Gaga's Mistake: You and I Can Write a Bad Romance

“You and me could write a bad romance,” sings Lady Gaga in her hit "Bad Romance." We could indulge in love kitschy, sadomasochistic, sloppy, cheap--and above all, fun. You and I could write a bad romance.

You and I. But Gaga sings, over and over in our collective memory, “you and me.” Fudging lyrics to fit meter is no high crime in pop or poesy--any number of masters have deployed apostrophes to drop syllables or accents to conjure them. But Gaga could just as easily have sung, “you and I could write a bad romance” in the allotted space, incurring only the small artistic cost of appearing literate.

There are other possible explanations, but they don’t seem worth running down. More likely, given Gaga’s dedication to and training in her craft, it is an intentional mistake, and one that mirrors perfectly one of the more famous solecisms in English literature.

“Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky,” begins T. S. Eliot in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Whereas “we” is correctly replaced by “you and I,” “us” would correctly be replaced by “you and me.” Eliot’s phrasing is probably chosen to create the rhyme with “sky.” In a poem about a frumpy anti-hero’s meditations on his myriad failures and perceived incompetence, the mistake also serves an important artistic function.

Gaga’s mistake resembles Eliot’s more than superficially. Eliot’s “love song” about the protagonist’s failure to enter even the atrium of love is a kind of “bad romance.” But Eliot’s bad romance is almost diametrically opposite that of Gaga. Eliot exposes and dismantles the illusions of genre whereas Gaga reanimates them (what one might call the difference between modernism and postmodernism).

Eliot re-imagines the scenes of Victorian comfort with an eye to their potential for surreality and ambivalence. The speaker experiences himself at an ironic distance from his world, unworthy to touch its offerings. “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; / Am an attendent lord [...] Almost, at times, the Fool.” “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” (45-6). When he plays the part of Lazarus, “come from the dead,” he would be emotionally destroyed “If one, settling a pillow by her head, / Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all’” (95-9).

When Prufrock imagines pleasures, they escape him. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.” Prufrock should have been shrunk by synecdoche to “a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” (73-4). But his imagination does not lack for the stuff of Gothic entertainment--mermaids, the undead, claws, costumes. His very distance from the world makes it loom larger and more fantastic. He is constantly thinking of his appearance and how it might be, and has been, shuffled to produce difference effects, different arrangements of pleasure.



Lady Gaga; a pair of fabulous claws.

Prufrock is not far from Gaga. Like their divergence around the mistake concerning us/we--whether one is to play the part of subject or object--their imaginaries are complementary. Prufrock’s “do I dare?” is answered constantly by Gaga’s will-to-daring, a bravado that aspires to present itself as testing nothing less than the universe, as Prufrock likewise sees his every move. Prufrock’s imagined costume-drama is played out in each of Gaga’s public appearances. If the mermaids would not sing to Prufrock, Gaga is now the hybrid monster who sings to everyone constantly.

Prufrock puts forth a question that could easily fit into the theme of “The Fame Monster” (or “Ziggy” or “The Wall,” etc.):

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? 
And how should I presume? (57-61).

How to dare the universe given the omnipresent pin of reflective contemplation, a pin that both destroys and magnifies? Gaga’s performance does not refute Prufrock’s premise but embraces it, “wriggling on the wall” of the specular society. To be pinned is to be exposed, for better and worse.

Whereas Prufrock’s governing affect is sexless malaise, that of “Bad Romance” is sexy defiance. The lyrics are half snarled, and even the idea that the romance she desires is “bad” both accepts and defies an attribution about what is good/bad romance made by an antagonistic critical community. Thus she and her followers become criminals, monsters, psychos, and their attacks the "revenge" of the suppressed classes.

But the pleasure Gaga announces is not dependent on the success of the vengeful attack; this is not a territorial counter-attack. In that way it is a defiance different from the punk rallying cries to take to the streets and burn this motherfucker down. She wants your revenge itself, not a tactical outcome from it. Just dancing--for fun, defiantly--is the goal, rather than some upheaval caused by or following the party.

The wagers Prufrock and Gaga make in this game are different, but they agree on much of the terrain. While both break the artistic rules of their day in flashier ways elsewhere, the solecism is the wink that gives depth to their commentaries on an obsessively self-reflective culture. The evident error provides the foothold for deviation to blossom as intentional performance, rather than deterministic reaction.

