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 We all know Spinoza's famous line, "A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death." (EIVP67) I have turned to the line again and again, in graduate school it draw a line of demarcation if not a line in the sand between Heideggerians and neo-Spinozists, and, as I have argued, made possible different ways of thinking of finitude.  It makes for a great slogan, but, as they say in graduate school, let's unpack that.First, we should ask the question why? As Deleuze says a proposition cannot be separated from its demonstration. Here is the demonstration of that proposition:"A free man, that is, one who lives according to the dictate of reason alone, is not led by fear (by P63), but desires the good directly (by P63C), that is (by P24), acts, lives, and preserves his being from the foundation of seeking his own advantage. And so he thinks of nothing less than of death. Instead his wisdom is a meditation on life, q.e.d."The demonstration repeats a theme that comes up several times in Part IV of the Ethics, the difference between doing things because of the affects, especially sad affects, and reason, is developed in the corollary of Proposition 63."The sick man, from timidity regarding death, eats what he is repelled by, whereas the healthy man enjoys his food, and in this way enjoys life better than if he feared death, and directly desired to avoid it. Similarly, a judge who condemns a guilty man to death-not from hate or anger, and the like, but only from a love of the general welfare-is guided only by reason."Death then is only the most extreme example of acting from an affect, from fear. Which implies that death is not something we can have an adequate idea of, not something we can know. This is a point that Spinoza develops throughout earlier sections of the Ethics. As Spinoza writes, "We can have only an entirely inadequate knowledge of the duration of our body. (EIIP30). The duration of our body depends on the common order of nature and the constitution of things, but as such it exceeds what we are capable of knowing. Our death is part of this common order, its conditions, the bullet, bus, or butter (as in cholesterol) that will be our undoing is already out there, but the series of causes and effects that would bring it to us is more complex than we could possibly comprehend. We cannot know how and when we will die. However, that does not stop us from imagining our own death. What we imagine is in some sense fundamentally different from what is actually true. The things that people fear, things like shark attacks, plane crashes, and being killed in violent crime are statistically less likely than drowning in a bathtub, getting hit by a car, or dying of sedentary lifestyle. Which is not to say that these things are entirely irrational. "Inadequate and confused ideas follow from the same necessity as adequate, or clear and distinct ideas" (EIIP36) For every imagined cause of death there is a cause, or series of causes, from shark week to the nightly news maxim of "if it bleeds it leads" that produces an entirely skewed sense of the real dangers. Even if we know the real truth, that a rip current is far more dangerous and likely than a shark attach, there is a limited efficacy of the true insofar as it is true (EIVP1). Our imagination of our demise is riddled with spectacular images of fears that knowledge of the real risks of living cannot efface.There is no wisdom of death in that sense. We cannot know when, where, or how we will die, and that void is filled with spectacular and inadequate images of our imagination. There is nothing profound about death, just a void of ignorance that our imagination fills. That is the epistemological argument for not thinking of death. There is also the affective one. Death is not just a bummer, but it is the complete and nullification of all of our powers to preserve and maintain ourselves. No matter what we do, and how we strive, by being clever, strong, popular, smart, etc., all those qualities and skills mean nothing in the face of death. As Sleater-Kinney put it, "we are equal in the face of what we are most afraid of." (although Hobbes might be a more timely reference). Death is the great equalizer. Death can only be a source of sadness, frustration, and impotence. Finally, there is Spinoza's suggestion, in his example of the healthy man and the judge, that whatever death, or a recognition of our finitude might drive us to do, eat healthy or condemning someone to death(?), we would be better served to do for different reasons, for reason itself. We should strive to increase joy not reduce sadness, increase health not avoid sickness, to increase reason not just decrease the imagination. This distinction culminates in the division between the free man and the slave. As Spinoza writes, "If these things are compared with those we have shown in this Part up to P18, concerning the powers of the affects, we shall easily see what the difference is between a man who is led only by an affect, or by opinion, and one who is led by reason. For the former, whether he will or not, does those things he is most ignorant of, whereas the latter complies with no one's wishes but his own, and does only those things he knows to be the most important in life, and therefore desires very greatly. Hence, I call the former a slave, but the latter, a free man." I would argue that the term "free man" only has a heuristic significance in Spinoza. It is a model that we strive for, an ideal, but one that can never be realized. We are always affected, always subject to the imagination. Spinoza's political writings effectively undermine this division between free and slave, between acting on one's own reasons and acting through others. We are never free of the affects, of the imagination, of our dependence on others.What does all of this mean for thinking of death? I have been thinking about this a lot since my mother passed last month. I was fortunate in that I spent her last days with her, and was able to say what I needed to say, even if I do not know if she could hear me. Her death has got me thinking of the other people (and one ten year old dog) in my life, whose deaths I imagine will happen before mine. Is it possible to live with that fear and uncertainty, to have an ethical relation to what we cannot know? I have no real answer to this question, but I will say at least I am more comfortable not thinking of my own death, and when it might arrive, than I am not thinking of the deaths of others. At the very least I feel that I have a responsibility to make their lives as joyful as possible. Or too put it differently, as much as we strive to overcome our own finitude, to become more active, more rational, more capable (and to some extent more eternal) we must at the same time recognize the insurmountable nature of finitude itself, and in others. I have spent a lot of the last few months in care facilities, and it has me coming back to a basic, and I would say Spinozist core, of my politics, we are finite creatures, loss, death, heartbreak, are unavoidable facts of our existence, politics, which is to say the organization of our social relations, should exist to alleviate that sad affects of our finitude as much as possible, to produce joy and understanding, not, exacerbate them. We should strive to make each other as free as possible, while recognizing that it is an impossibility. 

In loving memory of Debbie ArntzApril 6, 1945-December 21, 2024The two phrases you hear when you lose someone, at least in the US, are "Sorry for your loss" and "May their memory be a blessing." The two phrases are diametrically and not dialectically opposed. The first emphasizes absence, the living person that is gone, while the second emphasizes presence, the memories that remain. The first of these phrases are more common, more generic, while the second is more often heard from Jewish friends, at least in my experience, and is a translation of the Hebrew "zichrona livricha." The second has begun to be used more widely, either in act of cultural appropriation or cultural tribute.  I have always thought it to be the better of the two phrases.Now that my mother has passed I find myself wondering how do memories become blessings. Right now every memory seems to be more like a curse. I will see something that reminds me of my mom, and I will  break down in tears thinking of what I loss. I have been trying to think about those things of my mother that I would like to live on, that would continue, that should become blessings. My mother was a joyful and optimistic person. It is easy to dismiss this, during much of my adolescence my mother ran a day care center in Cleveland Heights. Sometimes her cheer and optimism just seemed to be an extension of that, she seemed permanently on in Romper Room mode, just like years of working with children had taught her to never swear, shouting "fudge" when someone cut her off in traffic. She hated it when people dismissed her for being optimistic and cheerful. Once a coworker called her a Pollyanna, and it made her mad enough to actually swear. I have gradually come to the conclusion that my mother's optimism was hard won, and a conscious struggle. I am not going to air too much of my extended family's dirty laundry here, but my mother came from a home in which spite and anger were more common than joy. Being joyful was a kind of victory, if not a battle over darkness in her past. In many ways this joyful outlook served my mother well. She was completely incapable of being caught up in the mediated spite and anger that engulfed much of her generation. It had its limits as well. My mother was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2008. She struggled with acceptance of this diagnosis even as the disease consumed more of her life, looking for a bright side that wasn't there. My mother was passionate about justice and fairness. My mother had a righteous anger that was something to see. I remember as a kid my mother storming into the police station in Shaker Heights to contest a parking ticket. Fun fact: Shaker Heights police station was bombed in 1970.  The station that replaced it was built more like a bunker than a suburban police headquarters, all bullet proof glass and reinforced doors. When my mother stormed in I was convinced that she would be dragged behind one of those reinforced doors and disappearing forever. I just did not think that one could yell at a cop and get away with it. My mother had a long history of standing up to wrongs, of writing letters to corporations or government offices that she felt had wronged her. These letters did not always amount to anything, but when my mother saw a wrong she had to say something. She hated U2 not for their music, but because she ended up with a album she did not want and couldn't figure out how to get rid of. Like I said, my mom did not swear much, but she cursed Bono's name many times for imposing his music on her every time she opened her iphone. This righteous anger was not only about her. She was just as concerned for others. One night a cancelled flight left her and a bunch of other people stranded in Newark airport overnight. As uncomfortable as this left her, what really made her angry was that a mother and her small children were left to spend the light in a cold airport as well. My mother not only spoke about helping others, she did it. When one of my high school friends had a falling out with his parents, and was kicked out of his house, it was my mother who gave him a place to stay, making the basement into a room for him until he could get back on his feet. This was the sort of thing that she talked about doing, but I was almost surprised when she did it. My mother was part of a community. All of my mother's careers from art teacher and daycare director to advocate for housing for the elderly were aimed at serving the community. This idea of community did not just define her professional life but her personal life as well. My mother volunteered a lot, wherever she saw a need. Often this meant writing and editing various newsletters for organizations including the retirement community where she lived for the last thirteen years of her life. Writing and editing the newsletter is a thankless job; people notice the mistakes, you get the bocce league playoff schedule wrong or forget to include details from someone's memorial section, but almost no one credits you when it comes out on time. The community newsletter was delivered by another man in the community, Keith. Keith delivered newsletters whenever he felt like it, and was unreliable by nature. My mother was the public face of the newsletter so all complaints were aimed at her. Keith and my mother did not get along. There is more to this story and some of it involves the spite and anger from my mother's own family, but I am not going into that. Suffice to say there was a lot of bad blood between the two. Then Keith died. My mother did what she always did when someone in the community died, talked to their friends and family and wrote a memorial page. She did this for Keith, no mention of their conflicts, of the fact that he was a dick to her, it was a glowing tribute. I was visiting when the issue of the newsletter came out. Someone related to Keith, I forget who, came up to my mom with a stunned look on her face, thanking my mother for writing such a beautiful tribute for Keith. My mother then turned to me and said, "Why was she so surprised? Did she expect me to write something nasty to get revenge?" I said, "Yes, because they would have." My mother just said, "I couldn't." She couldn't. She had to do the caring thing, the fair thing, because that is who she was.Of course, I am my mother's son, and I am biased, to use the parlance of our times. I saw the best in her just as see saw the best in me. However, I don't think that all of what I wrote here stem from the partial nature of my perspective. Which is why I will end with one last anecdote. In 2019 my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Treatment would involve surgery and six months of extensive chemotherapy involving daily trips to a hospital. When word of this spread to community a group of people stepped up to volunteer to drive her to appointments, to help with household tasks. In early 2020 my mother was declared cancer free. She held a party to thank everyone who helped her. The photo above is the picture from the party, and it is as good of a memorial as any, a testament to a person who brought joy, fairness, and  a sense of community to everything she did. My mother had other positive qualities she was creative, funny, and generous, and of course she had negative ones as well, she was a human being after all. These are the memories that I am trying to make into blessings. One of the last things I said to my mom, when I visited her during those last few days of her life was "anything about me that is kind or caring I learned from you, thank you for all that you taught me." This is my attempt to put some of those lessons into words. 

