Suchergebnisse

When I was in graduate school "the imaginary" was one of those words that circulated all the more often because it was untethered to any specific theoretical source. It borrowed bits from Lacan and bits from Castoriadis to suggest some historically specific articulation of the very capacity to imagine. There were multiple imaginaries, political, social, technical etc., As someone who was getting interested in Spinoza at the time I tried to connect his writing on the imagination with this idea to no avail.Now, thinking about Spinoza again, it might make sense to think about the way in which Spinoza's particular idea of the imagination is useful for thinking about social and political life.  I should be clear that on this point I mean "imagination" as it is described as a particular kind of necessarily incomplete and inadequate knowledge in the Ethics, and not superstition as it is developed in Spinoza's political writings. Any such separation is artificial, as the two are thoroughly intertwined as bodies and minds, however, it is still worth at least heuristically the limitation of thinking from that of acting. For Spinoza the imagination, images formed by the body, always involve both the body that affects us and how we are affected. As Spinoza writes, "Next, to retain the customary words, the affections of the human body whose ideas present external bodies as present to us, we shall call images of things, though they do not reproduce the figure of things. And when the mind regards bodies in this way, we shall say that it imagines." (EIIP17schol).It is not representation but presence that is central to the imagination. To imagine something is to regard i as present. This presence is a confused amalgamation of the qualities of the thing affecting us, and the way we are affected. To imagine is to treat our own associations and connections as if they were part of what we are perceiving. "For example, a soldier, having seen traces of a horse in the sand, will immediately pass from the thought of a horse in the sand will immediately pass from the thought of a horse to the thought of a horseman, and from that to the thought of war and so on. And so each one, according as he has been accustomed to join and connect the image of things in this or that way, will pass from one thought to another" (EIIP18Schol). As I have argued in my post on Spinoza and conspiracy theories is that it stresses the imagination can be both complex, involving a chain of associations from hoof print to horse, and horse to war, and immediate, directly lived as something present. As Althusser stresses for Spinoza the imagination is nothing other than the phenomenological world of lived experience as such. All of our perceptions and evaluations of the world as it is lived, or tendency to view some aspects of nature as good or bad, useful or harmful, organized or disorganized, are the imagination, which is to say are confused perceptions of our own desires and the way that the object affects us. I was thinking of this mediation of the immediate or the immediacy of mediation when reading about theories of race.  First, and not surprising, is this line from Etienne Balibar's "Is there a Neo-Racism?" As Balibar writes "I shall therefore venture the idea that the racist complex inextricably combines a crucial function of misrecognition (without which the violence would not be tolerable to the very people engaging in it) and a 'will to know', a violent desire for immediate knowledge of social relations." In other words, part of the appeal of racism is that it makes social relations immediately legible. It provides a geography, dividing town into the "good" and "bad" part, a morality, telling us (people who believe ourselves to be white) who to trust and who to fear. As much as this imagination is immediate, registered in somatic markers such as skin, hair, and eye color, the immediacy is a product of associations and connections that we are constantly subject to, media, entertainment, etc., and, like Spinoza's soldier, we have forgotten in focusing on the immediate present nature of the image.Or, to take another version of the argument, this time from Stuart Hall, "Race is only one element in this struggle to command and structure the popular ideology: but it has been, over the past two decades, a leading element: perhaps the key element. Since it appears to be grounded in natural and biological "facts," it is a way of drawing distinctions and developing practices which appear, themselves, to be "natural," given and universal...Race provides the structure of simplifications which make it possible to construct plausible explanations of troubling developments and which facilitates the application of simplifying remedies. Who now wants to begin to explore the complex of economic and political forces which have perpetuated and multiplied the poverty of the working-class districts fo the inner cities? Who will have time for that complicated exercise--which may require us to trace connections between structures of our society which is more convenient to keep apart: when a simple, obvious, "natural" explanation lies to hand."A few hasty connections/conclusions. First, if you listen to any episode of Hotel Bar Sessions  the podcast that I am now a cohost of, I suggest you listen to the interview with Caleb Cain available here (I can plug this in good faith because this is from before I joined the show):One of the thing that comes up in the discussion is how the racist, or "race realist" explanation offers a quick an easy explanation of a variety of phenomena, such as why the inner city of Baltimore is the way that it is in terms of poverty and crime. An actual, or to use the Spinozist term, adequate understanding of the actual factors that have made the inner city the way it is would have to take into consideration the history of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, deindustrialization, etc. etc. etc., Of course it is important to point out that what appears here as immediate, race as an explanation, is itself the product of a long history of associations. It took us a long time to see race, and it takes a lot of work, political and ideological, for us not to see everything about social life, the accumulation of capital, and so on, that is effaced in the immediacy and simplicity of seeing race. So this is what it might mean to consider what "the imaginary institution of society" might mean from a Spinozist perspective. It is the dominance of a particular set of immediate associations of bodies and qualities, associations that are themselves the product of a complex articulation (in Hall's sense), that disappears in the immediacy of the association. I have focused here on race as one such mediated immediacy. It would be wrong to think it is the only one. As Alexandra Minna Stern argues in her book Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination, "Transphobia is the butter on the bread of much alt-right and alt-light vlogging." As with race there is an appeal to a kind of natural immediacy, that of sex, gender,  and gender roles, one that is the product of many mediations, right down to the latest explosion in a gender reveal party. The natural order of sex and gender is in some sense the entry point to a larger sense of a natural order. Of course the relation between these two different images of nature, racial and sexual, is complex, overdetermined, and in some sense always shifting. As much as there is an epistemic tendency towards the imagination predicated on its immediacy and self-evident nature, there is a practical one as well: the order and connection of bodies being the same as ideas and all. For many, especially those with advantages in the existing order, there are reasons to hold unto and act within the horizon described by its imagination. I recently finished reading Jeremy Gilbert and Alex William's Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (and How We Win it Back).  In the midst of that book there is a long discussion to retrieve the idea of interests in politics. One of the things that Gilbert and Williams stress that one's interest is related to both one's position and one's horizon. As they write,"From this perspective, workers who vote for immigration restrictions are acting against their interests when conceived within a liberal, communist, or even expansively social democratic horizon, but not when conceived within a conservative horizon. What is it that defines the particular characteristics of the horizon within which interests are perceived, computed, and acted upon? In part it must be a question of the scale--in terms of space and time--of that horizon. When horizons of interest are operating at a small scale, this will mean a focus on the hyperlocal (my immediate family) and the hyper-present (today and tomorrow and perhaps next year). What is reasonable within one horizon is unreasonable in another."If we want to change and expand the horizon of people's interest we must first recognize the horizon that they already operate within even if that horizon is defined by imaginations that seem irrational to us. "Inadequate and confused ideas follow with the same necessity as adequate, or clear and distinct ideas" (EIIP36). To put this in Spinozist terms, we all strive to maintain our existence, but we do so according to what we understand, rightly or wrongly, to be in our interest according to our given level of imagination or understanding. All of which is a very long way of saying that any politics of radical change has to start with understanding the epistemic and practical attachments that most have to the existing imaginary institution of society. 

 Sometime awhile ago I came up with the idea of doing a trilogy of posts on conspiracy theory, or modern conspiracy thought, read through Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx. I am not exactly sure why the idea appealed to me, in part because I increasingly consider Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx to be the cornerstones of my philosophical thought, even if these cornerstones come through the mediations of Tosel, Jameson, and Althusser (to name a few), but in this case, more specifically it seemed worth asking what would three critics of the mystifications of their day make of our modern mystifications.After writing the pieces on Spinoza and Hegel it took me a long time to even consider writing a piece on Marx. The intersection of Marx and conspiracy theory just seems too big to take on in a blogpost. This is  in part because for many in the US, Marxism is both the name of an actual conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. It has become increasingly so in terms of the former, the right has dealt with decline of the Soviet Union not by giving up on red scares, but by making the object of such ghost stories more and more diffuse and conspiratorial.  Marxism, or communism, are not to just to be found in open appeals to revolution, or organizing workers instead everything from Critical Race Theory to the casting of a Disney film can now be seen to be the work of Marxism in its more diffuse cultural form, a plot that becomes more insidious the more indirect its connection discernible political goals become. At the same time that Marxism is seen as conspiracy it is argued that its understanding of history and politics which sees the interest of the ruling class behind everything is fundamentally a conspiracy theory, if not the fundamental conspiracy theory. As is often the case, I would argue that this idea that Marxism is a conspiracy theory gets things wrong and upside down. To gesture to a much larger argument, I would argue that Marx's fundamental theoretical innovation is to present an understanding of economic, social, and political relations that breaks with every conspiracy theory in that its primary mode of explanation is not individual intentions, or collective strategies, but the economic and social conditions that exceed any intention or conspiracy. The actions of capitalist with respect to wages and working conditions are, to use the parlance of our times, dictated by the demands of the market, by the demand to be competitive, etc., what Marx would perhaps more simply call the extraction of surplus value. Marx stresses that this structure is absolutely indifferent to the conscious intentions of not only the workers, who must conform to it in selling their labor or risk losing their jobs, but to the capitalist as well. As Marx puts it, in the mouth of the worker addressing the capitalist,  "You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the R.S.P.C.A. [Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals], and you may be in the odour of sanctity as well; but the thing you represent when you come face to face with me has no heart in its breast." As I argued with respect to Spinoza (see the link above), if the defining characteristic of most conspiracy theories is understanding the world in terms of ends, of deducing the conspiracy from effects, (if talking about race makes white people feel bad that must be the reason behind such teaching, and so on, Marx's fundamental argument is how little ends and intentions mean in understanding social and political life. Marx's criticism is not one of "capitalist greed" as a moral failing, but of the structural conditions that cause capitalists to seek cheaper workers, to demand more of workers, and so on regardless of their moral character. This is the real meaning of Marx's invocation of vampires and werewolves, not to call the capitalist a monster, but to claim that there is something monstrous in capital that exceeds intentions and is found not in the hearts of human beings but in the social relations that produce and reproduce them. As something of an aside, I will suggest that part of Marx's legacy on critical theory, for lack of a better term, is this demand to think in terms of structures that exceed and situate consciousness, this, as I have argued awhile ago, is partly what is at stake in the concept of the mode of production. This legacy goes beyond those who are explicitly Marxist. What Foucault called a dispositif, or apparatus, what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as assemblages or machines, were also an attempt to think the structural over and above the intentional. They are in some sense an attempt to articulate a concept that could displace the mode of production understood as the articulation of material practices and ideas, what Marx called base and superstructure. In Foucault this becomes the relation of power and knowledge, while in Deleuze and Guattari it becomes that of machinic assemblages of bodies and collective assemblages of enunciation. Both of which could be understood as an attempt to expand the explanatory framework beyond the putatively economic to encompass the production of knowledge and desire.  Closer to home, the insistence on the term "structural" in "structural racism," as well as similar attempts to think patriarchy as a social and political structure, are all attempts to theorize racism, sexism, or misogyny without reducing it to individual prejudices, biases, or attitudes. I would then say, summing this up all too quickly, not only is Marx's thought not a conspiracy theory, Marx's fundamental move of thinking relations, structures, and institution in excess of intentions and understandings is the antechamber or all theories that want to be more than conspiracy theories that want to understand the structural conditions and not the individual attitudes as the basis for exploitation and domination. Such a point is beyond the focus of a blogpost, and, moreover, it was not what I intend to get at here. My question is what does Marx offer for thinking the conspiratorial turn in contemporary politics. The first point, which I have already more or less uttered, is that a great deal of what we call conspiracy theories are really just anti-communism, and that these theories have become more baroque and oblique as communism as a political force retreats into historical memory. They are in some sense a kind of anti-communism without communism, as Seymour argues. It is the decline of Marxism as a political force that leads to the demand to find it everywhere; everything that challenges the existing order, not just the economic order but its racial and gender aspects as well, from teaching about the history of slavery to non-binary gender identity can be labelled "Marxist." (The irony of this is that actually existing Marxism, especially in its more official state varieties, has had a spotty at best record when it comes to understanding race and gender as sites of domination and exploitation. Many Marxists of an old school variety are perhaps surprised to learn that anti-racist education is secretly Marxist and that Marxists are behind the demand to respect individual's choice of pronouns). Second, Marxism is integral to understanding the real conditions of social and political life which are in some sense experienced as a vast conspiracy. As I have alluded to above, Marx explains, better than any conspiracy theory the way in which prevailing economic and political relations produce the feeling of helplessness and lack of control that is, as Marcus Gilroy-Ware argues, the raw material for most conspiracy theories. Of course the fundamental question is if it is in some sense the relations of capitalism that create the conditions of alienation and powerlessness which in turn create the condition for conspiracy theorizing, why do such theories name everything but capital, or the ruling class, as the agent of this conspiracy. This is part because the demands of capital are too open, too disclosed to be the object of a conspiracy theory. There is no riddle to solve in saying that capital is driven by the extraction of surplus value, or, as they say, the pursuit of profit. It is openly declared in every newspaper, website, and news broadcast. Without a secret, without the ability to be in the know, there is no affective appeal to a conspiracy theory. We are stuck in a kind of perpetual purloined letter situation in which it is because the existing goals of the ruling class are so out in the open that there is a need to create a kind of bizarro world inversion of this world in order to believe in the conspiracy that must exist. While it is fairly clear to anyone paying attention that the established position on COVID for example is to declare it over again and again in order to be able to get people back to work and to end any state spending on aid, testing, or vaccines, such a goal is too open to muster any theorizing, too public to generate any critique, so we get a bizarro inversion where the powers want to keep the pandemic going, want lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccines for some vague reason of control. At the same time, it could be argued that the fact that conspiracy theories generally leave capitalism untouched, approaching it only obliquely through the antisemitic fear of global elites, demonstrates to what extent the demands of capitalism have become, as Marx writes, self-evident natural laws, wage labor as a mode of existence and commodification as the realization of pleasures remain unexamined by conspiracy theories. Thus to butcher a phrase, is easier to imagine the world controlled by lizard people than it is to question the existence of wage labor and the commodity form. 