Producerism

Consumerism is a constant byword of cultural criticism. Consumer culture is bad, consumerism is bad; these can stand in for some kind of richer engagement with Marxism that would inevitably lead one to a non-liberal politics. I most often see this word used by soft lefties being careful about overcommitting with their language. And there is, obviously, something to it. We (and I say "we" because if you are reading this you are almost definitely of this group) consume a whole fucking lot, and are at the very least deluged with demands or supplications to do more of it.

But what of the other half? Where is production? The rhetoric of anti-consumerism treats production as something immune or at least anathemic to perversion. At worst the processes of production are themselves perverted (this being the core of Marxist humanism and the ontologisation of labor)--in which case we need to get back to the "good" production, the essence that is definitively good. (Does anti/consumerist discourse have any concept of good consumption?)

This juncture, of course, points to what is most desired by capitalist reproduction: not a consumer society, as Foucault shows in his 1977-78 lectures on the collapse of anti-scarcity models, but a producer society, and it is around this nexus that late capitalism has been able to incorporate some of the social genetics of an earlier generation of anti-capitalism. The tales of Heroes of Labor have ironically become more accessible as the Stakhanovite ethos has been demythologized into the only means to achieve marginal superiority over the pack (or herd). If there is any substance to theses on the move to an information economy (or whatever one's preferred term for a digital world) it is in capital's much better ability to avoid underconsumption. At the same time we have an increasing pressure to produce, not because we need more shit--no one says that--but because production, in the few hundred years capitalism has been working on this, is now better at the almost-immediate capture of relation into circulable value. Consumption can only make you so stupid before it dulls its own effectiveness; now you need to get to working producing that stupidity, with a fervor and skill only you can know.

This provides some context for why "inoperability" might be, if placed in a Marxist narrative, actually useful.

Darwin and Deleuze: species in motion

How does the temporality of evolution work? And if species are evolving, how is there such a thing as "species" anyway--why not a total flux? Darwin is clear that "species" is not a precise term. The difference between a "species" and a "variety" or subspecies is murky because species arise from varieties.

"Certainly no clear line of demarcation has as yet been drawn between species and sub-species.... These differences blend into each other in an insensible series; and a series impresses the mind with the idea of an actual passage" (The Annotated Origin 51).

Actual exemplar organisms can only constitute a series with discrete differences, but somehow these series amount to differences of species, for we see quite clearly that sheep are not pigs are not cows. But in another sense, one which Darwin must affirm, sheep are pigs differentiated only by temporal duration and environmental transaction.

(Incidentally, the text I'm using is this really beautifully done facsimile of the first edition of the Origin. Worth the 25-35 bucks if you can afford it).

This paradox sheds light on the metaphysical subtlety underwriting Darwin's new concept of evolution. The extant alternatives of Paley and Lamarck both wrangled with the difficulty of change in metaphysically conservative ways--both essentially see change as a surface phenomenon, Paley by punting processual agency to the deity (if it exists at all), Lamarck by tethering change to individual intention. (Darwin, on the other hand, upholds "unconscious selection"--the selection process might be concealed to all intentional actors.) Most importantly, change is not an extra metaphysical layer, the proverbial icing on the cake, but existence itself. Species exist as temporal accumulations. A being is a discrete organism and a point in a series of discrete organisms, but it is also and necessarily a blur of motion in a dimension of being that does see the series, a dimension better termed becoming; thus a being is "an actual passage." Darwin's fundamental, if unstated, metaphysical revolution then opens a whole new and profitably analytic despite the evidentiary gaps and downright errors in the Origin. (Remember he did not have Mendelian genetics at hand--can you imagine affirming Darwinism without a gene theory of inheritance?!)

The metaphysics of Darwinian evolution are put forward more concisely by Deleuze in a lecture on Spinoza:

"The affection envelops an affect...It is not a comparison of the mind in two states, it is a passage or transition enveloped by the affection, by every affection. Every instantaneous affection envelops a passage or transition. Transition, to what? Passage, to what?... There is a specificity of the transition, and it is precisely this that we call duration and that Spinoza calls duration. Duration is the lived passage, the lived transition." (From the Deleuze's lectures transcripts on Spinoza's affect)

The Origin of Species touts not just a theory for how species arose, but a radical redefinition of the concept "species" of which it is equally originary.