 The one two punch of Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink are probably peak Coen brothers for me. They have other films that are considered classics (No Country for Old Men, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, etc.), but they are two films that typify everything that comes to mind when one thinks of the Coen Brothers, the obsessions with classic Hollywood films and the culture that produced them; the attention to dialogue that turns every line into both an archive and a poem; and a dark sense of humor. A few years ago, thanks to the Maine International Film Festival I got to see the film with Gabriel Byrne speaking afterwards. One of my best movie going experiences.I watched the film again recently. It stirred up a few ideas I had about writing something about the movie that have been lingering around for some time. Those ideas begin at the end, from the image that closes the movie. Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) the éminence gris of the film's local Irish mafia, "the man behind the man," to use the parlance of the film, stands alone in the woods. The problems that opened the film, how is Leo O'Bannon, the head of the Irish mafia and ruling town boss, going to deal with his rival for power, the head of the Italian mafia, Johnny Caspar (John Polito), and contend with the fact that Bernie Berbaum /(John Turturro), a grifter and loose canon, is the brother of his romantic interest, Verna (Marcia Gay Harden). All these problems are solved, Caspar and Bernie are both dead, and no one can trace that back to Leo who is now able to marry Verna. Everything has been put back into place except for Tom. He stands alone. He neither gets the girl, he is also seeing Verna, nor his place next to the throne. He only pays off his gambling debts,  a temporary victory. He has planned for everything except for himself. This final scene always seemed like one of the best adaptations of Dashiel Hammett's Red Harvest's premise of one man standing between two rival gangs, pitting them against each other, and a statement on the gap that separates knowing from being. Tom has seen all of the angles, orchestrated a plan in which everything falls back into place except for him. He occupies a kind of Archimedian point, outside of everything, thrown out of Leo's gang, separated from the woman he seems to love, and alone. It is because he is outside, not attached to anything, that he can see everything, see all of the connections the lust, the greed, and the fear that connects everyone, but it is also because he is outside, not attached to anyone, that he is alone. You can see the situation or you can be in the situation, but you cannot do both. Watching it again I had a different thought, one strung between three bits of dialogue that occur, and even repeat over the course of the film. In the opening scene Tom says to Leo that it helps to have a reason for an action, pitting him as the thinking man against Leo who operates by his feelings, his love of Vera and his pride at being the ruler of the more powerful gang. Tom presents Leo with calculation as the degree zero of thought. Tom Reagan: Think about what protecting Bernie gets us. Think about what offending Caspar loses us.Leo O'Bannon: Oh, come on, Tommy. You know I don't like to think.Tom Reagan: Yeah. Well, think about whether you should start.In the closing scene (in the clip above) when congratulated by Leo on his elaborate plan, of thinking it all through, Tom contradicts this idea of being governed by reason, stating that he does not always know why he does things. These two statements form a contradiction of sorts; one that is resolved by a third line of dialogue, repeated by Tom several times throughout the film, "Nobody knows anybody. Not that well." Tom says this primarily about others, nobody knows what another person is capable of, anyone could kill or lie if it came to that. It also could be turned back on ourselves. We do not know what we are capable of, or why we do what we do--we do not even know ourselves that well. There are then two different ways of looking at the end of Miller's Crossing. In one version Tom is the Archimedian architect of a master plan, one that sees all of the angles and all the connections. Tom knew that Caspar would recruit him once he and Leo fell out over Verna, that Caspar would have him kill Bernie as a test of loyalty, that Bernie would try to double cross Tom, and so on. In the second version any such master plan is only a retroactive illusion. Tom is just trying to stay alive, driven by this striving, this desire to survive, combined with some revenge, some lust, and perhaps a desire for drink, he is just taking each moment as it comes. These momentary decisions only look like a master plan when everything is done. I would say that the film supports both readings, that of the master plan and that of the spur of the moment striving for survival. If one was looking for a philosophical reference to distinguish the two versions, a modern one, then it is possible to say that the first reading is cartesian. Descartes had a fondness for Archimedes and constructed his own cogito, his own subjectivity, for lack of a better word, on that of a point of thought separated from its body, from its relations, and from the world. This metaphysics has as its unstated condition of possibility that of the emerging urban space which detaches individuals from any kind of familial or local belonging while simultaneously related them as isolated atoms. As Descartes writes…[T]his desire made me resolve to take leave of all those places where I could have acquaintances, and to retire here, in a country where the long duration of the war has established such well-ordered discipline…and where among the crowds of a great and very busy people and more concerned with their own affairs than curious about the affairs of others, I have been able to live as solitary and as retired a life as I could in the remotest deserts—but without lacking any of the amenities that are to be found in the most populous cities."One can see echoes of this ideal down through the ages right down to the lone hero of film noir. In this view connections and attachments can only muddle seeing the angles and connections. In this view subjectivity is transparent to itself so long as it does not connect itself to others. The second perspective, the one in which no one really knows what one does, can be supported by Spinoza. From the Spinoza that posits an opacity at the heart of subjectivity. As Spinoza writes,"So the infant believes that he freely wants the milk; the angry boy that he wants vengeance; and the timid, flight. Again, the drunk believes it is from a free decision of the mind that he says those things which afterward, when sober, he wishes he had not said...Because this prejudice is innate in all men, they are not easily freed from it."And "From all this, then, it is clear that we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it."  In this view, which has been supported by some studies of affect and thought, what we call our reasons are nothing more than retroactive justifications of our striving, our desires. We are only the fly in the coach, believing ourselves to be in control of that which exceeds our intentions. Of course it is hard to see from the outside which of these are true. The film's ambiguity is the ambiguity of subjectivity itself. Do we construct our plans in advance, comprehending the world from outside of attachments, passions, and desires? Or do we act first, struggle to survive, only coming up with reasons after the fact. Perhaps it is as Tom says, "Nobody knows anybody. Not that well."