Plekhanov/Labriola As a bit of an experiment, coupling my interest in André Tosel and my work on translation, I have decided to try my hand at a few translations of the former when I get the time. These are totally unauthorized, and rough drafts posted for edification and entertainment purposes only. I started on this piece because it is short, and because it works on an area that I need to learn more about, the history of Marxist-Spinozism before Matheron or Althusser. However, the more I worked on this piece, the more I thought that this split between Plekhanov and Labriola, still exists, in the divide between neo-enlightenment Spinozists and what some might call post-modern, but I prefer to call Marxist Spinozists. The Marxist Uses of Spinoza: Lessons of Method The history of the role of Spinoza's thought in the formation and the development of the work of Marx remains to be written, as is that of the history of the diverse Marxist usage (from different Marxisms) of Spinozist philosophical elements. This double history would reveal the work of Marx, and its contradictions, as much it would open up the work of Spinoza himself. Marxisms have reflected their aporias and their hopes onto Spinoza without necessarily truly thinking them through. In other words this is a domain of misunderstandings and equivocations. In order to undertake this history it would be useful to draw some lessons from the encounter of Marx and Marxist thought with Spinoza. First remark. The encounters of Spinoza by Marxists are discontinuous and contradictory. This discontinuity is initially characterized by the lack of a definitive encounter between Marx himself and Spinoza. Marx is formed through the reading of Spinoza, of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and the correspondence. Not to learn the lessons of materialism, but an ethico-political lesson. Spinoza is considered as philosopher of freedom and autonomy, modern incarnation of Prometheus and continuation of Epicurus, all at once. Marx, in is progression from Kantian-Fichtean idealism to the speculative communism of the 1844 Manuscripts, develops three theses which are the practical theses of philosophical materialism, without the epistemological and ontological theses of this materialist tradition.  Thesis One: Philosophy has a fundamental interest in the liberty of humanity, understood as autonomy and as the end of all heteronomies. Thesis Two: Philosophy is critical of all transcendental authorities of all principle of domination which justify and represent their domination through this principle.  Thesis Three: Philosophy is eminently a science, knowledge, but knowledge of life, of the simple life of spirit of bodies rendered by their power. All particular sciences and knowledge must be thought from the point of view of science of life and its forms, as forms of life.  When Marx elaborates the materialist conception of history he revolutionizes materialism but he does this without ever connecting it to the spinozist theory of nature, of the relations of extension and thought, of bodies and mind. He integrates and modifies the strong ontological and epistemological thesis of materialism, but these theses are taken more from Hobbes and other materialists of the eighteenth century than from Spinoza.
Let us state these theses which are capable of a Spinozist formulation, without however assuming such a formulation.  Thesis Four: Nature is the original reality and it is organized as matter at different objective levels. Thought cannot be separated from matter. Thesis Five: Nature in its diverse senses is intelligible. It emerges only from itself, excluding all creation. The human order is not a kingdom within a kingdom and susceptible of being understood.  Thesis Six: All knowledge presupposes the reality of its object outside of thought. The appropriation by the knowledge of its own object of knowledge presupposes the reference to a real object. It is necessary to pay attention to the debates in Marxism of the Second International in order to see how the question of "Spinoza precursor of Marxist materialism appears." Emerging in the years of the crisis of revisionism the debate engages above all the German and Russian theorists of social democracy: Bernstein, Kautsky, and Plekhanov. It is in part based on the Anti-Dühring of Friedrich Engels and puts into play the complex questions of the relationship between the materialist theory of history with the sciences of nature with the political problem of the alliance of the intellectual groups in the perspective of socialist transition. This debate between 1896-1900 is inscribed in a theoretical problematic, such of Marxist orthodoxy that will find a new actualization with the problems proper to Soviet philosophy between 1917 and 1931, when it is a matter of specifying what would be called "Marxism-Leninism." If the question of materialism assumes the continuity between the Spinoza of the Second International and that of the Third, nothing would be more erroneous than to let oneself be taken in by the apparent continuity of an imaginary history of philosophy. These occurrences are in effect specific, they constitute theoretical and political conjunctures which must be grasped in a way that takes into account the strategic dimensions of the class struggle whether or not it is led by Marxist parties, the problem of alliances, that of the intellectual division of labor. Marxist philosophy, as it is officially constituted, is part of the practice of parties, and the reference to Spinoza is overdetermined by the political and theoretical stakes that have to be elucidated in each specific situation. Here we touch on the second lesson of method: it is necessary to historically specify the conjunctures where Spinoza intervenes and where and how there is a specific usage of this prestigious and troubling reference. This method makes it possible to determine what falls under ideological legitimation, and what is inserted at the level of the practical politics of the party, of the state, of the level of specialized intellectuals. Spinoza does not only appear only in the emergence of Marxist orthodoxy. He intervenes, in a subterranean manner, in the elaboration of theorists where the considerable theoretical importance has never been associated with an actual political importance. This can be found in the crisis over revisionism in the last century, such that Antonio Labriola in his Essays on the Materialist Conception of History (1895-1898) attests to the presence of a different Spinoza than that of his contemporary Plekhanov and a fortiori than that which was celebrated in Soviet Philosophy in 1927 and 1932.
Spinoza intervenes as a critic of the same orthodoxy which returns as elements of an older materialism in another theoretical configuration that has solicited different aspects of his philosophy: no longer the parallelism between extension and thought, not a determinist ontology but the mode considered to be at once conceptual and experimental, the same geometrico-genetic method, in that it now excludes the guarantees of teleological philosophies of history. A contradictory intervention which is not without analogies to another occurrence, the most recent, that of Spinoza in the work of Louis Althusser which can be considered as a systematic deconstruction of the Marxist orthodoxy of the Second and Third International. Between Labriola (1898) and Althusser (1965), if we except the Soviet Spinoza, there is little except Ernst Bloch's remarks that no one has yet taken into account for a history of materialism oriented in the direction of a utopian ontology. This appearance of a Spinoza critical of stated and intended Marxist orthodoxies gives a third lesson of method: the diverse contradictory Marxist uses of Spinoza are situated between two poles, the first is that of an orthodoxy elaborated by the intellectuals of the social democratic and communist parties at the end of an a party/state conception of a finalist world and at the other is from thinkers situated in a problematic relation to the party, who look in Spinoza for other ways to make sense of the world and other practices then the becoming state of the worker parties. This opposition can appear to be schematic. It can be developed into provisional and schematic path of investigation. Such an investigation takes one central question: What is it in the philosophy of Spinoza that authorizes these discontinuous usages, determined by their conjunctures, and perhaps violently opposed?  Confronting therefore these different usages of Spinoza that can be considered historically significant in the course of history, that is to say in terms of their specific conjunctures. This can be seen with the orthodox use of Spinoza by Plekhanov and the critical usage of Spinoza by Labriola at the heart of the second international. Plekhanov gave himself the task of elaborating the originality of Marx's philosophy and defending it in the face of revisionists who, with Bernstein, contest the self-sufficiency of Marx's philosophy, dividing into an evolutionary sociology and a Kantian inspired ethics. For Plekhanov there is very much a Marxist philosophy. It is inscribed in the materialist current which it revitalizes by giving it a historical dialectical dimension. Spinoza is the direct ancestor of Marx in that it is through the monism of the former that one can unify the science of nature and the science of history of the latter. Marx has revitalized substance as historical-social matter, metabolism of humanity with nature, and has inherited his realist theory of knowledge, thought is nothing other than a moment or function of matter. There is a Spinozism of Marx that is the realization of historical Spinozism as a the affirmation of the materialist conception of the world, one predicated on the knowability of matter in terms of its organization at diverse levels. Only this conception of the world can give the workers' movement its organization and which would permit it to avoid the disorganization that revisionism introduces, neo-Kantian idealism cannot organize the class struggle without harmful compromises.  Spinoza is one part of orthodox Marxism returned to during this period. This Spinoza can authorize the theses of Friedrich Engels, in some sense simplifying the complexity of the Anti-Dühring. Concerned to think together the development of the sciences of nature, the materialist conception of history, and developing a philosophy capable of correct reflection and the movement of the specialization of sciences and the political struggle of classes (alliance with the intellectual stratum), Engles had proposed the idea of a materialist dialectic that oscillates between an ontological conception and a methodological conception of this dialectic. These two conceptions are apparently unified in the idea of "the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thought — two sets of laws which are identical in substance, but differ in their expression in so far as the human mind can apply them consciously, while in nature and human history (at least up to now), these laws assert themselves unconsciously, in the form of external necessity, in the midst of an endless series of seeming accidents." This parallelism between (laws of) movement of the external world and (the laws of) thought has a Spinozist connotation which reinforces the idea of liberty as the comprehension of necessary laws. However, it remains above all intended to make possible a representation of the dialectic under materialism, without examining its own difficulties. Plekhanov is not interested in these difficulties in elaborating a general materialist conception that Marx completes and fulfills through the mediation of Hegel. Antonio Labriola, who wrote "Origin and Nature of the Passions According to Spinoza's Ethics" at a young age (1866), refuses this ontologization or methodolization of the dialectic in order to develop the idea of a philosophy of praxis as a philosophy immanent to a new conception of history, reflecting the constitution of history as a complex unifying ground and surface. In this sense, the Plekhanov project, apparently Spinozist, of thinking the continuity of nature and society at the heart of a substantial and homogenous causality loses its sense. The process of social life must be desubstantialized at with it the philosophy that is presented as a hyperphilosophy or super science organized as "theosophic or metaphysic of the totality of the world, as if by an act of a transcendent knowledge we can arrive at a vision of substance and all of the phenomena and processes under it." Antonino Labriola as much as he refuses to make man an 'kingdom in a kingdom' refuses the naturalization of history and the transformation of Marxism into a naturalist ontology where social practice becomes a species of being in general. Labriola denounces a matter found on things as a form of metaphysical superstition. Spinoza is evoked as a hero in the struggle against the imagination and ignorance that resurfaces in Marxist orthodoxy under the form of universal materialism. It is necessary above all to think of the diverse levels of the "animation" of matter, and therefore the specificity of the "artificial terrain" which constitutes practice. What Spinoza knew how to do for the theory of passions must be done for praxis: each one, the relations of affects and and those that constitute praxis, are not ruled by a subject and for this reason must be studied through a genetic method. Labriola speaks of a genetic method that also defines the method of Marx in Capital. The genetic method takes its distance from the dialectic and its teleological philosophy of history and established guarantees.  For Labriola the turn to Spinoza is less about the strengthening of a materialist monism than it is about the possibility of reinterpreting Marx's Capital as a geometry of capitalist social being. The geometrical method is an instrument of internal purification destined to eliminate the finalism of productive causes and biological predetermination from Marxist orthodoxy. The philosophy of praxis manifests the basic critical and formal tendency of monism: everything is conceivable as a the causal genesis of a complex totality. The materialist dialectic is neither a universal method nor a logic of being, but constitutes the critical movement internal to knowledge which acts on the practice of philosophy and makes it a "conceptual form of explication" parallel to contemporary science. The reference to Spinoza intervenes in the critique of a Marxist orthodoxy which is supposed to include in a dogmatic manner Spinoza's own materialism. Marx and Spinoza are considered as two practitioners of philosophy who refuse the closure of knowledge in favor of the immanent self-reflection of knowledge. The lesson of Spinoza is not to find the unity of knowledge under a principle but to demystify the fetishes which substitute imaginary principles for the movement of practice.  One could develop a similar analysis of the confrontation of the Soviet Spinoza of the Third International to the Spinoza of Louis Althusser.  The Soviet Spinoza is an impoverished and petrified version of the Spinoza of Plekhanov. With respect to Althusser, Spinoza's critique is referenced constantly and augmented, infinitely better elaborated than in Labriola, since it acts this time not as a critique of metaphysical fetishism, even materialist, but of the metaphysics of the juridical subject characteristic of occidental rationalism.  The contributions of R. Zapata and J.-P. Cottent have clarified these points, but it seems opportune to underly the paradox of this history: it is possible to tie together the diverse uses of Spinoza, one against the other. If Spinoza is enrolled in the constitution of a "conception of the world" which intends to complete a current of philosophy and which cannot at any time criticize its presuppositions, it is also possible, as with Althusser, to think the structure of ideological interpellation that constitutes the ideological subject and invalidates philosophy considered as a theory of knowledge. If Spinoza makes possible a conception of the world in which the State Party is supposed to be the subject of history accomplishing its ultimate ends, it also makes it possible for Althusser to try to reconstruct Marxist theory on the ruins of the triple myth of origin, subject, and the end. The Labriolian critique of imaginatio and ignorantia is radically interiorized in the destruction of Marxisms of the Second and Third International. The recourse to structural causality supposed to have been developed in the theory of modes and substance serves as an incomplete program to develop the theoretical revolution of Marx.  However, it goes further still: there are two Spinoza's in Althusser himself. The Spinoza critical of any theory of knowledge ultimately occludes the Spinoza of structural causality: the denunciation of the triple myth of origin, subject, and end is lead to the liquidation of the rational modernism present in Marx. However the pars destruens always prevails over the pars construens. The idea of structural causality (such that of substance as the absent cause over the modes and affects) is accompanied with the affirmation of an unknown radicality of Marxist science, but the critique of the metaphysics of subjectivity in the teleology of Marxism that accompanies it announces the crises of Marxist liberation in the last interventions of Althusser. Everything comes to pass as if Althusser deconstructs a dogmatic Spinoza in the name of another Spinoza, more secret and more enigmatic. Spinoza is always divided from Spinozism which claims to define himOriginally published in Bloch, Olivier, Editor,  Spinoza au XXe siècle, Paris, PUF, 1993. 