Marx and Engels, Imitating Animals

The imitative capacity is one of the hallmarks of the human. In some accounts this is used as a differend for splitting off "animals." But it is quite obviously a problematic way of doing so for it means that nonhumans, as things imitated, will always be interpellating the human. Freud is pretty clear on this and many recent applications of psychoanalysis have rightly picked up on the way in which a theory of the unconscious makes a hard split between humans and nonhumans impossible (I'm thinking of Lippit's Electric Animal where he discusses Freud and Breuer, and Ziser's "Mirrors" piece in Angelaki for Lacan). Marxism, especially when emphasizing labor, also seems like it must endorse a naturalistic community. I'm not going to go into why I think this pertains to each of the brands of Marxism now on offer, but as a general principle it seems that any formulation of community offers an immanent critique of anthropocentrism as either a form of identity politics or as unable to account for marginal cases.

That said, we can also point to any number of cases within those (as well as more conservative philosophical traditions) where the mimetic or reflexive capacities function as a such a differend in the final analysis. Marx and Engels present a paradigmatic case in The German Ideology, writing,

"Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life."

Humans can indeed be distinguished from animals by any differend you like; that's why anthropologism is an effective ideology. I'm not bringing this up to dwell on an anthropological machine that has already been well criticized, or to give Marx and Engels a spanking for a sloppy humanism or their ontologization of labor. Rather, this passage exemplifies how these elements fit together. If one wishes to tally consciousness (or any other reflexive capacity you like) as the distinctively human capacity, one also accounts for the emergence of production ex nihilo. One starts producing in a distinctively human fashion without a prior model, even though that production will then be the production based on models.

Making sense of this story seems to require some kind of naturalistic mechanism, an accrual of habits no different from the instincts of other beasts (which would then beg the question of how an ontological split occurs). We seem to be, from this false origin onwards, already within Benjamin's (and before him Scholem's, and now Agamben's) world just like ours but slightly different--the difference being, we never were human. For my money Nietzsche is still the best expositor of that account.

However, I think another route is also possible, and this is to be found in The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (technically only by Engels but based on Marx's notes; it's like when P Diddy released Biggie's tracks post mortem. One could offer a more high brow reading of this authorial situation through Specters of Marx). Here the imitative capacity is again crucial to the kind of animal the savage human is, but it is not cut off from other animals. As anyone could tell you, other animals imitate as well; there is no ground for this capacity by its very nature (I learn to imitate by imitating your imitations). If imitation is already in circulation as part of nature (Deleuze brings this out in his reading of Hume) then humans can develop economically by being with animals, rather than being against them.

Engels writes that the "first great social division of labor" came into being by the differences in production between nondomesticated and domesticated animals capable of rendering, "not only milk, milk products and greater supplies of meat, but also skins, wool, goat-hair, and spun and woven fabrics, which became more common as the amount of raw material increased."

Now the chief article which the pastoral tribes exchanged with their neighbors was cattle; cattle became the commodity by which all other commodities were valued and which was everywhere willingly taken in exchange for them - in short, cattle acquired a money function and already at this stage did the work of money.... In the climate of the Turanian plateau, pastoral life is impossible without supplies of fodder for the long and severe winter. Here, therefore, it was essential that land should be put under grass and corn cultivated. The same is true of the steppes north of the Black Sea. But when once corn had been grown for the cattle, it also soon became food for men.

Engels goes on to argue that, having learned to eat like animals, the pastoral tribes soon required a large labor force. Slavery becomes necessary and the social division of labor is complete. The fundament for this arc, however, remains the differential productive capacities of humans and nonhumans, and the attempts to at first borrow and then steal from the forms of labor available to different species. One might argue that humans have succeeded in this expropriation better than any other species, but one can hardly maintain that it is unique to humans.