Every election generates its questions. Generally these questions are an attempt to answer the question, what happened? The way this question is asked and then answered is often not very helpful. The pundit class have a predilection for framing electoral results as symbols in a broad search for meaning. Such explanations tend towards expressive causality as the entire election expresses a historical moment, and the soul of a nation. Thus we are told that Obama's election was the beginning of a new post-racial America, that Harris' lost is the end of identity politics, and that we are all in Trumpland now. A difference of a few million votes in a few different key states is translated into the expression of a new zeitgeist. Such expressive explanations are generally not very useful, especially when we are talking about voting which is actually the actions of millions of different people across different classes states, classes, races, and so on. If anything is overdetermined (and I would argue that everything is, but that is a different, and more speculative point), then elections definitely are overdetermined. My response to all of the various answers to why Trump beat Harris, everything from Harris' failure to distance herself from Biden's support for genocide in Gaza to Trump's appeal to racism and misogyny is to say "yes" to all of them. They are all factors, and all played a role in different degrees and different places. The question of what happened is one question, and it drives a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking from the pundit class, but a far more pertinent question is what happens next. What will Trump's second term look like. This is especially pressing since Trump does not know or care about the norms and limits that have restricted past presidents, and despite the fact that he is open about this, and about the what he plans, there does seem to be a gap between what he says he will do and what its effects are. To put it bluntly, and risk returning to the overdetermined questions above, it is hard to imagine that the voters citing economic concerns such as inflation as one of their reasons for voting for Trump willingly and knowingly signed up for the economic chaos that tariffs and mass deportations will almost certainly involve. Cheap labor overseas and cheap labor at home are the twin pillars of our imperial mode of living (to use Kohei Saito's phrase) and it is hard to imagine people motivated by inflation and, to use the cliche, cheaper eggs voting for an increase in the cost of consumer goods and a disruption to the cheap labor that is fundamental to agricultural production. This does not stop Trump and company from presenting both of these plans according to an economic logic of self interest. During the vice president debate J.D. Vance argued that mass deportations would bring down the cost of housing as if it was undocumented workers and not private equity firms that were buying up single family homes. (As an aside I would say that when mass deportation is presented as a solution to a economic problem like the cost of living it would seem to be difficult to maintain the idea that there are "legitimate economic concerns" underlying Trump's appeal.) I imagine that one could present tariffs as an attempt to restore American industrial production to its past glory, to replace foreign made iphones and televisions with those made in the USA. Restoring the nation, the jobs, and the families of the fifties. make America great again is Fordism plus the internet. Which sounds feasible until one is aware of how long it would take to build up such productive capacity in a nation that has spent decades outsourcing it. One could selectively and cruelly present both of these proposals according to an economic logic of individual self-interest arguing they will create jobs. That does not change the fact that mass deportation will probably have its most immediate economic effects in the cost of food not rent and tariffs will drive up the cost of living well beyond the current rate of inflation. One can take some reassurance that even as the rest of the checks and balances of American society, from the media to the judicial, collapse, that economic self-interest will prove to be the ultimate check to a such a nativist and nationalist project of isolation and ethnic cleansing. I tried to reassure myself that this would have to be the case. Such reassurances would have perhaps worked if I had not been reading Richard Seymour's Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization . One of Seymour's fundamental arguments is that if we are to make sense of the present we must think beyond self-interest, must imagine politics and even economics to be governed by different affects and different motivations than what is generally considered to be self-interest. As Seymour writes, "What is self-interest anyway? According to Albert O. Hirschmann, the concept of 'interest' first gained ground among liberal philosophers like Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith in the eighteenth century, as an alternative to the rival concept of the 'passions.' The purpose of this shift was to help neutralize the potentially disruptive passions of the masses, who were becoming political actors in their own right. The easiest way to do with was to arouse one set of passions against another; that is, against lust and ambition, one should incite greed and avarice. To make this seem less scandalous, they re-described avarice as 'self-interest." And self-interest, it was thought would incentivize people to behave prudently and in conformity with morality and law. This is how liberal philosophers thought people ought to be governed, not how people really behaved. But, taken seriously, the concept of 'interest' could never be reduced to greed or avarice. To have an interest in anything is to find one's attention and desire riveted to it, as we might be absorbed by a distant war, or the fate of an endangered species despite its having no bearings on our income. We are passionate animals. Passion, as Karl Marx wrote, is our 'essential force.' To understand what's happening today, we must return to the passions."Along these lines Seymour argues we must expand both our sense of the economy and politics. The economy has to be expanded beyond utility maximizing calculation to include the experiences and realities of class and work. As Seymour writes with respect to the latter:"Work, for most of humanity, means working for others, in conditions one doesn't choose, in which precarity of rights and survival leaves one exposed to coercion and humiliation. Nor has all this effort ever been extracted from all employees on equal terms. Employees need not depend on de jure segregation as they once did, but they prefer a segregated labour market in which certain groups of workers (women, migrants, ethnic minorities) 'naturally' come cheap and flexible. The rewards of all this productivity are prodigious, but of course, the biggest rewards accrue to owners and managers of capital. Shorn of all euphemism, work is exploitation. "I completely agree with the centrality attached to work, and have even written recently about the role the racial division of labor played in the recent US presidential campaign. For Seymour thinking about economics means thinking about class and not interest, thinking of how economic relations are lived as experiences of domination and precarity, and how these experiences fuel desires not so much for individual advantage but collective ressentiment. Seymour's survey of the different forms of Disaster Nationalism from the US to India and Israel show to what leaders have offered people not so much an improvement of their interests but targets for their passions, providing constant enemies for hatred, mockery, and revenge. Disaster Nationalism is as much of a mutation of the online entertainment apparatus, a transformation of the spectacle into a constant game of hatred and revenge. It is a dark prospect, and Seymour's chapters on India under Modi and the Philippines under Duterte offer a horrifying vision of a future in which authoritarian takeovers of state power are fueled by a spectacle of cruelty in the streets. To frame this as an answer the perennial question, why do people fight for their servitude as if it was salvation? The answer is that servitude can be fun so long as others have it worse and you get to participate in their subjection (or at least get to watch).I keep coming back to two questions after reading this book. The first, and most immediate, one is what will happen when the proposed hardship of Trump's disaster of nationalism comes to the US. Will people gladly tighten their belts in the name of making America great again? Or, to be more honest, will people accept the decline of real wages so long as the wages of whiteness are restored? Will some people put up with suffering so long as they know others are suffering more? Or will interest reign as people demand the pleasures of cheap consumer goods over the pleasures of spectacles of suffering and revenge? It is hard to say which will come to pass, or, more to the point, the answer is probably both in different populations and varying degrees. The future offers us contradictions and tensions: everything is overdetermined after all. This brings me to the second, larger question, we know what a politics of interest looks like, we have lived under it for all of our lives. As we see its failures, and see a revived nationalist right expand to include the passions of suffering and ressentiment as part of its politics, we can ask the question as towhat does an affective politics of liberation look like? What are the joys that we can create? What does a revolutionary politics look like that takes seriously the passions as well as the interests? 

Machiavelli argued that a prince must appear to be of the people, must seem to have the same values and morals that they do. For him, writing in the sixteenth century, the most important way to appear to be of the people was to be religious. Christianity as set of ideals is certain doom for any ruler, but a necessary appearance for every ruler. As Louis Althusser sums up this general demand. "The prince must take the reality of popular ideology into account, and inscribe therein his own representation, which is the public face of the state."Althusser's general formulation makes it possible to ask the question what is the popular ideology that a contemporary ruler must take into account. Of course religion has not totally disappeared, at least in the USA, there has been a president who did not attend church or, at the very least, sell overpriced vanity bibles. I would argue that the centrality of religion has fade in the face of capitalism, our new religion of daily life. More specifically I would argue that every would be prince need to situate themselves in relation to the primary activities of capitalist society, selling labor power, or working, and purchasing commodities, or shopping. This is why every presidential election season must entail its spectacle of candidates donning hard hats and jeans and visiting various worksites a long with state fairs and dinners. They must show their familiarity with both the world of commodities, and that particular commodity called labour power that people sell in order to live.  There are famous stories, most apocryphal, of candidates failing to put on a convincing performance in front of the machines and customs of working life, such as George H.W. Bush's supposed surprise at a supermarket scanner and Hilary Clinton's shock at seeking an apartment in Harlem. As Machiavelli would remind us, when it comes to politics appearance is reality. If one looks out of touch with working or shopping one is out of touch with the economic concerns of most Americans. Photo-ops around work and consumption must be cultivated with the cunning of a fox. The risk of failure is greater than the potential of success.Last week Donald Trump staged an odd variation on this ritual of American politics. Trump spent a few hours cosplaying working at a McDonalds that was only open to donors and supporters. All of this has to do in part with trolling Kamala Harris for saying that she once worked at McDonalds, a claim that Trump has repeatedly called into question. I have not followed the whole story, but it appears that Harris mentions the job even though she did not list it on her resume. If I am right about this, then it seems like this in an instance of the meme "tell me you never had a minimum wage job without telling me that you never had a minimum wage job." Taking old jobs crappy jobs off of your resume as one, hopefully, gets better and better jobs is almost a right of passage in the modern labor process. Almost everyone has a job that they would like to forget, and skills they would never want to use again. I worked as a bus boy and barista for years in high school and college and I am not sure if it makes any sense to tell a university that I can load a dishwasher quickly or make a passable cappuccino. I still have the apron from my first job. Trump's particular ploy has multiple levels. In part it is an attempt to continue to use fast food as an an image of Trump's own particular status of a man of the people. It is the corollary of his famous image in front of the stacks and stacks of Big-Macs.  Trump has shown himself to be quite at home in the world of fast food. It is the catholic church for this modern Prince. It is what makes him a "blue collar billionaire," to use a line I recently read but couldn't believe. That such a line is even utterable as anything more than an oxymoron shows to what extent class is increasingly defined as primarily as an aesthetic rather than an economic position. The most valuable symbolic capital is to be worker, to have the tastes, culture, and appearance of an imagined idea of the worker, which is to say male, white, and blue collar. Which brings us to the second aspect. By this rationale Harris, as a black woman, could never have worked a real job. To the extent that she has held jobs at all must be due to DEI or, more crudely, some kind of exchange of sexual favors for work. These points that Trump returns to again and again in his rallies are not just him being cruel, they are fundamental to his worldview in which white men work, black and brown people take their jobs through DEI or by evading ICE, and women...women exist for sex (reproductive or otherwise). I have written before on this blog about the idea that racial capitalism must in part be understood as the intersection of the hierarchies of racism and the hierarchies of work. This can be seen in the exclusion of Harris from real work, real work is white and male, but it can also be seen in another aspect of Trump's campaign, his warning that immigrants are coming for "black jobs." Two things can be said about this: first, such claims are an attempt for Trump to expand his base, to expand beyond white men, and he can only do this by expanding the logic of his appeal, by expanding negative solidarity. Or, more to the point, to expand the kind of affective composition of anger and ressentiment that negative solidarity depends on, the sense that one has been wronged and the people who have wronged them are to be found, at least in part, among those who are beneath them in a social hierarchy. Trump is inviting everyone, black people and even hispanics, to hate immigrants, to feel that immigrants are eroding whatever small gains they have made in society. Such claims about "black jobs" cut both ways, as much as they include, or attempt to include black people in hatred and fear of immigration, they do so in a way which racializes and naturalizes existing hierarchies of labor. The image it invokes, but never directly names, is that jobs in things like fast food, as well as service jobs in general, are in some sense "black." They are the jobs that we see black people doing, and because of that, they are the jobs that we think black people should do. As much as Trump is trying to expand his base he is also appealing to his true base, racists, by invoking an ideal of a hierarchy of jobs from manual labor to mental labor, from fry cook to CEO, that matches with, and overlaps with a racial and gendered hierarchy of white and black men and women. Can you get a gold medal in trolling?As I have written about briefly here, and at length in my book The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work, the dual nature of the labor process that Marx described, as both abstract and concrete labor can be understood to correspond to two different images of humanity and society. The first, abstract labor gives us an image of humanity in the abstract, of human beings as all bearers of labor power, equal and interchangeable. The second, concrete labor, gives us an image of humanity divided into specific jobs, different tasks, each situated hierarchically. While the first is modern, coming into existence with capitalism which produced the worker as an abstract subjectivity, the second is ancient, and has been around since Plato dreamed of a society with a place for everyone and everyone in their place.  Both coexist in the contemporary labor process, in contemporary society, but in such a way that the hierarchy of different jobs is no longer found in different natures, with their corresponding metals, but in the racial and gender division of society. There are supposedly "black jobs" and "white jobs" just as there is women's work and men's work. Capitalism continues and deepens the existing hierarchies of society.One of the things that has drawn my interest in work, and the politics of work, is, to paraphrase Hegel, because the worker is the antechamber of the citizen. It is in work that we get our images and ideas of humanity, of how it is possible for us to cooperate and act. It is also in work that we get our frustrations and fears. Trump's vision of politics is one in which the frustrations and fears work to reinforce the divisions and hierarchies of the existing labor process. The opposite of this would be a politics of positive solidarity, one that takes as its starting point that we are all, white, black, immigrant, men, and women, waged and unwaged, workers. All exploited. Unfortunately, that position is not on the ballot, and will never fit into any ballot box. It is a revolutionary politics.