 Translation is the closest that I have ever come to demonic possession. Let me explain, I used to think that there were books I read, books I wrote about, and books I taught, each category representing a deeper level of familiarity, even intimacy to the point where it is harder and harder to tell where the book's thoughts end and my thoughts begin. Translation, however, is on a whole different level. It is thinking someone else's thoughts. As I have mentioned repeatedly on this blog, on social media, and to random people on the street, I have spent the last year or so translating Frank Fischbach's La production des hommes: Marx avec Spinoza. The translation is now for the most part complete, and should come out from Edinburgh University Press in June of 2023. Translating the book has been a transformative experience. I am even more convinced of one of the book's most controversial theses, that alienation is not the reduction of subjectivity to some object but is the reduction of material objective existence to subjectivity.  To be reduced to a bearer of labor power, to pure subjective capacity, is to be cut off from the social relations and objective conditions that make existence and activity possible. In other words, to draw together Spinoza and Marx, to be a kingdom within a kingdom, or to see oneself as such is not the zenith of freedom but the nadir of domination.Beyond this point, Fischbach's book does for Spinoza and the early Marx what Althusser did for Spinoza and the late Marx, effectively destroying that very division. The book goes a long way in making the case that what is often considered Marx's humanism is better understood as naturalism, and the influence or presence of Feuerbach conceals the subterranean influence of Spinoza. I feel like I need to reconsider how I read the early Marx. However, there is one point that I really struggled with and that is Fischbach's engagement with Heidegger, often placing Spinoza, Heidegger, and Marx in the same intellectual lineage. Part of my resistance to this pairing is autobiographical. When I was in graduate school Heideggerianism was everywhere, and Spinoza seemed to be a real alternative, an entirely different orientation of thought. Fischbach's book did make me curious, so curious that I decided to read one of the books he references, Jean-Marie Vaysse's Totalité et Finitude: Spinoza et Heidegger. The first thing that surprised me about the book was the conjunction "and" (et). I expected it to be "or"(ou) as it was for Hegel in Macherey's famous book. Vaysse recognizes that the conjunction is a strange one, that it must be in some sense an "and" that flies in the face of the obvious opposition. Spinoza would seem to be a thinker of metaphysics, of a philosophical system. This alone would oppose his project to Heidegger. As for Heidegger's explicit relation to Spinoza it is more of a non-relation, Spinoza is merely mentioned by Heidegger, and to some extent Spinoza falls outside of the trajectory that Heidegger charts of metaphysics as becoming a metaphysics of subjectivity, to thinking being as being what a subject produces. To go back to Fischbach one last time, Spinoza and Marx can be understood as falling outside of Heidegger's comprehension because for both of them production and subjectivity are not conjoined, each defining each other, but are absolutely opposed. As Fischbach writes,  referring once again to Spinoza and Marx (we'll get to Spinoza and Heidegger)"The fundamental point these two philosophers have in common is their being at one and the same time thinkers of production and radical critics of subjectivity – two elements that are completely indissociable. While Heidegger considers the modern metaphysics of subjectivity as the completion and accomplishment of an approach than consists, from Greek philosophy onwards, in taking the productive comportment of humanity as the implicit guiding thread into the sense of being, Spinoza and Marx demonstrate on the contrary that a thought of production leads to the removal of subjectivity from its foundational role. Neither Spinoza nor Marx start from the subject: the former begins from substance and understands it as the infinite activity of production, that is, as the absolute unity of producing (natura naturans) and of product (natura naturata), as the complete immanence of production in the infinity of things produced; the latter begins not from the production as the activity of one or several subjects, but from the ensemble of the relations of production, a productive industry that is at the same time a process of individuation. In neither case is production thought from the subject: for both Spinoza and for Marx there is a production that exceeds all subjectivity, a production which has always already preceded, englobed and exceeded every subjective formation, engendering subjectivity as a secondary and derived aspect. Whether thinking of production as the infinite productivity of substance – which, in its immanence to the infinity of things produced, is demonstrated to be not at all a subject (the latter being conceived as that which precedes or supports the things that are produced, or as the term by which they are assembled) – or thinking of production as primarily an ensemble of relations that precede, condition and determine the formation of individually productive positions, both Spinoza and Marx understand and illustrate that production is never assignable to any foundational subject, that it is the basis of everything without being the act of a founding subject."Despite this claim of omission, Fischbach sees a fundamental simularity of Spinoza, Heidegger, and Marx in that they are all philosophers of the world, not the subject, beginning with the relations that constitute subjectivity rather than the knowing subject as starting point. Vaysse, however sees a different similarity between Heidegger and Spinoza, one that starts with their critical targets, metaphysics and theology. Heidegger's destruction of metaphysics and Spinoza's pars destruens of theology, place the two on similar ground, or as Vaysse puts it, "Spinoza and Heidegger reject the metaphysical opposition between immanence and transcendence." This reject is clearest in what can be considered their methods. On this point Vaysse draws most distinctly from the existential analytic of Being and Time, in which Heidegger traces the very category and concepts of philosophical thought back to the practical comportments that underly them. At first glance this seems far from Spinoza's sub specie aeternitatis, of the Ethics as a system of propositions and demonstrations, however, Vaysse demonstrates that this mode of presentation is in some sense at odds with what it presents, with the understanding of existence that structures and articulates it. Spinoza like Heidegger begins from the assertion that it is is our practical comportment which primarily orients our thinking and acting. It is our desire and our affects that shape how we make sense of the world from the original "consciousness of our desires and ignorance of the causes of things" up to the qualities we attribute to the things that we desire. Our thinking is affective and active before it is reflective and contemplative. To some extent Vaysse's Heidegger and Spinoza comes after the Marxist interrogation of both, after the reading of the former, prompted by the proximity to Lukács that reads Being and Time for its critique of reification and alienation in modern life, and for the reading of the latter that understands Spinoza's philosophy to be as much one of the constitution of modal life as a philosophy of substance.As much as this point brings Heidegger and Spinoza together as thinkers of comportment and activity, it also divides them on this terrain. As Vaysse writes, "If the affects proceeds to a detailed and systemic analysis of affective life, of its variations and conflicts, Heidegger retains only the phenomena of fear." Spinoza and Heidegger are both thinkers of the constitutive nature of affects or Stimmung, but differ in terms of the primacy they attach to different affects and their objects. This difference of affects reflects a fundamentally different understanding of finitude. For Spinoza to be finite, to be a mode, is to be affected in multiple and different ways, to be constantly affected and transformed even as one strives to maintain their being, while for Heidegger finitude is centralized in one primary affective orientation, fear or anxiety framed in terms of one central event, death. This difference relates to a second difference, for Heidegger inauthenticity, our everyday understanding, is primary structured through the anonymous They, while for Spinoza the imagination, the realm of inadequate ideas that constitutes our common sense, is structured around the individual as a kingdom within a kingdom. Of course, Spinoza has his own understanding of what Heidegger might call "inauthenticity" through the imitation of affects, the way our thinking, and feeling, is shaped by a kind of generic figure of what we imagine others love and hate. Such an imaginary constitution of a norm, or a standard, remains secondary to the primary illusion, and it is an illusion of autonomy and independence, an effacement of the relations that sustain and thwart our striving. Which is to say that for Spinoza the question of the quotidian, of our basic comportment, cannot be separated from our collective relations, there is a primacy of ethics and politics to ontology that is unthinkable from Heidegger's point of view. To come to a quick and provisional conclusion, Vaysse's book has the merit of removing the external opposition of Heidegger and Spinoza that would juxtapose ontology to metaphysics, finitude to totality, but in doing so he reveals an internal difference, one predicated on how we make sense of the relationship between our quotidian comportments and philosophical reflections, our finite striving and totality. Vaysse's book begins with Heidegger and Spinoza, tracing an unrecognized similarity of orientation and investigation, only to end with Heidegger or Spinoza, a difference which is political or ethical more than metaphysical. To say it  is political or ethical seems fairly lopsided, because, as many have noted, for Spinoza the political, or collective dimension, and the ethical, or practical orientation, were always central to Spinoza's examination of the quotidian formation of the imagination, while Heidegger never directly incorporated ethics or politics to his reflections on everyday comportment with disastrous results. 

 Every mention of the film Barbarian carries with it the warning to not spoil anything, to experience it completely ignorant so as to be best frightened by its particular twists and turns. [Fair Warning: I will spoil everything here] For that reason it is not entirely clear if the title refers to anything. It could just be a vaguely menacing word. Many horror movies from the last few years seem to take their title from a series of such words, Insidious, Malignant, Terrifier, as if someone was just looking up "evil" or "scary" in a thesaurus. The opening scenes of the film, however, suggest that this title is not just a vaguely scary word, after all, it would be an odd choice suggesting that the we are running out of synonyms for scary, but that the film is very much about what it means to be a barbarian and what it means to be civilized.  The film opens when Tess (Georgina Campbell) arrives at her Airbnb rental in Detroit. Everything seems to go wrong at once, it is pouring rain, someone named Marcus keeps calling even as she has no interest in answer, and, worst of all, the key is not in the lockbox to the house. It turns out that the Airbnb has been double booked. A man named Keith (Bill Skarsgard) is already inside. He invites her in, and offers to share the house for the night, even opting to take the couch. It is around these gestures that the film makes clear what is at stake in civilization and what might define a barbarian. Keith makes her a cup of tea even though she declines his offer. The camera lingers over the tea cup asking the question if perhaps he slipped something into it. The threat of violence, of specifically sexual violence, hovers unstated over all of these scenes.A gesture of friendliness and comfort could also contain a threat. However, as the two talk and get to know each other, it becomes clear that not only does he not mean her any harm, they actually have things in common, and are both interested in Detroit's emerging arts scene. For a few minutes one could forget that one is watching a horror movie, and believe that one is watching the "meet cute" of a romantic comedy. Horror returns the next day. First, the sunlight reveals that the rented house is alone in a block of dilapidated and abandoned buildings. (Like It Follows before it, Barbarian uses Detroit to be a scene in which urban decay is the setting for modern horror.) Second, when Tess returns to the house later that day she is chased by an apparently homeless and unstable person who aggressively yells at her to get out of that house. These are all only the beginning. The real horror begins when Tess goes into the basement to search for toilet paper and finds a subbasement, and a basement below that, both of which seem to be constructed as prisons or torture chambers. One room is just a bed, a bucket, and a video camera on a tripod. A bloody handprint on the wall suggest that the camera has documented unimaginable horrors. When Keith returns to the house we begin to see how unimaginable these horrors are, in exploring the subbasement he is attacked and killed by a monstrous woman, seven feet tall, naked, deformed, and capable of massive brute strength. Before the audience can even make sense of what they have seen the screen goes black, and cuts to a convertible driving along sunny day on the California highway. The car is being driven by  AJ Gilbride (Justin Long) and is takes the film awhile to connect him, and sunny California, to a tunnel under a home in Detroit. In the meantime he has the worst day of his life, but one that has nothing to do with monsters, at least the literal kind, at least yet. AJ is a sitcom actor. He gets a call informing of him that he has been accused of sexual assault by one of his costars. His life begins to fall apart quickly after this, his show is cancelled, even his financial planner wants nothing to do with him. It is only then, in a brief mention of rental properties in Michigan that we learn of his connection to the house that opened the film. AJ travels to Detroit to escape the negative attention and liquidate his property. He finds the house exactly as Tess and Keith left it, their bags still on the bed, toiletries near the sink. He too eventually finds the basement, and the hidden tunnels below, setting up one of the funniest scenes in the whole film. AJ immediately googles the question whether or not basements count as part of the square feet of a home in its listing. What Tess sees as a horrible scene of past violence, he sees as an investment opportunity. He immediately get a tape measure and begins to calculate the size of his investment property. It is then that he meets "the mother" creature that killed Keith and he is thrown into a pit with Tess who has been its captive. Once again the film cuts from darkness and horror to the light of day, to a flashback to the same house on Barbary Lane years earlier when the block was a picture of suburban paradise. Horror films have their own particular economy, their own particular way of regulating and maintaining fear and anxiety. In general this is indexed to sunset and sunrise. When the sun comes up the audience breathes a sigh of relief. What is interesting about Barbarian is that every time it cuts from the dark tunnels beneath the house to the sunlight of the world above the momentary relief from the horror actually deepens the extent of the horror. Even though we do not see the rape that AJ is accused of, his actions, referring to his accuser as a lying bitch, and his description of her "reluctance" when telling the story to his "bro," make it abundantly clear that he is exactly the sort of person that Tess feared in the opening scene, justifying her wariness at spending the night in a house with a strange man. The second cut to daylight goes even further into the barbarism hinted at the beginning of the film, in it we meet Frank the past owner of the home. Voices on the car radio date the scene to be during the beginning years of the Reagan administration, and before deindustrialization devastated Detroit. He goes to the grocery store searching for "baby stuff" and meets an incredibly friendly worker at the supermarket who is all too willing to help him with his "home birth." She even sells him the nursing videotape that we see later. Frank then stalks a young woman he sees at the grocery store, masquerading as a Detroit Public Works employee to get into her house and leave a window unlocked. Later, when we he returns home, his neighbor tells him of his plans to sell his house, beginning the "white flight" that would transform the neighborhood into the broken down ruins we see in the present day. The exodus from the neighborhood only expands Frank's domain, his property grows, at least underground, as his neighbors leave.The scenes with Frank are striking, because not only do they begin to spell out the backstory of the house, and the horrors that took place there, but they do so in a way in which the darkness of the horrors contrast with the brightness of the day. Frank is the architect of the underground subbasement. It was where he kept the women he kidnapped and raped, their children, and the children of those children. "Mother" the creature lording over the dungeon now is the unholy offspring of those offspring. All of this is revealed not only during the light of day, but in the face of friendly neighbors and cashiers. Frank's world seems to be not just that of a world gone by, of large American cars and VHS tapes, but a fantasy of what America supposedly used to be, a world where neighbors stop by to say hi and you can always find good help. Who then is the barbarian of the film's title? The obvious answer would be "Mother," she is naked, speaking only in grunts, so outside of civilization to be almost feral. However, she is the product of Frank, of his cruelty and brutality, cruelty and brutality that did not hide in the dark, but took place nearly in full sunlight. Jameson writes "Today all politics is about real estate. Postmodern politics is essentially a matter of land grabs, on a local as well as a global scale." I have always wondered about this line, but it is hard not to see in the case of this film the connection between property, privilege, and power. Frank is able to exploit the private nature of his home, the fact that his neighbors do not care what he does so long as he keeps the yard clean and muffles the screams from the basement. The two monstrous men of the film, Frank and AJ, are not only both rapists, but they are both owners of the house, and they each use this property to protect them. For Frank it becomes the scene where his crimes take place, where the evidence is hidden away, while for AJ selling it can make it possible to afford the kind of lawyer who could not only protect him from his crimes, but also silence his victim through an anti-defamation suit. This connection between property and privilege is further underscored when Tess manages to escape and calls the police. That the police are going to be useless is almost a given in a horror movie, one the genre's consistent subversive elements, but the question is how are they going to be useless, are the going to be skeptical, arrogant, or simply overwhelmed. In this case the police do not believe Tess's stories of underground tunnels and monstrous women in part because she has no key to the house, and because her time spent underground has left her looking strung out and crazed. She is black woman without property and she is treated as such. The police are more inclined to arrest her for breaking the window than they are to break down a door to rescue someone. Police protect property not people. From the opening of the film, in which Tess is desperately calling the company who manages the Airbnb to get them to address the mistake of double booking the house, to the appearance of the police towards the end, the film is clear that those who own property are protected, even to the point that their crimes can go unnoticed, and those without are left exposed and vulnerable. As Benjamin says there is no document of civilization that is not also that of barbarism, and in this case what connects them is property, the private property of the home. The doctrine that makes the home one man's castle also makes it his dungeon and torture chamber. The one person who offers real help, who believes Tess and tries to help her, is that man that screamed at her to get out of the house, a yell that was more of a warning than a threat. This man, Andre, offers both Tess and AJ help and shelter, but in the end he cannot shelter or protect them. Without a home he has no protection to offer, and mother kills him.This deleted scene underscores the connection with property as well as how funny this film can be.What then about "the Mother'? If she is not the barbarian of the film's title then what is she. How are we to read this monster. It is worth noting that she is excessively, even monstrously maternal. She kidnaps Tess and AJ not to torture or kill them, but to keep them and care for them. Her one bit of civilization, of education, is the instructional video tape on nursing, and, in one of the most talked about scenes of the film, she forces AJ to nurse from her breast. I am sure that Freudians and Lacanians will have a lot to say about this monstrous mother, but I am tempted to read it politically. If Frank is the true barbarian, and his evil is tied to property, to the privation and seclusion that the home makes possible, and if the home continues to be a condition of violence even as it is changed to an asset, to revenue, then the home as the privatization of care, as Sophie Lewis puts it, is both the condition of that seclusion and what it in some sense represses. Even in the underground dungeon that Frank has created babies are raised, care goes on even in a place that exists for the purpose of violence and exploitation. Of course that care has become warped by its very relation to the violence that made it possible. Thus we can in some sense reverse Benjamin's saying, there is civilization, care and nurturing, in every element of barbarism. This seems to be the real merit of Barbarian in all of its twists and shocks, in the end it changes how we see both a suburban home and the homeless that surround it. seeing barbarism where we are used to seeing civilization and civilization where we might expect barbarism. 