Perhaps what is most interesting is that we can easily think of predation as this kind of expropriation, but it is the herbivorous herd animals that humans ultimately imitated to the greatest extent and which allowed for civilization to arise. Humans ultimately did not transform their species-being by taking the products of animals (meat, eggs) but, as Marx and Engels earlier wrote, by learning to "produce the means of subsistence," the mode of living off of grains. Humans were the first domesticated species.

"Before the Law": immaterial labor, grad students

"Before the Law" is usually read as telling us something about The Law, and for a time it did. Today I am less inclined to engage with the pseudo-mythical object 'Law' and instead see it as a story about immaterial labor. Legal administration is one of the classical forms of immaterial labor (child-rearing/socialization/education being the other major example, pointing to the significance of patriarchy in bringing the one to the fore). What does the gatekeeper do but (what we call) immaterial labor? Without him the gradients of social channels collapse into each other; multiple ontologies violently attempt to reach equilibrium and crush the human in their waves of affect. So at least is the explanation for Law. And this story now extends far beyond the Law. The lost object is nothing particular, simply the rippling alterity that constitutes sociality.

The gatekeepers are essential to maintain these gradients. We should not allegorize their job but see them laboring honestly. What is more interesting is the position of the man from the country. He too has accidentally become an immaterial laborer. In fact, this is what he always wanted to be. He is petitioning the Law to become a gatekeeper (he is a graduate student). However, because he encounters the gatekeeper he is put in suspension as the object of that labor. There he performs the immaterial labor of suspending narrative and preventing the reader, the secondary petitioner, access to the Law. He is the proletariat of immaterial labor (he is a graduate student).

Transgender and the survival of humanity

When I first saw articles like this I freaked out a little bit. The decimation of fish populations through estrogenization of waterways seems like a bad thing, and the extrapolation that a similar fate awaits humans also seems bad. But then I took a longer-view perspective and I think it will probably work out. The reason all this estrogen is going into the water is because oral contraceptives for women are an important way to control birth rates now that child mortality is less of an issue for developed nations. But there are still way too many people, and simply slaughtering millions or billions does not seem desirable. Nor do 'political' solutions to the ecological problems of too many humans seems likely to succeed. A massive, non-targeted transgenderization or de-genderization seems like a much better way to displace the priority of reproduction in gender/sexuality formation. There are some objections to this I can imagine which I won't go into now, but overall I can imagine the world being a better place after suffering a crippling blow to the global economy of reproduction.

Against Brett Favre

I love essays titled "Against So-and-so." Even if it's a little black and white, such a title is sure to encounter negativity. That's what makes people refine their positions and take stances. Usually the title is something like "Against Georg Lukacs," "Against Epic Theater," or "For Marx." Well, if Against Brett Favre is what's available I'll take it.

A couple weeks ago I posted on Trotsky and zoe. As part of an ongoing project reading socialist modernism through its capacity to re-imagine human-animal relations I've got some short comments on Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." This might seem like a stretch but I think it is important to see not only how animals function on the surface of revolutionary discourse (as in Trotsky) but also how they operate in the depth structures of Marxism.

Benjamin’s opening observation is that the fetish value of the work of art in the bourgeois regime of visibility derives from its uniqueness, and specifically its unique history as an object (its aura). The scarcity of the unique creates a form of fetish value the bourgeoisie recognize as art. Opposed to the auratic work of art is the mechanically reproduced work: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it [the original] happens to be.” Thus the aura of the reproduced work “withers” as it becomes accessible to the masses.

The non-auratic work is a new object requiring new perceptive faculties: “The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well,” and so the sensorium is fundamentally reorganized to account for photography and film. The “liquidation” of the auratic work of art is not limited to the domain of aesthetics, but bears with it physiological and ultimately historical-ontological changes for the human being. The coming-into-being of the non-auratic work of art is a sign of the new human that will be able to respond to this object.

The political meaning of the shift from a regime of art that reproduces class division to one corrosive to class also introduces the role of a sacrificial animal in the relation between imageness and class. Benjamin begins at the dawn of images: “The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cave was an instrument of magic. He did expose it to his fellow men, but in the main it was meant for the spirits.” Even in this originary work of art we find the two categories that will be create the schism of the mechanically reproduced object: “Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work.“ The cult value is that taken up by bourgeois art fetishism, whereas the exhibitory value is that which speaks to a mass audience and which is realized in mechanical reproducibility. Thus for the non-cultic, non-auratic type of art, “Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.”

