agamben, The coming community, 43.
29. Giorgio Agamben, “Giorgio Agamben: Alternative ethics,” August 19, 2011, http://
www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/videos/alternative-ethics/ (accessed October 12, 2012).
30. For more on Agamben’s philosophy of temporality and teleology, see Cesare Casarino,
“Time matters: Marx, Negri, Agamben, and the corporeal,” in Cesare Casarino and Antonio
Negri, In praise of the common: A conversation on philosophy and politics (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
31. Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” in Dan McCall (Ed.), Melville’s short novels (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002).
32. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities, 245.
33. Giorgio Agamben, The coming community, 35, italics added.
34. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities, 179.
35. Ibid., 257.
36. Giorgio Agamben, The idea of prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1985/1995), 65.
37. Gert J. J. Biesta, Beyond learning: Democratic education for a human future (Boulder
and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2006).
38. For critiques of the learning society, see Charles Bingham and Gert J.J. Biesta, Jacques
Rancière: Education, truth, emancipation (London: Continuum, 2010), Gert J.J. Biesta, Good
education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics, democracy (Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers), and Marteen Simons and Jan Masschelein, “The governmentalization of
learning and the assemblage of a learning apparatus,” Educational Theory 58, no. 4: 391-415.
39. Initially Lewis’ intervention locates the learning society as part of neoliberal democracy,
but as his theory of study develops he moves toward a conceptualization of biocapitalism,
drawing on Clayton Pierce, Education in the age of biocapitalism: Optimizing educational life
for a flat world (New York: Palgrave MacMillon, 2013).
40. Tyson Lewis, “Rethinking the learning society: Giorgio Agamben on studying, stupidity, and impotence,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 30, no. 6: 587.
41. Ibid. Later in his work Lewis will be careful to distinguish “im-potentiality” from
“impotentiality.” The former maintains fidelity to the relation between generic and existing
potentiality.
42. See Derek R. Ford, “A pedagogy for space: Teaching, learning, and studying in the
Baltimore Rebellion,” Policy Futures in Education 14, no. 2: 176-193.
43. Tyson E. Lewis, On study: Giorgio Agamben and educational potentiality (New York
and London: Routledge, 2013), 147.
44. Ibid., 45.
45. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities, 179.
46. Tyson E. Lewis, On study, 100.
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Chapter 3
47. Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between innovation and negation, trans. Isabella Bertoletti,
James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 33.
48. Ibid., 76.
49. Ibid., 86.
50. Ibid., 88.
51. Ibid., 94.
52. Annie Dillard, The writing life (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 57.
53. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black
Study (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2013), 17. I should add that for Harney and Moten “politics”
carries a meaning opposite that of my deployment, as politics for them is about capture.
54. Ibid., 61.
55. Ibid., 126.
56. Catherine Mills, The philosophy of Agamben (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 2008), 135-136.
57. Antonio Negri, The porcelain workshop: For a new grammar of politics, trans. Noura
Wedell (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 88.
Chapter Four
The Secret Struggle
Capitalism demands that subjectivity be actualized and ordered according to
an existing or new identity in order to capture the undercommons and make it
circulate according to capital’s logic. How, then, does capital treat alterity?
What is the relationship between the capitalist mode of production and that
which is singular? That there is something other than—beyond, perhaps—
what we can articulate and express is undeniable. As Samuel D. Rocha
writes, “we constantly find ourselves being things that we do not know. In
fact, to be a human person is, in a very real sense, to not know what or who
one is.” 1 Singularity and subjectivity always exist beyond the word. Yet
education has a sordid affair with identity, and this is nowhere as evident
than in calls for voice, dialogue, discussion, and representation. In the classroom, especially the critical ones, we are constantly being asked to define
and reveal ourselves, who we are and what it is that we think.
There is a way in which the call for voice and dialogue accompanies
capital’s forced reduction of the subject to an identity and a way in which a
certain terror haunts pedagogical formulations that insist on expression. To
get at this, I want to turn in these next few chapters to the thought of JeanFrançois Lyotard. It is Lyotard, I proffer, who—with a little help—can provide crucial insights into the relationship between the capitalist mode of
production, subjectivity, and democracy. Further, although Lyotard broke
with marxism in 1966 when he left Pouvoir Ouvrier (Workers’ Power), we
can excavate from within his work modes of being and of being together that
are resolutely and irreducibly antagonistic and incommensurable with the
rule of capital. 2 Lyotard conjures up a particular operation of resistance that
is already present within and between subjectivities today, although it is
under constant suppression; a kind of mute, insurgent, protagonistic life.
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Chapter 4
EDUCATION AND THE SYSTEM
Throughout the 1990s there was a flurry of debate in education dedicated to
examining, problematizing, critiquing, applying, and opposing both the postmodern and the thought of Lyotard from a variety of standpoints. 3 This
literature, even at its peak, tended to focus on only a select few works of
Lyotard’s, most notably The Postmodern Condition and The Differend. The
former book in particular has dominated educational discourse on Lyotard,
which is not surprising given that its subtitle is “a report on knowledge,” and
it deals fairly explicitly with education (it was actually a report—penned by a
philosopher but not a philosophical text—commissioned by the Conseil des
Universitiés of the Quebec government). Further, this literature tended only
to focus on a particular notion of the postmodern—the postmodern as a
historical period defined by the collapse of grand narratives. And then, it
seems, radio silence. Writing in 2006, Richard Edwards noted, “All is relatively quiet on the postmodern front line.” 4
One of the concepts developed in The Postmodern Condition that is most
directly linked to education is performativity, a criterion and organizing principle that is brought about through the delegitimation of grand narratives as
well as developments in technology, science, and information production,
distribution, and consumption. Under performativity, “the role of knowledge
becomes that of contributing to the best efficiency and effectiveness of a
system . . . and the worthwhileness or value of the knowledge is evaluated on
that basis.” 5 Knowledge is transformed from a use-value into an exchangevalue; it “ceases to be an end in itself.” 6 The search for truth is eclipsed by
the search for the greatest effectiveness for the system. Writing about institutions of higher learning, Lyotard writes that their function will be subsumed
entirely under the performativity criterion, that their operation will be driven
entirely by the needs of the system (read: the market), and their function will
be to supply that system with not only the appropriate kinds of labor-power,
but also the appropriate kinds of information, data, and technologies of analysis.
Bill Readings took on this idea in his book The University in Ruins, in
which he postulates the contemporary institution of higher learning as the
“university of excellence.” In the university of excellence “[w]hat gets taught
or researched matters less than the fact that it be excellently taught or researched.” 7 What could be wrong with doing something excellently? The
problem lies in the fact that excellency itself is devoid of content, and it
instead always has to be judged in relation to another goal, an external
referent. One can’t use the same metric when determining if an essay and a
piece of furniture are excellent. Questions of truth and the idea that what we
should learn and how we should learn it—let alone questions about what
education actually is—are completely brushed aside in this scenario, or, more
The Secret Struggle
63
accurately, are determined solely by business elites and the logic of capital.
Anyone in higher education, at least in the imperialist countries, can readily
attest to this reality.
Yet whereas Readings argues that the university has become a closed
system and that it has taken on the logic of the corporation and of bureaucracy toward its own ends, I hold that the university certainly still has important
ideological work to do and thus that its relationship to the nation-state and
the economic regime is still paramount. 8 The reason, after all, that ethnic
studies and radical programs are under attack is not just that they are not
profitable for the institution—there is actually a good demand for them—but
because they are ideological and political threats to the capitalist mode of
production as a whole. Thus, “excellency” is really a code word for “efficiency.”
The relationship between knowledge, performativity, and the system is
complex and, as Robin Usher demonstrates, contradictory. On the one hand,
knowledge is “pulled towards closure and locked in to an economy of the
same” while, on the other hand, it is increasingly “marked by an economy of
difference, a greater diversity and complexity.” 9 Usher correctly shows that
“it is precisely in conditions of decentredness that performativity flourishes,” 10 but he mistakenly claims that Lyotard did not conceptualize the
importance of decentredness. In fact, Lyotard insists that “the system . . .
arouses disparities, it solicits divergences.” 11 My point here is not to jab at
Usher for getting Lyotard wrong, as if that in itself had any significance, but
rather to point out how a limited understanding of Lyotard’s “system” has
become commonplace in education (and academia more generally). And this
limited understanding, which often ventures into complete misunderstanding,
is because of an almost exclusive focus on The Postmodern Condition, and
hence a key reason why we need to move beyond that particular text. 12
POOR MARIE
Education is not only the process through which subjects are brought into the
system but also where the system is adjusted and optimized by means of
signifiable differences. The system demands that differences be represented
and signified, for only then can they contribute to the maximization of the
system’s functioning. Unspoken thoughts and unpublished papers are quite
useless for the system. If, following Readings, we take the university as an
example, we find that “the university as an institution can deal with all kinds
of knowledge, even oppositional ones, so as to make them circulate to the
benefit of the system as a whole.” 13 Again, because Readings conceives of
the university as a self-enclosed system, he exaggerates this point. There are
absolutely knowledges that the university can’t tolerate because of its tight
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Chapter 4
link to the nation-state, capitalism, and liberal imperialism. Consider the
firing of Palestinian scholar Steven Salaita from the University of Illinois
Chicago in 2014 as a prime example. For the crime of tweeting pro-Palestinian remarks during Israel’s savage bombing campaign of Gaza that summer,
he was fired from the university (at which he was scheduled to begin teaching in two weeks). There are limits to oppositional knowledges within the
university. Or, rather, perhaps Readings’ proclamation reveals that what
passes as “oppositional” or “radical” in the university isn’t quite so.
Nevertheless, there is certainly a marketplace for difference. Take Lyotard’s tale of Marie, a French academic who travels to Japan to deliver a
lecture at a conference. As and after she travels, Marie reflects on her role as
cultural capital, her role as a singularity on the capitalist marketplace. During
the discussion and answer period at her lecture, she asks herself, “Have I
been ‘other’ enough? . . . Answer politely, explain, mark your alterity, don’t
let yourself be brought back to what is well known, defend your difference.” 14 In this internal dialogue we can glimpse the relationship between the
economy of the same and the economy of the different, and we can see that
both have the sign in common. 15 And this clarifies something for us: the
performativity of the system—the market—thrives on a particular kind of
difference: a difference that can and must be brought to signification. Thus,
while many have noted that today capitalism thrives off of individuality,
difference, and the new, they have missed the mark that Lyotard addresses:
alterity has to be articulated and expressed.
Education is where subjects are brought into the system and where the
system is adjusted—and even optimized—by means of signifiable differences. In the critical classroom, too, we learn that we must be brought to
signification. Our radical difference is only useful if we speak it, journal it,
blog it, stage a debate, and so on. In this, critical pedagogy contributes to the
maximization of the system’s functioning. In other words, the key factor for
the system is the constant generation of subjectivities, desires, and needs that
can respond to and drive the needs of the global market. More of the same,
more of the different, more of the critical, more of the radical. A postmodern
academic is as good as any other. It doesn’t matter—more is always better.
As Marie quips to herself about the academic marketplace, “Why all this
cultural busyness, colloquia, interviews, seminars? Just so we can be sure
we’re all saying the same thing. About what, then? About alterity.” 16 The
system can accommodate (most) oppositional knowledges provided that they
are expressed in and through new articles, journals, conferences, and
books—like this one. And so Marie wrestles with how “postmodernism has
become a part of cultural capital, a sort of slogan for the commodified,
institutionalized talk of the other, of becoming open to the other, experiencing difference,” the idea of which “is not even different anymore, but the
most predictable, least revolutionary thing one can say.” 17
The Secret Struggle
65
To be sure, while the system creates and thrives off of both sameness and
difference, not any sort of difference is or will be acceptable. Take the
concept of multiculturalism as an example of the coinciding of differences:
this form “is agreeable to it [the system] but under the condition of an
agreement concerning the rules of disagreement. This is what is called consensus.” 18 As Michael Peters puts it, “consensus can only be established on
the basis of acts of exclusion.” 19 Peters here is referring to Lyotard’s book on
the differend, which examines the relationship between difference and the
system. At the basis of the book is the phrase regimen. Each phrase regimen
consists of rules for linking phrases (sentences) together. Thus, phrase regimens such as “reasoning, knowing, describing, recounting, questioning,
showing, ordering, etc.” all have different rules. 20 One phrase regimen cannot be translated into another, but two or more phrase regimens can be linked
together according to a genre of discourse, which “supplies a set of possible
phrases, each arising from some phrase regimen.” 21 A differend is a conflict
that arises between two or more parties “where the plaintiff is divested of the
means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim.” 22
Strictly speaking, a differend occurs between either phrase regimens or
discourses where there are not only different but incommensurable stakes
and rules; a wrong for one party is untranslatable into the other party’s idiom;
consensus is impossible. This incommensurability, however, runs counter to
the performative demands of the system. In the face of this incommensurable
heterogeneity the system imposes silences. Lyotard refers to this silencing as
terror:
By terror I mean the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language game. . . . He is silenced or consents, not
because he has been refuted, but because his ability to participate has been
threatened. . . . The decision makers’ arrogance . . . consists in the exercise of
terror. It says: “Adapt your aspirations to our ends—or else.” 23
Difference is acceptable, encouraged, even necessitated. Marie insists on and
defends her difference; her honorarium depends on it! But not any kind of
difference will do. The differences must be reconcilable with the system.
This all begs—or should beg—the question: What is “the system?” Usher
believes that it doesn’t matter for Lyotard, that all systems are the same. But
Lyotard doesn’t write of systems. He writes of the system. And he actually
defines this system in at least two ways: “liberal, imperialist capitalism” 24
and “liberal democratic.” 25 True, Lyotard acknowledges that other systems
have existed, and he does not take aim at imperialist, capitalist, liberal democracies in order to assert a different type of order—and this is simultaneously the problem and promise of his thought. But in order to engage Lyotard
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we have to have an understanding of his conception of the system, and why
he feels so compelled to write about and against it.
Liberal democracy, so Lyotard contends in “A Postmodern Fable,” is the
result of the earth’s development. It all started with the dispersion and grouping of energies into celestial bodies. In one of these bodies—the Milky
Way—a star known as the Sun, in conjunction with the chance assembling of
energy types on a planet known as Earth, created the conditions for the
emergence of cells. Cells reproduced themselves through division. “This is
how life and death were born. As opposed to molecules, living systems [i.e.,
cells] were obligated, in order to survive, to consume external energy.” 26
Sexual reproduction furthered the Earth’s development and contributed to the
greater complexification of the planet, for the offspring of this reproductive
process were more distinct from their forebearers than the offspring of the
fission reproductive process. This is where Darwin enters and takes over, for
a bit. And then there was the development of symbolic language, which
allowed humans to reflect on and plan their thinking and doing, making both
more efficient, even “excellent.” Survival and reproduction are predicated on
the ability to regulate disruptions, but without those disruptions development
would cease. As it is for social life so too it is for political and economic life:
After a time, it happened that the systems labeled liberal democratic showed
themselves to be the most appropriate at exercising these regulations. They in
effect left the control programs open to debate, they in principle allowed each
unity to accede to decision functions. . . . This flexibility turned out in the long
run to be more efficient than the rigid fixation of roles in stable hierarchies. . . .
Of course, there thus resulted frequent crises that were sometimes dangerous
for the survival of these systems. But, on the whole, the performativity of the
latter found itself increased. This process was called progress. It induced an
eschatological representation of the history of human systems. 27
Development depends on both disruption and regulation. Development
would stop were it not for instability, crisis, decentredness. Performativity
requires difference, contradiction, and complexification. “Development is a
kind of negative entropy proceeding by complexification,” as it were. 28
Think of just how productive economic crises can be for capitalism. Crises are capitalism’s saving grace. While such crises can threaten the very
core of capitalism, “no matter how disruptive and dysfunctional” they are,
they can be enormously helpful: “The mergers, takeovers, and bankruptcies
as well as general devaluation (of commodities, labor power, machinery,
money) and destruction of capital (variable as well as constant) that accompany crises also prepare the ground for a new phase of capitalist development.” 29 Or we can think back to chapter one and our discussion of the
transition from the industrial to the immaterial era of capitalism. We noted
that the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and the crises of overproduction
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and overaccumulation usher in the immaterial era, causing capital to search
for new energies, new forms of labor-power, and new commodities. Lyotard’s writing on the system, however, isn’t so much concerned with its
economic component as it is with its political and social mode: democracy.
LIFE IN SECRET
In “The General Line,” another of his postmodern fables, Lyotard writes that
the subject lives two kinds of existence: the general life and the secret life.
He makes this distinction by drawing on Russian author Nina Berberova’s
book The Revolt. “From the earliest days of my youth,” the book’s narrator
writes,
I had had the notion that every person has his own no-man’s-land, a domain
that is his and his alone. The life everyone sees is one thing; the other belongs
to the individual, and it is none of anyone else’s business. By that in no way do
I mean to imply that, from an ethical standpoint, one is moral and the other
amoral . . . but man lives at intervals unchecked, in freedom and in private,
alone or with someone. . . . They may be a joy or a necessity, or a habit, but
they are crucial to demarcating any sort of “general line.” 30
The general line cuts betwixt and between the general life and the secret life.
The general life is the life of the subject that is exposed, the public life that
speaks, engages in deliberation and in civil society, the life that is lived and
articulated, as Butler might say, through norms, language, and discourse.
The secret life, by contrast, is the subject’s “no-man’s-land,” an internal
alterity, an intensive, interior otherness that is “utterly other than ‘the others;’” 31 an inhuman region upon which the human depends. Butler would call
this the subject’s self-opacity, and it is opaque precisely because it resists and
exceeds representation through language and discourse. But this life isn’t
trapped within the individual nor is it pre-social. The secret life is not private
nor is it lived only in solitude. “There is room for several in the second life,
me, you, the other.” 32 In fact, the secret life exceeds the self, and this is what
is meant by a “no-man’s-land”: it’s a land beyond the self, from which the
self emerges, and upon and into which the self folds back. One can’t, then,
properly speaking, have knowledge of this secret life, instead of knowing this
life we encounter it, we bear witness to it. Such is the case because the secret
eclipses and resists knowledge, identity, codification, symbolization, signification, and representation. The secret is, by definition, non-communicable. If
you and I have a secret together, it is not just that we choose not to communicate it. If it is truly a secret we cannot communicate it, at least not without
reducing and, finally, betraying it. We can—and this point is crucial—communicate with each other in the secret life. We share the secret.
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How can we enter this secret life, how can we open ourselves up to the
encounter? The aesthetic experience is a privileged means for accessing this
life of ours, whether it be the production of art or the engagement in the
world as a work of art. What makes a thing a work of art and not, say, a work
of technology or science, is that there is something in the work of art that is
totally irreducible to a concept. Art is not about representing some truth or
some fact, about communicating some narrative. In fact, art is exactly that
which is communicable without a concept. Indeed, there is something in art
that escapes the artist herself. Music, for example, “is not the author’s doing.
The work of the author is to let the sound make a gesture that seems to
surpass the audible and to consign its trace in the space-time-sound that
determines the field of audibility.” 33
The secret life seizes us in these moments, and it is paramount that in
order to be seized by it we are open to the beyond of representation. “What
happens to us” in the experience of the work of art, “is not at all something
we have first controlled, programmed, grasped by a concept. . . . How can it
test us if we already know, or if we can know—of what, with what, for what,
it is done?” 34 And it is for this reason that we engage in artistic practice in the
first place. It is also why, Lyotard says, we write: “Writing is one of the
means, necessarily risky, of making an encounter. One writes because one
does not know what one has to say.” 35 Without this encounter, one cannot
say anything radically new. As Margret Grebowicz puts it, the secret life, “as
an event, as something that simply happens (rather than being deployed by a
subject) . . . is the moment of discursive passivity, a stupor that makes
listening possible. Only following this silence or stupor am I able to say
something.” 36 Thus, in this encounter we are outside, beyond, and beneath
ourselves; we are suspended and held hostage in this encounter.