The ending of the original The Blob I have a distinct memory of watching the original The Blob on a Saturday afternoon movie. I watched a lot of Saturday afternoon movies, Godzilla, all of the Universal monsters, and various giant ants, crabs, and praying mantis. The Blob stood out because it was actually frightening in a way that a giant monster crushing a city was not, and because its ending, in which a frozen blob was dropped someplace north of the Arctic Circle was followed by a giant question mark hovering over the sky, lingered in my mind. At the time it seemed like the perfect way to end a horror movie, with the horror still intact. I must admit as well that Steve McQueen's last line, "As long as the Arctic stays cold," sounds much more ominous these days.  
It is perhaps because of this fondness for the original that I rewatched the eighties remake as part of the Criterion Channel's 80s Horror collection (parenthetically I want to throw out a few words of praise for the Criterion Channel in general and for their ability to do a great job with Halloween programing. While the collection only has a few horror movies, including, for some reason, the original Blob, the channel has branched out to include some classics, like Wolfen, some forgotten gems, like The Hidden, and some oddballs that would not show up anyplace else). The remake is uneven, but not terrible. Perhaps its best innovation is to update the original film's social conflict. The original was framed in the conflict between the small town authority figures and the kids (who were portrayed by actors well into their twenties when the film was made). This is preserved in the figure of Kevin Dillon, who, for some reason, wears the "Puffy shirt" that Seinfeld would make famous. The remake expands the social conflict to include a government agency whose attempt to contain the blob is couched in cold war paranoia in which every alien is a potential bioweapon. Its real improvement, however, in how it updates the question mark that lingers over the original with a scene featuring the town's preacher. He has witnessed the blob's attack on the small town and concludes that it is a harbinger of the apocalypse, that he sees himself tasked to complete. Upon rewatching I realized that what I liked about this ending is its fundamental incompleteness. There was no sequel to this particular version of the blob. The ending just hovers as a question mark. I wish more films were allowed to end on the question. The original Halloween has one of the best endings of modern horror. Its ending makes the film feel like one of the stories told around a campfire about "escaped lunatics." When I was growing up "escaped lunatic" stories were what we told camping, not ghost stories, and they always ended with some twist about the scratching of a car roof, or who was licking a hand, all guaranteed to make it hard to sleep. Halloween's ending, "he looked over the balcony and the body wasn't there" always seemed to be one such ending, which is why the film almost feels more like a rendition of a kind of urban legend or folk tale. Of course this ending has been turned into multiple sequels that have expanded on Michael Myers ability to survive bullets, fire, stabbings, etc., As I watched the most recent film in the long line of sequels, Halloween Ends I kept thinking that it would be better if the whole series had ended with just the shot of the imprint in the shape of the body in grass (or gone in the direction Carpenter wanted, with a different Halloween film each year, as in the underrated Season of the Witch).. All of the original movies of the eighties and seventies that were serialized into sequels, reboots, and, in the language of the new Scream film, requels (reboot and sequel, like the new Halloween films that simultaneously follow existing films and restart the sequence, often cutting films out of the canon), Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, ended on a question mark, on a scene in which the seemingly dead killer or monster comes back in one last jump scare. In the parlance of the times, they left it open for a sequel, but now, everything is open for a sequel. Any character that does not die can return, and even those who do can return, somehow. The endings of the originals almost function as frightening short films in their own right, albeit, ones dominated by jump scares. It is worth noting how much they "hold up" even as many of the sequels and prequels they gave rise to fade into well deserved obscurity. All of those sequels, which expand upon and then reduce the mythology of the characters, add up to so much less than endings which made them possible. The question mark, incompleteness, is as much a part of the narrative as what we see on the screen. Contemporary intellectual property driven film production, however, abhors a vacuum. Everything that is not explicitly resolved must be made and remade until there is nothing left to extract from it. A lot of the frustration and boredom that many people feel about contemporary film and television stems from the tension between narrative, which demands closure as well as incompleteness, and the extraction of value which works against both. It is not enough to see that a character lives, the sequel must be made, just like it is not enough to learn that spies found the plans for the Death Star, we must see their story, and their back story. Narratives are finite by definition, but commodity production is a bad infinity. 