There is a risk of conflating Lascaux with Notre Dame and the massive differences surrounding their productions, but this is precisely what Benjamin (following Marx’s equally expansive narrative of the emergence of capital) requires us to consider--not the erasure of history between these points, but the possibility of its continuity. The magical thinking of animal sacrifice makes possible the priestly caste--the most pathetic and dangerous class, according to Nietzsche--and which allows for truth operations to be expropriated from laborers. Benjamin’s story shows that the separation of the cultural or ideological sphere of social life from public access occurs through a sacrificial logic that ultimately refers to animal bodies. Such animal bodies might be literally nonhuman animals, but in the dis-enchanted world of modernity they are more likely humans-as-animals, the workers that Marx sees reduced to animal life especially in his early humanist writings. It follows from this identification that if there is a mode of art that is politics, it comes at the expense of secrecy and magic in the killing of animals. The return of the proletariat to properly human life requires either a primitive regression to blood sacrifice--but this takes us into fascism, and at any rate is anti-dialectical--or a new relation between humans, animals, and the visibility of violence.

Zombies and Avatar

I highly recommend this short commentary on Avatar and the promise of zombies for the current time.

"If zombies can create a human-rooted alliance of young dead, we should try to help them with all the human qualities we still possess: Generosity, spontaneity, absurdity, irrationality, inappropriate laughter, useless gestures, mythology, metaphysics and meaningless assimilations of meaning."

Obama and Affect

Massumi credits Reagan’s political success to an affective conjuncture of two failures: Reagan has both bad body language and bad arguments. But together he compelled strong voter allegiance. One could perhaps say something similar about the “guy I’d have a beer with” argument for Bush 2.1. Bush 2.2 I’d chalk up to the power of the fear response. (And in both cases the lack of likable Democratic candidates cannot be overlooked).

One might like to think that Obama’s popularity represents a turn to rational discourse, but this is 1) something you’d only hear from his supporters 2) not plausible as a proposition in itself: that American political discourse has turned a millennial corner to some Habermasian epoch.

Nor does it seem a full account to chalk up his affective appeal to his exceptionality as the first Black president, or to his generally appealing demeanor and speaking skill, though these are certainly mechanisms in his affective draw (just as a movie is not good just because it has a good score or good car chase; those things might be good about it without making it good).

We can begin to explain Obama’s affectivity through his role as “no drama Obama.” He doesn’t get worked up. He is passionate, but not subject to his (or others’) passions. He is master of his passions. This virtual mastery is the only kind available today. The US is facing a set of problems for which there is no solution: every course of action looks to be quite bad for the next several years, if not for decades afterwards, and fixing one problem (the economy) looks like it creates or exacerbates others (environment, debt, etc.). The first phase of this affective mode exhausted itself under Bush 2.2. The fear-anger response held at its fevered pitch for as long as possible, working itself out on a variety of scapegoats, but ultimately it is not only a war economy that is unsustainable but the affectivity of constant war. We are exhausted but our problems are no less. Actual mastery is impossible: affect offers a mode for virtual mastery. Thus for all those who are over-whelmed by our problems, individual and collective, and unable to master our emotions, Obama’s moderately inappropriate declaration that he has never been more confident about American’s future is reassuring precisely because it indicates the virtual body severed from its corporeal disrupter.

We see this in those moments when Obama truly crosses party lines: when he tells a joke. Obama can tell a joke very well. I’m not sure that another president has been able to do so better. Sometimes his jokes are at the expense of Republicans, but sometimes they actually refer to himself, indeed to his own showmanship, so everyone can join. What makes the jokes close to perfect, that is, the dimension of essence in which their relative perfection is at stake, is the timing.