One example of art that gestures toward and bears witness to the secret
life that Lyotard offers his readers is the work of Barnett Newman, an abstract expressionist painter and aesthetic theorist. Working in the 1950s in
New York City, Barnett’s first exhibit shocked even those whom Newman
had won over theoretically for the reason that his works included in the show
“appeared to push the notion of abstraction to a limit that rivaled such works
as Malevich’s infamous squares.” 37 Newman’s paintings do not seek to represent anything. In fact, as Lyotard writes, Newman’s “message is the presentation, but it presents nothing; it is, that is, presence.” 38 Another way that
we could put this paradox: it is the presentation of the secret, a communication of the incommunicable.
One of Newman’s signature features is what he called the “zip,” a vertical
line—or a series of vertical lines—painted across the canvas. Mary Slaughter
describes one such painting, “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III,” in
the following way: this work “is approximately one meter by two meters. On
the left edge there is a thin strip of bright yellow, on the right edge a some-
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what wider strip of darkish blue. A vast expanse of bright orange-red
stretches between them.” 39 Newman’s art is inductive, not deductive. One
doesn’t need to know anything to engage with the painting. There is no
reference to other works of art, no reference to history, to culture, and so on.
Interestingly, a lot of people think that they can’t engage something that is
abstract, believing that they don’t “understand” the abstract artwork. 40 Art
like Newman’s is not about understanding, and is all about experiencing.
Lyotard argues that what we experience in a Newman painting is the instant,
time as event. We don’t experience the infinite expanse, or the time beyond,
nor do we anticipate the future or recall the past. Placed in front of Newman’s painting we undergo the experience of “the occurrence, the moment
which has arrived.” 41
Another set of works that attract Lyotard’s attention is Newman’s famous
Stations of the Cross exhibit at the Guggenheim in 1966. Newman’s Stations
was a reworking of the traditional religious series—also known as Via Dolorosa or Way of Sorrows—which documents fourteen moments before the
crucifixion of Christ. Accompanying the images are prayers that are supposed to be said or thought as one moves through the exhibit in chronological
order, contemplating each moment. Newman’s rendition contains fourteen
images, yet the chronology and representation are done away with. There is
no depiction of Christ, no linear progression, no sense of duration. Each
image in Newman’s Stations is a large black and white painted canvas with a
series of vertical zips. In the text accompanying these Stations, Newman
writes, “Why did you forsake me? Why forsake me? To what purpose? Why?
This is the Passion. . . . Not the terrible walk up the Via Dolorosa, but the
question that has no answer.” 42 Instead of an imperative to pursue knowledge, Newman invites us to be, and this is the root of another set of canvases,
one of which—Be II—was shown alongside the Stations in 1966.
Be II is, as Slaughter describes it, “white with a cadmium red zip on one
side and ragged black one on the other.” 43 The painting sits alongside the
Stations and it can be seen as the answer to the problem presented by the
series: what to do without the guarantee of knowledge, other than, that is, to
wait for the Messiah? The answer is, as Lyotard puts it quite simply, to be:
It has to be understood that this Be is not concerned with the resurrection in the
sense of the Christian mystery, but with the recurrence of a prescription emanating from silence or from the void, and which perpetuates the passion by
reiterating it from its beginnings. When we have been abandoned by meaning,
the artist has a professional duty to bear witness that there is, to respond to the
order to be. The painting becomes evidence, and it is fitting that it should not
offer anything that has to be deciphered, still less interpreted. 44
The fact that the average onlooker is confused at the sight of an abstract
painting is telling of just how deep the demand for knowledge and represen-
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tation runs, for how thoroughly engrained the logic of learning is in capitalist
subjectivity. It must mean something, what does it mean? To what does it
refer? It’s not saying anything! It has to speak! If some predetermined meaning is not being communicated then we dismiss the artwork as self-indulgent
or irrelevant. But if we can move past these questions and accept the unsettling command to “just be,” we can perhaps open ourselves up to the encounter with that common internal alterity that Lyotard calls the secret life, to that
which is an opening of the act of study.
NOTES
1. Samuel D. Rocha, Folk phenomenology: Education, study, and the human person (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2015), 5.
2. I am tempted to say that Lyotard critiqued marxism in much of his work, but Lyotard
himself wrote early on that “there is no need to criticize Marx, and even if we do criticize him,
it must be understood that it is in no way a critique: we have already said and repeated that we
laugh at critique, since it is to maintain oneself in the field of the criticized thing and in the
dogmatic, indeed paranoiac, relation of knowledge.” Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal economy, trans. Lain Hamilton Grant (London and New York: Continuum, 1974/2004), 94.
3. See Michael Peters (Ed.), Education and the postmodern condition (Westport: Bergin &
Garvey, 1995) and Elizabeth Ellsworth, Teaching positions: Difference, pedagogy, and the
politics of address (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997). There was also a 2006 special
issue of Studies in Philosophy and Education 25, no. 4, dedicated to a “retrospect” of these
debates. For more a more general take on the “postmodern,” see David Harvey, The condition
of postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
4. Richard Edwards, “All quiet on the postmodern front”? Studies in Philosophy and Education 25, no. 4: 274.
5. Robin Usher, “Lyotard’s performance,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 25, no. 4:
281.
6. Jean-François Lyotard, The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
1984), 50.
7. Bill Readings, The university in ruins (Cambridge and London: Harvard University
Press, 1996), 13. Readings writes that Syracuse University (where he worked and where I did
my graduate work) was a prime example of such a university: “[Syracuse University] does have
the ambition of being entirely market driven, a notion that the administration called ‘The
Pursuit of Excellence.’ Hence the then-Chancellor, Melvin Eggers, repeatedly characterized
Syracuse as an aggressive institution that modeled itself on the corporation rather than clinging
to ivy-covered walls,” p. 10.
8. “However,” Readings writes, “the contemporary University of Excellence should now
be understood as a bureaucratic system whose internal regulation is entirely self-interested
without regard to wider ideological imperatives,” 40.
9. Robin Usher, “Lyotard’s performance,” 281.
10. Ibid., 283.
11. Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodern fables, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993/1997), 199.
12. The postmodern condition is the only work of Lyotard’s that Usher cites in his article.
13. Bill Readings, “From emancipation to obligation: Sketch for a heteronomous politics of
education,” in Michael Peters (Ed.), Education and the postmodern condition (Westport and
London: Bergin & Garvey, 1995), 205.
14. Ibid., 12.
15. Robin Usher, “Lyotard’s performance.”
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71
16. Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodern fables, 6.
17. Margret Grebowicz, “‘Marie goes to Japan’: Thinking, praxis, and the possibility of the
new,” Janus Head 8, no. 2: 422.
18. Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodern fables, 199.
19. Michael A. Peters, “Lyotard, nihilism and education,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 25, no. 4: 311.
20. Jean-François Lyotard, The differend: Phrases in dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1983/1988).
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 9.
23. Jean-François Lyotard, The postmodern condition, 63-64.
24. Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodern fables, 199.
25. Ibid., 89.
26. Ibid., 86.
27. Ibid., 90.
28. Jean-François Lyotard, “Anamnesis: Of the visible,” Theory, Culture & Society 21, no.
1: 117.
29. Neil Smith, Uneven development: Nature, capital, and the production of space (Athens
and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1984/2008), 170.
30. Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodern fables, 115-116.
31. Ibid., 121.
32. Ibid., 116.
33. Ibid., 217.
34. Jean-François Lyotard, The inhuman: Reflections on time, trans. Geoffery Bennington
and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988/1991), 111.
35. Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodern fables, 120.
36. Margret Grebowicz, Why internet porn matters (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2013), 24.
37. Simon Malpas, “Sublime ascesis: Lyotard, art and the event,” Angelaki: Journal of the
Theoretical Humanities 7, no. 1: 202. Referred to in this passage are a series of paintings by
Kazimir Malevich, a Russian painter in the early twentieth century. The most famous in this
series, “The Black Square,” was a canvas with a large black square surrounded by a smaller
white frame, with both the square and the frame painted with oil.
38. Jean-François Lyotard, The inhuman, 81.
39. Mary Slaughter, “The arc and the zip: Deleuze and Lyotard on art,” Law and Critique
15, no. 3: 253-254.
40. Thanks to Sarah Pfohl for this insight.
41. Jean-François Lyotard, The inhuman, 79.
42. Barnett Newman, “Catalog statement for Barnett Newman: Stations of the Cross,” in
John P. O’Neill (Ed.), Barnett Newman: Selected writings and interviews (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992), 188.
43. Mary Slaughter, “The arc and the zip,” 255.
44. Jean-François Lyotard, The inhuman, 88.
Chapter Five
The Terror of Democracy
In order to move past these demands for representation and narrativity, in
order to open ourselves up to the secret life and to the act of studying, it’s
helpful to understand the political thrust behind these demands. This second
life is always present and never eliminable, and for this reason it is under
constant attack. Irreducible resistance. This attack, however, doesn’t appear
as a frontal assault. We can’t see the battalions forming on the horizon. No,
the attack is much more subtle; inconspicuous and omnipresent. Actually, we
call for the attack ourselves. We participate in it each time we dismiss a work
as “too theoretical” or “abstract.” In fact, we assemble protests and demonstrations in response to the call to attack the secret life. The attack is already
there, but we seem to want more of it.
This past year I was at a protest and march in Philadelphia that was called
to respond to a recent wave of anti-refugee sentiment in the United States and
other Western countries. This recent wave was sparked by the scores of
refugees fleeing the crisis in Syria, a crisis that has been sparked and fueled
by the very countries to which the refugees have been fleeing. It was a fairly
small action, even for Philadelphia’s standards, with perhaps about seventyfive people at the rally, and with half of that number leaving as we started
marching (and as the temperature started to drop). During the march, somewhere between the stop at the statue of Frank Rizzo and the Israeli Embassy,
someone started in with this quite popular chant: “Show me what democracy
looks like! This is what democracy looks like!” 1 I’ve been at countless political actions at which this chant has filled the air, and while I always cringe
when it begins and begrudgingly join in, for some reason it seemed particularly odd, or appropriate, that day.
I was at the back of the march chatting with a few comrades. We were
right in front of the rear police line. Earlier in the week there had been an
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attack in France that was designated as a terror attack, and so the Philadelphia cops had an even bigger showing than they usually did. They outnumbered us at least 2:1. They even had two helicopters hovering above us. And
as I chanted these words with the thirty or so protesters and the dozens of
cops, I thought to myself, “Yes, this is exactly what democracy looks like.”
Not only does democracy allow for one to express oneself, it compels this
expression. It needs it, even as it insists on dispatching police to make sure
that this expression takes a particular form and doesn’t interrupt the flow of
commerce (the circulation of values). And here we are, demanding more of
it. This happens not only in social movements, but also in those forms of
pedagogy that seek to influence social movements.
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT!
It’s not that there is anything wrong with or oppressive about expression in
general. Neither is there anything wrong with protests. The general life needs
to be lived, too, and politics necessarily takes place—at least in part—in the
streets and in the public. The problem arises when the general life seeks to
take over the secret life, and that is Lyotard’s critique of democracy. As
Grebowicz puts it,
The democratic state denies the subject her secret existence . . . by pressuring
her to exert her rights at all times, to be exhaustively, absolutely public. One
must be crazy not to exercise the rights one has! “Why didn’t you do this, do
that? You had the right!” 2
Democracy knows that there is an excess to the subject, that there is always
something that will escape and resist the general life, the public life, the civic
life.
There is an irreducible antagonism between the secret life and democracy,
for democracy requires transparency, visibility, communication, and deliberation. Everything must be subject to discussion, and so all sorts of “heavy
pressures are put on silence, to give birth to expression.” 3 In a democracy
there is perhaps no greater insult than to be called “undemocratic” or “nontransparent.”
In order to get at this secret life, democracy works on fashioning expressive subjects, subjects that won’t and don’t shut up, subjects that compel
themselves and others to communicate, to express themselves. We are all
“stationed on the edge of ourselves, turned toward the outside, benevolent,
ready to listen and to speak, to dispute, to protest, to explain ourselves.” 4
Perhaps most emblematic of this is the talk show television genre. Here, we
showcase our most intimate problems, subjecting our bodies and our lives to
the general life and the public arena, discussing our relationship problems,
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75
our concerns about our bodies, and so on. Or consider the reality television
genre, in which the very relations that make up people are captured on
camera and broadcast to the public, who then consumes them and participates in the destruction of the secret, tweeting out its details and voicing our
own opinions, expressing ourselves in relation to their expression. And isn’t
this the logic of social media? There is a common joke that goes, “If it hasn’t
been posted on Facebook it didn’t really happen.” Couldn’t we translate that
as “If it hasn’t been brought into the general life it’s not real?” And isn’t this
our own participation in the attack on the secret life? Or what about PostSecret, which describes itself as “an ongoing community art project where
people mail in their secrets.” 5 PostSecret started as a weekly blog in 2005
and a comments section was added to the website two years later. Over the
years it blossomed into a series of phone apps, art exhibits, publications, and
international variants on the theme. Our secrets are “capitalized swiftly and
efficiently,” they are “put into circuits . . . transcribed into bits of information.” 6
Grebowicz has quite brilliantly brought this Lyotardian analysis to bear
on contemporary politics in several ways that I find illuminating and that
help convey how important this analysis is for communist practice, two of
which I examine here. First, in an article in Hypatia and then in a short book,
she argues that the truest exemplar of the terror of democracy is internet
pornography. There is a qualitative shift in pornography with internet distribution because pornography is no longer secret, it instead founds a community. As such, she argues, “it should come as no surprise that more and more
pornography websites are devoted to free file-sharing, where registered users
upload and download videos, discuss, and rank them, all of this riding on a
logic of democratization and information-sharing.” 7 There are websites that
take it further, in which “not only do users ‘show themselves’; they also
show second-order information about the consumption of what is being
shown (how many hits, when it was viewed most recently, and so on) and its
reception (thumbs up or down).” 8 The pornography community is the truest
democratic community possible for the reason that it is organized around the
expression of every last secret and the magnification of every secret’s detail.
No pornographic practices, no matter how queer or transgressive, respect
alterity and allow for the secret. There is no critical pornographic practice
that is possible, only more of the same.
Second, Grebowicz demonstrates how seemingly radical projects work to
foreclose the possibility of real politics by further encroaching on the secret
life. In an essay on the environmentalist movement, she points out how the
sustainability project has worked to impinge on the secret life of nature. 9
Whereas some ecological activism is predicated on the return to an originary
(and imagined) state of Nature, a time before human interruption, there is a
newer trend that denounces this return and embraces nature as a political
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thing. Bruno Latour, representing this second trend, argues that nature is no
less of a construct than society. 10 There is no pre-social nature to which we
can return, and in order to engage in environmental politics at all we have to
refashion our understanding of nature again and again, for nature is an actant
that interacts with and is in competition with other actants and their discourses. The voice of nature must be added to the discussion:
Democracy can only be conceived if it can freely traverse the now dismantled
border between science and politics, in order to add a new series of voices to
the discussion, voices that would have been inaudible up to now, although
their clamor pretended to override the debate: the voices of nonhumans. To
limit the discussion to humans, their interests, their subjectivities, and their
rights, will appear as strange a few years from now as having denied the right
to vote of slaves, poor people, or women. 11
We have to listen to nature and take account of its secrets. Politics for Latour
requires a heightened communicability in which every thing speaks. This
“babbling democracy,” Grebowicz writes, “risks a certain violence.” 12 In
making nature speak, Latour’s ecological politics legitimates and contributes
to the complexification that the system demands.
The system—liberal, imperialist capitalism—thrives on diversification
and instability. It demands differences. It expands itself by accommodating
these differences and by adjudicating between them. Before this happens,
however, differences must be brought to signification. Publish your differences or perish! This is a terror that is prior to the terror of silencing: the
terror of “bring[ing] something you don’t understand to ‘signify’ by means
you don’t control.” 13
SIGNS, MACHINES, AND THE EXPRESSIVE SUBJECT
Maurizio Lazzarato’s recent work on capitalism and the production of subjectivity can contribute to our understanding of the secret life and its rearguard actions against democracy. Further, it can deepen our understanding of
the connection between democracy and capitalism. Taking up the largely
underappreciated work of Felix Guattari—who has unfortunately been overshadowed by his interlocutor, Gilles Deleuze—Lazzarato studies two key
aspects of the capitalist production of subjectivity: social subjection and
machinic enslavement.
Social subjection is that with which we are most familiar; it is the process
of the distribution of identities and roles within the capitalist order, a process
that is of course continual and dynamic. This is accomplished via the subject’s relation to external actions, in which external forces compel us to act
and be in certain ways. The coercive law of competition, for example, com-
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77
pels the capitalist to act as nothing more nor less than the personification of
capital, whatever his intentions are, even if he is “a model citizen, perhaps a
member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.” 14 Or consider the ways that high-stakes testing regimes and schemes that tie teacher
pay to student test scores (or, in my case, student evaluations), condition
one’s identity as a teacher. In both of these cases, external things structure a
subject’s identity. Linguistics, semiotics, and representational forms of communication more generally are the operators of social subjection.
Machinic enslavement, by contrast, is a more radical form of subjectification in which the subject is desubjectified within and by an ordered set of
relations; in this process “we constitute mere inputs and outputs, a point of
conjunction or disjunction in the economic, social, or communicational process governed by enslavement.” 15 If in social subjection the subject is poised
as a more or less intentionally relating thing (the capitalist can in fact choose
not to be a capitalist, and can theoretically even join the ranks of the proletarian party), then in machinic enslavement the subject finds itself a priori in an
assemblage of relations that act immediately upon the subject. For Deleuze
and Guattari, machinic enslavement exists “when human beings themselves
are constituent pieces of a machine that they compose among themselves and
with other things (animals, tools), under the control and direction of a higher
unity.” 16 Guattari gives the example of driving a car. When one gets behind
the wheel, one drives “without thinking about it, without engaging reflexive
consciousness, without speaking or representing what one does. We are
guided by the car’s machinic assemblage.” 17 It is only when something goes
wrong—when there is an event, as such—that “the individuated subject
comes into play.” 18
Machinic enslavement occurs not through language and semiotics but
through what Guattari calls asignifying semiotics, which include “stock listings, currencies, corporate accounting, national budgets, computer langauges, mathematics, scientific functions and equations as well as . . . music,
art, etc.” 19 These asignifying semiotics act on and through us in ways that
precede and exceed our consciousness. These semiotics “do not speak but
function.” 20 As an illustration of the process of machinic enslavement, Lazzarato presents the stockbroker. Standing on the market floor or seated in a
corporate office, the stockbroker’s movements take place as automatically as
the car driver’s:
Mathematical systems, data banks, interconnected computer networks, telephone networks, and so on, are part of the financier’s subjectivity. Through
him, groups, lobbies, interested economic and political parties, and schools of
thought act and express themselves. . . . Instead of a rational subject who
controls information and his choices, homo economicus is a mere terminal of
asignifying, symbolic, and signifying semiotics and of non-linguistic constituents which for the most part escape his awareness. 21
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We could view the teacher’s subjectivity similarly, as a subjectivity through
which a network of scripted curricula, ranking systems, value added metric
analyses, standardized tests, and so on, act. Of course, neither the teacher nor
the stockbroker are machines or unconscious agents, for subjectification and
desubjectification, social subjection and machinic enslavement, are not mutually exclusive but are heterogeneous. And this leads us directly to the
problem for Lazzarato: capitalism acts on both levels simultaneously, but
critical theory today seems only to focus on subjection. Like Agamben, Lazzarato seems to take learning for granted—and so does, it seems, Guattari.