Halloween in Houston The Following is a response to Vardoulakis book Spinoza, The Epicurean that I gave at SPEP. I previously blogged about the book. One of the many merits of Dimitris Vardoulakis' Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism is that it focuses on the question of obedience as central to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Obedience is what differentiates revelation from knowledge, scripture from philosophy, action from belief. On one side, the first of these terms, there is obedience, that which falls under the control the state, and on the other freedom, the domain of philosophy. However, such an assertion would suggest obedience is a simple matter, that the line between obedience and freedom can be sharply drawn. Vardoulakis suggests that obedience must be understood through a dialectic of authority and freedom. As Vardoulakis describes this dialectic: Authority requires obedience whereas the drive to calculate our utility presupposes that we make our own practical judgements. Thus, under certain conditions, when authority takes over and suspends our judgements the result is political submission. But, also, under different conditions, we may calculate that it is to our utility to let someone else—for instance, someone with more knowledge or expertise—calculate our utility on our behalf. We can show the same interdependence by starting with utility: it is impossible to conceive of the human in terms of the calculation of utility without admitting that obedience, and hence authority, are necessary in certain circumstances. There is no such a thing as pure reason in human action. There is no human immune to obedience. Vardoulakis formulation is striking in two parts, first, as I have already indicated, in suggesting that the division between obedience and freedom, authority and utility, is not easy to draw, as one necessarily spills over into the other, but more importantly in suggesting that this relation is necessarily dialectical. This is the second major contribution of Vardoulakis' book, in arguing not for a dialectic reading of Spinoza but for a specifically Spinozist dialectic.  The idea of a dialectic in Spinoza is a necessarily vexed one. Much of the current turn to Spinoza in contemporary thought, especially that of Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri, have promoted Spinoza as an alternative to the dialectic. It is a matter of deciding between affirmation and negation, Spinoza and Hegel. However, Pierre Macherey in the closing of Hegel or Spinoza, puts forward the notion that Spinoza offers a non-teleological dialectic. As Macherey writes, outlining the fundamental problems of this dialectic, What is or what would be a dialectic that functioned in the absence of all guarantees, in an absolutely causal manner, without a prior orientation that would establish within it, from beginning, the principle of absolute negativity, without the promise that all the contradictions in which it engages are by rights resolved, because they carry within them the conditions of their resolution?  The contemporary turn to Spinoza is itself split, without a necessary conditions of a guarantee, between those who see Spinoza as opposed to the dialectic, to negativity and contradiction, and those that see in Spinoza not the nondialectical other of the dialectic, but its dialectical correction, a surprising one since, as Macherey argues, in this case the correction comes before the deviation, Spinoza before Hegel. Spinoza makes possible a dialectic without telos or resolution, a materialist dialectic. Vardoulakis' declaration of the dialectic of authority and utility is most productively read against the backdrop of this turn to a Spinozist dialectic, or a dialectic in Spinoza, which is to say along with Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar as his central interlocutors. (I say Balibar and Macherey, but for the purpose of this response I am going to focus on the former, but Macherey's Sagesse ou Ignorance would seem to have its own dialectic of obedience). As I will argue, in each case what is examined dialectically is obedience itself, or, what we could call, following contemporary philosophy, subjection. That subjection is dialectical can be glimpsed from Spinoza's well known formulation that the masses fight for "servitude as if it was salvation," the formulation suggests that subjection must be thought not just as something passively endured but something actively strived for, we need to see subjection in activity and activity in subjection.  In this way a dialectical reading overcomes the limitations of those interpretations which have apparently found in Spinoza only a theory of subjection, of ideology, or of subversion, of affirmative transformation.. The most obvious of the former would be Louis Althusser, for whom the Spinozist theory of the imagination, with its focus on the subject, is the basis of ideological interpellation. It also overcomes the limitations of those, such as Deleuze and Negri, who find in Spinoza the affirmation of a constitutive and transformative power. Reading Spinoza dialectically means recognize that the very terms of opposition, subjection and constitution, negation and affirmation, must be thought of as thoroughly intertwined. Spinoza is neither a thinker of pure subjection, of the imagination, or first kind of knowledge as ideology, but nor is he the thinker of constituent power or affirmative lines of flight. He is neither of these things, or perhaps both of these things, because subjection and its opposite, lines of flight or constitutive power, are neither of these things. We are always dealing with both, and with both intertwined, that is part of what it means to read Spinoza dialectically.  What do we mean by dialectic? In some sense a definition of the dialectic would seem to be, well undialectical, but beyond such an objection, which is both always tempting and always disappointing, I think that we can offer a basic formulation of at least a few common aspects. First, such a dialectic involves both a unity and a contradiction of opposites, but one without a third term or necessary resolution. Authority and Utility do not resolve themselves into some sublation through the authority of utility itself in a kind of enlightened democracy. However, this does not mean that such a dialectic is entirely static. The rejection of a general resolution, of a third term, means that the resolution of these tensions can only be thought in their historical specificity. Spinoza's historical study of Moses is not an illustration of a general principle but specific instances of what in a concrete situation, a political dialectic. As Balibar argues, "Spinoza's definition can be considered dialectical in the sense that the passage from the abstract to the concrete, as the development of the initial formula's contradictions, arises from a historical study." Spinoza's engagement with the singular case in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is necessary because the contradictions of utility and authority only resolve themselves in a specific situation.  The existing historical situation is not just a contradictory unity of authority and utility, but also reason and imagination. Etienne Balibar has made this particular dialectic central to his understanding of Spinoza. Spinoza reflects on the intersections of imagination and reason, affect and intellect, in the constitution of the collective and the individual in at least two places. The first is in terms of the general definition of ambition. Ambition is the affective constitution of society, the desire that others love what I love, that others live according to my temperament [ingenium]. As such it is inseparable from the imagination, from the imaginary constitution of the other's desire and love. In and through ambition we constitute the image of the other, of 'men' [homines] in general, the generic image of others that functions as a guide for our actions and desires (EIIIP29). It is no longer the love or hatred of this or that individual, or collection of individuals that orients an individual's actions, but a generic idea, a kind of 'society effect.' There are two limits to this affective constitution of ambition. First, at the level of sociality, and the conceptual grasp of social relations, 'men' is a universal. For Spinoza all universals stem from the human body's finitude, it is affected by so many images that it can no longer grasp the singular differences (EIIP40S). What is left then is a generic idea that is produced by the inability to imagine all the myriad things, a universal that is always tainted by some particular content: some will imagine man as a rational animal, while others will think of a featherless biped. The 'men' who we strive to act like, whose image governs our loves and hates, is a fiction, an unstable universal that is imagined differently by different individuals. It is as much a condition of discord as harmony. Second, there is a problem at the level of the object of this sociality, that which we want others to love or hate. We desire that others love what we love, the love (or hatred) we feel is strengthened by the idea that others love what we love. This ambition becomes a source of conflict especially if the object that we desire is subject to the rule of scarcity, and thus cannot be possessed by all equally. Ambition is thus internally conflicted. As Spinoza writes, 'those who love are not of one mind in their love—while they rejoice to sing the praises of the thing they love, they fear to be believed' (EIVP37S1). The constitution of society through ambition is inherently contradictory, the very things that draw people together, the desire to love as others love and to have others love what I love, divide them as well. As conflicted as this sociality is, it is a sociality, which is to say that the ambivalence of ambition are not a remnant of the state of nature, but are a product of sociality itself.  Society, or, as Spinoza puts it, the city, is not exclusively founded on the ambivalent sociality of the passions. It is also founded on reason, on the powers of the intellect. It is the same conatus, the same striving, underlying reason and ambition. In each case there is a striving to make the temperament of the individual coincide with others, to constitute a collective temperament that would reflect the individual. However, the essential difference is in how this relation to the other and the object is constituted. The rational constitution of the state is based on the recognition that it is more useful to live with others. This idea of man is not the idea of men constituted through the imagination, it is not the universal idea, but the utility of sociality relations. It is not the desire that others live as I live, or that I coordinate my love and hates with others, but mankind can accomplish more collectively than individually (EIVP35S). As Spinoza famously writes, 'nothing is more useful to man than man' (EIVP37S2). This idea of man does not produce the ambivalence that determines the affect of ambition. Individuals guided by reason actually agree with each other, add and assist each other, rather than strive to orient their actions around an impossible object of what the others want. Moreover, reason as an object of desire is truly common, not only can it be shared by all, but its worth increases with the number of people who participate in it (EIVP36). Reason is not scarce, not finite, and is actually increased by others thinking the same thing. Men under the guidance of reason can overcome the contradictions of ambition and actually desire that others desire what they desire.  These two different foundations of the city, these two different genesis of sociality, one based on the affect of ambition and the other based on reason, are not two different options: there is not a city of affects and a city of reason supplanting each other as two different phases, two different orders. Spinoza's text presents them as two different demonstrations of the same thing, suggesting the coexistence of these two different constitutions of society. As Balibar writes, 'Sociability is therefore the unity of a real agreement and an imaginary ambivalence, both of which have real effects.' We are always dealing with both affects, with ambition, and reason, with a city founded on a projection of our ideas of man, and a city founded on our rational utility. While there is no telos, no necessary progression by which the city founded on reason, a democracy, necessarily displaces a city founded on founded on superstition and affects, that does no meant that the relation is entirely static. The particular combination of reason and affects defines the nature of a given city, and its particular history. There is no more one generic essence of the city's striving than there is an essence of man's singular striving. The striving, the particular relations that constitute the city, the collective, must be thought from the singular case, from the specific way it is affected and determined. There is thus a history, but this history must be thought from the singular case, from the particular way in which any given city combines ambition and reason, affects and knowledge. For Balibar this is not just a reading of Spinoza, but could be understood to be a general thesis about politics in general, which is always situated between reason, on the fundamental thesis that "nothing is more useful to man than man," that we benefit from living in a society, from the way in which living among others makes our lives better than a solitary life. This fact is true of any society which has an irreducible dimension of utility. At the same time every society is founded on an imaginary institution, an image of what it means to be in a city, what it means to be human. Every city is both rational and imagined, and this contradictory unity of these two scenes exists in each specific case. As much as it is possible to push the city to become more rational, which is to say less exclusive and hierarchal, it is never possible to dispense with the other scene entirely. This limit acts back on political philosophy itself, as Balibar argues any attempt to think through the relation of Spinoza and Marx must necessarily recognize the limit of each to think the other scene. As Balibar writes, It would be easy to conclude that Marx is basically unaware of the "other scene" of politics, the scene of communitarian affiliation, and therefore unaware of symbolic violence as well (although he names it or has bequeathed us with the word ideology, one of the aptest names for it); and to conclude that Spinoza, for his part, basically ignores the irreducible level of economic antagonism (doubtless because, at the economic level, where conatus can perhaps be conceived of as a "productive force," Spinoza is basically an optimist and a utilitarian" (Balibar 2015: 12)  The dialectic of imagination and reason means that any philosophy that focuses on reason, on individual or collective interest as the basis of politics, must necessarily contend with imaginary identifications, and any politics of the imagination, or imagined communities, must necessarily contend with the rational basis of any social relation.
It is possible to map these two dialectics onto each other, to argue that reason is utility and vice versa, since nothing is more useful to man than man, and, at the same time, that authority is constituted in an through the imagination, since authority, that which cannot be contested often passes through the theological, which is to say superstition which is founded upon the imagination. However, what I would like to suggest is that we see the dialectic of utility and authority and that of imagination and reason as two fundamentally different dialectics, which intersect without necessarily reflecting each other. This is in part because, as Vardoulakis argues, authority cannot be neatly mapped onto the imagination even as it passes through it especially in those forms inflected by religion and superstition. Authority exists in part because humanity does not always recognize what is useful, namely that a political order which combines the efforts of each, is useful. For those who do not recognized the utility of society, or more to the point, those who do not recognize it in the moment, since we see the better and do the worse from time to time, we are all social and anti-social, authority provides another foundation for society. Authority is a necessary supplement to the rational basis of society, and as such it could be described as a rational irrationality, or a-rationality. Authority which is outside of reason because it cannot be contested by reason has a rational basis, or to put it more succinctly, sometimes there is a utility to authority. However, at the exact moment that such a claim can be made, a claim that would unite two into one through the expansive sense of utility, they come asunder because if authority is useful, a necessary supplement to the rational understanding of society, than it can be evaluated in terms of its utility. This is what Negri identifies as the historical criticism of religion. Religion, it is argued, played its part in sustaining and bringing together the human community during a period in which it could not govern itself, as in the case of Moses leading his people out of slavery, but it is no longer useful, creating conflict rather than accord, and functioning as a fetter on the powers and forces of society. Any attempt to unify authority and utility into one term, make authority useful or utility itself authority, necessarily fails, producing its opposite. The two dialectics could also be differentiated in terms of their specific foundations. Imagination and reason are grounded on an anthropological basis, on humanities capacity to affect and be affected. The two images of humanity, the one defined by utility and rationality is an concept of humanity, while the other, that of the imagined community is an image, and like all images it is defined by the bodies inability to hold multiple images together. All images of humanity, or of a common community, are necessarily shaped by particular images of society. In contrast to this, authority is less an anthropological fact than a particular institution, it is artificial, or more to the point it is an attempt to contend with the artificial ground of any social order. This is why there is an appeal to the theological in those moments of foundation. As much as the two dialectics overlap, as reason and utility are two different expressions of the same thing, and imagination and authority pass through the same relation to the past, they cannot be said to be the same thing, the political or institutional cannot be reduced to the anthropological and vice versa. The two different dialectical reflect the fundamental fact that any given political order is at once an effect of anthropology, stemming from human reason and imagination, but exceeds it in that any political order cannot be reduced to imagination and reason. This brings us to what could be considered the third moment of the spinozist dialectic, one that pushes it furthest from a Hegelian understanding, if the first is to be found in the unity of opposites, a basic criteria for a dialectic, and the second in the non-teleology, or, to say the same thing differently in the historical specificity of its resolution, then the third moment is in the necessary overdetermination of the dialectic itself. There is never anything like a contradiction, or even a central contradiction, which would be able to encompass the totality of the historical moment. It is not a matter of a dialectic of authority and utility, of reason and imagination, or of affect and concept, to add another figure but of the necessary overdetermination of any dialectic, as reason and imagination, utility and authority intersect with and complicate each other. This is only to name the two we have briefly considered here, we could also consider the dialectic of desire and the affects which have been explored by Frédéric Lordon. The merit of Vardoulakis book is not just that he has given us a new contradiction, that of authority and utility, which remain outside of the scope of most discussions of Spinoza, but that in insisting on the dialectical dimension of that relation he offers a way to not only encompass the others, but brings us that closer to thinking together Spinoza and dialectical thought.

To wear a mask in a store, bus, classroom, or other public space is now to be in a small, and dwindling minority, as much as this might vary from place to place. Aside from a few holdouts, doctors offices, the place where I get my haircut, and so on, there are no mandates requiring masks anymore. That it is a minority, and a choice, is not the way that it often appears, at least to those who do not wear masks.One thing that I have heard, and others who still wear masks hear from time to time, is the assertion, "You do not have to wear those anymore" by some bystander. Sometimes this is truly meant to be helpful, as if someone thinks we have not received the news. Underlying this correction is the unstated claim that the only reason anyone would ever wear a mask is if they were made to do so. It can only be compliance and not cooperation. What is more interesting, as the tweet above indicates, is that there is a strange tendency to interpret mask wearing as not just compliance but conformity. People wearing masks are see as sheepishly obeying rules that do not exist, and conforming to a community that is non-existent. There may, in some contexts, and situations, be some social pressure to wear a mask, but given the overall numbers that pressure would seem so small as to be meaningless. What else explains the couples where one person, usually a woman, wears a mask while the other, usually a man, does not? Many people have interpreted this reaction, and the hostility to mask wearing as the acting out of a guilty conscience. People do not want to be reminded of the pandemic in the first place, and on top of this, to be reminded that they could be doing more, or something, to stop its spread. Almost inadvertently "mask wearers" have become a kind of "Guilty Remnant" from The Leftovers. The Leftovers is show more people should be talking about, especially now. It takes place after 2% of the worlds global population disappears suddenly one day. The show deals with the ramifications of this traumatic event. The Guilty Remnant as they call themselves are a cult of sorts, dedicated to not letting society return to business as usual. They wear white, stalk survivors of the disappeared, and smoke copious amounts of cigarettes as if to underscore the transient and random nature of death. If we could all go at any moment why not light up? Masking could be interpreted as a refusal to let the world move on. However, there are two important differences between our world and the show. In the world of The Leftovers, no one has really moved on, everyone is struggling to make sense of an inexplicable event. In our world we have been trying to move on since before the pandemic even started. Second, in the world of The Leftovers the event was traumatic, instant, but it is over. The US still records four hundred deaths a day.. A scene from The Leftovers Masking could also be understood as an uncomfortable reminder of not just the ongoing pandemic but our overall dependency on others. One of the traumatic effects of the pandemic, at least on life in the USA, was the sudden recognition that none of us are "kingdoms within a kingdom," that our lives are dependent upon countless others, truckers, warehouse workers, cooks, dishwashers, etc. that for the most part remain out of sight and out of mind. The mask is a symbol of our species being, that we share the same world and live together even as we try to tell ourselves we live in isolation and separation. Which is not to say that the virus affects us all equally, the entire history of our response to the virus, from the uneven access to vaccines, to the spotty protections offered by such things as working from home, which protected a small number at the expense of many more. I would like to offer a third interpretation. In order to do so we must historicize the pandemic, and our response to it a little bit, at the very beginning, in year one before the vaccines were even developed, there were many calls to return to normal at any cost, that the cure should not become worse than the disease. There was an almost ghoulish demand to sacrifice lives at the alter of the economy. That is not what we are dealing with now. What is striking about the contemporary restoration of normal is that it is less ideological, less a political project, than the insistence of persistent force of necessity. No one says that we are sacrificing lives to restore the economy anymore, ghouls are at least honest, but with a shrug we just proclaim that nothing else can be done. Mandates are dropped because of the resistance it elicits from customers, the same with vaccination requirements, everything is left to a choice. We become kingdoms within a kingdom even in the face of pandemic that would remind us otherwise.Previously, on this blog (and elsewhere) I argue that capitalism can be understood as an institutionalization of Spinoza's formula of "seeing the better and doing the worse."  We often know what the right thing to do is, but we are confronted by the necessity of doing otherwise because it will help us keep our job, make it possible to buy what we need. The pandemic is particular instantiation of this, as academic administrators drop vaccine mandates out of the fear that enrollments will decline, stores drop mask mandates because it will threaten business, and so on. Some of the people in these situations know that they are doing the worse. Of course seeing the better and doing the worse is difficult, it creates a constant schism. It is better to just do the worse and claim nothing better is possible. You see the better and do the worse long enough, you lose sight of the better. 