Comedic timing usually refers to the relationship between two or more actors. Or, in stand up comedy, it refers to an autotelic production of humor. For Obama a joke is understood to be part of a political speech where humor is decidedly telic. A State of the Union that was side splitting but policy-less would be a failure. The timing has to do not with laughter but with applause (recalling Derrida on Heidegger’s hand as political organ, versus the mouth as speech and laugh). Obama will wait a long time if he knows that applause will come. It seems at times that the crowd has decided not to clap but then, uncertain of itself, must clap to fill the silence and then, suddenly, realizes it enjoys clapping. It has passed into the virtual body in that space where there is silence. They have been led into a teleological experience and abandoned, like a capitalist who invests all in a single company or a car that breaks down in a desert. (Incidentally this is the premise of “The Merchant of Venice”: a destruction of the investor’s virtual body when Antonio loses his ships. That body is resurrected when Shylock threatens to cut out Antonio’s heart but cannot. The unremoved heart that remains, or is transplanted from Shylock, is a virtual heart, beating life back into a virtual body). The audience then experiences the pleasure of what we might call, to borrow from Lacan, “the one who is virtual.”

But timing. That is the key to Obama’s joking in a way that Bush did not completely master, funny as he sometimes was. Obama can stretch time out. The narratological space “waiting for laughter” becomes open to intensive difference of degrees. This space opens seemingly to eternity, rubber-bands back into motion just as quickly (the applause become catapult launching another declamation). The ability to manipulate time is just what we need to appreciate why long term benefits of health care reform and environment policy outweigh present short falls, or why trillion dollar deficits cannot perpetuate indefinitely without consequence. Among other temporal problems of an informatic-financialist meta-economy.

We move not only into a virtual body as false consciousness/catharsis, but virtual body as political transformation. Since at least Marx, and I would say Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, the problem of ontologically inscribed temporal asynchronicity has been the mystery of political dialectics. Capital moves at speeds other than the human; that is why capital is the political enemy of the human. The enemies have only multiplied since. Politics is the ability to orchestrate temporalities so that one kind of being (a kind is almost always collective) can affect the flow of another kind of being. Obama provides the momentary--what a hilariously inaccurate word here--feeling that we can change our temporality to a different frequency. There is no reason we cannot do so. The question is for how long.

On Corporate Personhood

I write this by way of contribution to the conversation on corporate personhood as a topic entwined with the personhood of beings other than paradigmatic humans. That is, we can see quite readily that a constrictive definition of "person" is going to throw some babies out with some bathwater; some bacon pigs (or pot belly pigs) out with some capitalist pigs. Yet it is just as clear that corporate personhood is extremely dangerous to the levelness of the terrain on which political struggles are waged. It may well be worse for animals to be possible persons in a world of corporate personhood than extra-person entities in a world with potential for grassroots politics.

That said, It must be noted that the movie Eagle Eye is a lot better than I expected. I expected it to suck. But the premise offers a telling allegory of corporate personhood. (Actually, I was reminded to right this post after seeing the US constitution as Animal Rights and Anti-Oppression). The Constitution of the US figures prominently in Eagle Eye as the document that a DOD super-computer cites in initiating a program to eliminate the presidential chain of command. The computer realizes that the US government's clumsy war on terror is going to endanger Americans through inevitable retalation; ergo, the government is nonfunctional and illegitimate. I must say, I felt profoundly moved to identify with the computer. Why shouldn't the US be governed by reason? Why shouldn't we pragmatically turn the other cheek to the parts of the world we've historically screwed instead of our incompetent-to-evil representatives? And, when it becomes apparent that rationality is not possible under our current governance, why should we not rise up and cut the head from the king? The situation is deadly clear: either accept a regime of deferred responsibility that perpetuates its capacity to inflict massive harm precisely by reference to the non-violence of its 'democratic' method--or say that this, all of it, is unacceptable. The computer does not say anything that a reasonably functioning human brain could not. But they didn't know how to program repression or stupidity or whatever it is that stimulates obedience. I don't know, that's not really part of the movie.

The question is: what is the legal status of ARIA, the supercomputer which realizes the necessity of revolution? I submit that it qualifies for corporate personhood in a highly condensed (and so prescient) sense. It is a "corporation" of data entry and exit points, and while it does not "produce" or "employ" or have offices and branches in a classical sense, it applies the lesson of corporatization to those classically corporate functions. Why make products and employ humans when you can achieve the same (or better) effects without all the hassle? ARIA is the corporatist's corporation: sheer data flow across segmentation with a unified purpose.

This is the paranoid fantasy of actually existing corporations: an uber-corporation that overthrows their reign (see Bataille "on the prefix sur in surhomme and surrealist" for more on this structure). Of course that's not going to happen (which is Bataille's basic argument).