No one gets behind the wheel of a car and is at one with the car. No, we learn
to drive, just like we learn to trade stocks. Thus, it is not without good reason
that theory has focused on subjection, for it is always prior to enslavement.
Lazzarato nonetheless gives us another window on the constitution of our
subjectivity and the economic aspect of the general life’s offensive. Not only
is our no-man’s land attacked and repressed by democracy, but it is also
invaded by asignifying semiotics, by the operation of currencies and capitalist value metrics. There is so much babbling going on that inclusion into the
order isn’t the problem at all. “Access to these shared semiotics is not only
not denied,” he writes, “it is imperative: one must join in, one must take an
active part . . . a shortage of speech is not the problem but rather its overabundance, the consensus and conformism that its circulation presupposes
and produces.” 22 Consider this insight from Christian Marazzi: “if the
world’s entire population (6 billion people) were to speak continuously for a
whole year, all of the words pronounced could be transmitted in just a few
hours by the potential capacity of telecommunications systems produced
between 1996 and 2000.” 23 There is, it seems, almost no limit to the amount
of babbling that capital can absorb; its demand is in principle impossible to
satisfy.
THE DEMOCRATIC PROJECT OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
(AND ITS CONSPIRING CRITICS)
This demand for representation runs deep, so deep that it permeates even the
most “critical” and “radical” forms of pedagogy. In fact, both critical pedagogy and its more radical critics have been romanced into fighting democracy’s
battle against the secret life, and they have served a crucial role by articulating this battle in favorable “progressive” terminology. In doing so, these
pedagogies have both obscured and reinforced the terror of democracy.
What Lyotard helps us grasp specifically is the very serious dangerousness of the public project of critical pedagogy. Giroux is no doubt the main
proponent of this particular project, which weds publicness, identity, and
democracy in a tight package. 24 Consider one of his driving questions: “What
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pedagogical projects, resources, and practices,” he asks, “can be put into
place that would convey to students the vital importance of public time and
its attendant culture of questioning as an essential step towards self-representation, agency, and a substantive democracy?” 25 This question is closely
connected to his project of public pedagogy in general, which locates culture
as
the site where exchange and dialogue become crucial as an affirmation of a
democratically configured space of the social in which the political is actually
taken up and lived out through a variety of intimate relations and social formations. 26
On Giroux’s own terms this project is entirely internally consistent. Democracy absolutely requires self-representation and agency, and the more that
politics and intimacy relate, the greater the quality of democracy. Absolute
democracy is absolute transparency, absolute nakedness.
And the critical pedagogue, it seems, has a crucial role to play in this.
Under the guise of progressive-sounding phrases peppered with “radical” and
“critical” throughout, they condition students into endless expression and
confession. For critical pedagogy has no problem with these modes of being.
Indeed, the problem for critical pedagogy is that expression isn’t real, it has
been commodified and corrupted by “celebrity culture.” 27 So we need more,
better, critical expression. “If you are not public,” Lyotard writes, “you disappear; if not exposed as much as possible, you don’t exist.” 28 Giroux and
his protectors of the public sphere, then “need the whole soul, and they need
this soul to surrender unconditionally.” 29
What’s more, those who have critiqued critical pedagogy from feminist,
poststructuralist, and postmodern perspectives have been complicit in this
project, too. Indeed, while many of these critics rail against critical pedagogy’s (allegedly) unproblematized insistence on voice and dialogue, they too
fail to escape the paradigm of knowledge, representation, and signification,
and so remain democratic co-conspirators. In fact, some of these critics even
take the demand for representation further. Consider Alison Jones’ article
about the limits of dialogue in the critical classroom, in which she condemns
the call for dialogue across difference as “imperialist.” 30 Jones does a service
in teasing out the complexities and, ultimately, the impossibility of true dialogue across different social groups. She documents how the demand for
voice and the call for border-crossing can be a “cannibal desire to know the
other,” 31 that it is “a demand for pedagogy by the oppressed.” 32 Separation
along social group lines is, on this account, completely justified because it
frees oppressed students from a series of burdens and injustices that they face
from dominant group students in mixed classrooms.
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Yet part of Jones’ pedagogy requires that students “submit a journal in
which they traced their resulting ‘intellectual journey.’” 33 The students have
to self-identify in these journals, and in a footnote Jones cops to excluding
“the responses of the two Japanese and one Iranian women for reasons of
focus.” 34 Nowhere does Jones investigate or critique her own demand that
students identify and reveal themselves to her. Jones critiques the demand
that the dominant have for the voice of the other, but she does not question
the demand for voice and expression in general.
The demand for the identity, knowledge, and subjectivity of the student is
also present in Gert Biesta’s deconstructionist pedagogy. The purpose of
Biesta’s educational project is to claim a space for the unique, singular attributes of the human to emerge. 35 The educator shouldn’t simply stand aside
and allow the new to emerge, but neither should they insist on a particular
subject-form and identity. What separates education from learning is that the
former requires the intervention of the teacher, whereas the latter can be done
on one’s own; teaching is an act of transcendence and learning is an act of
immanence. 36 The responsibility of the educator is to facilitate the uniqueness of the subject, and the way that the educator does this is by asking
“simple” but “fundamental” questions: “What do you think about it?”
“Where do you stand on this?” and “How will you respond?” 37 The uniqueness of the subject must be expressed, represented, and codified. A stand has
to be taken: you have the right!
FUGITIVE STUDY: SECRET RESISTANCE
How to respond to this terror? How to formulate a counterproject to the
public, to democracy? How to keep the secret a secret? Lyotard’s call in
response to the blurring of the general line and the subsumption of the secret
under the general is, like his essay, brief but potent. Any formulation to keep
the secret has to begin with an acknowledgement that it is there, it persists.
Moreover, it is the basis for democracy, even as democracy constantly works
against it (and this is one of many latent dialectical moments in Lyotard!).
“Rights and respect for rights,” he says, “are owed to us only because something in us exceeds every recognized right. The latter has only the final sense
of safeguarding what is found beyond or below it.” 38 As such, what we have
to do is allow for the secret and its excess to exist, recognizing that it is truly
exceptional.
Grebowicz argues that the practice of philosophy itself is a form of resistance. In the endless and unyielding circulation of signifying and asignifying
semiotics, the practice of philosophy and thought is necessarily disruptive.
Philosophy, after all, wastes time. This is what distinguishes the philosopher
from the expert. “You philosophers,” Lyotard writes, “ask questions without
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answers, questions that have to remain unanswered to deserve being called
philosophical. According to you answered questions are only technical matters.” 39 Lyotard absorbs and celebrates the charge leveled at philosophy in
today’s academy, that it just isn’t practical or useful. The thing about use, of
course, is that it is something that requires a referent; nothing is useful in and
of itself, but always useful for or to some thing or action. And so it is not that
philosophy is useless, but that its use comes in its ability to stop and to
disrupt.
So it is with thought itself, which is, Grebowicz writes, synonymous with
the postmodern. The postmodern isn’t about computers or information or
technology or popular culture; it’s about “ideological instability and confusion, of radical undermining of foundations and transgressing of boundaries.
It is just another name for thought.” 40 Thought is that which allows for the
truly new to emerge, and Grebowicz provides important examples of this
relationship. Feminist theory and subjectivity is a perfect case in point. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex positions women as a subject without a
history in that “women cannot claim an historical origin for patriarchy.” 41
Unlike the proletariat, which can document the rise of capitalism, or oppressed nationalities, which can lay claim to common culture, language,
habits, and so on that are repressed by another nation, women inhabit a world
that “has always been patriarchal.” And so the very possibility for feminism
rests on imagining that things could be radically otherwise. “More than it
needs the belief in democracy and equality,” she writes, “feminism needs the
belief in the instability of everything, in the possibility that everything is
essentially refutable, even democracy and equality.” 42
An attentiveness to and orientation toward the secret, which is always
already present within and between us, can help open us up to the event, to
the revolutionary rupture within the existing dominant order of things and
subjects. The secret is a rearguard, always operating outside of and against
democracy and the logic of exchange-value. One question for politics is how
we can embrace the secret life and mobilize it as part of a vanguard project
against capital. Such an embrace, I suggest, can help us mind not just what
we want out of politics, but what we have that we want to keep.
Moten brings up to two fundamental questions that guided the Mississipi
Freedom School curriculum in the early 1960s that enunciate this very aspect
of organizing counterprojects: “Question one was: What do we not have that
we need, what do we want or want to get?” Question two, however, a question that comes first “in some absolutely irreducible way, is what do we have
that we want to keep?” 43 This second question, Moten admits, sounds like a
strange one for Black people to pose to themselves and each other in 1964
Mississippi. Indeed, it may seem strange today, given the heightened exploitation and oppression of the Black nation in the United States. After all, we
are constantly being told by some critical intellectuals that we have nothing,
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that we are zombies, totally reified beings, and so on. But this second question, Moten contends, is imperative for politics for three reasons: first, because it insists that we have something that we want to preserve, including a
way of being and being together (which is antagonistic to capital); second,
and relatedly, that we have something that they don’t; and third, that they
have things that we do not want. We want our secret lives, and we don’t want
their democracy.
NOTES
1. Frank Rizzo was an arch-racist cop and politician who served as chief of police and
mayor of Philadelphia from 1968-1980.
2. Margret Grebowicz, “Democracy and pornography: On speech, rights, privacies, and
pleasures in conflict,” Hypatia 26, no. 1: 151.
3. Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodern fables, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993/1997), 120.
4. Ibid.
5. http://www.postsecret.com.
6. Jean-François Lyotard, The inhuman: Reflections on time, trans. Geoffery Bennington
and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988/1991), 201.
7. Margret Grebowicz, “Democracy and pornography,” 162.
8. Margret Grebowicz, Why internet porn matters (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2013), 55.
9. Margret Grebowicz, “Can sustainability be domesticated?” in Heidi Bickis and Rob
Shields (Eds.), Rereading Jean-François Lyotard: Essays on His Later Works (Surrey and
Burlington: Ashgate, 2013).
10. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 110.
11. Bruno Latour, as quoted in Margret Grebowicz, “Can sustainability be domesticated?,”
99-100.
12. Ibid., 102.
13. Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodern fables, 206.
14. Karl Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy (volume 1), trans. Samuel Moore
and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 255. See also Curry
Stephenson Malott and Derek R. Ford, Marx, capital, and education: Towards a critical pedagogy of becoming (New York: Peter Lang, 2015), chapter 6.
15. Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and machines: Capitalism and the production of subjectivity,
trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014), 26.
16. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1980/1987),
456-457.
17. Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and machines: Capitalism and the production of subjectivity,
89.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 80.
20. Ibid., 115.
21. Ibid., 99-100.
22. Ibid., 142.
23. Christian Marazzi, Capital and language: From the new economy to the war economy,
trans. Gregory Conti (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2002/2008), 65.
24. Here I am talking not about public property and public ownership, which are absolutely
necessary sites of communist struggle.
25. Henry Giroux, On critical pedagogy (New York and London: Continuum, 2011), 122.
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83
26. Ibid., 139.
27. Henry Giroux, Education and the crisis of public values: Challenging the assault on
teachers, students, and public education, 2nd ed. (New York: Peter Lang, 2015).
28. Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodern fables, 120.
29. Ibid., 118.
30. Alison Jones, “The limits of cross-cultural dialogue: Pedagogy, desire, and absolution in
the classroom,” Educational Theory 49, no. 3: 299-316.
31. Ibid., 313.
32. Ibid., 312.
33. Ibid., 301.
34. Ibid., f7.
35. Gert J. J. Biesta, Beyond learning: Democratic education for a human future (Boulder
and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2006); Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics,
politics, democracy (Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2010); The beautiful risk of
education (Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2014); Derek R. Ford, “Toward a theory
of the educational encounter: Gert Biesta’s educational theory and the right to the city,” Critical Studies in Education 54, no. 3: 299-310.
36. Gert J. J. Biesta, The beautiful risk of education; “Freeing teaching from learning:
Opening up existential possibilities in educational relationships,” Studies in Philosophy and
Education 34, no. 3: 229-243.
37. Gert J.J. Biesta, Beyond learning, 150.
38. Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodern fables, 121.
39. Jean-François Lyotard, The inhuman, 8.
40. Margret Grebowicz, “Marie goes to Japan,” 425.
41. Ibid., 426.
42. Ibid., 427.
43. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The undercommons: Fugitive planning and Black
study (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2013), 121.
Chapter Six
Figure
Studying is always happening, and the secret is always there. Yet their operation is suspended, impeded, when the professor calls the class to order, when
agents of democracy compel the subject to articulate and represent itself. We
are left with that perennial question: What is to be done? How can we study
the secret life? How can we open up space within pedagogy to resist the
encroachment of democracy and the logic of exchange-value on subjectivity?
How can we enact forms of life that are against the demand for exchangeability? What, in other words, does a pedagogy that engages the secret, the
singular, and the opaque look like? In this chapter I want to excavate such a
pedagogy from one of Lyotard’s earliest works. Along the way, we will
clarify the relationship between representation and alterity, and gain new
insight into the relationship between learning and studying.
In culling insights from Lyotard’s work, theorists have conceived of education as a defense of radical alterity, but they always stop short of telling us
what that means. Michael Peters, for example, argues that the appropriate
educational response in the face of the persistent reality of the differend is to
cultivate an ability to respect those differences that can’t be reconciled—
those differences that disrupt the system’s performance. 1 Similarly, Stephanie Mackler writes, “educators should teach students to recognize and respond to the differend.” She quickly adds, however, that “what that response
should be is another question altogether.” 2 For his part, Readings proposes
that “we find a way to make our pedagogical activities, as students and
teachers, difficult for the system to swallow, hard to insert within the generalized economy of capitalist exchange;” we have to work to listen to each
other, which “means trying to hear what cannot be said, but which tries to
make itself heard.” 3
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Finally, A. T. Nuyen suggests that education for Lyotard “is about intensifying the différend between reason and imagintation.” 4 What is unique
about Nuyen’s contribution is that it explicitly tries to avoid romanticizing
the differend, or alterity: “The Lyotardian vision is not only not anarchistic
toward the ‘basics’ of education, it is also not anarchistic toward social
goals.” 5 Instead, education works “to imagine about far-off planets and to
think of how things might be in these places.” 6 Nuyen, that is, emphasizes
that the differend can eventually be expressed, and so the role of education is
to imagine and then facilitate new ways of linking phrase-regimens in order
to articulate differences. In this way, Nuyen’s emphasis is different than that
of Peters, Mackler, and Readings, as the latter are primarily interested in
listening to and allowing for the differend, while Nuyen wants to bring it to
expression. 7
In sum, then, the general education lesson we get from Lyotard is: educators who want to cultivate a respect for alterity and to disrupt the system’s
performance must be attentive to the radical differences that the system suppresses (and that, we might add, democracy seeks to bring to articulation).
We don’t get anything else, other than perhaps a deferment. That is all well
and good, but it leaves one asking: how? How might educators and organizers engage that which is repressed—the differend, the secret—for the sake of
the system’s functioning? This is not to say that prescriptions and methods
are required, for such a reduction to instruction would surely betray the
possibility of the event’s taking place. If political pedagogy is to work
against the system and its silencing of differences, and democracy and its
compulsion to express difference—which, in the end, amount to the same
thing—what are some possible ways it might do this? I suggest that we can
find some possible ways by turning to Lyotard’s second book (and his doctoral dissertation), Discourse, Figure. 8
DISCOURSE AND ITS FIGURE
Discourse, Figure is not a book that takes education as its object, but it is a
book that is deeply about educational things, things like representation,
knowledge, intelligibility, and communication. In fact, I would go so far as to
say that the book can be seen as an intervention into educational thought
from the very opening pages, in which Lyotard references the allegory of the
cave:
This book takes the side of the eye, of its siting; shadow is its prey. The halflight that, after Plato, the word threw like a gray pall over the sensory, that it
consistently thematized as a lesser being, whose side has been very rarely
really taken in truth . . . this half-light is precisely what interests this book. 9
Figure
87
Lyotard, as we have seen, takes the side of the shadow, the thickness and
opacity of things, that which cannot be represented, and this book is no
different. In this sense, then, the book takes as its object the taking of an
object. As a result, the book is something of a paradox, for a book by definition consists of words that represent objects that are ordered according to a
discourse. A discourse is composed of languages, or what Lyotard will later
call language games and phrase regimens, and is concerned with intelligibility, or the production of meaning and sense. The object is taken, held at a
distance, represented through words, language, and discourse. Yet there is
always the object’s shadow, the cast half-light in the cave. The secret is
always there, we are always other to ourselves, always more than we know.
An enduring opacity. In order to get at this shadow, Lyotard performs a
deconstructive reading of structuralism and phenomenology, represented by
Saussure and Merleau-Ponty, respectively, by way of Freud and with an
emphasis on the aesthetic.
At first blush, we could say that there is an opposition between discourse
and figure. As Readings notes, “discourse is the name given by Lyotard to
the process of representation by concepts.” 10 Discourse is the textual space
of signification in which the order or system of language is established. The
textual space of discourse is exemplified by Saussure and his conception of
the linguistic as a structure and system of signs. For Saussure, this space is
flat and extends horizontally by differentiation. Each sign is composed of a
signifier and a signified, where the signifier is the sound, the sound-pattern
(spoken word) or sound-image (written word), and the signified is the concept that the signifier calls forth, a mental construct of a thing. The signifier
is unmotivated; there is no innate connection between the signifier and the
signified. A sign is differentiated negatively from other signs. In other words,
the sound-image “chair” evokes in the mind the idea of a chair through a
process of elimination from all other signs in the linguistic system; there is
nothing inherent in the object that determines what the sound-pattern or
sound-image that corresponds to it will be.
As we approach the borders of the linguistic system we see where Lyotard departs from Saussure, as the latter conceives of a closed system, but for
the former there is something more, something porous, deep, and thick. Lyotard writes, “One could start (again) by stating that language is not made of
signs.” 11 To grasp what Lyotard means here we have to make what should be
an obvious remark: One has a body that hears, sees, and feels, a body that
orients oneself in the world and participates in the linguistic system. 12 Thus,
signs are not unmotivated. Neither are they in some correspondence to the
body, of course, but there is nonetheless a “connatural relation between discourse and its object.” 13 Bodies speak, write, and create language and discourse, and bodies are never unmotivated. To argue for the elimination of
motivation from discourse, as Saussure does, is to “banish the poetic and
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preclude describing and comprehending an experience of speech.” 14 Lyotard,
however, is referring to the relation between the sign and what the sign
signifies, not to the signified-signifier relation, which is an analytic category
and epistemological abstraction, not an ontological experience. What he
wants us to retain is that there is always something else to language than
signs.
This is where the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty comes into play, for
it is Merleau-Ponty who places “perception . . . under the authority of the
body, demonstrating that there is structure before signification, that the former supports the latter.” 15 For example, the letters N and Z both consist of
three straight lines and are distinguished from each other at one level only by
the observer’s relative position to the surface on which they are inscribed:
“does this mode of opposition not call for relationships of textual displacement in the reader’s optical field, and therefore for figural properties?” 16
Here the figural features of the lines that compose letters are brought forth. A
line can be both seen and read. Langauge is made of lines, not only signs.