Every adaptation mining the vast troves of memory that we recall as our lives as readers of books and comics and watchers of film and television, but is known by its owners simply as intellectual property, always runs up against the singularity of the memory in adapting the generic nature of the property. Much of the politics of culture hinge on the conflict over the singular and generic nature of the memory. At times this politics takes the form as an attempt to retain some singular experience, a memory or attachment, against the commodification of culture  and at other times it takes the form of an attempt to insist on this singular memory or experience as the only correct one.  We are constantly trying to retain what is singular against what is interchangeable, which is, to some extent, a doomed project under capitalism. All of this is a set up of sorts to a very particular memory. I was not a huge fan of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, and to be honest I am not sure if I ever read the whole run, but I do have a very particular memory from a collected volume. In the story Dream, or Morpheus, tracks the Corinthian, the fugitive nightmare to Serial Killers convention, or as they call it, in a thinly veiled disguise a "Cereal Convention." After dispensing with the Corinthian Morpheus turns his attention to the audience of serial killers, or collectors, and offers the speech detailed in the following panels. I am not sure why this particular bit of pop culture stuck with for so many years. Maybe there is no real reason, it is baggage without inventory as Gramsci would say. However, I can offer two reasons, one old and one new. For the old I have never really found serial killers interesting. The serial killer who taunts the police through a series of clues has to be one of the most tired cliches of popular culture. Beyond the cliches I was always disgusted by the way in which actual serial killers, from Jack the Ripper to Jeffrey Dalmer, became pop culture figures in the there own right, even to the point of having their own trading cards. I just find that stuff to be distasteful to the point of offensive. In the Sandman the killers are frightening, but as the dialogue makes clear, they are nothing to look up to or emulate, just damaged people with delusions of grandeur. That is why I first liked the panel.As I have occasionally thought about this scene from time to time the way one does with the odd and accumulated bits of popular culture that make up our "tertiary retentions" (to use Stiegler's phrase) it has taken on a different meaning, one that hinges on the line "fantasies in which you are the maltreated heroes of your own stories." This formulation of a kind of day dream or, dreaming with one's eyes open, appears in Spinoza. For Spinoza the formulation is reserved specifically for those who believe that the mind controls the body. As he writes "Those...who believe that they either speak or are silent, or do anything from a free decision of the mind, dream with open eyes." One could argue that in general this formulation in which one is caught in a kind of dream in which one is at the center describes what Spinoza calls superstition, and what Althusser calls after him ideology. On this reading, and if one wanted to simplify things considerably, one could say that ideology is a matter of what the "kids today" on Tik Tok call main character syndrome, the belief that one is at the center of their own little universe, a cause and never an effect.  The idea of all of us walking around in our own little daydreams is not only an interesting way to think of a kind of spontaneous ideology, but Dream's removal of that Dream suggests ideology critique as a kind of superpower. Although to be honest, after watching the series I am a little unclear on what Dream's powers are and how they work, but as the panels above indicate I have pulled my collection out of the closet to reread it. I am not going to offer a full consideration of The Sandman series here, or talk about how it differs from the comic. I am confident it has been analyzed to death elsewhere. I will say briefly that I think that one of its strengths is that it borrows the pacing of the comic, following the arc of the first dozen or so issues. It always seems strange to me that comic books have had better success with movies when their serial form lends itself to television or streaming. Stranger still that the turn to streaming of recent MCU shows has tended to write them more like long movies than episodes of in an ongoing story. The Sandman has more of the structure of the comic in which there is an ongoing story, but there are also stories that are contained more or less within an episode. When it comes to adapting the panels in question. The dialogue is retained, albeit extended, and to some extent, as the clip below demonstrates, the scene is as well. We get to see the effects of Morpheus intervention as the collectors wrestle with their newfound conscience and consciousness of their situation. In that sense the scene is well adapted from the page to the screen. However, one cannot be struck with a certain flatness to the initial shot. In the place of the graphic play of color and line we just get a man standing in front of a curtain. I do not love the art, and there are many panels in comics that would stand out more, but the panels work better than the moving image. One of the things that I find striking in the sheer number of comic book films and television shows is not just how they fail to function as movies, that point has been made again and again, but they often fail to live up to the comics, there are striking visuals in so many different comics, and over the years there have been talented artists working on all of the different superheroes that have made it to the screen, and while these visuals are sometimes gestured to in individual scenes in the various films there is still a kind of translation problem in which the color and composition of the panel is lost when it is put into motion. In fact these visuals become one more easter egg, one more thing for fans to pick up on such as Martha Wayne's pearl necklace from The Dark Knight Returns returning again and again in nearly every filmed version of Batman's parent's death. This is an aside, but I would argue that one of the reasons that Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse stands out as a film is that its animation captures the visual sense and sensibility of comics better than CGI. I have more thoughts on The Sandman, about the representation of dreams in popular culture, but my focus here has been just on how an image from popular culture can linger like the remnant of a dream, and how that image might make it possible to think about how one's memory is shaped and formative, and what an adaptation misses. 

What follows is not a review of the entirety of Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production, something that is hard to do with collections of essays in general, trying to find some common theme or thread, but would be easy to do in this case, because not only are the essays excellent on their own they also unify around an important thread of saving Macherey's work in general and his first book on literary production from obscurity. This has also been one of the projects of this blog, and one can follow the links to reviews (or at least posts) on his books on daily life, the university, utopia, norms, Spinoza, and literary production. What I would like to do instead is pick up one of the central threads running through this collection. This thread has to do with the connection between symptomatic reading and capitalism. The term symptom carries with it a heavy Freudian influence, and with that there is the suggestion that the symptoms in question are some kind of slip reveal if not the unconscious then some other omni-historical reality, perhaps the limit of any ideology. In his essay, "Reading Althusser" Macherey makes the case that the symptom that Althusser read through Marx reading political economy had a particular structure and reality. As Macherey writes:"Symptomatic reading seeks to show between the lines not the hidden presence of a content--the essence hidden beneath appearance, which requires only that it be brought into the open and placed before our eyes--but a lack waiting for the means that would permit it to be filled, means which materially are lacking."And more specifically in the next paragraph. "Marx's discovery is that capitalism exploits an ambiguity related to that on which the notion of "power" is based; it is made possible by the ambiguity proper to a reality that may exist both potentially and actuality at the same time, and from which it has found the means to draw the maximum profit, in the two forms of extraction of absolute surplus value (an extension of the working day) and of relative surplus value (an increase in the productivity of labor power). When Marx speaks of the relation between essence and appearance, he speaks without knowing it, because, in fact he does not speak of it, all the while speaking without speaking of the relation between the potentiality and actuality, which is the secret of the function of labor power and of its exploitation by the capitalist who pretends to buy labor, and to pay what it is worth, as Ricardo insisted, while in fact he has rented the right to make use of it a certain place and time, transforming it from the potentiality to the actuality of labor power."Symptomatic reading concerns the fundamental orientation of Marx's project. It is the lynchpin around which the whole critique of political economy rests. The difference between labor, as that which is sold and bought, and labor power, gets at the fundamental relation between potential and actuality in capitalism. Labor is treated as any other commodity, it exists on a market that fluctuates with rises and fall of supply and demand, but unlike any other commodity it is not a thing, but a potential, a capacity. How much it produces, how much work it does (or really he, she, or they do) is not set, not determined by its price on the market, but is determined by how much work the capitalist can get from it by extending the time worked (absolute surplus value) or the intensity (relative surplus value). This is why, in the one section of Les Sujet des Normes that has been translated Macherey argues that capitalism should be understood as a kind of materialist metaphysics because it puts to work, in a practical way, the distinction between potentiality and actuality. This metaphysical division is also a quotidian division between the worker as an owner of labor power, as a wage earner, interpellated as such, and worker as part of the valorization process, as part of productive process and subordinated to it. In some striking passages from the essay on Reading Althusser Macherey, in a passage that to some extent annuls the gap that would separate "Althusserian" Marxism from "Autonomist Marxism" (quotes are necessary for both of those terms), Macherey argues that this division masks a fundamental relation of domination (my apologies for the picture of the text). The symptom of capital is thus wage labor, or the difference between wage labor as potential, as labor power and actuality, a difference which is also the difference between the labor market and the "other scene of production. "As much as it is possible to read other "sciences," other discourses, symptomatically it would have to do other fundamental points of schism or division, political economy can be read symptomatically to the extent that it treats labor power as a labor, treating a potential as actuality, and a relation as a given. Philosophy can read symptomatically to the extent that it, in its bourgeois variation, effaces this as well, treating the market as the paradigm of equality rather than the basis for a new form of domination. Macherey offers a striking, and a strikingly political reading of the concept of symptomatic reading. Capitalism as a mode of production rests on the paradoxical status of labor power as a commodity, and political economy, or economics, as a discipline is constituted in effacing this fact, as are other disciplines to the extent that they are under the sway of that new queen of the disciplines. What does it mean, however, to think of this as a symptom? Or, put differently where else might these symptoms manifest themselves? If capital is founded on the unique status of labor as a commodity where might we find symptoms of the repression of this fact? I would say that the capitalist class, at least the small business owner, seems to also maintain that wages have a unique status. Whenever wages go up, or there is at least a possibility of a wage increase, restaurants and other businesses will claim that this threatens their very existence. The same business owners are generally silent about other increases of the cost of doing business such as rent or utilities. (Although the current inflation has changed this a bit.) These costs are absorbed or are silently translated into increased prices. An increase of wages is treated less as just a new cost and more of a threat to the very idea of a profitable business. To give an example, during the time when the pandemic was still acknowledged the city of Portland, ME, where I live, the city imposed a hazard pay increase that raised the minimum wage for workers to $19.50.  Several restaurants increased their prices accordingly and even stated on their website menus that the price increase was a direct increase of the increase cost of wages. One could contest the necessity of this, after all it is possible to bear these increases by just taking in less money for the owners. However, I am less interested in the economics of this than the status of wages as a symptom. Higher wages are often talked about as a make or break cost, as not just another cost but almost as an existential threat to capital as such. In his contribution to the same volume Nick Nesbitt writes, "Marx seems to be telling his reader that the abstraction that is value must be thought not only as a concept but also vividly imagined, in the form of a animated manifestation in the concrete materiality that is the human symbolic order." This seems to be another way of thinking of a symptom, as much as the actual exploitation of labor must be effaced and concealed behind the image of the labor market, as a market of "Freedom, equality, and Bentham," this exploitation still appears, albeit in an inverted form, every time wages increase, or more to the point, workers seem to resist the discipline and subordination that is required of them. That every increase of wages, or every attempt to address and acknowledge the working conditions appears as a a threat to the economic and symbolic structure of capital is itself a symptom of the exploitation that the system depends upon. 