A collection of posts from this blog will be published as a book soon from Mayfly books. I am posting the introduction as well as the table of contents below.  
"…no philosopher has held any interest for me as long as I
was aware only of hid ideas, and not of his practice."
– Etienne Balibar There is too much to read. Too many hot takes, blogposts, etc. The
last twenty plus years have completely transformed the attention
economy of writing. The digitalization of text, combined with the
dissemination of social media has led to a proliferation of texts and
takes. Every moment from politics to popular culture generates more
tweets, blogposts, and comments than anyone can read. There is a
fundamental transformation of the attention economy in which it
seems that there are more writers than readers. How can any justify contributing to such a deluge. Does the world
really need more takes on Snowpiercer, Breaking Bad, and Trump?
Why write such things, and we reprint them here and now. In short,
why blog?I started the blog Unemployed Negativity in the summer of 2006.
I was in JFK airport waiting for an overdue connecting flight to
Portland, Maine. I started it during a brief swell in philosophical
blogging. I won't list all of the blogs here, and someone should write
the history of that period, but for a while it seemed like a new blog
was forming every month, and most were being updated repeatedly.

Most of those blogs are no longer updated, lingering on now as
digital time capsules of a moment that has passed. The activity has
shifted to other spaces, podcasts and substacks. I have kept at it for
eighteen years now, a fact that might attest to the persistence of habit
more than anything else. It is an important practice for me. I can only think of my continued engagement with the blog as a
particular kind of practice of philosophy. I take this term from Louis
Althusser and his students, Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar.
While there are multiple different definitions and debates about
the term and what it means, the fundamental underlying it is that
philosophy is a kind of activity. It is something that one does, an
activity, rather something that one is, an identity. I have never really
liked the idea that one who studies philosophy is a philosopher,
someone who has a reservoir of knowledge and wisdom. One has to
do philosophy, and that activity has to be constantly enriched and
transformed by an engagement with the outside world. In other
words, one has to constantly think and write about the books one
reads, the films one sees, the latest news from politics, culture, and
society; not just to make sense of them, or to illustrate philosophical
concepts, but to put those concepts to the test. In other words,
philosophy needs material, without it philosophy risks becoming a
dead letter of cliches and stock phrases. It needs a matter to reflect
on if it is not to collapse in an endless reflection it itself. This is
perhaps always true, but it becomes increasingly so as philosophical
reflection comes to us as categorized and pre-digested by all of the
various introductions, guides, and articles; if we know the names of
different philosophers we know that Spinoza is a rationalist, Louis
Althusser a structuralist, Michel Foucault a postmodernist, all of
these labels save us the trouble of actually thinking. G.W.F. Hegel
outlined this problem two centuries ago: "The manner of study in ancient times differed from that of the
modern age in that the former was the proper and complete
formation of natural consciousness. Putting itself to a test at
every point of its existence, and philosophizing about everything
that it came across it made itself into a universality that was
active through and through. In modern times, however, the
individual finds the abstract form ready-made; the effort to
grasp and appropriate it is more the direct driving forth of
what is within and the truncated generation of the universal
than it is the emergence of the latter from the concrete variety
of existence. Hence the task nowadays consists not so much
in purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode
of apprehension, and making him into a substance that is
an object of thought and that thinks, but rather in just the
opposite, in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity so as
to give actuality to the universal, and impart to it spiritual life. " One way to free these thoughts, to remove them from their
reification in so many categories, is to put them into contact with
something that they could not anticipate: Snowpiercer and Althusser's
ideas on ideology and repression, Covid and Michel Foucault,
Spinoza and conspiracy theories. This is the first sense of what
could be called the materiality of philosophical practice: philosophy
needs matter in order to matter. This matter must in some ways be
alien or foreign to the philosophy at hand. It is precisely because
something does not fit into established categories and concepts that
it becomes something worth thinking about. At the same time, in
order for thinking to have any effect, any transformative relation to
not only the world, but any effect on itself it must be materialized,
it must be written. Writing is always a transformation of thought,
even if the written text never finds an audience beyond the person
who wrote it. As anyone who has reread even their journal, or
tried to revise something months later, can attest to, the person
who reads their own writing is not the same person who wrote
it. The text, the words, stay the same, fixed in their meaning, but
the thought that created it vacillates and change; or maybe our
thinking stays the same, fixed on the same point, but it is the text
that seems to vacillate, meaning something else. To write is always
to transform what one thinks, fixing the flux of impressions and
ideas into words and sentences, and in doing so one transforms
oneself. This is the second sense of materiality. The materiality of
the letter, of the text, undermines and calls into question the ideality
of identity. The difference that one encounters in reading their own
writing is nothing compared to being confronted by someone else's
interpretation or reading. People read what was never intended, but
these interpretations have an uncanny identity, they are both familiar
and unrecognizable.  These two senses of materiality, the matter considered and the
materiality of the text, create difference, or two differences, the
difference between the concept and its situation and a difference
between the text and its interpretation. Writing is not a pure play
of difference. There is, even on a blog, an attempt to connect and
reconnect the observations and ideas into something that could
be called a position, or point of view, I hesitate to use the word, "a
philosophy." As Balibar writes, "philosophy constantly endeavors
to untie and retie from inside the knot between conjuncture and
writing, or if you will, it works from within the element of writing
to untie the elements of conjuncture, but it also works under the
constraint of the conjuncture to retie the conditions of writing."
In blogging the emphasis is on the untying rather than tying, of
trying to see what happens when a concept confronts the cultural or
political elements of the conjuncture. This collection is an attempt to
see if it ties together.  A lot of blogging goes nowhere, become nothing more than a few
thoughts that never cohere into an essay or even an idea. It is in part
for this reason that I decided to call my blog unemployed negativity.
I remember reading about the phrase in some of the discussions
of Hegel's end of history brought about by Alexandre Kojéve's
influential seminar on the Phenomenology of Spirit. The idea was that
end of history, when the conflict and struggle for recognition that
had defined most of human existence had come to end, conflict,
negativity itself would be unemployed, without a use. It seemed
a fitting name for a blog. It seemed to be fitting for a bunch of
writings that were never conceived to be put to work. Not only were
they not planned to be books or articles, they were often in areas that
were outside of my official areas of expertise or training. They were
posts on television shows, movies, and comic books by someone who
did not study or teach on media or film. There was something of a
surplus, an excess to these writings. Writing outside the boundaries
of academic productive research and writing. Critical thinking,
negativity, working off of the clock; thinking does not stop just
because one is going to a movie or keeping up with current events.
I started this blog as someone who could not imagine publishing
on television or movies, leaving these thoughts unemployed, but I
should mention that since I started it some of these ideas have been
put to work. My book, The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on thePolitics of Work incorporates discussions of movies and television in
its argument about representations of work. Blogging transformed
the kind of writer that I am. I wrote often for my own self-clarification. It is worth noting how
utterly idiosyncratic some of the posts were, posts on the political
subtext of Planet of the Apes films, the economic structure of
dinosaur movies. Add to this a collection of philosophical references,
Marx, Spinoza, Deleuze, etc., and one has writing so idiosyncratic
to almost be unreadable. Part of the appeal of blogging is in the
absolute idiosyncratic nature of the writing. I wrote what I wanted.
Sometimes I wrote on a film that was being discussed and debated,
sometimes on some major issue like a Presidential election on an
ongoing pandemic, other times I wrote a review of a book that was
recently published in French and would never be translated into
English. Part of the unemployed nature of the negativity is that I
was not driven by revenue or clicks.

I did manage to find readers,
and even translators, as posts were translated into French, Spanish,
Portuguese, Turkish, and Farsi. This brings me to another thesis that
I have written about at length in my published, or employed writing,
and that is the concept of transindividuality. I do not plan to go into
it here except to say that one aspect of this idea is in rethinking the
very relation of the individual and community. It is not a matter
of engaging the community by suppressing individuality, by trying
to write in a neutral voice, but that idiosyncrasy and individuation
is not the opposite of some kind of community, some kind of
commonality, but its necessary condition.  One of the clichés of writing is that one always imagines an
audience. I am not sure if I ever did that, at least in any specific
sense. However, part of the impetus for blogging came from my own
experience as a graduate student and that shaped my idea of audience.
First, in graduate school I developed the habit of writing a lot, a lot
more than I would ever use in papers or classes. I was in a number of
reading groups, groups on Marx's Capital, on Althusser, on Deleuze,
and many more. In these groups we constantly read and wrote small
reports for each other, building collective knowledge. Many of my
blogposts are modeled on that line, reviews, small book reports to a
collective that does not exist, or would perhaps exist in and through
reading it. I was in graduate school before the age of blogs, but we
did have listservs. These listservs were sometimes the only place that
I could read about some of my interests that were outside of the
standard philosophy curriculum. I learned a lot about Autonomia and
Operaismo from the listserv called AUT-OP-Sy (which I believe stood
for Autonomia, Operaismo, and Syndicalism), even Deleuze and
Guattari were discussed more on blogs than in classes or books back
then—as hard as that is to believe. These listservs made it possible
for me to understand things that were not taught at my school or
discussed by my peers. Graduate reading groups and listservs were a
huge part of my education. They allowed me to engage with ideas and
perspectives outside of the expertise of the faculty at my university,
setting up lateral communications of knowledge that short-circuited
the hierarchies between advisor and student. Blogging was an attempt
to continue and maintain the kind of community, both face to face
and virtual, that I found in graduate school.