This leads to what Lyotard calls the plasticity of the line, or the line’s
function qua line that is outside of and other to discourse; the line as opposed
to the letter. The letter operates as graphic in that its “function consists
exclusively in distinguishing, and hence in rendering recognizable, units that
obtain their signification from their relationships in a system entirely independent from bodily synergy.” 17 The line, by contrast, remains plastic and
bodily. The plasticity of the line signals a thickening and opacity of discourse; or the figural operating within discourse, for the line itself “is an
unrecognizable trace” that can be transformed into the letter, placed graphically in textual space. 18 The letter can also work to free itself from textual
space, which is what takes place in the calligraffiti, the literal joining together of calligraphy and graffiti art. In calligraffiti, the letter exists in a nonrepresentational mode and, as such, the eye is not quick to read it. The pure
line, however, cannot be subsumed into a system of representation: “The line
is therefore figural when, by her or his artifice, the painter or drawer places it
in a configuration in which its value cannot yield to an activity of recognition—for to recognize is to know well.” 19 While there are undoubtedly lines
that lend themselves more to recognition or unrecognition, part of what determines whether the line will be plastic or graphic depends upon the encounter with the viewer, the mode of engagement and presentation through which
the viewer encounters the line.
FIGURE AND ITS DISCOURSE
So far in the way I have been constructing Lyotard’s argument there is a
blurring of the boundary between discourse and figure, but the opposition is
Figure
89
still too neat. On one side we have the text, letter, and graphic as the discursive and, on the other side is the body, line, and unrecognizability as the
figural. The next move is crucial: “Luckily,” Geoffrey Bennington writes,
“Lyotard is not content to remain at this critical stage, at which the figure
serves as a stick to beat the discursive with, and is in fact concerned with the
insistence of each series in the other.” 20 There is, after all, a comma that
separates discourse from figure in the book’s title, not a hyphen or a slash.
There is a heterogeneity to discursive space itself in which the figural begins
to “work over” the discursive.
Before getting at this relationship, we need to delve deeper into the figure.
Lyotard distinguishes between three types of figurality: the figure-image, the
figure-form, and the figure-matrix:
The first term [figure-image] applies to the image of an object with its outline;
the second [figure-form], to the form (Gestalt) of the visible, which can be
brought into relief through analysis even if it was not seen at the outset; the
third [figure-matrix], to a still deeper configuration to which analysis could
possibly come near, but that can never become object either of vision or
signification. 21
So far I have touched on the first two forms. Returning to the letter N: the
figure-image is the letter N in its totality as it is graphically inscribed in
textual space, the letter N as it is read on the page. The figure-form consists
of the plasticity of the lines of which the letter is composed; the N seen not as
a letter but as a series of lines. But what of the figure-matrix, with which
Lyotard is really concerned? The figure-matrix is wholly unseen and resists
translation into visibility, let alone legibility. It is not invisible but avisible.
How, then, to approach this sensible but not visible thing?
To articulate what the figure-matrix is positively, we have to call upon the
unconscious and desire. It is at this junction in the book that phenomenology
begins to recede. First, we sense the presence of the figure-matrix (hereafter
referred to simply as “figure”) in the dream. As Deleuze and Guattari write:
Lyotard shows that what is at work in dreams is not the signifier but a figural
dimension underneath, which gives rise to configurations of images that make
use of words, making them flow and cutting them according to flows and
points that are not linguistic and do not depend on the signifier or its related
elements. 22
The dream is a space where the figural informs discourse and image and
where the figural and discursive are co-present, blocked together; there is no
temporality and no negation. Dreams, therefore, “have the logic of ‘but also’
or ‘but and.’” 23 When we wake, the figural is what cannot be recollected, and
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its presence in the dream makes it difficult to recall the discursive operating
in the dream as well.
Consider, for example, the moments between being asleep and being
awake. During this time, we can sometimes retain our dreams and, when they
are particularly absurd, funny, sad, or relevant in some way, we desire to
share them with our partners or housemates, or to jot them down on paper.
Then, upon bringing the dream to articulation—in our heads, out loud, on
paper—we find that the objects, words, gestures, and events which while we
were dreaming seemed so natural become so alien and nonsensical that we
are stopped in our tracks. They become illegible and unintelligible as we seek
to articulate them. The discursive in the dream is worked over to such an
extent by the figural that it is rendered unrecognizable. As such, any interpretation of the dream will necessarily fracture. Or, rather, interpretation is not
discovery but production.
The second place where we can go to articulate the figure positively is
desire. For Lyotard, the figure “is hand in glove with desire on at least two
counts;” it is both at the “margin” and at the “heart of discourse in its
‘form.’” 24 The figure as desire is co-present in discourse, but it “does not
manipulate an intelligible text in order to disguise it; it does not let the text
get in, forestalls it, inhabits it, and we never have anything but a worked-over
text, a mixture of the readable and the visible.” 25 Desire is generated by the
gap between signification and reference, a gap that becomes progressively
widened as signification takes place. This is so because as each reference
enters a significatory system it is flattened and altered, although its shadow
resists: “A compulsion of opacity exists that requires that what one speaks of
be declared lost.” 26
This existential reality spawns the demand for more and different signification; “Reality and desire are born together at the threshold of language.” 27
One example of this trend is the metaphor, which modern poetry employed in
an effort to join language and nature. The metaphor itself, as “a non-signified
comparison,” is actually “already a breach of the law of communication
without equivocation” because even if the metaphor attempts to reveal or
represent something about a referent, it also in the very same movement
obscures the referent. 28 The simile operates similarly. We say that x is like y
in order to render x more clear, but in that very same move we obscure and
render x opaque; in our effort to bring x closer to us we push it further away.
As a result, discourse “finds itself endowed with an enigmatic thickness. The
signifiers come forward and seem to be hiding something, something that is
not their ‘signified.’” 29 We can sense the figure operating in discourse, then,
“negatively, through disorder.” 30 What is particularly interesting is that the
poet (as well as Lyotard) does not paint their poem, but remains within
textual space: “The legible is never renounced. Such is the paradox of the
figural finding refuse in a text without destroying it.” 31
Figure
91
Keeping in mind Lyotard’s critique of Saussure, the former’s insistence
that the relation between the sign and its object is motivated, the claim is that
all language—not only the poetic—operates in this manner. It is the object—
the thought, the thing, the dream—that is opaque. It is also, at the same time,
the designating language that removes “its immediate meaning and deepens
its mystery.” 32 Perhaps one of the most apparent examples of this co-presence of the figural and discursive is when, in an attempt to describe one’s
love for another, the phrase “there are no words” is uttered and, upon being
communicated, somehow understood beyond the literal meaning. To return
to the example of the letter N, we can now grasp how the three levels of the
figural are co-present to varying degrees. There is the letter N on the page as
intended to be read; there is the plasticity of the lines of the letter N; and then
there is the corporeal, affective desire that gives birth to the N, generating the
plastic lines of which it is composed.
A FIGURAL EDUCATION
The discursive and the figural are heterogeneous spaces that comprise, cut
across and through the system. Each is inscribed in and struggles to occupy
the other. While there is not a simple opposition between them, there is
always an antagonism: “The presence of figures (from all the levels) in
discourse is not only deconstruction of discourse; it is also the critique of
discourse as censorship, as repression of desire.” 33 The figural is unpresentable and tends toward heterogeneity, and discourse aims to repress heterogeneity in order to present itself, or to be presented. But we can’t get to the
figure without discourse; “there is simply no way to go to the other side of
discourse. Only from within language can one get to and enter the figure.” 34
Again, what is crucial here—and what will distinguish Lyotard from Derrida—is that language is not only text or signs. Language acts upon the world,
becoming the world, and this process is an “always incomplete synthesis”
that produces the thickness from where thought comes. 35 The secret and the
general are wrapped up together, they impinge on each other and make each
other possible even as they push away and resist this relationship.
There is a moment in Discourse, Figure when Lyotard mentions education. In this passing remark, Lyotard defines in part what a figural education
is not. He writes: “It is precisely of this skill that discursive education and
teaching deprive us: to remain permeable to the floating presence of the line
(of value, of color).” 36 Discursive education, it seems, seeks to minimize the
time between when one encounters something and when sense is made of
that thing; it is an encountering of things as they have already entered into
signification and discourse, brushing aside their alterity and relegating their
shadows to irrelevance. A discursive education edges study out, working
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hand-in-glove with the learning society; it can’t comprehend any process
without a predetermined end, without something that can be quantified, verified, and ranked.
The figural is thus sacrificed at the threshold of textual space, and it is
continually repressed as we operate in that space discursively, engaging the
letter at the expense of the line and the latter’s ambiguity, opacity, and
intractable thickness. Another way to formulate this is to say that discursive
education is concerned only with reading. A figural education, by contrast
acknowledges and takes reading into account as a component of education,
but is not content with remaining at this level of practice. I propose here that
a figural education is comprised of a tense constellation of reading, seeing,
and blindness.
Reading: The system, with its demands for recognition, representation, and
signified difference, is predicated upon the logic of reading. When we read,
we encounter the lines of language and recognize them in flat, textual space
as signs. Thus, there are “assumptions, interpretations, and habits of reading
that we contract with the predominant use of discourse.” 37 We learn to do
this; we learn the process of reading, which is, in turn, a mode of engagement
in the learning society. We do not only read text, but we also read paintings,
actions, animals, ourselves, others, our encounters, and so on. We read the
world. Marie must make her differences legible to others in order to assert
and defend them. Her differences must be published! Only then can they be
absorbed into the system. They might provide a temporary disruption, but in
the end they will help contribute to the overall efficiency of the system. The
demand for legibility thus is closely related to the saving of time that is
central to capitalism. The central point here, however, is that through the
logic of reading educational objects, such as history, for example, are learned
as represented, pre-existing and stable totalities; the meanings of historical
events are communicated as pre-established. What are educators to do to
resist, or hold at bay the logic of reading?
Seeing: A figural education works in part by forgetting how to read and
learning how to see so that we might connect with the figure. This is not
limited to an engagement with history, poetry, the arts, and the dream; it is
not content-specific. We can even work to see the book as visible instead of
legible. As Lyotard writes, “Irreversible thickness stands in the way of the
mind’s rush toward signification.” 38 Seeing is one step in drawing out this
thickness.
One way to illustrate what I mean by seeing is to turn to the Situationist
practice of détournement. Détournement was a socio-spatial practice that
entailed introducing simple distortions into an object, event, behavior, or
convention so as to disrupt their context and flow, calling attention to their
Figure
93
otherwise unseen or hidden aspects. A minor example of a détournement
provided by Guy Debord and Gil Wolman is the introduction of images to
well-known texts or novels: “Such a detournement,” they write, “gains by
being accompanied by illustrations whose relationships to the text are not
immediately obvious.” 39 In this example, the teacher purposefully places
signatures about for the student to collect. Another common détournement
involved re-titling works of art. By making these minor alterations, the object
was troubled. It is similar with seeing, in which the point is to unsettle and
thus to prompt a reconsideration of context and of the connections between
the thing and its meaning, thereby opening up new possibilities. When one
sees an educational object, as opposed to reading the object, one can better
resist the urge to insert the object into an already-existing phrase-regimen.
Blindness: To further articulate what a figural education might “look” like, I
want to draw on a piece of literature on blindness and the classroom by Rod
Michalko. Michalko writes about what happens when blindness—his blindness—enters the classroom. Because of the way in which the U.S. university
and its classroom are organized, in terms of both discourse and built-form,
blindness is a disturbance. At the most macro level it unsettles the taut
connection between sight and knowledge, whereby one knows by seeing.
Playing with this unsettling, Michalko asks his students to point to different
things: to him, his desk, and so on. Then, and because he is teaching sociology, he asks the students to point to society: “The students cannot point at
society; they cannot even look at it; they have ‘gone blind!’ The sense of
sight that the students so implicitly and so ‘naturally’ relied upon as the
conjoining of ‘seeing and knowing’ has failed them.” 40 One of the lessons
from this exercise is that “sight needs to be achieved.” 41
We not only learn to read, we also learn how to see, which means that
there must be something else to sight. Blindness in this sense is a type of
primordial dis-orientation to the world, others, and ourselves. Michalko’s
educational practice also demonstrates that blindness does not come naturally, but rather requires the pedagogical intervention of the teacher. By becoming blind, we can detach ourselves from the predetermined meaning and
content ascribed to educational objects. Another one of Lyotard’s concepts
that is helpful here is anamnesis, roughly translated as “before forgetting.”
Anamnesis, for Lyotard “is guided by the unknown;” 42 “It explores the
meanings of a given ‘present’, of an expression of the here and now, without
immediate concern for (referential) reality.” 43 As such, anamnesis takes
place when we encounter things or events without ready-made conceptual
frameworks with which to understand them or preformed signs through
which to render them legible. Whereas seeing is about unsettling the relations
between signs and their designated objects, blindness as anamnesis is about
suspending, or temporarily forgetting, these relations.
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We can sense the figural by approaching the objects and spaces of education
blindly. In fact, we might understand Lyotard’s differentiation between the
three levels of figurality as a kind of pedagogical approach to educational
objects and spaces, in which there is a rough correspondence between, on the
one hand, the figure-image, the figure-form, and the figure-matrix and, on the
other hand, reading, seeing, and blindness. We first approach the figureimage, the recognizability of the inscribed graphic letter and its differential
relation to other letters and signs. We encounter the letter and read it through
its negative differentiation to other letters in the system. We then pull back to
the figure-form, concentrating on the shadow and opacity and discourse’s
edge; the letter becomes unrecognizable, troubled, and unsettled and the line
shines forth. Finally, we engage the figure-matrix and become blind to the
object; we no longer see it or, rather, we no longer know what it is. The
world is finally open to us and we are finally open to the world. Yet this is
not the end goal of a figural education; the figural exists always with the
discursive. A figural education does not proceed linearly from reading to
seeing and then to blindness; these three components rather coexist in an
always uncertain and unsettling relation.
A figural education is a kind of training in and against the learning society, one that helps us parse through the contradictions between learning and
studying, and one that foregrounds the alterity that always persists and always resists capture into the circulation of capital. Each time we encounter
an object or a space it is a singular event, and this singularity—its heterogeneity, irreducibility, and opacity—that capitalism seeks to repress is what
communist pedagogy must attend to, but it cannot do so without effort;
processes and modes of engagement need to be learned, unlearned, and relearned. It is a pedagogy toward pure use, of use disconnected from exchange, without any alterity fetish. There is not just unalloyed desire; Lyotard’s figural experiment keeps the door open for repression, a word that
today is quite unfortunately seen as a bad thing, especially on the Left. As
Bennington says about Discourse, Figure, “we are always in fact faced with
a negotiation of desire and repression, discourse and figure.” 44 Lyotard, of
course, doesn’t provide any specific criteria for determining when or on what
basis repression should take place. 45 We certainly can develop such criteria,
and we will certainly have to, for politics is ultimately about division, about
taking positions for and against. 46 Without this acknowledgement, we can
succumb to the most confusing and dangerous of philosophical and political
stances, as we will see in this next chapter.
Figure
95
NOTES
1. Michael Peters, “Lyotard, nihilism and education,” Studies in Philosophy and Education
25, no. 4: 303-314.
2. Stephanie Mackler, “Natality seduced: Lyotard and the birth of the improbable,” in Kal
Alston (Ed.), Philosophy of education yearbook 2003 (Urbana: Philosophy of Education Society, 2004), 371.
3. Bill Readings, “From emancipation to obligation: Sketch for a heteronomous politics of
education,” in Michael Peters (Ed.), Education and the postmodern condition (Westport and
London: Bergin & Garvey, 1995), 205.
4. A. T. Nuyen, “Postmodern education as sublimation,” Educational Theory 46, no. 1:
100.
5. Ibid., 102.
6. Ibid., 103.
7. Thus, Nuyen misses the fact that once the differend has been phrased and expressed the
system will be able to accommodate the new rules of discourse. This is not to say that such a
process is necessarily negative, for the generation of languages and rules with which to express
and adjudicate harms is of the utmost importance. It is rather to say that there is a rush to
valorize expression over difference.
8. While in moving to the figure, I am departing from the previous terms of Lyotard’s (the
differend and the secret), it is not a long journey: all are concerned with the incommensurable.
9. Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, figure, trans. Anthony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1971/2011), 5.
10. Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 3.
11. Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, figure, 72.
12. Thus, while Lyotard is primarily concerned with the visual and auditory systems of
representation, his observations could also be applied to the tactile system of braille.
13. Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, figure, 76.
14. Ibid., 77.
15. Ibid., 55
16. Ibid., 206.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 213.
19. Ibid.
20. Geoffrey Bennington, “Lyotard: From discourse and figure to experimentation and
event,” Paragraph (Modern Critical Theory Group) 6: 20.
21. Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, figure, 279.
22. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1972/1983), 243-244.
23. Marty Slaughter, “The arc and the zip: Deleuze and Lyotard on art,” Law and Critique
15, no. 3: 235.
24. Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, figure, 233.
25. Ibid., 267.
26. Ibid., 102.
27. Ibid., 123.
28. Ibid., 284.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 324.
31. Ibid., 305.
32. Ibid., 83.
33. Ibid., 323.
34. Ibid., 7.
35. Ibid., 82.
36. Ibid., 211.
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37. Ibid., 212.
38. Ibid., 172.
39. Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, “Methods of detournement,” in Ken Knabb (Ed.,
Trans.), Situationist International anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981): 11.
40. Rod Michalko, “Blindness enters the classroom,” Disability and Society 16: no. 3: 354.
41. Ibid.
42. Jean-François Lyotard, “Ananmnesis: Of the visible,” Theory, Culture & Society 21: no.
1: 107.
43. Ibid., 108.
44. Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the event (New York: Manchester University
Press and Columbia University Press, 1988).
45. This statement implies that Lyotard’s writing on the differend doesn’t supply us with
anywhere near sufficient criteria.
46. For the link between politics and division, see Jodi Dean, The communist horizon (New
York and London: Verso, 2012) and Alan Badiou with Nicolas Truong, In praise of love, trans.
Peter Bush (London and New York: New Press, 2012).
Part III
“Those today who use the term ‘Stalinist’ as an epithet evade the real question: that is, were Stalin and the Central Committee correct?”
—Harry Haywood
97
98
Figure 6.1.
Part III
Source: Photograph by Sarah Pfohl
Chapter Seven
In Praise of Tanks
In the last few pages of The Coming Community Agamben briefly ponders
what the political form of whatever singularity might look like, what brushes
would be used to create the image of political being such as it is. Some of the
elements of this politics, he proposes, are to be found in the events grouped
under the signifier “Tiananmen,” which also serves as the title of his last
chapter. Most observers in the West, Agamben claims, miss what was most
important about Tiananmen when they frame it as a struggle between communism and democracy. “What was most striking about the demonstrations
of the Chinese May,” Agamben claims, “was the relative absence of determinate contents in their demands (democracy and freedom are notions too
generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of conflict, and the
only concrete demand, the rehabilitation of Hu Yao-Bang, was immediately
granted).” 1 What the Communist Party of China (CPC) understood clearly—
and what they could not tolerate—was the radical antagonism posed by the
Tiananmen protesters’ refusal to put forward a set of demands that could be
received, negotiated, bargained over, and so on. For Agamben, this signals
the politics of a predicate-less community, a type of belonging without the
requirement and affirmation of identity. Wherever and whenever such a politics happens, Agamben closes his reflections, “there will be a Tiananmen,
and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear.” 2
In a short essay written in 1990 and published six years later, Agamben
writes that his insights on Tiananmen flow naturally from anyone who paid
“real attention . . . to the facts of that event.” 3 Yet one wonders to which facts
Agamben is referring, for there is very little to no mention of what, who,
how, and why things unfolded as they did, and in what context they unfolded.