 It has taken me a long time to write a follow up to my first post on Bizarro World. That is because once you begin to think about the strange inversions in which the persecuted are made out to be threats, and the comfortable are made out to be threatened, it is hard to not see it. Our entire world seems reversed and inverted, those who are most subject to violence are made into violent threats, and those who are most comfortable have made the threats to their comfort our central concern with the claims of cancel culture. Bizarro world would be one of those "descriptive theories" that Althusser talks about, something that stops thinking because it seems to be such an accurate description of what one is thinking about. I have decided to approach the topic by breaking it up, by trying to grasp the specificity of the different reversals, following what I did earlier with the inversion of the relation of workers and capitalists to that of the relation of human capital and job providers I would now like to examine the way in which margins and mainstream have also become inverted, and what that inversion means for both terms in question, the dominant culture and the marginal subculture. In doing so I would like to start with a particular philosophy, or spontaneous philosophy, that characterized my life as a young teenager. As a nerdy kid interested in comic books, science fiction, and other things, I fostered the belief, shared by many of my kind, that our rather minor marginalization made us sympathetic to the marginalization of others. This was helped in large part by the fact that many of the dominant comic books when I was growing up, such as the X-Men, Spider-Man, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, were all in some sense allegories of oppression and exclusion. With respect to the first in the list, the idea that the X-Men stand in for an oppressed minority, complete with the conflict between Professor X's integrationist philosophy and Magneto's more militant position, is so entrenched in its reception that it ceases to be subtext (even if it is not true). Comic books were at least in the eighties, both in their culture and in their content, stories of the misunderstood, the maligned, and the excluded. One could raise two questions about this mythology. The first has to do with the allegorical distance of framing the stories of marginalization and exclusion through such science fiction content as genetic mutation, or, in other contexts, alien visitors or androids. In some sense these science fiction elements set up the necessary allegorical distance to make the stories palpable as entertainment. The condition of possibility is the condition of impossibility, however, in that the detouring of exclusion and marginalization through such allegories as the "mutant menace" always made it possible that some readers would miss the point. That people actually did is demonstrated by the twitter posts that ask in all sincerity "When did X become political?" where the X in question is some bit of pop culture such as X-Men or Star Trek that was always steeped in political subtexts. Such posts miss the point, but the possibility of missing the point is inscribed in the text in question and is a necessary condition of its popularity. Of course there are comics, television shows, and books that bridged this allegoric divide, more directly connecting the fictional exclusion of mutants and aliens with the actual history of oppression, but they are to some extent exceptions. There is something awkward, however, when the history of imagined exclusions confronts the real history of discrimination. There are the moments when we realize that the Nazis were an actual political ideology, and not just bad guys that seem ready for the four color word of comics. Second, and more importantly, one could argue that the marginalization I felt at the time was slight and temporary, I was (and remain) a white cis male, after all, and being bullied after school, or made fun of in the back of the bus, is nothing compared to what other adolescents face, nor does it really deserve a place in the ongoing history of persecution and discrimination. However, becoming an outcast of sorts, a nerd, and later a punk, can be understood as a becoming minor in Deleuze and Guattari's sense. For Deleuze and Guattari majority and minor are not simply quantitative matters, but the relation between constant and variable. As Deleuze and Guattari write, "Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it. Let us suppose that the constant or standard is the average adult-white-heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language. It is obvious that "man" holds the majority even if he is less numerous than mosquitos, children, women, blacks, peasants, homosexuals, etc. That is because he appears twice, once in the constant and again in the variable from which the constant is extracted."Since we are speaking of comic books, it is worth noting that superhero comics themselves illustrate this majority, not just in the proliferation of various prefixes appearing before the world "man"," bat, super, iron, spider, etc., man is the constant, the norm, but in the fact that white and male is the unstated norm from which the first "black," "Asian," or gay superhero takes their meaning. Marvel comics in particulr does not bother to create new characters and superpowers it is enough to add "-woman" or "she" to Spider or the Hulk to create a new character. The deviations appear meaningful because the norm is assumed. While this is true of comics, and begins to illustrate the limits of the social justice dimension I alluded to above, I think that becoming a comics nerd is itself a kind of becoming-minor. To quote Deleuze and Guattari again, "Minorities, of course, are objectively definable states, states of language, ethnicity, or sex with their own ghetto territorialities, but they must also be thought of as seeds, crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority."Not to be too autobiographical, but I would describe my entire life as a passage through different minorities, different subcultures, comics, punk, philosophy, etc., all of these where very different territories, with different languages and cultures, but the overall movement was an attempt to evade majority, to not be the constant, a position which Deleuze and Guattari argue, is all the more oppressive because it is occupied by no one. If all of this language of major and minor seems a bit baroque, then I am reminded of a passage from Deleuze and Guattari that seems uncharacteristically direct. After a few lines that state "There is no subject of the becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of the majority; there is no medium of becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a minority," they bring up a historical/literary example, writing, "As Faulkner said, to avoid ending up a fascist there was no other choice but to become black." This cuts through the particular neologism to make the stakes clear. Such an assertion has a lot to unpack, but I would argue here that a lot of subcultures, especially those that embrace their deviations and exclusions from the mainstream and are, it is worth saying primarily but not exclusively white, are attempts to avoid becoming fascist, to avoid being part of the majority. You cannot change the color of your skin, but you can change the color of your hair, and that seems like enough especially if it gets the same people to hate you. That is my all too glib summation of some of the politics of punk aesthetics. My main reason for bringing up this little theory of subcultures, as well as the subtext of comic books, now is that it seems to have completely exhausted itself. Comic books, or, more to the point, superheroes, have gone from the margins of our culture to the center. They are the dominant culture, have become majoritarian, and as much as one would like to think that they have carried with it their fundamental minoritarian political aspect the opposite seems to be the case. Love of mutants and other imaginary minorities has not extended to a support for actually existing marginalized groups, but has been mobilized to not only perpetuate exclusions but to become the voice of the majority.In part this happens through the politics of nostalgia, which demands that the present, the film adaptation, identically recalls the past, which in this case means that the film must resemble comics written in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, complete with the racial politics of those eras.  There have been online freak outs over the casting of Idris Elba to play Heimdall in Thor, of John Boyega playing a central role in Star Wars, of Moses Ingram appearing in Obi Wan Kenobi. These deviations from some supposed canon have all been met with vicious online hate campaigns that have led actors to shut down accounts and retreat from the digital public sphere. The demand to preserve the sanctity of one's childhood memories has led to absolute hostility towards any of the social change that has happened since one was a child. Lest this all seem incredibly minor (in the conventional sense) and all too online, I would argue that this cultural nostalgia, the demand that the present match the past, has been thoroughly weaponized into MAGA nostalgia. This hostility is not limited to changes to the canon, but is extended to include even new characters and stories that do not so much recast or change past memories but create new ones. Both Ms. Marvel and She Hulk have been "review bombed" on online review sites, hit with a flurry of negative reviews almost before they air primarily for the crime of casting a muslim woman or a woman in a comic book themed show. There seems to be an entire online niche of people who hate Brie Larson for not only playing Captain Marvel, but for speaking up for diversity in film and film criticism. We live in an age in which a film that was basically an hour and half long recruitment advertisement for the Air Force is seen by its critics as too woke, too concerned with social justice, because of its cast. All of this criticism coalesces in the online mantra, "Get Woke, Go Broke" which threatens companies and brands with boycotts for embracing "social justice."The world of comic book fans has been no less critical of those who criticize their beloved films for their artistic merits. Martin Scorsese famously declared that Marvel films are not cinema, and he has been ridiculed online ever since. It is not enough that these films, the Marvel films, be commercially dominant, being the most financially successful films that are released each year, and culturally dominant, reshaping all of popular culture in their image, they also most be loved and revered by everyone. Dissent cannot be tolerated. Blockbusters must be acknowledged as art. It is at this point that we get our bizarro world inversion of the comic book nerd. The fan of comic book movies is now something of a "sore winner," who continues to act the victim, marginalized, even in his dominance. I would argue that this "sore winner" idea is integral to our contemporary version of the majority, and even fascism to recall the quote about Faulkner. We are far from Deleuze and Guattari's image of a majority that is all the more powerful in being unstated, in being assumed, now dominance, cultural, political, and economic, focuses on its apparent marginalization in order precisely to reassert its dominance. The inversion is not just that comic books have gone  from margins to mainstream, but that marginalization has gone from being the basis of empathy to an expression of dominance. Victimhood is the language of domination. The bizarro world that we are living in is not just that what was once the obsession of a few has become the culture of many, that Moon Knight is now practically a household name, but that grievance against perceived marginalization has become the language of the majority. 

 How it Started/How it is goingThe final episode of Better Call Saul is not just a finale to the series but to the entire Breaking Bad multiverse (to use the parlance of our times). While the first half of the season dealt with Better Call Saul as a separate show from Breaking Bad, dealing with the fates of characters such as Ignacio and Lalo who are named but never appear in the latter, the second half returns to its status as prequel and sequel. This is not just because of the appearances by Walt, Jesse, and Marie Schrader, but because it returns to the fundamental question of both shows and that is personal change and transformation. Was Jimmy always Saul dovetails with the question was Walt always Heisenberg. Or, as Chuck put it, can people really change?Breaking Bad famously ended with a negative answer to that question, with Walt's confession to Skyler that he enjoyed every minute of being Heisenberg, that the power was always his dream. It initially seems very much that Better Call Saul is going in the same direction. Twice during the episode Saul brings up the hypothetical situation of a time machine, once to Mike and once to Walt, to ask them what they would go back to and change. Mike uses the question to rewrite his entire life story, to never take a bribe as a cop and thus never become the drug enforcer out in the desert with a sniper rifle. Saul, however, seems free of regret in both conversations. When talking with Mike in the desert he does not want to go back and change the actions that caused the death of his brother, and when talking with Walt in a flashback to the basement of the vacuum cleaner supply he does not want to go back and change the actions that led to the death of Howard. He only wants more money and to save his bad knee from his life as Slippin' Jimmy. To the latter Walt replies, "So, you have always been like this," stressing, as Chuck did, the continuity of Slippin' Jimmy the conman and Saul Goodman the lawyer. Walt's answer to the time machine question returns the show to its subtext, the intersection of change, of personal change, and class transformation, with the idea that a person could change their class status, what Chantal Jaquet calls non-reproduction or transclass. Jaquet's concept of non-reproduction cuts between two different discourses on class and class reproduction. On the one side there are the various theories of social reproduction, from Bourdieu to Althusser who focus on the mechanisms, social, political, and ideological that reproduce the relations of production, keeping people in their class position. The sons and daughters of bodega owners end up owning their own bodega while the sons and daughters of partners at law firms can one day make partner. On the other side there are the various ideals, or even ideologies, that claim that anyone can make it, can pull themselves by their bootstraps and transform their class position. These two discourses are divided as much by their respective anthropologies as their politics. Reproduction, the reproduction of the relations of production, is understood to be the effect of multiple causes, economic, ideological, familial, while non-reproduction is generally attributed to the univocal and ahistorical effect of the will, ambition, or some other such attribute. As much as the side of non-reproduction is undermined at the level of theory, offering little more than homilies to the undaunted human spirit, it does have a case for itself at the level of experience: people do transcend their class position. This is the challenge of Jaquet's concept of tranclass, to think non-reproduction not as the effect of some individual agency or will, but as itself produced in and through the multiple determinations of reproduction. The multiplicity of causes that reproduce the social order, material, affective, imaginary, ideological, do not just reinforce it, but in their multiplicity there is also potential discord in their common score. The school, for example, can be as much a site of nonreproduction, of exposure to a different norms, habits, and ideas, as it is an institution of reproduction of the social order. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul can be understood to produce their own particular perspectives on non-reproduction, its conditions, possibility and limits. Class transformation or its failure, Walter's failure to fit in amongst his upper class classmates and Chuck's success at becoming partner, are generally alluded to more than presented, they are more backdrop than narrative. What we get in its place is a far more spectacular, and one could argue entertaining, transformation of a chemistry teacher into a drug kingpin as well as that of a former conman turned mail clerk into a corrupt lawyer.Walt's answer to the time machine question, that he would go back and stay on as partner to Gray Matter make his money legitimately, reveals both the identity and non-identity of Walt and Heisenberg. It was always about money, and the power connected to money and thus Walt was always Heisenberg, but also that Heisenberg is a return of Walt's fantasies of class transformation, of becoming a member of the "upper class" of someone who drives something better than an Aztec and does not have to worry about such mundane things as water heater issues (also referenced in the final episode). Saul does not mention Chuck, or his own attempts to lift himself by the bootstraps in the mailroom of Hamlin, Hamlin, and McGill to become James McGill, Esquire in his conversation with Walt, but we do get a flashback to Chuck. In that flashback we are reminded that Chuck has successfully transformed himself from the son of a bodega owner from Cicero, Illinois to a law partner who reads the Financial Times. The flashback also shows us what Jimmy ultimately says about his relation with his brother, that his attempt to destroy him, to take away the one thing he loved, practicing the law, was in part a product of their failed relationship, of a failure to connect. We also see a different side of Chuck, one that we might have forgotten, not the Chuck that insists that "people don't change." that Jimmy will always be Slippin' Jimmy, but the Chuck that wanted a connection with his brother, a Chuck that in his own way appreciated his brother's efforts or at least was willing to discuss his cases with him. As befitting a show about a lawyer, Better Call Saul's closing arguments about change and transformation happen in a court room. We see Saul/Jimmy give two different version of the common narrative that connects Walt/Heisenberg and Jimmy/Saul, two different summations of the intertwined plots of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. The first, delivered before a federal prosecutor is a lie, a con, Saul tells the story of a man who was terrified of Walt, who did everything out of fear, a story that only he can tell because he knows about the bodies. The point of this story is not to convince the prosecutor, not to argue for leniency, but to demonstrate what he, Saul, is a capable of, that the same story could convince a jury to change their mind, and he only needs one juror. The scam works. Saul is offered an incredibly light sentence of seven years to be severed in the poshest prison in the Federal system, the one for the likes of Bernie Madoff. Saul too would successfully make the change to become a member of the upper class even if it is just as a white collar criminal.Saul cannot leave it at that, and in his last push to prove that he has won, that he cannot be beaten (and to score some good ice cream) he learns that Kim has come clean, confessed her involvement in the destruction and death of Howard Hamlin. This leads to a second retelling of the narrative. In the courtroom Saul tells a different story of his involvement with Heisenberg, not the story of a man afraid of a vicious criminal enterprise, but of a man driven by desire, by greed. As with the earlier telling this story is said to the judge but she is not the intended audience. His confession is meant for Kim who is in the courtroom. The first audience, the judge, restores his sentence to eighty six years, while the latter, Kim, makes possible his forgiveness and his transformation back to Jimmy. In an odd Möbius like twist Saul is never more Saul when he claims to be Jimmy, when he tells the story of being frightened by Heisenberg it is all a con, but he finally becomes Jimmy when he narrates his life as Saul, when he claims to be the immoral monster of greed that everyone thinks he has been all along. He is Saul when he claims to be Jimmy and finally becomes Jimmy again when he tells his life story in the character of Saul with all of the bravado and ego one would expect. Jimmy/Saul lives out the last of his life in a federal prison, and not the one reserved for the likes of Madoff. He has not entirely shed the multicolor skin of Saul, and to some extent his Saul skin protects him. There are a lot of people in federal prison with fond memories of the "criminal lawyer." He is visited by Kim, and thus in some sense redeemed. The relation with Kim sets up one last parallel. We see a long montage of Kim's post Saul life in Florida, maintaining the website of a irrigation supply company, eating tuna salad, and discussing office gossip, it is the blandest life possible right down to the sex with a man who says "Yep" while climaxing as if he is discussing mayonnaise. These scenes, shot in the black and white that washout the color of Gene's life in Omaha remind us that there are other ways of being confined than a federal penitentiary. What is doing time in a prison compared to doing time in a cubicle. To quote J Church, "Prison guards are our daily banalities." Breaking Bad ended with two nightmare versions of life in contemporary capitalism, Walt's impoverished retirement into poverty and exile in New Hampshire and Jesse being forced to work, Better Call Saul also ends with two images of straight life, one in prison and one in Florida, but who is to say which is worse. This parallel undermines the moralism of the final episode. Kim was right, the real thing that one has to break bad from is a life spent in work. Breaking out of that world is something no confession, no con, can get you free from. 