All of this sounds rather self-important for a bunch of pieces
written under the hold of insomnia, or while having a cup of coffee
in the morning, but I firmly believe that philosophy has accepted
the university as its natural environment at its peril. This has
excluded a great many people who want to continue to think and
reflect, but do not have access to classrooms or teachers, and more
importantly this natural environment has proven to be ultimately
quite hostile to thinking and reflection. Its focus is an accreditation
and jobs training, tasks that often stand in the way of the practice
of philosophy. Universities are cutting philosophy programs every
year. If philosophy, if thinking the intersection of conjunctures and
concepts, is going to continue to have a future, and I think it must,
it will have to find new spaces and methods of communication.
Blogging might not be all of that, but it is at least a start. Speaking of community, I would like to thank the editors of
Mayfly books for having the idea of publishing this book, and the
help of Emrah Ali Karakilic, Charles Barthold, and Jess Parker. I
also would like to thank the people who took it upon themselves to
translate some of these posts into French (David Buxton), Spanish
(Javier Sanz Paz and Jaime Ortega), and Italian (Gigi Roggerro).
They are all part of the community referred to above.
The table of contents are below: every piece has been edited and revised for publication.

Over the summer I posted a rant online (below after the jump), which was circulated enough that I was invited by my university to take the con position in the debate should students be encouraged to use AI in the classroom. This is what I wrote in response to that question. It is an an attempt to think about what is lost when we automate the acts of reading and writing. I am not really sure if what I wrote works, or if anyone will read it, I decided to share it here as well. My position is that so-called AI or Large Language Model (LLM) technologies such as ChatGPT should not be used for preparing writing assignments in college classes. There are multiple arguments that one could make against using such technologies. I am not going to address the ecological impact of AI, except to say in passing that it is substantial enough to lead companies like Google to completely reassess or scrap their objectives for lowering carbon emissions. I am also not going to address the ethical and legal issues brought up by the fact that all of these LLMs (and image generating software) are trained on published and copyrighted works. Those issues are best dealt by people who have expertise in that area. What I am going to address is what I know, and what I worry about, and that is what we lose when we automate or outsource reading and writing to technology. I am also not going to address the products of these technologies, the texts, images, and conversations that they can produce. I freely admit that they can be impressive as final products. My concern is not with the product, but with the process—with the process of reading and writing as part of education.I will start with a basic axiom of teaching: we read in order to learn how to write. This is a fairly simple and often repeated formulation. It has many different variations, it is invoked as a building block of basic literacy and it is often uttered in graduate creative writing seminars which stress that a good writer is by definition someone who is well read. It bears repeating for two reasons. First, this kind of symmetry between reception and creation, consuming and producing, is not necessarily found in other forms of communication and other types of media. While watching films is integral to any directors apprenticeship, and directors will tell you that you have to watch a lot of films in order to make a film—filmmakers watch movies just like writers read, the act of watching does not directly tell me how to recreate what I see. I could also listen to music and never be able to sort out the sounds of what I hear, never distinguish between the part played by which instrument. Watching movies and listening to music might develop my taste, and make me a better and more informed consumer, but they do not by themselves teach me how to produce, how to create. It is in reading that the raw materials of writing are immediately apparent and given. The written text lays its construction bare, making possible a lesson in writing through that no other media reproduces.Of course this only stands to raise the question, "why learn how to write?" Isn't writing just one technology among others when it comes to the retention and communication of thoughts. I could just as easily make an audio or visual recording of my ideas as something to share with others or even as notes to myself. The difference between these different ways of recording is how each relates to time. Videos and audios have their own time span, a film is ninety or a hundred and twenty minutes, a podcast an hour or more, and so on. That cannot change without distorting it. (I have heard stories of people playing podcasts at one and a half speed to take in more information, but who wants to get their news from what sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks?) When I read, however, the timing of the reading is more undetermined and less hardwired into the technology, if it does not sound too weird to call writing technology. I can read quickly, jumping from paragraph to paragraph, skimming for the most important ideas or facts, or I can read slowly, contemplating each word. This timing differs from individual to individual, what some find to be a page turner is for others an interminable slog. This is in part determined by our histories and literacies; what we read teaches us how to read. As Spinoza argued, when a farmer sees hoof prints in the mud he will think of planting but a soldier will think of war. The same sign, even a simple one like the mark of a horse, will mean different things to different people. Our reading is shaped by our experiences on and off the printed page, by what we have done and what we have read. This is true of genres, reading science fiction teaches you how to read science fiction and so on; it is also true of disciplines, sociology, philosophy, history, biology all have their vocabularies and ways of arguing. One of the most fascinating things about teaching, even teaching the same text year in and year out, is that in a classroom we are never on the same page even when we are on the same page. Discussing a text in a classroom is always the interplay of the common text and the singular histories that frame and shape how we make sense of it. It is fascinating to see the different things that people find and respond to in a text based on their lives, their education, and their experiences. How we read is not left entirely to us as individuals, some texts almost invite me to skim, and others demand to be read slowly to be understood at all. I can also skip ahead or reread and this happens seamlessly without fumbling with the controls that would make possible fast forwarding or rewinding, and I do this as I think. Reading has a unique relationship to the time of thinking. In some sense reading is thinking.If we look at writing we find a different relationship to time and thinking. Every text from a grocery list to a philosophical treatise is written in a particular moment, and meets the exigency of that moment. At the same time every text from a grocery list to a philosophical treatise because it is written can exceed its moment. Even an old grocery list becomes a strange item of curiosity when found in a coat packet years later, "why did I need so much corn starch?" and "why did I underline garlic?" We all know how the passage of time has changed or altered the reception of philosophical texts, what seemed progressive even revolutionary during the time it was written has become commonplace or even reactionary with the passage of time. Texts from past ages are constantly proclaimed to be "dated" or to "hold up," or, more often than not, to be a combination of the two. On a more individual level, when I write my own thoughts I am constantly caught in an interplay of identity and difference. I think I know what I think, but as soon as I put those thoughts on paper (or a screen) they seem to have a life of their own, they seem to say something else. Writing is a constant act of reading and rewriting in part because what I think and what I write are never quite identical. This becomes even more the case when I show my writing to someone else, someone who does not have the same thoughts, history, and context to make sense of what I wrote. I might be shocked or surprised to find that they read what I wrote differently than how I meant it. If reading can be understood as a process of the common becoming singular, as a shared text opens up different interpretations, then writing can be understood as an attempt to construct the common from the individual or the singular, to make what I think, see, or understand, something that can be shared with others. Communication is inseparable from the clarification and conception of what it means to think. As Eric Hayot argues, writing is not just a mode of expression of ideas that exist prior to their articulation, writing is thinking.We are facing what the philosopher Bernard Stiegler called a "proletarianization" of thought. Stiegler borrows this term proletarianization from Marx; whereas Marx stressed that proletarianization meant that workers faced increased insecurity and poverty, Stiegler focused on the way that proletarianization was a change in the relation to the knowledge integral to the production process. Workers are proletarianized when the skill and knowledge, the know-how, that was part of the working process becomes externalized in the machine. One could think of the example of the difference between driving nails with a hammer and with a nail gun, the former, as anyone who has hung pictures can attest, requires skill to hammer the nail at the right angle, while the latter matches the angle through the machine. The history of technology in work can be understood as a technology of proletarianization, of deskilling. The dream of the fast food industry is to have zero training time for new employees, to fill a kitchen with so many devices, automated burger flippers and timed fryers, so that anyone off the street could be put to work. Or to take another example, Uber has replaced cab drivers with their intimate knowledge of city streets and traffic patterns, with a GPS map that can make anyone who can drive a cab driver. Of course this does not just relate to working technology. The skills of daily life have also been proletarianized, microwave meals replace learning to cook and the same google maps that an Uber driver relies on makes it so I never really have to know how to get around the city I have lived in for years. I am old enough to remember when driving around Maine required a copy of The Maine Atlas and Gazatteer and the knowledge of how to read a map. The skills of daily life have become increasingly automated and mechanized. Not all of these seem like a loss, anyone who has banged their hand with a hammer enough might welcome a nail gun or some other device for hanging pictures, google maps are in some ways an easier way to navigate than reading a map while driving, and it is hard to overlook the convenience of the automatically generated suggestions when sending a text. There are not that many different ways to say "Running late: on my way' anyway. What concerns Stiegler is the way in which proletarianization has come to affect the skills that are integral to what it means to be a human being, to be able to think and make sense of the world. Reading and writing are such skills. They are integral to how we acquire knowledge about the world around us, of ourselves (think of the journal or diary), and how we situate ourselves in the world. Learning to read a map of Maine makes it possible to read other maps, relying on google maps only teaches you how to rely on google maps. What is called AI or LLM is the latest example of this proletarianization of thought. It is advertised to us as a new example of a nail gun, as something which will do the onerous work of summarizing, freeing us from the terror of the blank page. This is a new development in the proletarianization of thought because it does not divide between two different people, the engineer who designs the automated fryer and the workers who just have to respond to the bells and buttons, but between two different sides of the process of writing or reading. Samsung recently ran an ad in which a phone could not just record the brainstorming suggestions from a meeting, but summarize them as well. We have been told that the technology can take care of the boring work of coming up with a first draft or an initial summary and all we have to do is provide the pure inspiration and creativity that will make it an interesting final product. This overlooks the simple fact that the act of typing up the suggestions from a meeting might create new ideas itself. That inspiration and creativity sometimes emerges from repetition. Google recently ran an advertisement for the Gemini AI system in which a father used the software to write a letter that his young daughter could send to an Olympic athlete who inspired her. As Ted Chiang has argued, it is unclear what exactly is being sold here, the point of such a letter is not to be eloquent or well written, the point is that the child has written it. It is a singular expression. I would go further than Chiang here, however, and argue that what is lost when we automate something, even writing a fan letter, is learning how to even begin to articulate and know what is that we know or think in the first place. I have heard people say that LLMs like ChatGPT can do the work of jotting down some ideas, or summarizing the secondary readings, and then they can take it from there in order to create something interesting. This creates a division between a part of thinking that is rote, repetitive, and mechanical and a part of writing that is creative and intentional. This seems to me to be an utterly specious and false division. For me writing is much more akin to playing an instrument, or sport, or learning an art or martial art in which the most mechanical basics and drills are foundational and must be returned to again and again in order to get inspiration to do the interesting stuff. Personally, I get my best ideas when I am doing something like transferring my notes for class from handwritten pages to something typed up, or copying down passages into a slide for presentation, in doing exactly the kind of work that could be automated. Reading and writing are thinking. Can technology such as ChatGPT give us a better product? Perhaps. What it cannot do, however, is replace the process of reading and writing, and that process is education.