All we have are Agamben’s assurances that there were no concrete demands
put forward by the protesters (except for the one regarding Hu Yao-Bang),
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and that “the state” could not tolerate the whatever singularities that had
assembled in Tiananmen Square. However, “the facts” to which Agamben
alludes as well as his assurances present an incorrect and dangerous—for the
purposes of communist struggle—image of Tiananmen. To be sure, Agamben is not alone in his romancitization of Tiananmen, for critical theory in
general has an unfortunate history of uncritically celebrating nearly any and
all movements for “democracy” and “freedom,” terms that are not at all
ambiguous. On the contrary; if we look at the history of these movements
and the “facts” associated with them, we discover that these terms mean very
particular things.
THE DETERMINANT DEMAND: IMPERIALISM’S CRITERIA
Most linearly, the events around Tiananmen began with the death of Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989. This is one of the “facts” that Agamben actually
includes in his reflections on the subject. But Agamben doesn’t tell us anything about this person. Who was Hu and why is it significant that his death
inaugurated the struggle around Tiananmen? An inquiry into this question
will help situate Tiananmen and will clearly reveal the character of the Tiananmen protesters, those “whatever singularities.”
Hu was a long-standing but controversial member of the CPC, which he
joined in the 1930s at the age of fourteen. Prior to the liberation of China on
October 1, 1949, he actively fought against the Japanese colonialists and, at
times, the Kuomintang, the Chinese nationalist grouping headed by Chiang
Kai-shek. 4 After the end of the liberation struggle, Hu rose in the leadership
of the CPC, occupying key positions in the Communist Youth League, the
Politburo, the Propaganda Department, and the Organization Department.
Most significantly, Hu was Chairman of the CPC from 1981 to 1987.
This path, however, was far from a straight ascension, and the ebbs and
flows of this specific history are intimately tied to the broader struggles
within China and the CPC, and ultimately the “two line” inner-party struggle
during the 1960s and 1970s between the socialist and capitalist “roaders.”
The Chinese Revolution inherited a feudal social and economic system, and
efforts to industrialize and advance social and economic relations during the
1950s—known as the Great Leap Forward—resulted in significant gains, but
these efforts also faced great challenges, including organizational mistakes,
residual attachments to feudalism, technological deficiencies, the Sino-Soviet split, and natural disasters. 5
In response to these shortcomings, some elements of capitalism were
reintroduced into China, which “strengthened the political position of more
conservative elements in the Communist Party, who used [these difficulties] . . . as an opportunity to wage a political offensive against Mao Zedong
In Praise of Tanks
101
and . . . other supporters of the ‘socialist road.’” 6 Just as every old ruling
class does in an effort to survive within and resist a new dominant system,
landowners, colonialist sympathizers, and pro-capitalist forces planted themselves in the CPC to promote their individual and class interests. These
forces, emboldened by the production crisis of the Great Leap Forward and
the resulting capitalist reforms, waged a struggle for leadership of the CPC.
In response, Mao and the left wing of the CPC—which was a minority
within the Party—initiated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the
summer of 1966 to eliminate bourgeois and sympathetic factions from the
Party. This mass movement began with students who, responding to a call
from the Central Committee of the CPC, armed and organized themselves
into “red guards” with the help of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
These students “began to put up wall posters by the thousands identifying
particular school and government officials as ‘capitalist roaders.’” 7 Later,
teachers and “students began to openly denounce and replace school and
government leaders.” 8 The red guards and the movement as a whole escaped
the university and quickly—and, of course, unevenly—spread to cities across
the country. By early 1967, workers would have taken over the leadership of
the movement. 9 In this revolution within a revolution, workers, peasants, and
students seized newspaper headquarters, occupied factories and government
buildings, and created new communes (the most legendary of which was the
Shangai Commune).
It was during this period that Hu—along with his mentor, Deng Xiaoping—was purged from the Party. With the death of Mao in 1976 the capitalist
roaders, headed by Deng, consolidated power. They arrested those grouped
around Mao, including the “Gang of Four”: Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao,
Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen, and also leaders from mass organizations. There were purges of the CPC and its Central Committee, and a propaganda campaign began that denounced the Cultural Revolution. By 1978
Deng was at the helm of the Party, with Hu by his side. Within four years
China had a new constitution, which legalized the free market, took power
away from communes, and eliminated all mention of basic wages. Hu was
tasked with the more practical aspects of liberalizing China’s economy, a
process that included the dissolution of collective agrarian labor, the erection
of “special economic zones” for foreign capital, the cutting of basic social
rights, the displacement of working-class people from neighborhoods, and
the acquisition of land in the countryside.
In 1986, groups of urban students took to the streets to protest what they
saw as the slow pace of economic liberalization. Hu expressed his support for
the students, and this move led to his forced resignation in January 1987. In
order to understand this, a few of the complexities, particularities, and
contradictions of contemporary China have to be brought into play. For
starters, although Deng and his ilk initiated a right-wing and pro-capitalist
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shift in the economic, political, and social policies of China, they did so from
within the CPC. The CPC is an extremely large Party that currently has over
85 million members and over 4 million mass, grassroots organs and organizations. 10 With these numbers and the divisions within the Party during the
period of the Cultural Revolution in mind, we affirm that the Party is not a
monolith, but that it contains different factions with different orientations—
including significant communist groupings. 11
The policy of “market socialism,” or “socialism with Chinese characteristics” that Deng introduced after Mao’s death was not a wholesale abandonment of socialism. It is certainly true that, since 1978, the course of the
Chinese economy has been driven by capitalist logic. However, there is still
significant public and state ownership of enterprises and land, and capital is
not completely unfettered. This contradiction is clearly evident in Article 15
of the Chinese constitution, which enshrines both the free market (for private
good) and centralized planning (for social good). This contradiction is a
manifestation of the class struggle that is—and has been—raging in China,
including within the CPC. 12 The memory of the Chinese Revolution, that
decades-long struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds, is not distant
at all, and even amongst the country’s bourgeoisie there is great pride in
Chinese self-determination (Deng’s wager with market socialism, after all,
was that the CPC would be able to manage the influx of capital and prevent
the return of China to neo-colonial status). Struggles within the CPC—including the struggle that resulted in Hu’s forced resignation—are, at base, an
expression of this more fundamental power dynamic.
When assessing the legacy of a political figure in a country that has had a
socialist or nationalist revolution, it can be quite instructive to read their
obituaries in the bourgeois press in imperialist countries. Upon Hu’s death,
Nicholas Kristof wrote a touching, laudatory obituary for the New York
Times, in which Kristof praised Hu for his role in Deng’s rise to power and in
steering China toward capitalism, his Western cultural leanings, and his dismissal of Mao’s contributions to modernizing China’s economy. This bold
political figure was reproached by his friends “in the party and military . . .
for moving too fast toward the market.” 13 “Nothing was sacred for Mr. Hu,”
Kristof tells us, “not the memory of Mao Zedong, not even chopsticks.” 14 Be
that as it may, Hu clearly had political, economic, and social convictions that
were strong enough to trump the continuation of his political career.
Hu still had allies in the CPC, and these pro-market elements put out a
call for student demonstrations to take place in between Hu’s passing on
April 15 and his funeral on April 22, 1989. This is when students first started
to assemble in Tiananmen Square: when the man who was reproached even
by his allies for “moving too fast toward the market” died. No wonder, then,
that Agamben doesn’t mention any details about this man whose rehabilitation was the Tiananmen protester’s one “determinate demand.” If we know
In Praise of Tanks
103
who Hu was, then we might wonder whether or not “democracy” and “freedom” were so indeterminate after all, or if they rather meant Western democracy and market freedom. While this missed Agamben, it certainly didn’t
miss the imperialists, whose media outlets and whose leading figure—U.S.
President George Bush—trumpeted unqualified support for the students and
unilaterally condemned the CPC.
THE MASSACRE THAT WASN’T
The popular story today is that there was a massacre in Tiananmen Square,
that the Chinese military soaked the democratic aspirations of students in
blood. Thus, when Agamben tells us that wherever whatever “singularities
peacefully demonstrate their being in common . . . sooner or later, the tanks
will appear,” he is appealing to this story, upholding this dominant narrative
as he warns us that our protests will face severe repression. Upon investigation, however, this story appears to be nothing more than a story, one that
was crafted in the chaos of June 4, 1989, and that, despite being disproven
shortly thereafter, still retains a powerful hold over the psyche of critical
theorists and radical activists in the West today. 15
Tens of thousands of students flooded into Tiananmen Square in advance
of Hu’s funeral. The CPC and their outlet, People’s Daily, condemned the
protests in an April 26 editorial. The following day, there was another march
of 150,000 students. In response, the government took a conciliatory stance
toward the protesters and met with student representatives, and protesters
began to clear the square in early May. Student leaders who remained in the
Square initiated a hunger strike on May 13 in advance of a visit from Mikhail
Gorbachev. 16 This act served to reenergize students in Beijing and it sparked
solidarity protests in cities across the country, which caused the government
to extend another hand to the protesters.
With little progress made, the government declared martial law on May
20 and sent in troops, none of whom were armed. Protesters prevented the
troops from entering and caused them to retreat four days later. Instead of
emboldening students, the movement suffered from internal division over
strategies, tactics, and politics, with some students wanting to leave the
square and other students wanting to hold their position. The number of
students had also dwindled, as those who had traveled to the protest returned
home. It was during this time that the students erected the “Goddess of
Liberty,” a replica of the Statue of Liberty, an act that is difficult to understand as anything other than a gesture to the United States, that bastion of
“democracy” and “freedom.”
Phillip Cunningham, an American who was staying in Beijing while doing research for a movie project, participated in the demonstrations through-
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out May. He would serve as both a journalist and a translator during his time
with the students. In his book, Tiananmen Moon, he recounts how, toward
the end of his time in the Square, a “new element” emerged. He writes of
“young punks” in the square. “Under our lights,” he writes, “their eyes
gleaming with mischief, they brazenly revealed hidden Molotov cocktails.” 17
Cunningham gained fame for an interview he conducted with Chai Ling, a
student leader who had participated in the hunger strike. Cunningham spoke
with Chai on May 28, just a week before the “tanks appeared,” although the
interview wasn’t made public until the documentary The Gate of Heavenly
Peace was released in 1995. In the interview, Chai is quite clear about her
intentions: “What we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, the moment when
the government is ready to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the
Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes.” Cunningham asks Chai if she is going to remain in the Square, to which she
replies “No . . . because my situation is different. . . . I want to live.” 18
Blood was eventually shed in Tiananmen, but it didn’t take place as Chai
and the other student leaders had wished or as the popular imagination (and
Agamben) remembers. On June 2, unarmed troops from the People’s Liberation Army entered the Square. Before they could enter the area, however,
they were met with battalions of students who were organized into groups of
100-150 and armed with Molotov cocktails and clubs, some of whom took
troops hostage. The next day, the troops were armed but “under orders to
avoid violence,” according to the Wall Street Journal. 19 The dominant narrative holds that a massacre of students ensued that night and on the next day,
June 4. This narrative is repeated in the mainstream press—and, often, the
“left” or “alternative” press as well—year after year, as the anniversary of the
event approaches. 20 Yet according to U.S. State Department cables obtained
by Wikileaks, which convey the words of a Chilean diplomat who was
present at the Square (and allowed to roam freely), “there were no mass
shootings of students in the square or at the monument. . . . He watched the
military enter the square and did not observe any mass firing of weapons into
the crowds, although sporadic gunfire was heard.” He added that the PLA
troops “were actually armed only with anti-riot gear—truncheons and wooden clubs.” 21 Some bourgeois journalists and newspapers also provide us with
evidence that contradicts this myth (of course, many of them still repeat the
myth year after year).
While among historians it is agreed that no deaths took place within
Tiananmen Square, there were certainly deaths in Beijing that day. These
deaths occurred not from a massacre but from a battle. Staff reporters for The
Wall Street Journal, who were clearly biased toward the protesters, admitted
in a June 5, 1989, article, that on the streets of Beijing
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dozens of soldiers were pulled from trucks, severely beaten and left for dead.
At an intersection west of the square, the body of a young soldier, who had
been beaten to death, was stripped naked and hung from the side of a bus.
Another soldier’s corpse was strung at an intersection east of the square. 22
The reporters go on to tell about protesters who “commandeered a tank . . .
beat two of its crew mercilessly, and planted flags proclaiming ‘Democracy’
and ‘freedom’ on the tank’s turrets before setting it ablaze.” More evidence
of this picture is presented in a June 12, 1989, article in the Wall Street
Journal, which stated, “Aerial pictures of the conflagration and columns of
smoke have powerfully bolstered the [Chinese] government’s arguments that
the troops were victims, not executioners.” 23
Instead of a bloodthirsty communist government ruthlessly killing innocent protesters yearning to be free from totalitarian rule, what took place
around Tiananmen Square was a battle between a state’s army and armed
protesters. People died; protesters, students, and, quite likely, bystanders. No
massacre took place, however. One could even argue that the Chinese state
was actually remarkably restrained throughout the weeks of protest in central
Beijing that year. 24 Interestingly enough, I proffer that the iconic image of
“tank man” is illustrative of this restraint. In this photograph, a “lone rebel”
stands (with shopping bags in hand) in front of an army tank on a street in
Beijing. 25 While the dominant reading of the image is one of a heroic defiance to the state, it can also be read as a state willing to be disrupted to
prevent bloodshed. It is never remarked that, in the end, tank man was not
run over by the tanks.
BEFORE: HUNGARY, 1956
Tiananmen is not the first myth of a “democratic uprising” by “the people”
against a “dictatorship” being put down by force, and it was not the first one
that many “critical” individuals, intellectuals, and organizations consumed
completely uncritically. It was not the first time that many on the Left found
themselves without any criteria for judging repression. In fact, many in the
Western academic left were fundamentally influenced (read: lead astray) by a
similar story of something that took place in 1956 in Hungary. And just like
Tiananmen, there is never any real inquiry into what took place that year in
and around Budapest, what the class character of the conflict was.
After the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic led by Bela Kun was
overthrown in 1919, a fascist government headed by Miklós Horthy took
power. A virulent campaign of terror against communist forces (and Jewish
people) swiftly followed in an effort to defend the new ruling class of feudal
landowners, nobility, and capitalists. The Hungarian Social-Democratic Party completely acquiesced—as social democrats are wont to do—to the fascist
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order. 26 The rule of private property was established and upheld in a feudal
aristocracy accompanied by virulent nationalism and anti-Semitism. It was
not for nothing that Hitler, after all, referred to Hungary as Nazi Germany’s
“best ally.” The Church, which was the second largest landowner, controlled
the majority of schools in the country. There was extreme poverty and deprivation. As Oscar Jászi wrote in a 1938 Foreign Affairs article that was based
on a survey of recent books published on Hungary, “the picture is so dark
that the present writer has not found anything comparable to it, even in the
gloomiest descriptions of Tsarist Russia.” 27 The landless masses toiled the
land, dependent for survival on what did not belong to them. Hungary’s
economy was deeply agrarian—one of the many particularities it exhibited
compared to its fellow Balkan countries—dependent as it was on the export
of raw materials to industrialized nations.
When the Soviet Red Army liberated Hungary from the grips of the
fascist Horthy government, the aristocracy, the feudal landlords, the capitalists, and the Roman Catholic Church in February 1945, a new coalition
government was established consisting of parties that had cooperated with
the Horthy government as well as the Communist Party. The government’s
most right wing component was the Smallholders Party, whose ranks expanded as former functionaries with the Horthy government sought to gain a
foothold in the new order. Because of the bloody struggle waged against the
Communist Party after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the Party
had few members and no base in the country. In the elections of November
1945 it won only 17 percent of the vote. 28 Still, through the passage of the
Land Reform Act of 1945, the communists were able to expropriate 35
percent of Hungary’s land, doling most of it out to peasants. Two years later,
the country’s banks were nationalized, and by this time the Communists
were, judging by election results, the most popular Party in the country. 29
The socialist reorganization of Hungary brought impressive results in economic and social life. In the decade following Hungary’s liberation, unemployment was eradicated and industrial capacity doubled, while advancements were made in fighting patriarchy as well as the legacy of anti-Semitism and national chauvinism.
There were severe problems in socialist Hungary, too. In his critical evaluation of this period, historian Herbert Aptheker carefully argues that there
were four basic errors committed by the Communist government in Hungary
that fostered discontent amongst the population and that contributed to the
uprising in late 1956. Aptheker demonstrates that the Communists (1) failed
to adequately account for the nationalism in Hungary; (2) emphasized heavy
industry too much and forced agrarian collectivization too quickly; (3) implemented rigid, bureaucratic, and monolithic forms of culture and life; and (4)
united and centralized the Party and the state. 30 There was widespread and
arbitrary repression, heavy censorship, and the dogmatic enforcement of cul-
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tural norms. Important changes began in 1953, such as price reductions,
housing construction, wage increases, the freeing of prisoners, an easing of
dogmatic censorship, the encouragement of cultural and economic critique,
and a revitalization of Party and political life. To push this process forward,
students and youth planned protests for October 23, 1956. In an editorial that
day, the Party newspaper, Szabad Nep, embraced the protests.
Thus, unlike Tiananmen, the Hungarian uprising began as an expression
of communist desire. But disciplined and coordinated arson and weapons
attacks emerged, as did evidence of foreign intervention. While Hungarians
did the fighting on the ground, one insurgent told Newsweek in a November
12 article, “It has been the hand of the Western radio which has told us where
to go and what to demand.” 31 This insurgent was referring to Radio Free
Europe, an anti-communist broadcasting network funded by the likes of
Standard Oil and the Ford Motor Company. Radio Free Europe distributed its
propaganda through the airwaves and also through leaflets and newspapers,
which were littered about in the millions. This was part of a cold war campaign against communism and the global proletarian offensive that shook the
world after 1945, manifesting in armed struggle and the emergence of socialist and bourgeois-nationalist states. 32 A new wave of terror was unleashed in
Hungary, and eventually the government requested military support from the
Soviet Union.
Aptheker, relying primarily on bourgeois news sources, meticulously
documents the role of imperialism in the uprising. However, his claim, which
I think is correct, is that the uprising began as a popular expression of discontent and for socialism, but it was quickly coopted by fascist and right-wing
forces who were encouraged and funded by U.S. imperialism. It was none
other than W. E. B. DuBois who perhaps characterized the class dynamics of
the Hungarian uprising of 1956 most succinctly: “Soon it was clear,” he
wrote, “that this revolt was not against the failure of socialism, but against
socialism itself, with the help of former Hungarian capitalists and landholders now gathering in Austria, together with the great capitalist and colonial
interests in America and the West.” 33 DuBois, too, with dismay notes that the
ranks of socialists and communists joined in a chorus with the New York
Times and the world bourgeoisie in their praise of the Hungarian revolution.
Here, again, is George Bush, reflecting on the uprising: “Though Soviet
tanks brutally crushed the Hungarian uprising, the thirst for freedom lived
on, and in 1989 Hungary became the first communist nation in Europe to
make the transition to democracy.” Bush had the benefit of hindsight to link
the Hungarian uprising to the wave of counterrevolutions that swept the
globe in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These counterrevolutions overthrew
socialist governments and Communist Parties, which had no doubt become
stale and compromised, but which nonetheless oversaw socio-economic systems that were organized along the lines of common ownership of the means
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of production and planned to meet collective needs, and not private profits. It
was this socio-economic system that the Soviet tanks were defending in
Hungary.
AFTER: LIBYA, 2011
Again and again, the Left has found itself shoulder to shoulder with the
bourgeoisie, united around the same objectives. Sometimes there are struggles over how to achieve those ends. During the first war against Iraq in
1991, there was one wing of the U.S. “peace” movement organized around
the National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East. The slogan put forward
by this group was “Sanctions, not war.” In other words, this “peace” group
had no qualms with the desire of the imperialists to overthrow the sovereign
government of Iraq and to restore the royal family in Kuwait; they were just
uncomfortable with that goal being achieved by bombs. Instead, they wanted
a slower, subtler, more indirect form of death to bring the Iraqi government
down. Maybe this form of death could help them sleep better at night, who
knows.