Seeing Nope at the Bridgton Twin Drive In Movie critics, even amateur ones, love puns, love working the title into their reviews in some sort of play on words. So it takes a certain amount of confidence to call a film "Nope". It just invites too many titles for negative reviews, say "Nope to nope" and so on. In the case of Peele that confidence is earned. It is the third movie by a director who is developing his own vision in an era where such things as vision or style, even directors as auteurs, are increasingly obsolete. The title of Nope recalls the title of Peele's first film, Get Out  which was an homage to Eddie Murphy's bit about how a haunted house movie would never work with a black family, they would Get Out at the first warning.  Just as Get Out was about a man, Chris who ignored all the warnings and did not "get out" until it was almost too late, Nope is a film about about saying yes, about going towards the horror rather than away from it. It seems to me that any attempt to understand the film has to begin with that, why do the characters not just say "nope" and walk away. That question seems central to the film.Nope is about  OJ or Otis Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya.) and Emerald "Em" Haywood (Keke Palmer) who, at the beginning of the film, inherit Haywood Hollywood Horses a horse ranch that trains and supplies horses for films, television, and commercials when their father is mysteriously struck and killed by nickel falling from the sky. Metal objects falling from the sky is the first hint that things are amiss in their little valley, but it is not the beginning of the Haywood family problems. Their family business, as the trailer below indicates, has been in Hollywood since before there was a Hollywood. Their great great great grandfather was the unidentified jockey in Muybridge's famous footage of a horse galloping.  It is a secret legacy, one obscured by the official history which remembers Muybridge but forgets the jockey. The Haywood's have no official claim to any real legacy, OJ and Em still have to work for every job.. He handles the horses and she handles the people, he is the craftsman and she is the salesperson. However, when a horse almost injures an actor on the set of a commercial all of their skills are quickly replaced with a CGI prop horse. What does a legacy, a connection to the past mean in an industry, and in a country, that is constantly retelling its story, reinventing itself. What do skills mean in an economy that is constantly deskilling, replacing knowledge with technology?
This same question burdens the Haywood's neighbor, Ricky "Jupe" Park (Steven Yeun) a former child star who now runs a wild west show capitalizing on his role as "Kid Sheriff". Jupe was also the star of a short lived but popular show called Gordy's Home that ended after one season when its chimpanzee star went on a rampage on set and killed and mutilated several of its cast members. Jupe works with one version of the past, a western theme park, one myth, but hidden behind his office is a museum to the tragic history of the show which might be a more lucrative attraction. A Dutch couple once paid thousands just to sleep in the museum.Television, or memories of television, play a central part in all of Peele's films from the commercial for the United Negro College Fun that pops up in Get Out to "Hands Across America" that underlies Us.  This is because Peele understands that our memories, collective and individual, are made as much by what happens on screens than in the so-called real world.  Peele's three films, Get Out, Us, and Nope, can be placed in a progression in terms of these video memories. In the first, Get Out, we hear the United Negro College Funds' slogan, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" in a commercial in the background just as Chris is about to have his mind wasted; in Us the image of hands across America is Adelaide/Red's primary memory and the structure of the tethered's revolution; and in Nope Jupe's traumatic memory of Gordy proves to be central to the whole film. Peele weaves together the audience's and characters memories of old commercials, media events, and cheesy sitcoms because these things make up our world as much as the clouds and desert of the valley. OJ, Em, and Jupe are all linked by the way that they deal with a legacy, with a past. In the case of OJ and Em this legacy was recorded but never credited, no one knows the name of the jockey in the famous pictures that created cinema, they are in some sense erased from history. They need to create their reputation anew, selling their business and their skills to clients without a legacy to claim. Jupe on the other hand seems tied to a traumatic past that he can neither escape nor entirely live off of. His niche fame or infamy does not provide enough to live on, but it is what people remember.

Jordan Peele posted the opening credits to his fictional show within the film on this twitter pageWhen what appears to be an alien spaceship appears in the valley OJ, Em, and Jupe all see it as an opportunity to change their condition. Em and OJ decide to photograph the alien spaceship, to get proof of alien life so incontrovertible that it cannot be contested. Proof of alien life will pay off enough to save the ranch and set them up for life. As they are trying to capture the elusive craft on film it turns out that Jupe has already started to profit off of the visitors, incorporating them into his wild west show. He has been buying horses from OJ and offering them to the alien ship. Jupe makes his offerings in front of a paying audience, exchanging the alien's mysterious desire for horses for a spectacle of an otherworldly being. It appears to be a fair trade, horses for a glimpse at the ship, but how can one understand what an alien understands or wants? Nope approaches this question by way of another question, how can we know what a non-human animal understands or wants? Understanding how we would communicate with alien minds is answered by asking how do we communicate with minds that are already other, with animals.This question is approached from two angles. First, there is the traumatic event of Jupe's past, the day that a seemingly trained chimpanzee was startled by a balloon popping and went on a rampage, killing and mutilating the cast. Jupe hid under the table and was not only spared in the rampage, but Gordy the Chimp was even about to give him his trademark fist bump before he was shot and killed. From his survival Jupe thinks he understands something about human animal communication, and thus, by proxy, how to communicate with aliens, give them what they want in exchange for something you want. In this case horses for a show. Second, there is OJ who does not presume to understand what horses want, but works from the premise that the first thing you need to understand about animals, and thus aliens, is that you do not see or understand how they do. A horse sees things differently, and to tame the horse, to work with it safely on a set, you have to understand that. To this basic principle OJ adds a second caveat he learned from his father, that some animals don't want to be tamed, a warning that OJ applies specifically to predators. As he argues you cannot tame a predator, the best you can do is collaborate with it, entering into an uneasy partnership. SPOILER ALERT: It turns out that the alien spacecraft is not a space craft at all but an alien monster. It is not sucking people and horses up to probe them or capture them for an alien zoo, but sucking them up to eat them. It is a predator. This is why it was not satisfied with the offer of a horse when it could gobble up the whole audience. It cannot be bargained with, but it can be appeased. OJ figures out that the only way to avoid the alien is to avoid looking at it--to not appear to be a threat. Incidentally this, and not the fist bump, may have been what actually saved Jupe when Gordy went on a rampage. Hiding under the table he avoided making eye contact with Gordy.  Gordy did not spare him because they were friends, but because he did not look Gordy in the eye.OJ's strategy to photograph the alien creature without looking at it is a strategy that ties together the two themes of the film. First, and most immediately what could be considered the problem of different minds. In order to understand a different creature you have to understand how it sees things differently. A balloon is just a balloon to us, but a different creature might see it as a threat (or as potential food). Second, the difference between legacy and history is the difference of seeing. A legacy unseen, or unidentified is not a legacy at all. The characters of Nope have all been cast out from the spectacle, Jupe is former child star, OJ and Em have a connection with Hollywood history that was never recognized, even Angel, the tech support staff who helps OJ and Em instal their cameras, has been discarded in a way, it turns out his girlfriend  broke up with him when she got cast in a show on the CW. Hollywood, the spectacle eats people and spits them out, not unlike the way a space monster eats people and spits out the undigestible bits of metal like coins and keys. The spectacle of Hollywood doesn't need to hunt its prey. They are all desperate to get their legacy back, to get back into the spectacle, to capture what Em refers to as the Oprah shot, the money shot. However, the spectacle is a monster, it eats people and spits them out. To look at it is to be drawn in, to be eaten up. The only way to capture the spectacle, to get a picture of the creature, is ultimately not to look at it. Years ago I remember reading that Jordan Peele planned to make five films about social issues. The first was Get Out which is generally recognized to be about race, the second was Us, which I argue can be about class. I am not sure if Nope can be said to be about something in the same way in which the horror is an allegory for some social issue, but at the same time its story of how people cast out by Hollywood, not a part of its official history, trying to avoid being literally eaten alive by a spectacle. No wonder Peele considers it his most personal film. Peele has managed to somehow create a spectacle, this is his most blockbuster film, without being sucked into its maw. 

 In the past few months I have done quite a few video lectures and guest spots on podcasts. I decided to post them here for anyone who might be interested, and, at least for a moment, to admit that blogging is increasingly archaic in an age of podcasts and youtube lectures. I gave a talk at the Subversive Festival in Zagreb. The talk is titled Negative Solidarity as Strategy: From Adaption to Transformation
Earlier in the month of May I traveled to a conference for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. I went to Brown's Cogut Center for the Humanities to present in the Capitalism and the Human conference. The video for that talk titled "The Work of the Human: Labor as the Constitution and Destitution of the Human" can be found here (be sure to check out the additional videos as well):
Earlier this week I was fortunate to appear on the Zerobooks podcast to talk with the Acid Horizon folks about Primitive Accumulation and my new book The Production of Subjectivity: Marx and Philosophy. The video of that can be found here:
Speaking of Acid Horizon. I was also a guest earlier on their podcast to talk about "The Great Resignation" and the Affective Composition of capital. The audio of that can be found here:  Earlier in March I did a little class with the Marxist Education Project on Marx and Spinoza. The video for that can be found here: 
Last but not least I was on Hotel Bar Sessions awhile ago to talk about Work, and Sorry to Bother You:That is all for now. I now resume the antiquated print based mode of communication that is this blog's regular format. 

 The prequel is defined by a particular kind of paradox. As much as it aspires to reach the point from which original story began, connecting with the present that it is the past of, the more that the point recedes, and become unreachable. Its very existence means that it can never reach what it aims for, its ending will always be different from the beginning of that which it is a prequel of. Or, more to the point it, overreaches its mark. This is especially true of the some of the worst versions of this, the movie Solo forgets that the name Han Solo is cooler if we never hear its hackneyed origin, that having a wookie as friend and sidekick is more interesting if we never see the first time they meet, and that the Kessel Run sounds cool but that does not mean we need to see it. A character can be defined more by the way the enter the screen in media res than by fleshing out their backstory. More becomes less and the more you add the less it alls seems to matter.Better Call Saul has struggled with this in a different way. The more we learn about Saul/Jimmy's backstory the less he can be the person we first meet in Breaking Bad. This is in part because he is introduced first as a character that is defined by his lack of depth and character. He is as tacky and as cheap in his character as the suit he wears, as thin as the veneer of classical architecture that adorns his office. Learning his back story can only add depth and tragedy to a character who revels in his cheap superficiality. Even if we get to the point where he becomes a man who will offhandedly suggest that Walt and Jesse murder Jesse's friend Badger to keep him from talking to the DEA what we know would make that person a different person and make it a different decision. The hollowness and emptiness of such cruelty and indifference becomes different if we know its causes, if we know what brought Saul to such a situation. Better Caul Saul has dealt with this problem of the prequel by shifting focus. As much as the show gives us the history of Saul's garish suits, the story of how Mike goes from corrupt cop to drug enforcer, and more about a secret drug lab under a laundry than we ever wanted to know, it also gives us characters like Kim Wexler, Ignacio "Nacho" Varga, and Howard Hamlin. These characters exist only in the prequel and thus all we really know about them is that they do not appear later on, why they are absent and how that comes to be is much more indeterminate ending, much less of a restriction, than knowing what a character becomes. The question driving much of the final season is not so much how does Jimmy become Saul, but what happens to Nacho and Kim. The first half of the final season deals with two plans. The first is repercussion of Mike and Gus' plan to have Nacho set up Lalo Salamanca to be killed. This plan did not succeed and much of the first half of the season deals with the repercussion of that failure, for Nacho, for Gus, and most importantly for Lalo. This plan leaves Nacho and Lalo in fundamentally opposed situations. Nacho has no resources, no one he can turn to, and a great deal of liability, most notably he has to protect his father; Lalo has a great deal of resources, including a man with the same dental records he can utilize to fake his death, and almost no liabilities. In the case of the former, Nacho's liability proves to be his undoing, he is forced to sacrifice himself in order to save his father. In contrast Lalo proves himself to be one of television's best depictions of the sociopath, someone for whom there is no difference between having a drink with a mourning widow or torturing someone in a woodshed if both can get him the information he wants. The second plan is Kim and Jimmy's scheme introduced at the end of the last season to undermine Howard in order to bring the Sandpiper Crossing class action suit to a quick and prosperous end. This plot takes the form a classic cinematic con in that the con we see is only the cover for a deeper con revealed later on. It is possible to argue that the heist film and con film are diametrically opposed. While the heist film often stages the difference between plan and execution as something unanticipated undermines the original plan  (that is its materialist dimension), the con film stages the difference between the plan we see unfold and the plan we do not see--a plan that is more clever in that it seems to have anticipated every possible reaction and apparent failure. In this sense it is more idealist than materialist in that it suggests the ability of an individual, or duo in this case, to incorporate all reactions and contingencies into a grand and secret plan. In the heist something goes wrong, a cop shows up at the wrong time or, to use an example from Breaking Bad, a kid with a dirt bike shows up just as you are robbing a train, but in the con even the glitches have been anticipated, they are the ruse of reason in which the larger plan is realized. In the heist we see often see the plan first in its idealized perfection only to then learn how it can go awry; in the con we never see the long con, the big plan, until the end. We are left to piece it together from the clues that we see. In this case we see Kim and Jimmy go through a great deal of effort to undermine Howard's standing in the community, planting drugs, starting rumors about him, and even stealing his car with its signature NAMASTE plate to make it appear he is soliciting and abusing prostitutes. These schemes are all meant to provoke Howard to hire a private detective to follow Jimmy to collect a dirt on him, a private detective who, unbeknownst to Howard, is actually working for Jimmy and Kim as a double agent. This is the plan within the plan: to use the private detective to get Howard to see some faked photographs. It is not Howard's reputation that they are working on, but his understandable anger towards Jimmy, and ultimately his sense of respect for the legal profession. Howard's retaliation has already been anticipated and is part of the larger plan which forces him to breakdown in the midst of the mediation of the Sandpiper Case. Jimmy and Kim's plan works, they have anticipated Howard's reaction, but what they have not anticipated is how their plan intersects with Lalo's. Watching Better Call Saul sometimes feels like watching two different shows, one about scheming lawyers and the other about the world of drug cartels; the midseason finale uses this to its advantage. When Lalo and Howard end up in the same room at the end of the midseason finale they are two characters from different shows and different worlds. Howard cannot possibly see who Lalo is, dismissing him as just a client of Jimmy, and it proves his undoing. The first half of the season ends with Lalo about to hatch his plan against Gus, a plan that suddenly involves Jimmy, the cockroach survivor, and we do not know what he will see and anticipate or fail to see in executing it, but I wonder if the first half of the season has already set up the second, if the real question is who has liabilities and attachments and who has resources. The tequila stopper in the flash forward that opens the season suggests that Jimmy/Saul still has attachments that will prove liabilities. Perhaps we have yet to see the actions that will bring Jimmy to the emptiness of Saul.