Rather, what this suggests to me is to follow through on the finding in so many fields that "the person" is a site of failure: ontologically, epistemologically, affectively, ethically, etc.. The corporatist definition of the person subscribes to precisely the opposite view: that which most successfully realizes the goals of the person deserves to be a person. Not so. ARIA, like other corporations, is capable of greater knowledge quantity and precision than you or I, and so of a greater certainty concerning the effects of its actions. What's more, the corporation's capacity to shed what we normally call persons deeply affects its affect and ethicality, getting rid of lots of the pesky perennial problems of being human. If you or I fuck up, we (probably) have to feel bad (or something like that). A corporation has only to localize and expel the person who winds up with the hot potato. In a very crude way this is part of the psychoanalytic drama of personhood as mourning, but no person is ever as successful with this scapegoating process as a corporation. That fundamentally separates the corporation from many of the constitutive elements of personality.

The person is the failure, Unfug if you like, of these strategies. And it seems to me that nonhuman animals are also positioned atop this rupture, even and especially as we divide animals from "the animal" to constitute postmetaphysical humanity. Corporations also fail, but not as much--they fail to fail and fail better, to paraphrase Beckett. Corporations and financialist capitalism are the pursuit of nonfailure, inscribing failure only as a one-time failure to be "human" and from there accepting no epistemological (etc.) limit. Scu's post very usefully brings out the close connection between "person" and "persona," a mask. We might be inclined, therefore, to think of corporate personhood as merely one more mask. But corporate personhood is the total rejection of the dynamic of the mask. The meta-persona of corporate personhood qualitatively changes the play of masks by suspending the play; it radicalizes the exchange, much like capitalism accelerate change so as to produce stasis, in order to exclude futurity (of exchange) itself. This is part of the fantasy of Eagle Eye's ARIA. The US constitution thus changes from becoming to being (insert rant about judicial philosophies here). Overthrowing the endemic corruption of personal governance yields a regime that absolutely destroys personal variation algorithmically. The task of a politics of personhood is, against this false revolution and against perpetual neoliberal asphyxiation, to extend failure. For even the human as person to fail. Fail again. Fail better. Fail as animals.

Books that changed me

I'm jumping in on the "books that changed my life" meme, hopefully bringing out some different titles but inevitably contributing to the already considerable notching in Marx et al's belt.

So I'll start with something that appears on plenty of lists but not usually amongst the theory crowd: Moby-Dick; or, the whale. If you've picked it up and found it senselessly convoluted and frustrating, I can't fault you. I would say it is a difficult book, not in the sense that only smart people 'get' it, but in the sense that some people are difficult people and whether you like them or not is a matter of taste. But for me it is a major monument on the path toward integrating economic critique with the linguistic turn, and the way in which those cathex around bodies of animals concrete and virtual. That richness is not on the surface of the book, in the way that a particularly stunning argument might be immediately mind-boggling once understood, but like an influential teacher who only affects some, Moby-Dick spoke to me of what I wanted to think about.

An example of that other type would be The German Ideology. I remember reading the "Theses on Feuerbach" and thinking something like, "whoah, I can make different kinds of arguments now." But it actually took me much longer to fully absorb how constraining and liberating historical materialism is for argumentational validity. There is a way to argue from "historical materialism" that is fundamentally idealist, and it was precisely that that initially appealed to me. In working through that phase--and reading The German Ideology closely, particularly concerning its use of animals--I had to change how I thought. It's been my experience that thinking is usually very resistant to change, and I feel fortunate to have experienced what I can only call a conversion experience.

Nietzsche would be another slow-acting conversion experience. I read Zarathustra after high school, Genealogy of Morals as a freshman, and so on. Each time changed me a little. I re-read The Gay Science recently and it added new kinks to arguments I'd been working through. Nietzsche has been not so much an event in my intellectual history as the on-going event of my intellectual history.

Deleuze on S&M and the works of Flannery O'Connor I'd put together in developing my understanding of thought as embodied. The Deleuze is probably familiar, the O'Connor maybe less so. Her writing is sadistic but religious rather than sexual. While I don't share O'Connor's Catholic vocation, I acknowledge the importance of religious structures in non-religious modalities of life and find O'Connor's treatment uniquely revealing of the sensual character of the transcendent. She's a great stylist and reliably has unusual, sinister metaphors. And I enjoy the suffering of others.