Sometimes, however, there is no discernable disagreement among sections of the Left and the world bourgeoisie. This was the case with the war on
Libya in 2011, in which even Noam Chomsky, the darling of the Left, saddled up and supported UN Resolution 1973, which began the war against the
independent nation and its people. 34 That resolution imposed a “no-fly zone”
over Libya. A no-fly zone, however, just means that the Libyan government
couldn’t fly any aircraft over its own territory, and that its air force would be
destroyed. Chomsky along with Chris Hedges, the International Socialist
Organization, Code Pink, United for Peace and Justice, and the Communist
Party USA bought into the propaganda that Gaddafi was “killing his own
people.” There was, allegedly, an impending massacre in Benghazi, which is
where the armed rebels began their insurrection. All of this propaganda was
coming from groups who were reporting from London and Geneva, and not
Libya. 35 This was parroted by organizations like Amnesty International
(which regularly appoints former U.S. government and military advisors to
its leadership). 36 On February 23, 2011, when these warnings began to circulate, I woke up to an e-mail from Code Pink, a liberal “anti-war” group,
whose subject line read: “Urgent!!!!!!! Massacre in Libya.” They were calling for a letter campaign to demand that the United States do something
about Libya and its government, headed by Muammar Gaddafi. The United
States, along with NATO, did do something. They launched an intensive war
against Libya, supporting insurgents by supplying them with arms, finances,
training, and ultimately an air force. A puppet grouping of Libyans called the
Transitional National Council was set up, and two days after UN Resolution
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1973 passed and the war began they set up a Libyan Central Bank and
National Oil Company.
While Libya was never a properly socialist country, its Jamahiriya
government emerged from an anti-colonial coup and emphasized progressive
nationalism, self-determination, and African unity. The government had consistently supported anti-colonial liberation struggles in Palestine and South
Africa, as well as protected Africa from colonialism. For example, whenever
the U.S.-led African Command (AFRICOM) offered an African country
money to host a U.S. military base, the Gaddafi government would double
the offer (which is why its headquarters today are in Germany). 37 The United
States and its European allies, according to Vice Admiral Robert Moeller, set
up AFRICOM to ensure “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to
the global market.” 38 It was established to counter the African Union (AU),
which posed a threat to this free flow of resources. The AU was funded
heavily by Libya, and Gaddafi served as chairperson from 2009 to 2010. The
Libyan government also pledged $30 billion to develop financial arms of the
AU, including the African Investment Bank, which was to counter the International Monetary Fund. By nationalizing oil after achieving independence
in the Al-Fateh Revolution on September 1, 1969, the Jamahiriya government funded a highly developed social welfare state, nearly eradicating illiteracy, doubling life expectancy, increasing living standards, and enshrining
rights to housing, electricity, education, health care, and work. Gender equality was established and abortion was legalized. 39
The Libyan government didn’t operate in a vacuum, and so there were
twists and turns along the way. After the overthrow of the Soviet Union and
the Eastern bloc of socialist states (Hungary among them), Libya had to
make some accommodations to the rapidly ascending neoliberal order. But
Libya never became a colonial puppet state or a neoliberal state. It always
asserted its independence and there is good evidence that Libya was going
through a swing to the left, as evidenced by U.S. State Department worries of
“growing evidence of Libyan resource nationalism.” Cables from the U.S.
embassy in Tripoli wrote, “The regime has made a point of putting companies on notice that ‘exploitative’ behavior will not be tolerated.” 40
Anyone with a cursory knowledge of history should have been quite
concerned when a rebellion broke out in Libya. And concern should have
turned to certainty as soon as the U.S. government began condemning the
government and supporting the “revolutionaries.” But the tired history of
Left capitulation hasn’t exhausted itself quite yet, and so many in the Left fell
in line, echoing condemnations of Gaddafi as a “dictator” and “tyrant.” 41
Along with Fox News, they laughed at the “deranged” Gaddafi as he denounced the rebels as radical Islamists and al-Qaeda affiliates (which was
100 percent correct). Some on the left, like the International Socialist Organization, took the contradictory position of “No to the intervention, yes to the
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revolution.” They ignored the fact that it was the revolutionaries who had
called for and were completely dependent on U.S. and NATO intervention!
The reality was that the largest protests that took place in Libya in 2011
were in support of the government, including one demonstration in July
attended by 2 million people—one third of the entire population. The government enjoyed widespread support throughout the war. At one point during
the summer, the government distributed 1.2 million weapons to everyday
citizens (many of them were women), and it is hard to imagine an unpopular
government carrying out such a gesture. 42 The rebels did not have widespread support. In fact, when they first pushed west toward Tripoli, they were
repelled in Sirte, not by the Libyan army but by armed townspeople. Without
the support of Western air forces, military support, and intelligence, Tripoli
would not have fallen.
But Tripoli did fall, and it was a tragic day. When Hillary Clinton, then
U.S. Secretary of State, received the news of Gaddafi’s lynching, she was
giddy with glee, exclaiming to reporters, “We came, we saw, he died.” But
the overthrow of the sovereign government of Libya has ushered in a new era
of chaos and misery within Libya; the country and its infrastructure have
been destroyed. Further, the entire region is severely destabilized. “Not only
have the Salafi militias been provided with the latest hi-tech military equipment by NATO,” Dan Glazebrook writes, “they have been given free reign to
loot the Libyan government’s armouries, and provided with a safe haven
from which to organize attacks across the region.” 43 It was not long before
the chaos spread to neighboring Mali. And it is not a coincidence that it was
after the wars on Iraq and Libya that Daesh, or the Islamic State in Syria,
emerged, for these forces were nurtured, strengthened, and emboldened
throughout these wars. 44
RESTRAINT
There is an epithet in the U.S. Left that is tossed around: “tankie.” The
origins of the term stem from the Soviet intervention in 1956 Hungary, and
the term is supposed to refer to someone who, apparently, “sides with the
tanks.” Such a political characterization has gained some traction on the Left,
and it is a characterization that is asinine as it is revealing. That siding with a
tank can stand in for a political designation on the Left today lays bare the
tendency against class analysis, or at best, the tendency to avoid class analysis. Like any form of technology, what is determinant are the social relations
in which that technology is deployed. For Agamben, a tank can only serve to
repress, and repression is bad. But doesn’t it matter what is being repressed,
when, and on what grounds? And this is the main lesson of the historical
inquiry performed in this chapter: valuing whatever, protecting the secret
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life, defending alterity is only one part of politics. It’s an important part, no
doubt, but it must be held in tension with class analysis and historical-materialist investigations. For if Agamben had bothered to commit to such an
analysis, he would have quickly found that those assembled in Tiananmen
Square were not an assemblage of whatever singularities united only in their
dissolution; no, they had a common identity! While throughout the month
many urban workers joined in the protests, the majority of those in the
Square were students from the upper and middle classes who were attending
elite universities in Beijing. They were a remarkably homogenous group—
and a very tiny sliver of the Chinese population, for that matter.
This chapter has been brief and it has covered a lot of territory, so I am
quite confident that some might say that it has been “reductionist” or “vulgar.” They might call on me to “complicate” the story, to add more “nuance.”
Such calls are ubiquitous in academia. But as Don Mitchell reminds us, “our
job as scholars it not to ‘complicate.’ It is to analyze and explain, and especially to explain clearly.” 45 Things are already complicated enough! I have
made a sincere effort here to critically appraise the historical situations that I
have engaged. I haven’t painted any government, party, or state as perfect, I
haven’t claimed that any country is a worker’s paradise or some such nonsense. I have attended to the contradictions in each historical instance as best
as I am able in this space. But we always act on partial information, that’s
part of operating in the world. Sometimes, however, the best action is restraint. Like studying, restraint isn’t a mode of passivity, it isn’t a disengagement from the world. And judging from popular discourse, restraint is a hard
thing to do in the United States. “We can’t let this happen!” “Surely, we have
to do something!” In these refrains we can hear the democratic impulses that
Lyotard understood interpellating us as humanitarian interventionists, as
NGO saviors of the world’s problems. When these refrains meet our ears and
our eyes, we have to be cautious, and this is especially true for those of us in
imperialist countries. We have to learn restraint just like we paradoxically
learn how to study. And when counterrevolutionaries assemble, we can only
hope that the tanks will appear.
NOTES
1. Giorgio Agamben, The coming community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1990/1993) 85.
2. Ibid., 87.
3. Giorgio Agamben, Means without end: Notes on politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and
Cesara Casarino (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996/2000), 88-89.
4. This date marks the defeat of the Kuomintang by the People’s Liberation Army and the
founding of the People’s Republic of China.
5. See Han Suyin, Wind in the tower: Mao Tsetung and the Chinese Revolution 1949-1975
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1976) for more on this as well as the two-line struggle. See also
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Richard H. Solomon, Mao’s revolution and the Chinese political culture (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1971).
6. Eugene Puryear, “From liberation to Thermidor: Phases of China’s socialist revolution,”
Socialism and Liberation 5, no. 1: 142.
7. Ibid., 145.
8. Ibid.
9. Alain Badiou, The communist hypothesis (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 87.
10. “China’s Communist Party membership exceeds 85 million,” Xinhua, July 01, 2013. It
is important to note that, while the number is quite high, only 6 percent of the population
belongs to the CPC.
11. For evidence of this, see Ma Bin, et al., “Precarious is China’s socialism! The Chinese
people have reached another extremely critical time!,” Socialism and Liberation 5, no. 1: 99112.
12. See Curry S. Malott and Derek R. Ford, Marx, capital, and education: Towards a
critical pedagogy of becoming (New York: Peter Lang, 2015), ch. 2; and Brian Becker, “What
do socialists defend in China today?,” Socialism and Liberation 5, no. 1: 3-20.
13. Ibid.
14. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Hu Yaobang, ex-Party chief in China, dies at 73,” The New York
Times, April 16, 1989.
15. There are multiple socialist organizations in the United States that on an almost yearly
basis publish denunciations of the CPC and China on the occasion of the anniversary of the
battle of Tiananmen Square. For a paradigmatic example, see Dennis Kosuth, “Twenty years
after Tiananmen Square,” Socialist Worker, June 4, 2009. Kosuth’s telling of the politics of
Tiananmen Square mirror any imperialist news outlet almost exactly (save a few phrases of
“left speak” here and there). Like Agamben, Kosuth mentions Yao-bang without mentioning
his politics (other than that he was “driven from the party in disgrace because he was seen as
challenging corruption”).
16. Dingxin Zhao, The power of Tiananmen: State-society relations and the 1989 Beijing
student movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
17. Phillip J. Cunningham, Tiananmen moon: Inside the Chinese student uprising of 1989
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010), 270.
18. Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton (Producers & Directors), The gate of heavenly peace
(Low Bow Group: USA). Chai’s comments are readily available on YouTube.
19. James P. Sterba, Adi Ignatius and Robert S. Greenberger, “Class struggle: China’s harsh
actions threaten to set back 10-year reform drive—Suspicions of Westernization are ascendant,
and army has a political role again—A movement unlikely to die,” Wall Street Journal, June 5,
1989.
20. See Jay Matthews, “The myth of Tiananmen and the price of a passive press,” Columbia
Journalism Review September/October 1998.
21. U.S. Department of State, “Latin American diplomat eyewitness account of June 3-4
events,” July 12, 1989. Retrieved from http://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89beijing18828_a.html.
22. James P. Sterba, Adi Ignatius, and Robert S. Greenberger, “Class struggle.”
23. Cited in Yenica Cortes, “Tiananmen Square 1989: Facing the threat of counterrevolution,” Socialism and Liberation 5, no. 1: 75.
24. This restraint is revealed if we compare the reaction of the CPC and the PLA to that of,
say, the police or the military in the United States, As I sit here in my apartment in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I can’t help but think about the violent state repression of MOVE, a Black
political commune and organization formed in the city in 1972. As radical Black activists,
MOVE members were constantly targets of police violence, and members armed themselves in
response to this violence. In May of 1985, under the pretense of neighbors’ complaints regarding noise and sanitation, the Philadelphia police swarmed and attacked the house with over
10,000 rounds of ammunition fired from automatic weapons and tanks. Police eventually
dropped two bombs with C-4 on the house, which started a fire that killed eleven people,
including six children. Entire city blocks were destroyed. Ramona Africa, the one surviving
MOVE member, was arrested. One only has to imagine what the U.S. government would do if
In Praise of Tanks
113
thousands of MOVE members had been occupying a central location of Philadelphia, kidnapping and killing soldiers.
25. Five photographers captured the event. The most widely used photograph was shot by
Steve Widener of the Associated Press.
26. The United States played a supporting role in this as it was looking for another nation
from which to launch attacks against the newly found Soviet Union.
27. Herbert Aptheker, The truth about Hungary (New York: Mainstream Publishers, 1957),
18.
28. Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 251.
29. The communists received 22 percent of the votes and “the left bloc headed by the party
obtained 66 percent of the seats in parliament,” ibid.
30. Herbert Aptheker, The truth about Hungary, chapter 6. Aptheker’s book is an extremely
balanced and insightful read, for, in addition to detailing the degree of imperialist intervention
in the uprising itself, he carefully documents the ebbs and flows of socialist development, the
errors and corrections that took place prior to the uprising.
31. Ibid., 231.
32. See Curry S. Malott and Derek R. Ford, Marx, capital, and education: Towards a
critical pedagogy of becoming, chapter 2; and Curry S. Malott, Education and history: Engaging the global class war (New York: Peter Lang, 2016).
33. W. E. B. DuBois, “Socialism and democracy: A debate,” The American Socialist, January 1957: 8-9.
34. Noam Chomsky, “Recognizing the ‘unpeople,’” Truthout, January 7, 2011.
35. Even U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates acknowledged that there were no confirmed reports of Libyan forces firing on protesters.
36. See Maximilian Forte’s excellent book, Slouching towards Sirte: NATO’s war on Libya
and Africa (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2012).
37. Dan Glazebrook, Divide and ruin: The West’s imperial strategy in an age of crisis (San
Francisco: Liberation Media, 2013), 39.
38. Cited in ibid., 70.
39. See Derek R. Ford, “From standardized testing to the war on Libya: The privatization of
U.S. education in international context,” in Mark Abendroth and Brad J. Pofilio (Eds.), Understanding neoliberal rule in K-12 schools: Educational fronts for local and global justice, vol. 1
(Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, 2015).
40. U.S. Department of State, “Growth of resource nationalism in Libya,” U.S. Embassy
Cable, Tripoli, Libya. Retrieved from: http://wikileaks.org/cable/2007/11/07tripoli967.html.
41. Perhaps the most opportunistic of the leading intellectuals was Horace Cambell, who
denounced the Gaddafi government and berated those who were organizing against the war in
the summer of 2011, and then published a book about how terrible the war against Libya was
for Africa two years later.
42. Ernesto Londono, “In Libya, women brace for battle,” The Washington Post, July 2,
2011.
43. Dan Glazebrook, Divide and ruin, 47.
44. The proxy war against Syria has contributed to this most significantly and directly. See
ibid. for more.
45. Don Mitchell, “A complicated fetish,” Social & Cultural Geography 15, no. 2: 125.
Chapter Eight
Party
The communist pedagogical constellation charted in this book is angled at
the revolutionary transformation of the entire social formation, toward the
institution of a new mode of production, new ways of being and of being
together. This has been, and is, the goal of the entire international communist
movement. There is one last concept that I want to bring into this constellation, and it is one that has been absolutely central to communist history: the
Party. The Party also has an important educational role to play, for it is the
collective organization that conducts the negotiation between desire and repression, between learning and studying. An educational reading of Lenin’s
What Is to Be Done? reveals that the question of communist organization is,
at heart, a question of navigating the relationship between organization and
spontaneity. Rather than locating the Party as part of the communist pedagogical constellation, then, it is better to view it as an organizational form of
commonness against that navigates the movement across the constellation.
The relationship between organization and spontaneity can be broached
through a quick glance at the relationship between experience and consciousness. Like all of Lenin’s work, What Is to Be Done? is an intervention into a
specific moment, it is a polemic against the emergence of economism, which
held that the working class would, on its own through the struggle in the
economic realm, overthrow capitalism and institute socialism. The working
class, so the story goes, develops its own consciousness and forms of organization spontaneously as a result of our daily struggles against the bosses.
Lenin, by contrast, argued that spontaneity “represents nothing more nor less
than consciousness in an embryonic form.” 1 Workers experience exploitation
directly and spontaneously resist this exploitation, by strikes, sabotages,
combining in unions, and so on. Consciousness is something different. As
Wayne Au writes, consciousness is “the willfull application of a systematic
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and materialist analysis of social conditions and relations, making use of
summation and generalization . . . for understanding what is happening in the
world in preparation for purposeful, volitional action to change that world.” 2
Lenin is by no means against spontaneity, which would be akin to being
opposed to breathing; it’s rather than spontaneity isn’t enough. Or, rather,
spontaneity is enough for micropolitics and localized struggles against particular enemies in particular places. But it isn’t enough for the revolutionary
overthrow of the entire sociopolitical order of capitalism. For that, revolutionary organization is necessary.
Workers experience exploitation directly: we suffer from being overworked and underpaid, from being deprived of safe and sufficient working
conditions and work breaks, from job insecurity, and so on. We don’t need
Lenin or the Party to tell us any of these things. We know that they are
happening, we literally feel them throughout our bodies. Yet there is a type of
consciousness that doesn’t flow directly from experience and this type of
consciousness has to do with the relationship of our experience to the relationship of broader social, economic, and political forces at differing scales:
within the factory, the city, the state, and the world. This type of consciousness is only generated and spread through organization—and this type of
consciousness crosses any binary between the mind and the body, between
emotion and intellect.
One of the reasons why the economists bowed to spontaneity and settled
for trade-union consciousness was because of their belief that the economic
realm was the most likely to draw workers into struggle. The economists,
that is, were economic reductionists. Lenin was not: “All and sundry manifestations of police tyranny and autocratic outrage . . . the flogging of the
peasantry, the corruption of the officials, the conduct of the police towards
the ‘common people’ in the cities . . . the persecution of the religious
sects . . . ” were all examples of acts of oppression that drew people into
struggle. 3 Lenin goes further, however, and maintains that the economic
mustn’t be privileged a priori over the political.
The Party is an organization that consolidates and advances spontaneity.
The relationship between organization and spontaneity is similar to the relationship between spontaneity and consciousness described above. Spontaneity is not only the embryo of consciousness, it is also the germ of organization. Negri provides a useful way to understand this relationship: “Organization is the verification of spontaneity, its refinement. . . . Organization is
spontaneity reflecting upon itself.” 4 Through organization we reflect on the
successes and defeats of protests, strikes, insurrections, reading groups, propaganda composition and distribution, and so on. Through organization we
consolidate and expand each area of struggle. We—Party members—collectively go through these experiences and learn from them, advancing as a
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result of such inquiry and reflection; this is what is makes the Party the
advanced guard.
The Leninist Party itself comes about as a lesson through the successes
and defeats of the spontaneous mass struggle in Russia. We can read this
point through Lenin’s response to a position spelled out in the journal Rabocheye Dyelo (translated as “Workers’ Cause), the main theoretical outlet of
the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad. Through this paper the
organization writes that they believe that what “will mostly determine the
tasks [our italics] and the character of the literary activity of the ‘League,’ is
the mass labor movement [Rabocheye Dyelo’s italics] that has arisen in recent years.” 5 There are two ways that this can be interpreted. For one, it can
be read as the reduction of communism to the labor movement. Alternatively, it can be read as stating that “the mass movement puts before us new,
theoretical, political and organizational tasks, far more complicated than
those that might have satisfied us in the period before the rise of the mass
movement.” 6 Lenin interprets Rabocheye Dyelo’s statement in the second
manner, against the paper’s intention. In this way, the mass struggle is the
teacher and the Party is the student; the mass struggle poses the problem that
the Party has to solve, a problem to which the mass struggle doesn’t have the
answer. The mass struggle is like Jacques Rancière’s ignorant schoolmaster,
who, assuming an equality of intelligence, commands the student to learn
material that the teacher does not know. 7
At the time of Lenin’s writing, one of the lessons that the mass struggle
posited regarded sustaining the struggle in the face of repression. The answer
to this problem was tight and secretive organization. This type of organization was—and remains—at odds with the obsession with “democracy.”