 At the end of a summer with at least a little time to read books not directly connected to teaching or writing I picked up Melinda Cooper's Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance and Stéphane Legrand's Ayn Rand: Femme Capital. The first I had been meaning to get to since it came out, and the second has lingered on my shelf for awhile. I was always curious what a French philosopher who has worked on Marx and Foucault would say about the very American (and anti-Marxist) phenomena of Ayn Rand.Reading both of them at the same time helped me think about a question that I have been thinking about and writing about for awhile. It is something that I sometimes refer to as "right workerism," the way in which work and the virtues of work appear less and less to be the terms of some contestation of capitalism than its strongest pillar of support. All of this leads to the inverted and bizarro world in which it is the right that positions itself as defending the worker, while the left is seen as synonymous with a parasitic dependent. This parasite is not identified with capitalists, but with everyone from "welfare queens" to "public workers." Those people who work in the public sphere are seen to be not truly workers, since their status, wages, and protections stem from unions and political organization, and, even more paradoxically, business owners, or capitalists, are seen to be the true workers, even the creators of work itself. As Etienne Balibar describes this situation, "The capitalist is defined as worker, as an 'entrepreneur'; the worker, as the bearer of a capacity, of a human capital."The second chapter of Cooper's book gives something of a genealogy of this reversal, by focusing on the particular role of the construction worker in articulating a representation of the working class. This genealogy has a few key moments. One of the first was the "hard hat riots" of 1970 in which a group of construction workers attacked student antiwar demonstrators. This visible moment of a vocal minority took place against a larger backdrop of a silenced majority, as Cooper argues, "polling data consistently showed that blue collar workers were more opposed to the war then the college-educated middle class--after all, their sons were more likely to be serving there." It was not just the war, Cooper situates the image of the conservative blue collar worker against the revolutionary challenges to not only wages, but the organization of work itself. "From the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, who refused to take orders from the ostensibly progressive United Auto Workers, to flight attendants, secretaries, and domestic workers, this was an era of unprecedented organizing on the part of those who had been relegated to the margins of the Fordist labor contract. Industrial unions were even beginning to form promising new alliances with the New Left Student movement, despite the inauspicious experience of the 1970s hard-hat riots." Cooper, like Chamayou, situates neoliberalism as a new form of governmentality against the interregnum of contestation and disorder. Integral to this new form of governmentality is the fragmentation of any solidarity, any unity of workers, as workers. This fragmentation took purchase in the existing divisions of society, divisions of race, gender, and nationality, but also in the instituted division of the working class. As Cooper argues public and private workers had both different demographic make ups, different levels of organizing, and different wage pressures. The basis for this division was institutionalized during the extension of labor protections in the middle of the twentieth century, but it was further driven asunder in the struggles over taxes and inflation. It is one particular worker, that of construction that stands as not just the symbol of a different worker politics, but a different idea of worker struggle. "It was in the construction sector, however, that the dividing lines between traditional employment and small business ownership were truly blurred. For much of the twentieth century it was common practice among specialized trades workers and journeymen to alternate between unionized employment on large construction sites and off-season work as sole traders on small residential projects. This resulted in an ambiguous class position very different from that of industrial wage worker. Labor historians note that "in large enterprises, the distinction between owner-manager and employee worker became ever clear as the rift between them widened. But for carpenters these distinctions remained blurred, for decades longer. Unlike an industrial worker, a carpenter often owned the tools of his trade. There was considerable fluidity between working as an employee and becoming the owner of a small construction business. In some ways, many construction workers were more like small businessmen than industrial laborers.""Ironically, it was this hybrid class status that had conferred on the building trades their unique bargaining power throughout much of the twentieth century. As holders of a specialized skill set who could readily withdraw their labor by setting up shop on their own, tradesmen were able to demand consistently better working conditions than industrial workers. This helps explain both their exemplary position within the midcentury union movement and their recurrent tendency to eschew solidarity with other workers. As unionized workers, building tradesmen had the power to extract wage concessions that other workers could only dream of, yet their part-time status as small owner-managers also created a sense of distance from the rest of the working class. Ultimately, the ambivalent class position of building trades workers would be used against them in particular, as it was in the construction sector that the instrument of legal misclassification would be wielded most ruthlessly as a tool of wage suppression."It is Reagan who in some sense played both sides against the middle, stressing the unique status of construction workers as aspiring small businesses in order to subject them to more exploitation. Many people know the story of Reagan firing the striking air traffic control workers, pitting public workers against private workers, but I did not known about his long history espousing the ideal of the independent contractor to further atomize the working class. There are some interesting passages in Cooper's book on Reagan's longstanding interest in the status of the independent contractor, stemming from his years in Hollywood. As Cooper writes, "In reaching out to blue-collar workers, Reagan addressed them first and foremost as taxpayers and made every effort to downplay their connections with other wage workers. With government spending now coded as inflationary and biased toward the "unproductive" public-sector employee. Reagan sought to persuade his audience that tax cuts, not direct spending, were the best way to restore the blue-collar wage." Reagan's rhetoric created both new commonalities between trade workers and small business owners, while exacerbating divisions between public and private workers. It also fundamentally changed the strategy of workers, moving them away from the collective strategy of organizing to an individual strategy of hustling. The ideal of the independent contractor promises individual freedom but what it offers is collective disenfranchisement, stripping the collectively gained protections of workers and cutting them off from their collective power. As Cooper writes, "There can be no doubt that Reagan's paeans to small-scale entrepreneurial freedom played to the real aspirations of blue-collar wage workers. Yet the more he insisted on the effective identity between the worker and the small business owner, the more elusive the transition became for those who started out as wage dependents. The long-term effect of the Republican war on labor was to multiply the number of workers toiling under the direct authority of small business owners and sharpen the class divide between them, making it increasingly difficult of the misclassified workers to assert their bargaining power qua wage workers, let alone accede to the position of owner manager."As with Reagan's welfare queen this is a myth that long outlasted his presidency. The idea that the true worker is an independent worker, and thus in some sense that the true worker is a capitalist enterprise  of one, has longstanding effects on our image and ideal of work. It posits a different strategy and a different subjectivity than worker solidarity, one predicated on not just self interest, but on pitting worker against worker. The struggle against taxes is also a struggle against those workers whose wages are paid by taxes. Yves Citton has described the period from the Reagan into the present as one of the attenuation of class struggle. Class struggle is still lived experienced, in increased worker hours, dwindling wages, and loss of job security, but class struggle ceases to be the way people represent or thematize either their condition, their insecurity, or their strategy, their struggle. We could say that a corollary of this way of thinking is that the attenuation of class struggle leads to a displacement of struggle. We get pseudo class struggles pitting private workers against public workers, tax payers against teachers and so on. It just so happens that I was reading Stéphane Legrand's Ayn Rand: Femme Capital at the same time as Cooper's book. I do not recall why or how I picked up this book. I was curious what Legrand, a philosopher that I know of primarily from his  work on Foucault and Marx, would have to say about Rand. Rand has always been weirdly fascinating to me even though I could never make it through any of her books, or, more to the point, she is fascinating to me because I could never make it through any of her books. It has always seemed strange that such a flatfooted propagandist elicited such cult like following. It just so happened that Legrand's book functioned as interesting complement to Cooper's. If Cooper showed the politics, the policy, that worked to produce the worker as human capital, as investor in themselves, Legrand shows how Rand made this seem sexy, made it seemed like a rebellion to some kind of dominant sense. Legrand's book is in part on the person Rand, part on her novels, and part on the people who have made her into a religion, up to and including Paul Ryan. As Legrand writes about the mediocrity referre above, "Ayn had this rare capacity, in her novels as in her life, to transfigure mediocrity into greatness, to operate a narrative transubstantiation which--as the ritual of the mass is supposed to change the most noxious swill into the blood of God--leads us to venerate as the paradigm of the great man a comedian of his own ideal, a ridiculous, capricious and narcissistic type who in the real world would be treated with a mixture of irritation and amusement." Despite Rand's absolute hostility to dialectical thinking, and her attempt to make tautology the center of her own philosophy and politics, A=A, the individual is self interest, one can see a strange dialectic in her thought in which what is culturally dominant, selfishness, is treated as rebellious, and the impersonal and abstract imperatives of capitalism are made into the pinnacle of humanity. Tautology is not entirely accurate as Legrand argues Rand's thought could be considered its own strategy of the "sive," after Spinoza's famous Deus sive Natura, God, that is nature. "If one prefers, Spinoza does not demonstrate that nature is divine--which would amount to adding a supplementary property to the idea of nature--he dissolves the concept of divinity into that of nature (in the philosophical scientific sense of the term, not the birds and the bees)--which in fact amounts to removing a whole series of properties which are traditionally attributed to it (personality, emotions, free will, transendence...). The concepts of morality and egoism (or capitalism) in Rand are in the same relation." The formulation of Rand's thought is "egoism that is morality." Such a definition strips morality of all that is generally meant by the term, such as an imperative or an ought, making it less an ideal than a justification. Oddly Spinoza might offer one way of thinking about what made Rand possible. Abstract ideals, even the ideal of rationality itself, need particular figures, particular representations in order to make them imaginable. This is what Rand did, created an image, a myth, to make capital, an impersonal system of domination, seem to be the expression of individual qualities. Here again we see a reversal of Spinoza's strategy, where Spinoza equated God and nature to de-anthropomorphize the former Rand equates capitalism to morality, egoism or capitalism is morality, to give the former flesh and blood, to make it a person. To cite Legrand again, "Where Chaplin in Modern Times fifty years earlier, utilized his iconic, charismatic, and recognized character to give body and visibility to the impersonal powers at work in the capitalist enterprise and society that crushes bodies and souls, make its inhumanity apparent, Rand does an absolutely inverse operation, personalizing and humanizing it..."There is much more that could be said about both of these books. What strikes me is the way in which policy and mythology, politics and poetics, appear as two sides of the same relation, necessarily supplementing and reinforcing each other. Could we have had Reagan without Rand or Rand without Reagan. The order and connection of ideology is the same as the order and connection of exploitation. Or, maybe this is just what happens when you read two books at the same time at the end of the summer. 