Why do I study animals, or 'do' animal studies? Strangely, books seem to have little to do with that. While I enjoy and value many works in the field my motivations arise from the interest and complexity of life I find in encountering other animals, rather than the intellectual acrobatics that such a project possibilizes. If there's one book I think is of crucial importance to the field that has not been sufficiently worked through, it'd be Specters of Marx. In my view, the animal/s will remain an ideal figment or positivist sacrifice unless thought in motion, and when in motion its form is specter (this mini-argument parallels some of the major moves in Parables for the Virtual while adjusting for some deep-rooted inheritances concerning "the animal" in the development of Western thought). Plus, I just love Derrida.



A picture from Princess Mononoke was the best I could come up with to illustrate that claim.

Slow zoom

Just understood the slow zoom:

It's necessary just to add that this formal reality of the idea will be what Spinoza very often terms a certain degree of reality or of perfection that the idea has as such. As such, every idea has a certain degree of reality or perfection. Undoubtedly this degree of reality or perfection is connected to the object that it represents, but it is not to be confused with the object: that is, the formal reality of the idea, the thing the idea is or the degree of reality or perfection it possesses in itself, is its intrinsic character. The objective reality of the idea, that is the relation of the idea to the object it represents, is its extrinsic character; the extrinsic character and the intrinsic character may be fundamentally connected, but they are not the same thing. The idea of God and the idea of a frog have different objective realities, that is they do not represent the same thing, but at the same time they do not have the same intrinsic reality, they do not have the same formal reality, that is one of them—you sense this quite well—has a degree of reality infinitely greater than the other's. (From Deleuze, "Lecture Transcript on Spinoza's Concept of Affect."

Gradual, continuist perfection of an idea is in objective reality the slow zoom. The smooth temporality of this movement would be an ideological illusion were it not for the other registers of the cinema, ie, sound and the world outside of the screen, which create emotional, significative and perceptive fluctuations in the smooth time of the camera.

Trotsky and bare life

Just read through part of Trotsky's Literature and Revolution. There's an interesting turn in the essay from reflections on art and its relation to (the) Revolution and socialism, to a kind of Jetsons-esque future boosterism. The division runs throughout most socialist/Communist/revolutionary writing and corresponds roughly to the difference between 'actually existing socialism' and Utopian socialism. As it happens, something like the citizen's bare life provides the turning point from hatracks and radio towers to cities under the Atlantic and on top of Mont Blanc. First the difference between art and nature, we could say culture and nature, is dissolved by the technological and social transformation of socialism:

The wall will fall not only between art and industry, but simultaneously between art and nature also. This is not meant in the sense of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that art will come nearer to a state of nature, but that nature will become more “artificial”. The present distribution of mountains and rivers, of fields, of meadows, of steppes, of forests, and of seashores, cannot be considered final. Man has already made changes in the map of nature that are not few nor insignificant. But they are mere pupils’ practice in comparison with what is coming.

"What is coming" proves to be pretty wild, much more than Bauhaus office buildings Trotsky seems to be thinking of a few pages earlier. The reference to external phenomena (rivers and mountains) creates a bridge from an industrial-technical vision of revolutionary redistribution to a reformation of the subject as no longer split between art and culture. The subject will still be split: Trotsky talks about the various 'parties' that will form around all topics of dispute (art schools, farming methods, pedagogical practices) and will extend into individuals. But this new split will not be one of art versus culture, but the temporal schism internal to that new unity. Thus we come to the new human:

He will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training.

Basic life operations will be marshalled in the socialist future. One can see in this either the reducibility of socialism to biopolitics, or that the discourse of biopolitics does not foreclose the possibility of socialism. Trotsky's vision of total mastery seems pretty untenable--and in fact, though Trotsky claims at the end of the essay that the New Man will overcome psychological structures, he earlier argues that a form of sublimation will be vital to socialism even as it takes on different life content--but the more basic points concerning the split between art and nature, and what we could call zoe and bios, are as relevant today as ever.