Within the struggle, Lenin observes, “broad democracy . . . is nothing more
than a useless and harmful toy.” 8 Broad democracy leads to broad arrests, to
broad repression—at least in the context of the Tsarist state. Depending upon
the degree of state repression, that is, the Party must uphold a respective
degree of secrecy and centralization. This organizational priority of “strict
secrecy, strict selection of members and training of professional revolutionaries” actually guarantees “something more than ‘democracy’ . . . namely,
complete, comradely, mutual confidence among revolutionaries.” 9 What
matters is not the formality of democratic mechanisms but the spirit of comradeship and dedication to the struggle. Secrecy and the careful selection of
membership protect Party leaders and members from police raids and infiltration. Membership in the Party is not just a matter of filling out a form; it’s
a matter of demonstrating commitment and discipline to the struggle. The
same goes for leadership. In the Party leadership is not a personality or
popularity contest. Leaders are elected based on their record of sacrifice to
the revolutionary struggle.
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It is important to emphasize that Lenin in no way fetishizes the Partyform. Nor does he issue blanket, abstract organizational imperatives about
secrecy, the selection of membership, hierarchy, or centralization. In fact, the
Communist International’s 1921 document on communist organization that
guided the formation of the world’s official Communist Parties, states this
explicitly in point two:
There can be no absolutely correct, immutable organizational form for communist parties. The conditions of the proletarian class struggle are subject to
changes in an unceasing process of transformation; the organization of the
vanguard of the proletariat must also constantly seek appropriate forms corresponding to these changes. Similarly, the historically determined characteristics of each individual country condition particular forms of adaptation in the
organization of the individual parties. 10
Lenin’s theorization of the Party emerged from the particular coordinates in
which he and the communist movement were operating, and he proposed the
Party-form as an organizational apparatus that would be able to meet the
challenges posed at the moment. The Party was conceived as an organism
that would ensure the proletarian’s victory on the battlefield. The Party
serves as an instrument with which to generalize and centralize the various
struggles and experiences of the working class and oppressed, to coordinate
spontaneity and organization.
DISCIPLINE AND SUBJECTIVITY
Lenin conceived of the party as an organizational organism appropriate to
wage combat against the systems and agents of capitalism and imperialism.
Lukàcs, for his part, claims that the Party is in essence a theoretical question. 11 He contends that the Party is not just a technical response to the
problems of struggles; it is rather “one of the most important intellectual
questions of the revolution.” 12 The entirety of this intellectual question
hinges on the notion of discipline. Indeed, the particularly Leninist form of
the Party did emerge as a real force in the communist movement within this
context at the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
Conference in Brussels and London. The thrust of the debate during this
congress, which resulted in the split of the Party between the Bolsheviks and
Mensheviks, was over the requirements of Party membership. Julius Martov
held that Party membership should require that the member be associated
with one of the Party organizations, while Lenin believed that members must
participate in Party activity directly, supporting the Party materially and
personally, and ultimately submitting to the discipline of the Party—even
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when the member disagrees with the Party. Lenin’s proposition won, hence
the formation of the Bolshevik—or majoritarian—tendency.
As Lukàcs declares, the Leninist position was that “it was essential for
members to take part in illegal activity, to devote themselves wholeheartedly
to party work, and to submit to the most rigorous party discipline.” 13 And
this is the crux of the whole debate and the whole purpose of the Party itself:
“Other questions of organization—that of centralization, for instance—are
only the necessary technical consequences of this . . . Leninist standpoint.” 14
This was not just a theoretical conviction for Lukàcs, who embodied this
ethos of revolutionary discipline throughout his life, always being willing to
denounce his work and actions when they betrayed the Party line (including
his participation in the right-wing Nagy government in Hungary in 1956 that
was formed while the communists tried to deal with the counterrevolution).
As he saw it, the relationship that the Party institutes in the revolutionary
mass movement is not between spontaneity and organization, but between
spontaneity and discipline. Why is discipline necessary? Because the Party is
nothing except the vehicle for working-class power in the revolutionary period, and revolutions are events: they are necessarily confusing, chaotic, and
unpredictable. This is the case for two main reasons: first, because of the
varying social and class forces that participate in revolutions and, second,
because of the complicated nature of the composition of the proletarian class
itself.
Rarely—if ever—do crises affect only one strata of society. Because of
the interconnected and tightly woven nature of the social fabric, even when
one sector of the economy undergoes a loss in productivity other sectors are
affected. This was evidenced quite clearly in the major economic crisis of
2007–2008, the shadows of which still loom over us today. The crisis began
with a bust in the housing market but quickly spread throughout all of the
international economy. It impacted the poorest workers most deeply—and
workers of color in particular—but it also impacted well-paid workers
(known as the “middle class”), the petit bourgeoisie (like the owners of
family businesses), and corporations of all sizes. If a revolution erupted in
response to this crisis, what would its class character be? The Leninist answer is this: it would be of the class that was the most disciplined, organized,
and conscious. “The deeper the crisis,” Lukàcs writes, “the better the prospects for the revolution. But also . . . the more strata of society it involves, the
more varied are the instinctive movements which criss-cross in it.” 15
Within the proletarian class—which encompasses all those who must sell
their labor-power for a wage to survive—there is a great deal of difference
and antagonism. The Leninist Party studies its own class, gaining a “deeper
and more thorough appreciation of the different economic shadings within
the proletariat.” 16 These antagonisms within the working class are not just of
an economic nature, and this is why Lenin was so concerned with national
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and racial oppression. The advent of imperialism intensified economic and
national divisions within the proletariat, enabling some workers in some
nations to attain better living standards, those comparable to the petit-bourgeoisie. This is the phenomenon of the labor aristocracy, a class that arises in
imperialist countries when the bourgeoisie buys off certain workers with
“enormous superprofits (since they are obtained over and above the profits
which the capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their ‘own’ country).” 17
The labor aristocracy aligns itself with the bourgeoisie, and this alignment
allows “a superiority in formal education and experience in administration
over the rest of the proletariat” through, for example, the occupation of
leadership roles in unions. 18 It is generally those members of the proletarian
class who ideologically align themselves most with the bourgeoisie who
occupy positions of authority—there is, as a result, a material incentive to
supporting bourgeois ideology. This, again, cuts across any proposed binary
between the mind and the body: “the proletariat is still caught up in the old
capitalist forms of thought and feeling.” 19 Without the constant work of the
Party there won’t exist a sufficiently strong counter—or proletarian—ideology and structure of feeling.
Discipline is necessary in and before the time of insurrection. The Party
member submits to the will of the Party, but this will is not some abstract
program; it’s rather a living, breathing organism of which the member is a
full part. The member and the Party do not relate in a reified way. Instead,
the Party requires “active participation in every event,” and this “can only be
achieved by engaging the whole personality.” 20 The Party engages the entirety of subjectivity, mobilizing all of the forces of intellect and desire, and in
this way the Party is subjected to the discipline of the proletarian class.
Lukàcs goes so far as to equate the “discipline of the Communist Party” to
“the unconditional absorption of the total personality in the praxis of the
movement.” 21 This relationship is the key to the Communist Party, and without it membership “degenerate[s] into a reified and abstract system of rights
and duties.” 22 The Party is not just another organization or coalition; when
one joins one makes a commitment to prioritizing revolutionary organizing
in their life. As Eric Hobsbawm writes, you can’t understand the Party “without a grasp of that sense of total devotion which made the party in Auschwitz
make its members pay their dues in cigarettes (inconceivably precious and
almost impossible to obtain in an extermination camp).” 23
When the revolutionary moment happens there is nothing to guarantee
either that the revolution will take hold or that the revolution will be of a
progressive nature. Revolutionary moments are, by their very essence, when
everything is up in the air: “Social power lies abandoned in the street, without an owner so to speak. A restoration only becomes possible in the absence
of any revolutionary class to take advantage of this ownerless power.” 24
Restoration is one possibility, and counterrevolution is another; there is al-
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ways the possibility that even more reactionary forces—like fascists or white
supremacists—will seize hold of this ownerless power. The purpose of the
Party is to prepare for the revolutionary moment so that it is ready to seize
that moment, to navigate the twists and turns as the revolution unfolds, and to
ensure that the advanced sections of the proletariat are doing the steering.
The Party, however, doesn’t create this moment, for it is only “a power
which can accelerate and provoke development” within the confines of the
movement: “The party can therefore in no sense take a real initiative.” 25 The
Party, too, is an ignorant schoolmaster.
STUDY PARTY
There is a misconception out there that the Party is the all-knowing being. As
we saw above, Lenin formulates the Party as the student of the masses and
their bodily intellectual movements. Lukàcs also disputes this misconception,
for the uncertainty of revolution—including the path to revolution—is what
necessitates discipline and, by extension, the Party. But it is Dean who most
astutely dwells on the opacity of the Party, defining it as a radical lack and a
radical desire. The Communist Party, for Dean “is a vehicle for maintaining a
specific gap of desire, the collective desire for collectivity.” 26 The Party
works to produce a different type of subjectivity. Against the ways in which
capitalism has produced us as individuals who are radically divided and
separate from others, the Party embodies the communist desire for collectivity, for the relationality, dependency, and opacity that we addressed in part I
of this book. Yet the production of this collectivity requires that we subordinate ourselves as individuals to the collective, renouncing our individual
freedom. 27 This renunciation and “subordination requires discipline, work,
and organization . . . it is active collective struggle that changes and reshapes
desire from its individual . . . form into a common, collective one.” 28 It helps,
of course, that the subject-form of the individual is more ideological than
actual, and that it is being challenged by recent norms and arrangements
within the capitalist mode of production.
There is another gap that desire animates, and that is the gap within the
existing order of things, filled with those whom Rancière terms the “part of
those who have no part.” This is a form of subjectification that the Party
animates; it is an “us,” but not an “us” that we can fully and finally delineate.
Dean gives an excellent, concrete example of this subjectification: “We are
the 99 percent,” the main slogan of Occupy Wall Street. This slogan doesn’t
name “an identity”; it rather “highlights a division and a gap, the gap between the wealth of the top 1 percent and the rest of us.” 29 The slogan is a
subjectification of the division between the people and the system without
unifying the people as homogenous. That is, “We are the 99 percent” mobi-
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lizes a common identity but it does not “unify this collectivity under a substantial identity—race, ethnicity, nationality. It asserts it as the ‘we’ of a
divided people, the people divided between expropriators and expropriated.” 30 The slogan expresses a collective desire for collective being, belonging, and producing. Thus, the gap in the present order of things opens up a
world of possibilities, literally. Within the gap we can experience and understand ourselves, each other, and the world differently, instead of as is. This is
the gap of study.
Dean thinks Occupy Wall Street and the Party together, arguing that
Occupy Wall Street both designates the need for the Party and provides us
with a model and example of the Party in embryonic form. The overthrow
and dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc socialist countries
impacted a shift in the forces of social movements in the United States,
resulting in the rise of anarchist and liberal groupings. This new composition
was most evident in the anti- or alter-globalization protests of 1999–2001.
Coinciding with post-structuralist and post-modern philosophies that celebrated difference against unity and the local against the universal, protest
movements turned toward concepts of “diversity, horizontality, individuality,
inclusivity, and openness (where openness actually means the refusal of divisive ideological content).” 31 Occupy Wall Street began with many of the
values associated with anarchism: horizontality, leaderlessness, inclusion,
autonomy, and consensus. The ideals celebrated at the beginning of the
movement turned out, in the practical experience of the movement, to be
nothing more than that. Nice thoughts, yes, but not sufficient for the task at
hand. Instead of solving the problem of organization it raised the question
once again, moving us to think seriously about the Party-form.
The momentum of Occupy “comes from a vanguard of disciplined, committed activists undertaking and supporting actions in the streets.” 32 It was
very much a matter, I would argue, of “from each according to their ability.”
Not everyone was able to stay at an occupation day and night. Some people
would come and go in between work, school, and family or community
commitments. Some people would just show up for the General Assemblies
or for protests, marches, and direct actions. But Dean notes that Occupy, like
the Party, subsumed the whole of subjectivity and disciplined itself to the
movements and desires of the 99 percent: “people joined in different capacities—facilitation, legal, technology, media, food, community relations, education, direct action—participating in time-intensive working groups and
support activities.” 33 In this way, Occupy possessed what Lukàcs attributed
to the Party: “the ability to draw together all party members and to involve
them in activity on behalf of the party with the whole of their personality.” 34
Further, Occupy insisted on the division that animates politics. Dean
argues against those who have read in the movement the “multiplicity of the
99 percent’s incompatible groups and tendencies,” as if Occupy was “a kind
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of political or even post-political open-source brand that anyone can use.” 35
This analysis completely misses the point: it was an occupation and a movement against the 1 percent. It wasn’t just some agglomeration of bodies in
the streets, but a united movement that insisted on division. Those who
celebrate the movement for its inclusiveness are also wrong: “That aspect of
the movement… isn’t new or different. It’s a component of Occupy that is
fully compatible with the movement’s setting in communicative capitalism.” 36 We have already seen the ways that democracy and capitalism are
able to absorb differences within the circuits of valorization. We have also
seen that there are limits to what differences and oppositions can be absorbed, and Dean makes explicit what capitalism will never be able to accommodate: Occupy was threatening precisely because it was exclusive: it
excluded the exploiters.
Although many wouldn’t like to admit it, Occupy was a form of representation and leadership. It was a vanguard of people—a part—standing in for
the whole: “Occupy Wall Street is not actually the movement of 99 percent
of the population of the United States . . . against the top 1 percent. It is a
movement mobilizing itself around an occupied Wall Street in the name of
the 99 percent. 37 The movement asserted and claimed this gap, this lack of
correspondence between the exploiters and the exploited. The problem is that
it never admitted as much. Just like it never admitted that leaders emerged.
This refusal made it so that we couldn’t address questions like who was
leading and speaking for the movement and what do we want them to do and
say?
Nonetheless, Occupy Wall Street still functioned similarly to the Party:
absorbing the full subjectivity of members, insisting on division, and drawing
people into the struggle; it was “a self-conscious assertion of the overlap of
two gaps in the maintenance of collective desire.” 38 One reason that Dean’s
analysis is so useful is that it is a compelling strategy for persuasion. Instead
of referring to those Communist Parties that we have been—through the
media and education—so indoctrinated to despise, we can start by pointing
out how Occupy Wall Street proved to be a Party in embryonic form. At the
time, it couldn’t admit as much to itself, and this refusal is exactly one of the
reasons for its dissolution.
Lewis celebrates the beginning stage of Occupy Wall Street as a form of
collective, public studying, especially in its absence of concrete demands.
The movement, he writes, “spent most of its time preferring not to commit to
any one demand over and above any other.” 39 Instead of division and exclusion, Lewis believes that Occupy Wall Street inaugurated a “state of exception” in which “what emerged was precisely the question (and not the answer) of inclusion and exclusion,” a question that was “a central tenet of its
own self-study, of its own possibility to exist.” 40 On these grounds he rejects
Dean’s argument that the movement needed the form of the Party, claiming
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that, in doing so, she “cut occupation from its ontological commitments to
the collective and public study of whatever.” 41 The destruction of Occupy
Wall Street and the various occupations across the country was, however, the
result of a highly centralized and coordinated national effort by capital and
its state. In late 2012, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund obtained documents through a Freedom of Information Act request that, although heavily
redacted, reveal a dense network of surveillance that included offices of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, the
New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve, universities and colleges,
major corporations, local police forces, and local governments. 42 In March
2016, the same group released documents proving that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the U.S. Marshals Service were each also
involved in the nationally coordinated crackdown. This is what cut the occupation from its commitment to study, and if we want to study collectively,
then we have to reckon with this reality. We have to join the Party.
Now, it may seem as though the Party bears down on the secret life that I
have been arguing we need to defend. This would be so were the link between the Party and subjectivity one way, flowing from the Party to its
subjects. But Lukàcs and Dean are quite clear here: the link goes both ways:
subjectivity subjects the Party, too. This does not mean that a particular party
in a particular moment cannot impose itself on the secret life, but it does
mean that there is nothing inherently contradictory between the Party-form
and the secret life. In fact, in orienting itself toward the revolutionary rupture,
toward that moment for which we have no prior conceptual framework, the
Party would do well to pay particular attention to its own secret life.
Studying doesn’t have conditions or prerequisites; it can and does take
place everywhere, even in the most dire and brutal of circumstances. 43 But
studying does have its enemies. If studying is to be conceived of and mobilized as an educational method against capitalism and imperialism, if it is to
be communist, then it has to be concerned with organization. Just as learning
has to take place in order to study, struggle has to take place to keep studying, to spread study throughout society. For that reason, studying cannot be
fully inclusive: the commonness of study has to, in the present configurations
of the world, be against. The Party is the form of struggle that organizes this
division, studying the mass movement, learning its lessons, absorbing them
and generalizing them, thereby advancing spontaneity; advancing study. The
Party organizes the double gap, allowing us to collectively navigate the pedagogical constellation, alternatively and simultaneously seeing, reading, and
being blind to the world as it is, making communist study possible.
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NOTES
1. V. I. Lenin, “What is to be done?,” in Henry M. Christman (Ed.), Essential works of
Lenin (New York: Dover Publications, 1987), 74.
2. Wayne Au, “Vygotsky and Lenin on learning: The parallel structures of individual and
social development,” Science & Society 71: no. 3, 278.
3. Lenin, “What is to be done?,” 96-97.
4. Antonio Negri, Factory of strategy: 33 lessons on Lenin, trans. Arianna Bove (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 32.
5. Quoted in Lenin, “What is to be done?,” 87.
6. Ibid.
7. See Charles Bingham and Gert Biesta, Jacques Rancière: Education, truth, emancipation (New York: Continuum, 2010).
8. Lenin, “What is to be done?,” 160-161.
9. Ibid., 162.
10. Communist International, “Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist
Parties, on the Methods and Content of their Work” (12 July, 1921). Available at: https://
www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/3rd-congress/organisation/guidelines.htm.
11. Georg Lukàcs, Lenin: A study on the unity of his thought, trans. Nicholas Jacobs (London and New York: Verso, 1924/2009; History and class consciousness: Studies in Marxist
dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971); Tactics and ethics, 19191929, trans. Michael McColgan (London and New York: Verso, 1972/2014).
12. Georg Lukàcs, History and class consciousness, 295.
13. Georg Lukàcs, Lenin, 25.
14. Ibid., emphasis added.
15. Ibid., 29.
16. Ibid., 27.
17. V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism (Peking: Foreign Language
Press, 1917/1975), 9.
18. Georg Lukàcs, Lenin, 29.
19. Georg Lukàcs, History and class consciousness, 310.
20. Ibid., 319.
21. Ibid., 320.
22. Ibid.
23. Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (New York: The New Press, 1973/2001), 7.