 Illustrated with a few pictures of enjoying the weatherAs many readers of this blog probably know, there is a new translation of Capital coming out this month. I am sure that this new translation will have a great deal of new revelations drawn from the work of considering the text in light of its multiple variations and Marx's notes.  However, it seems to me that the book that we are in need of reconsidering is not so much Capital but the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. For a long time, as long as I could remember, a strange consensus hovered above that text, it was assumed to be the writing of a humanist Marx, influenced by Feuerbach. Some celebrated this humanist Marx, and there is a long history of trying to make alienation, species being, and praxis the center of Marx's thought, while others bemoaned it, seeing it as too humanist, too idealist, and too essentialist for an understanding of capital. A consensus of meaning made possible a dissensus of value. This consensus has begun to unravel bit by bit, there is, as I mentioned above, Franck Fischbach's book on Spinoza and Marx, which reads the 1844 Manuscripts along with Spinoza's Ethics to produce a different early Marx, one that is not predicated on some human essence but on humanity as part of nature. Fischbach's book also points to why such a rereading of Marx might be necessary now. The Anthropocene has pushed the question of the relationship of capitalism to nature to the forefront of thinking about the critique of capitalism. Perhaps species being is all the more relevant in our consideration of our place as a species on the planet. Although this would be a different species being than the one that saw humanity as uniquely related to its its universality and activity. It would be a species being in which no species is a kingdom in a kingdom but each is necessarily interrelated. Frédéric Monferrand's book La nature du capital: Politique et ontologie chez le jeune Marx is a book completely dedicated to rethinking the meaning and value of the 1844 Manuscripts. Monferrand argues that the first step in reading of these manuscripts is breaking out from the shadow of the humanist debate, only then can one appreciate the relationship between humanity, nature, and society. As Monferrand writes, "The young-Marxist equation "humanism is = to naturalism" says nothing more or nothing less. It indicates that our manner of being human are Terrans, which are inextricably part of a nature which the are related to under forms that are more or less alienating." Monferrand's books is in some sense structured around the question as to how to read these fragmentary and early texts, texts which come to us as already read, and already burdened by the debates that have come before. What needs to be rediscovered is the novelty of these notebooks, which are a break with the basic questions and perspectives of political economy. They are, as Monferrand argues, a counter-investigation, one that upends political economy by insisting on both the questions it does not ask, the relationship between alienation and property, and by the experience it cannot recognize, of alienation. This combination of structure, private property and alienation as a social relation, and experience, alienation as a particular experience of work, defines in part Marx's novel approach. It is not a matter of focusing on structure or experience, but of understanding experience as structured and structures having their effects as they are experienced or lived. Alienation then does not refer back to some supposed essence, some human nature that is denied or repressed, but can itself be understood as a structure defined by inversion, dispossession, and submission. On this point Monferrand makes a distinction between an essential naturalism, one which posits some fixed idea of what it means to be human, and what he refers to as historical naturalism, in which humanity exists as an ensemble of forces, that is always changed and being transformed in different historical moments. "In this perspective, "alienated labor" is activity that cannot be accomplished by virtue of an internal impulsion, but by an external constraint, whether it is that exercised by the employer, that which the machine system objectifies in its functioning,  or that which embodies the very necessity of having to obtain a salary in order to survive. It is an activity which responds to no other need than the "need for money." Humanity, the human essence, is not given any particular priority here, and what Marx posits in the 1844 Manuscripts is a position in which nature, social relations, and human capacities are all understood to intersect and transform each other. Capitalism has to be understood as not a separation of nature, but as an organization of nature and human existence. As Monferrand puts it,"Marx comes to the position of conceiving of capitalism as a social totality, at the heart of which nature, human and non-human, is always more intensely put to work. Or, in order to think of an end or a possible escape from this alienation, it is necessary to envision another way of relating to nature inside of us and outside of us, which basically amounts to considering that capitalist alienation teaches us something essential about the social, namely that it consists of a changing and changeable process of collective appropriation of nature."Monferrand balances the limitations of the Manuscripts with their strengths. As he argues, the manuscripts do not offer anything like a historical understanding of capitalism, an account of its emergence. However, this lack of any historical understanding is made up for by an early concept of its existence as a system, or totality. This can be found in Marx's assertion that private property and alienated labor necessarily presuppose each other, are part of the same system. If capitalism can be understood as a totality, as an organization of nature, society, and humanity, it is one in which the primary organization of that system is one of separation, a separation of society from nature, from natural limits and needs and humanity from social relations. Monferrand ties together three of the most ambitious aspects of the 1844 Manuscripts, passages which suggest that a transformation of capital will entail a new relation to nature, a new social relation, and a new subjectivity. Such a vision can be found in two of the more provocative formulations of the Manuscripts."When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is instruction, propaganda, etc. But at the same time they acquire a new need - the need for society - and what appears as a means has become an end. This practical development can be most strikingly observed in the gatherings of French socialist workers. Smoking, eating and drinking, etc., are no longer means of creating links between people. Company, association, conversation, which in its turn has society as its goal, is enough for them. The brotherhood of man is not a hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their work-worn figures."In contrast to this capitalist society is an anti-society, in which social relations are neither the end nor the means of our different relations. In capitalist society sociality itself is a byproduct of the existence of profit. The more provocative statement from concerns not our relations with each other, but our own intimate relation with our own sense of the world, and the world around us. It is as follows:"Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when we use it. Although private property conceives all these immediate realizations of possession only as means o f life; and the life they serve is the life of private property, labour and capitalization.Therefore all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all these senses - the sense of having. So that it might give birth to its inner wealth, human nature had to be reduced to this absolute poverty."This statement seems on one level to be absurd. Of course an object is only ours when we have it. What other way of relating to the world is there other than that of private property? In capitalism, the objects we do not own, the commodities in shop windows, can only be objects of envy or desire. As much as equation of owning and having seems like basic common sense, it is one that obscures the way in which we constantly relate to objects that we do not possess. These are the so-called public goods, parks, beaches, and other elements of nature, but one could also add much of the social world that produces our joy and activity is not something that we own. We might own a house or an apartment in a desirable part of town, but everything that makes that part of the town desirable stems from the social relations, the people and activities that we do not possess. What shows up on balance sheets as externalities is most of what makes our life worth living. The various imperatives to "Keep [Blank] Weird" that one sees around Austin, both Portlands, and other desirable cities is often (a futile) attempt to sustain everything that makes the neighborhood cool (and does not make money).Monferrand's understanding of alienation comes closest to a Spinozist sense of the term, not just in Fischbach's sense of separation from objectivity, alienation as a collapse into pure subjectivity, but in a sense one finds in Sévérac. Sévérac argues that Spinoza's concept of passive joys define not a "seperation from one one is capable of" as Deleuze claims, but rather an apparatus of capture, to use a Deleuzian term, that connects our capacities to feel joy to a determinate object. Frédéric Lordon has connected passive joys to life under capitalism, connecting Spinoza's analysis of the affects to Marx's critique of capitalism. As Lordon argues capitalism can be understood as a fixation of not only desire but the basic and fundamental striving that defines our existence, assigning it an object, money, which as Spinoza writes "occupies the mind of the multitude more than anything else," and an activity, wage labor. Wage labor becomes the central activity, the only way to realize one's desires, obscuring other possibilities and other activities. Moreover, consumer society can be understood as the reign of passive joys, the things that we desire and purchase are entirely produced outside of us, and their meaning and significance is determined and dictated by advertising and the opinions of others. As Lordon writes, "Alienation is fixation: indigent enticements of the body, narrow confines of the things one can desire, a severely restricted repertoire of joys, obsessions and possessions that tie one's power to a single place and impede its expansion." As Marx writes, "The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history." That history culminates into an fixation and reduction of all the possible ways of experiencing the world to owning, to having, and the only possible way of acting in the world to labor.Monferrand finds in the broad range and often incomplete nature of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts a call for a revolutionary transformation that is not just a new organization of society, but a new relation to nature, and a new production of subjectivity.

