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.