24. Georg Lukàcs, History and class consciousness 308.
25. Georg Lukàcs, Tactics and ethics, 98.
26. Jodi Dean, The communist horizon (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 207.
27. Georg Lukàcs, History and class consciousness, 315.
28. Jodi Dean, The communist horizon, 197.
29. Ibid., 200.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 208.
32. Ibid., 216.
33. Ibid., 217.
34. Georg Lukàcs, History and class consciousness, 335.
35. Jodi Dean, The communist horizon, 219-220.
36. Ibid., 223.
37. Ibid., 229.
38. Ibid., 239.
39. Tyson E. Lewis, On study: Giorgio Agamben and educational potentiality (London and
New York: Routlegde, 2013), 152.
40. Ibid., 159.
41. Ibid.
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42. The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund is a militant national public interest legal organization. You can connect with them at www.justiceonline.org and you can view and search the
documents obtained at www.bigbrotheramerica.org.
43. I thank Tyson Lewis for helping me understand this point. See his contribution in Dave
Backer et al., “Review symposium: Studying On study with a reply by Tyson Lewis,” Policy
Futures in Education 14: no. 3: 409-423.
Conclusion
Architectures of Resistance
The tensions on and around which I have been writing haven’t been resolved,
and I can’t resolve them, not here, anyways. They can only be worked out in
practice, in struggle. What I want to do here, by way of closing, is to gesture
toward what these tensions might look like in the world. How might studying
and learning, alterity and reproduction, the general and the secret, subjectivity and political economy coexist in time and space? We can get a sense of
how such tensions might materialize, I suggest, by turning to the architectural drawings of Constant Nieuwenhuys.
Constant is best known for his New Babylon project, which spanned from
1956–1974 and consisted of sets of constructions, drawings, graphics, and
texts that address the topics of cities, capitalism, technology and art, and
urbanism. Using these different media, Constant explored the relationship
between reproduction and the production of the new. Or, perhaps it would be
better to say that through these media, Constant engaged in an argument
about what urbanism—as a social and spatial practice hinged on the city—
should be. The varying enunciations of the project unite around a sociospatial
form, suspended above the earth, which people, together, continuously construct and reconstruct according to their desires. New Babylon is essentially a
platform for study and a platform to study. The production of the material
basics of life takes place through automated machine operations that are
hidden beneath the structure. While this is just in diagrammatic form, and
thus doesn’t answer specific questions about practicality, the primary point
that I want to draw is the way in which the productive forces and the relations
of production are posited. The relationship is complicated, and ultimately
blurred, for “both the play of desire, which cannot be specified without
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Conclusion
blocking it, and the support of that play, which cannot be represented without
it being mistaken for frozen play.” 1
The materiality of the argument, that is to say, the multimodal presentation of the proposal, is not incidental, but central to the project. Mark Wigley
argues that Constant’s drawings, in particular, play a fundamental role in
performing his argument.
Constant tended to prefer models and photographs, but he increasingly
took to drawing. He insisted on the materiality of paper, which itself conveys
the dialectic between production and reproduction, between learning and
studying—as well as the decisive role played by the productive forces. The
invention of the printing press propelled the need for the mass production of
paper, and the new productive forces in the paper industry increased the
production of paper, cheapened it, and increased its distribution networks. As
Wigley observes, it was “precisely because it had become the means of
reproduction that paper could act as the optimum site to register originality.” 2
The material of the drawings themselves signals how New Babylon’s productive forces below lay the basis for the study in its networked cityscape
above.
The drawings, thus, present the argument and are not representative. Wigley likens them to “mirages” that facilitate the dérive, or the drift. 3 The
dérive is, as Guy Debord formulated it in 1956, when “one or more persons
during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action,
their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn
by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” 4 The
dérive is an intentional act in which one suspends one’s normal bodilyspatial associations, wandering about through space. It is thus different from
a stroll, which designates a bodily passage through a habitat. While the stroll
may be a type of wandering, it is a wandering that occurs within the world as
it already arranged. The dérive, by contrast, produces new arrangements, new
plans. Constant and the Situationists realized that the new only came from
the old. As such, the dérive was predicated upon studying the plans of the
city. Debord wrote that it was necessary to collect data before drifting off,
that one had to learn before one studied. In collecting this data for the project,
plans are reappropriated and redirected, put toward new uses.
Constant’s plans are decidedly ambiguous, secret. He doesn’t indicate
what play is taking place in the raised interior of the floating metropolis.
Fragile, hurried lines trace connections too close to count. Automated production is marked by grids and straight lines. “All we are allowed to see,”
Wigely notes, “is that we are not seeing very much.” 5 Indeed, in their varying media, all of Constant’s presentations of New Babylon resist homogeneity; it’s not as if one presentation provides a key or a clue to another. Constant doesn’t know, can’t know, how desire will unfold, and doesn’t want to
close it off, either for him, for us, or for the imagined inhabitants of New
Conclusion
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Babylon. It’s a nod to what McLaren calls the “something more” of pedagogy, to the secret life of common subjectivity; a way to think about how
political movements can engage the secret, the singular, the opaque; how we
can do this without being folded into democracy’s tendency toward terror
and capital’s demand for exchange-value.
Like Lyotard’s discourse-figure, in New Babylon reproduction and production are bound together; the study of the citizens begins where the grid of
automated machines leaves off. There is, however, a one-way street from the
production of materials underground to the play generated in the structures of
the cityscape. That is, Constant doesn’t indicate how the dérive of the inhabitants could become recodified and absorbed within production, which, crucially, has now been organized according to human needs and desires, and
not for private profit. Constant’s diagram is, of course, utopic; it’s a dream,
an imagining, and not a political program. To produce the world as we
deserve it requires this imagination and it requires that we be attentive to the
material conditions of the moment, of the restraints and the possibilities that
are immanent in the world, and in each of us. I’m reminded of a concept
McLaren proposes in his ethnographic study, Schooling as Ritual Performance. McLaren writes of liminal servants, who carry on the paradoxical
task of bringing forth opacity and clarity. As he put it, a liminal servant “is
both a convener of customs and a cultural provocateur.” 6 The role of education is to serve as a bridge between liminality and praxis, to straddle the
hyphen between discourse and figure; in short, to study. But as we study,
exploring and strengthening our commonness against, for another world, we
do it in the vulgarity of this world: this is what it means to study like a
communist.
NOTES
1. Mark Wigley, “Paper, scissors, blur,” in Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley (Eds.),
The activist drawing: Retracing Situationist architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to
beyond (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 50.
2. Ibid., 41.
3. Ibid., 52.
4. Guy Debord, “Theory of the dérive,” in Ken Knabb (Ed., Trans.), Situationist International anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981): 50.
5. Mark Wigley, “Paper, scissors, blur,” 52.
6. Peter McLaren, Schooling as ritual performance: Toward a political economy of educational symbols and gestures, 3rd ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1986/1999),
115.
Afterword
It’s a Wednesday: To Be a Problem-With, a Problem-For
Ailish Hopper
Poetry called. We have to give back the word “transformational.”
We forgot to wash it, so it got stained. We stuffed it in the bottom of our bag,
and it’s misshapen. Our acts aimed for something we already knew, or could
name at the beginning, and so it eluded our grasp. But we did not admit that.
We took the pre-packaged, allowed the scent to suffice. As if we could live
on scent, and did not need food.
Poetry called: we have to give back the word “innovation.”
Unless we mean, a willingness to change, and be changed-by.
Creative writing teachers love to repeat the adage, “kill your darlings.” Buddhists are reminded that, if they meet the Buddha on the road, to kill him.
The point is: there is no safe place to stand. There is no idea, no practice, no
lesson plan, no parent outreach, no conceptual framework, no recipe, no
belief, no goal, no toolkit, no theory, no starting point, no end point, no end
no beginning—that will not eventually become a narrow container. That
hides us from singularity. Which is to say, ourselves, and from classroom
encounter.
Poetry called—we have to give back the word “pedagogy.”
So many narratives unspool in our classrooms. Classrooms as text we must
learn to read differently, address differently. But most importantly, shift con131
132
Afterword
ditions, tilt the room, such that the people in it address us differently. We
shift our addressability.
To stand in the option of refusal. To step into actions that resemble the many
projections in the room (of authority, of neoliberal ideology, of “learning
objective”), but to do so as an act. Meaning, from a place of singularity. This
means renouncing our identity as educators, or wearing it loosely. As something borrowed, appropriated.
To make conditions that move beyond pieties of “reflection” and “dialogue”
depends less on any specific tactic than on the orientation, of the teacher, the
classroom, the system. The creation of structures (i.e., institution-wide, curriculum-level, etc.), conditions (classroom and assignments), and actions (the
teacher) that keep asking each of us to re-orient. These are systems that meet
the actual needs of the people within them; their practices are not concepts,
but alivenesses. They are welcoming of insurgence, are systems adaptive.
Poetry called: we have to give back the word “beginning.”
Where shall we, when we know that there is no such thing as identifiable
source. Take civil wars, for instance. Divorces.
The conditions always and already exist in the classroom, the work of encounter is to refuse what obscures them. We teach from the secret life, to the
secret life. We orient students toward it. This disorients them. Sounds good.
But the biggest impediment to it actually happening is that individual people
don’t choose it. They choose tenure. Salary. Social acceptance. Until such
choices are not in opposition, that will appear as a fork in the road.
This may seem like advocacy of a transcendent politic. Certainly a “personal” one. It’s not, but the secret struggle of study will only become accessible
and a source for challenging Power to the degree that practitioners engage
relationality, which is to say to bring ourselves into accountability to one
another. This does not need to be reliant on transcendent ideals/idealisms.
And it does need to take seriously the ways that our commitments are expressed, the fact that we are our gestures (and possibly nothing else). We
need models, guideposts.
Poetry returned our work, like this: ending [word choice?]
To deal with the dimension of machinic enslavement that teachers (and all of
us) experience, we have to release the idea of being free. This doesn’t mean
Afterword
133
accepting enslavement, but rather working with it. The releasing of romanticisms, but in the most romantic way.
What is “radical alterity”? Radical enough that we will never fully glimpse it,
in ourselves and others, until we can make space for it by challenging Power,
so that we can express it, which is the means by which we finally see it.
Pulling the rug out from under oneself, constantly.
I challenge myself, and fellow teachers, to do this. But, more so, I challenge
our communities: to give us protection, so that we can.
*
It’s a Thursday.
Seven weeks into the semester, so there’s a clear group-dynamic. And I’m
struck by how the classroom, every classroom, reflects and must work with
whatever environment it’s in, like a filter in a fishtank. Meaning, especially,
the makeup/histories of each human in the room, as well as the community
we’re a part of, and of course the country, even world—as well as the timing
and moment.
A classroom is a filter
A classroom is a liar
A classroom is a lean-to
A folding-cot
Folded, in all the Folds
So much
Hidden
*
The collaborative poem that is the space, in which we are tasked to teach.
Sometimes, my choice of words, sometimes yours.
*
134
Afterword
It’s a Monday.
A classroom is a poem. A day can be
*
We read excerpts from James Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance,
which talks about the ‘dramaturg[ies] of power’ that are our social spaces.
We see that
the page
is
a stage
and
a stage (the classroom)
is
a page
*
We are artists our job
Is to be a problem
For categories
To be a problem
For our own cateBodies
The physical body
The lyrical body
The conservative body
The rhetorical body
Afterword
135
The progressive body
The
The
The
*
What is a pedagogy that disrupts that grip, and makes space. For all bodies?
*
It is hard to name what exactly causes a room full of people to sit down when
a person says “sit down,” or to make circle when a person says “make a
circle.”
It’s not just “manners.”
*
In every classroom is a moment, tender as a bruise. We listen. Hold it for a
moment, let whoever owns it, speak. Or, just be heard
*
At the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles there was an exhibit in the
1990s whose entrance had two doors: one, marked “Prejudiced,” and another, marked “Unprejudiced.” To enter, you had to choose. If, for whatever
reason, you chose Unprejudiced, you found that the door did not open. And
you became, of course, part of the exhibit (and were quietly laughed at).
The message behind the curation was clear: we’re all prejudiced. But in not
actually exploring the notions and imaginative landscapes of exemption, the
exhibit ended up not cataloguing the realities that most or many of us actually inhabit.
Barriers to singularity operate similarly: conceptual locked doors that direct
us away, as if a choice. After all, it looks like a door. And, the other door is
the right one, anyway. Right? But, that locked door, that white page that is
136
Afterword
off-script, that moment of speaking directly to the audience, that is the entrypoint, the only real entrypoint.
But to open it, we must be willing to be a problem. Not for no reason, and not
to any end. A problem-with. A problem-for. A problem-as.
*
It’s a Wednesday.
We listen to Sam Cook, singing “A Change Gonna Come.” Everyone’s
Body language, energy changes. Inspired
The cover of the album is a picture of him, face looking down
Index fingers against his eyebrows
Tired
We listen again. I ask, about mimesis, the identification
Of audience, or reader, with the performer’s emotions, life
Remind them of Brecht, the ‘cold shower.’ That all sorts of
Things can get transmitted through our
Unsuspecting, besotted
Minds. “hope”? or hope-dope?
We Shall Overcome
“de-transcendentalizing the subject”
my former teacher, Cornel West
Calls it
*
Line between the
Afterword
137
Predictable, and the possible.
You know
You’ve crossed it
When things start to register as
“impossible.”
Writing teachers also love to quote Ezra Pound’s “Make It New.” But the
line was more clearly shown in the quote it riffs on: Leo Tolstoy’s, “Make It
Strange.”
*
It’s a Thursday.
Don’t get too excited, I say out loud in front of the class, in that register that’s
not quite me talking to myself in the kitchen, not quite me giving a lecture
from notes. I’m making a branch with my words, and simultaneously inching
myself out on it.
All teaching is at some level an act of what many call the “moral imagination.” We have actual information from students—their words, actions—but
a part of teaching relies on something else, which is quite delicate: we are
guides and companions for them to venture into what we might sense is
possible, and what we might hear or see that’s in their way. But these are by
nature (at least partly) imaginings. Intuitings, risks, questions. Always operating at the boundaries and testing zones of ethics.
*
It’s a Tuesday.
Why did we replace the question, “what do we want to be to/for one another?”—which is, admittedly, and extremely hard, and constantly evolving,
answer—with anthems? Slogans, toolkits, and campaigns. Accountability™.
Any –ism, to a poet, is just a temporary shelter. What travels through our
minds, words, bodies will speak through us—does do that. Again and again,
138
Afterword
in-moment, what’s needed. There is no one “idea” or “thing” one can “have,”
only a continual way I or any of us can choose to arrive.
*
Carlos’ raised fist.
*
Disappears
“Gone completely”
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Index
Adorno, Theodor, 19–20
abstract art, 68–69
Agamben, Giorgio: Bartleby, 50–53; the
coming community, 45–47, 49–50, 99;
Derrida and, 49; friendship, 49; homo
sacer, 46, 49; potentiality, 9, 51, 53;
Tiananmen Square, 99, 102–104, 110;
whatever singularity, 45–48, 57, 99
alterity, 9–11, 35–36, 53–54, 64, 67, 69,
75, 85–86, 91, 94, 110, 127
Althusser, Louis, 1–2, 23
anticipation, xiv–xv, 38, 51, 68
Aptheker, Herbert, 106, 107
Au, Wayne, 115
Badiou, Alain, 6
Balibar, Étienne, 21, 24, 31
Bataille, Georges, 46
Biesta, Gert, 80
biocapitalism, 9, 52
Butler, Judith: marxism, 17–18;
performativity, 19; subject constitution,
19–20, 22–23, 25, 34–37
calligraffiti, 88
China, 100–105
commonness against, 6, 8, 12, 45
communism, 6, 10–12, 34, 75, 94
communist study, 11–12, 58, 80–81,
91–94, 110–111, 115, 117, 121–124,
129
critical pedagogy, 1, 64, 78–79
Dean, Jodi, 6–8, 12, 39, 121–124
debt, 57–58
Deleuze, Gilles, 76–77, 89–88
Deng Xiaoping, 101–102
dérive, 128
desire, xii, 2, 89–91, 94, 120–122, 127
dialectical materialism, x–xi, 2, 5
discourse, 17, 20, 22–23, 65, 67, 87–88
dreams, 89–92, 129
DuBois, W. E. B., 107
Facebook, 74
figural education, 91–94
figure. See Lyotard, Jean-François
Freire, Paulo, xi, 5, 52
fugitivity, 9, 56–57
Grebowicz, Margret, 68, 74–76, 80–81
Guattari, Felix, 76–78, 89
Hobsbawm, Eric, 120
Hungary, 105–107, 119; socialist
construction, 106; Soviet Republic of,
105
identity, 19, 36, 39, 46–48, 52, 54, 57, 61,
67, 76, 78, 80, 110, 121
im-potentiality. See Lewis, Tyson
imperialism 12, 63, 107, 118–119
145
146
Index
Jones, Alison, 79–80
Latour, Bruno, 75–76
Lazzarato, Maurizio, 76–78
learning, xii–xiii, 52–53, 58, 69, 78, 80,
91–92, 94
Lenin, V. I., 34, 115; economism, 115;
Party, 115–118; spontaneity, 115–119
Lewis, Tyson: biocapitalism, 52;
constellations, 3; studying, 9, 52–55,
123, 124
Libya, 108–110
Lukàsc, Georg: Communist Party,
118–120, 122; orthodox marxism, 5
Lyotard, Jean-François: anamnesis, 93; art,
68–69; complexification, 12, 63, 66, 76;
democracy, 65–66, 74–76, 79, 80;
education, 62–63, 64; figure, 88–91;
general life, 67, 74, 78; secret life,
67–69, 74–76
machinic enslavement, 76–78
Malott, Curry, 4
Mao Zedong, 101–102
Marx, Karl, 1; falling rate of profit, 26;
general intellect, 24; overproduction,
26; subjectivity, 20–21, 24–25; time,
21, 26, 37; transportation, 33
McLaren, Peter, 2, 5, 17, 128
Melville, Herman, 50
spontaneity, 116
Newman, Barnett, 68–69
Nieuwenhuys, Constant, 127–129
opacity, 34–35, 37, 39, 54, 67, 87–88, 90,
92–94, 121
poetry, 54, 90, 92, 131–132
pornography, 75
PostSecret, 74
Rancière, Jacques, 117, 121
Read, Jason, 17, 36
Readings, Bill, 62–63, 85–87
restraint, xv–xvi, 105, 110–111
secret life. See Lyotard, Jean-François
Situationists, 92, 128
social formation, x, 1–3
Soviet Union, 6, 46, 106–107, 109, 122
subjectivity: Communist Party, 120–124;
Individual form of, 7–8, 19–22, 24, 31,
34, 36–38, 46, 64, 67, 121–122; Marx
on, 20–21, 24–25; mode of production,
21, 25, 31–32, 39, 127–129; poetry, 54;
revolution, 2–3
Tiananmen Square: demands, 99; events
of, 103–105; “Tank Man”, 105
undercommons, 9, 56–57
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 46, 50
nature, 75–76
Negri, Antonio, 36, 46, 58; critique of,
14n24, 33–34, 38; organization and
Virno, Paolo, 22, 24, 36, 54
About the Author
Derek R. Ford is assistant professor of education studies at DePauw University. He received his PhD in cultural foundations of education from Syracuse
University in 2015. Informed by marxism, critical geography, and post-structuralism, his research examines the nexus of pedagogy, subjectivity, and
revolutionary movements. He is currently looking at this nexus in relationship to architecture, urbanism, and urban rebellions. Ford is coauthor of
Marx, Capital, and Education: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Becoming
(2015) and has published widely in edited collections and in journals such as
Studies in Philosophy and Education, Educational Philosophy and Theory,
Critical Studies in Education, and Policy Futures in Education. He is involved in a variety of struggles as an organizer with the Answer Coalition,
and he is cochair of the education department at the Hampton Institute. He
can be reached at derekford@depauw.edu.
147