 I once heard someone remark about Alien that during the Reagan era the capitalist hegemony against workers was so complete that the only way to represent the struggles of working class was to set to set it in space. Such a comment is not entirely accurate about the film, it came out in 1979 after all, but does say something about its place in popular culture. Alien introduced the space worker, worried about the bonus situation and struggle with a company that deemed him or her expendable.  The space worker has appeared again and again in film, in Outland, Moon, and The Expanse. The space worker has disappeared from the Alien films, subsequent sequels gave us space marines (Aliens), space pirates (Alien: Resurrection), scientists (Prometheus), and explorers (Alien: Covenant). Workers return in Alien: Romulus. Immediately, we see a difference in their condition. In Alien the crew were horrified to know that they were expendable. We we first meet Cain (Cailee Spaeny) in Romulus we learn that she is trying to work off her debt to the Weyland-Yutani corporation. Given all that we learn about space travel from the films, the extended period of cryogenic hibernation that is required to get people to mining colonies, this makes sense. Workers are not so much expendable as they are investments, investments that work off their own debt. This does not mean that there is any real investment in their wellbeing. The harsh confines of the mining colonies means that disease is rampant and spreads readily. Romulus is film in which COVID not only structured the working conditions, Hollywood productions being one of the few places that you see masks at work, but shaped the film itself. It is a dystopia in which abandonment by capital is coupled with increased exposure to disease. Cain learns that her contract has been extended in order to deal with the company's losses due to sickness and death. She is caught in an indefinite indentured servitude. The same is also true of her brother Andy (David Johnsson). He is an android or, as he prefers to be called, artificial person. He is technically Weyland Yutani property, but we learn that Cain's father found him broken and discarded and repaired him. He has been programmed with one directive, protect Cain, but his abandoned conditions has left him cognitively and physically compromised. He shows none of the physical or mental powers of past androids, and mostly tells dad jokes. Cain looks after him. In the first film the horror was being expendable, left to die in the face of the greater profits from capturing the xenomorph; in the latest the horror is in never being able to escape, to never quit one's job and never pay off one's debt.Cain and Andy are looking for a way off of their mining colony, for a life outside of corporate control. This question, how can one becoming something more than, or other than property of the company, is something that the audience is asking as well, even if they do not know it. We find ourselves to be indentured servants of franchises that are trying to squeeze more money out of their initial investments. Disney-20th Century Fox is our Weyland-Yutani. I will say that the film definitely has its moments. The abandoned Romulu/Remus space station makes for some great scares and there are some great "set-pieces" to use the parlance of our times, and Johnsson's Andy is very good. Where it all comes crashing down is in the film's use of callbacks. The most egregious, and reported on, is the recreation of Ian Holm to play the space station's science officer, and synthetic person, Rook.  A lot could be said about this, I found it unnecessary, and have to admit that I was absolutely loving the film until it showed up. It did not ruin the film for me, but it definitely brought it down a few stars if I was one to rate films based on stars. I don't do that, but I do think a lot, too much perhaps, of the way in which "the order and connection of cultural production is the same as the order and connection of material production." In other words, without the Spinoza joke, how the content of our popular culture duplicates and represents its form, its conditions as not just a commodity, but a commodity made to continue and perpetuate investment in the franchise or brand. Films are intellectual property in the sense that capital is property: the exist not to be used, enjoyed, but to create more revenue in the form of sequels, prequels, and spinoffs. In this case the connection is direct and immediate we have Cain and Andy who are trying to find a life outside of the servitude to Weyland-Yutani, and in their attempt to escape they are confronted with the visage of Ian Holm who is still captured, still owned, long after his death by Disney-20th Century Fox. In its own way this is a callback to Alien: Resurrection in which Ripley discovers that she is still owned by the company long after her death. There are multiple callbacks in this film. Holm's Rook delivers Ash's signature line, "I can't lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathies." In the first film that line was delivered to a crew that Ash had worked with even though he was a double agent. It made sense. Now it makes less diegetic sense and seems more like a reminder of the series we are watching. This is even more true of Andy's "Get away from her...you bitch!" which seems completely out of character for the soft spoken and gentle artificial person. In moments like that the franchise overpowers and subsumes the film and its pleasures. These moments of fan service are supposed to provide their own pleasures, pleasures based on recognition, but ultimately recognition is not as enjoyable as surprise.Reflecting on the film I reminded of something that Samuel Delany said in an interview. He was asked once by an editor at DC comics to come up with some worlds for them to use. His response was that the world exists in and through its narrative disclosure, and vice versa. As Delany writes, "You can see, certainly, he was working from the theatrical model. It's
hard to explain to someone in such a situation that what they're asking
for is virtually impossible—that the vividness of the world or setting in a
science fiction novel or story is as much a matter of where, for example,
in the course of the scene, you mention the details of its description, as it
is what those details are; or, indeed, to explain that the fact those details
are written with a minimum number of words—especially adjectives—is
a direct factor in how vividly the reader perceives the scene."As Delany argues (in a different interview), where SF differs from "literature" of the non-genre kind is in that it has something like a universe, and not just a plot. (Of course "literature" has a universe too, it is just assumed that the diegetic universe is identical to the present or past world we inhabit). As Delany writes, "Plot, story, diegesis, history, the solving of problems or the failure to
solve problems—the whole generation of fiction only begins when character and universe, subject and object, are conceived, seen, and set in a local tension. I choose to see in this device a manifestation of that particular antimodernist, paraliterarily narrated subject-that-doesn't-evenexist-without-objects SF has taught me look for, to find, to propagandize
for, even as I consign much in the device that strikes me today as too
executive, as too proscriptive, to the realm of the metaphorical or to the
historical givens among a tradition of writers who considered themselves
craftsmen first and artists secondarily, if at all."Delany's point is to insist on the world and universe even in literature that is supposedly about craft, to see objects even in writing that is primarily identified with subjectivity, with character, experience, etc. This point can be inverted, and we can insist on the way that universe comes to light only through character in science fiction. This seems to me to be very true when it comes to Alien, the first film. We do not know much about the world that the film takes place in, and what we learn comes to us as a surprise or twist in the story. What we know is that the crew of the Nostromo are workers, they are subject to the demands of their employer and worried about the bonus situation. That is the cognitive grasp that the later estrangements are structured around. The realization that Ash is an android comes as a shock in the first film. As a narrative the first film can be defined as a series of shocks--the face hugger scene, the chest burst, Ash's betrayal, the true corporate mission to capture the alien. They are part of a world, or, as we say now, a universe, one populated by aliens, androids, and corporations, but what makes them work, what makes them worthwhile, is their role in a narrative of workers against an employer who sees them as expendable. Franchises are driven by a drive to place brand above universe, and universe above story. Three of the big science fiction franchises of the eighties, Terminator, Predator, and Alien work because they are very simple stories. They do not build complex universes like you find in Star Trek, with different alien civilizations, or even huge casts of potential characters, as in the world of Marvel Comics. They function because of their narrative economy, all of which boils down to some variation of The Most Dangerous Game in which human beings find themselves hunted. Turning them into intellectual property comes up against the particular limits of this simple story, you can try to expand the story, make it into a universe, as in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant did to dismal results, or you can accept the limits and serialize it, make it all happen again, as in the case of Prey or even the underrated Predator 2. Alien: Romulus at its best does something of the latter, gives us new workers against Weyland-Yutani, workers struggling not against being expendable but against the debt they owe to a company. The film's debt to the intellectual property that it is being made into are paid in a series of callbacks. I will say this about Alien: Romulus is that usually these sorts of callbacks only serve to remind me that I should have just watched the original film. With Alien: Romulus I liked the film and wanted to enjoy it, but all the fan service got in the way. 

 Years ago I was teaching political philosophy and decided to do something interesting with social contract theory. I made the point that the post-apocalypse is our state of nature. Whereas the seventeenth century contemplated the nature of authority and law from the origins of society we confront the same problem from its collapse. In each case human beings outside of the state, whether prior to or post, became the basis for thinking about both human nature, and the nature of the state. I then showed a bunch of clips from The Road Warrior and other films, all of which illustrated the intersecting problem of social contract theory and post-apocalyptic films: how does one go from disorder to order, from violence to authority?This problem develops throughout the Mad Max films, starting with The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2). In that film the problem is one of contracts. It is the most Hobbesian of the films, not in that there is a war of all against all, gangs are the elementary unit of social life, but in that it struggles with the problem that "covenants without the sword are but words, and of no strength to secure men at all." Can Max make a deal with the denizens of the refinery, should they trust Max to keep his word in delivering "a vehicle that can haul that tanker," and should anyone trust Lord Humungus to keep his word? At each step along the way we deal with the fundamental problem of how is it possible to have a contract without a social contract, a deal without any authority to enforce it?
In contrast to this Thunderdome is a film not so much about contracts, but about a society held together by a law. While contracts are ad hoc, formed as the situation demands, and established between two parties, each wondering if they should trust the other, laws are eternal and universal. They apply to everyone, both ruler and ruled. Aunty Entity (Tina Turner) finds herself constrained by the law that she established, which is why she needs to secretly subvert it in making a secret contract with Max. One could make a point here about the sovereign deciding the exception (if one wanted to Agamben about it(, or about the way that an official order of law needs an official and secret rule of violence that both subverts it and makes it possible (Zizek's point). The law in its stark universality is both the thing that makes Bartertown possible, sustains it, and also threatens it, constraining the very rule it relies on. While Road Warrior is in some sense about the struggle to even form contracts in a world defined by violence, Thunderdome is about the attempt to turn that violence into the basis of a law, of an order (and the constraint of the law on rulers).   

As I wrote earlier, the progression from Thunderdome to Fury Road is the progression from a society founded on a law to a society founded on religion. If one wanted to be crudely Marxist about it, it is a matter of moving up the superstructure (and away from the base) from the practical matter of the legal order to the lofty abstractions of theology. It is one in which the law has gone from a civil order, founded on its universality, to a religious order,  founded on its transcendence. The progression from Bartertown to the Citadel is a progression in the development of political power, from the Repressive State Apparatus of laws and contracts to the Ideological State Apparatus of ideas and subjection. It is a progression in which the techniques of social reproduction are expanded and extended, as Spinoza writes, "the multitude has no ruler more powerful than superstition." At the level of post-apocalyptic social history Fury Road is then after Thunderdome. The first gives us a city establishing law in the face of violence and chaos, while the latter gives us a city that has expanded its superstructure beyond law to encompass religion, even culture. It is a religion that dictates not just belief in a afterlife but clothes, hair, tattoos, and even a symbolism of the teeth and chrome (my favorite touch) To cite Spinoza once again in a passage that could apply to Immortan Joe as much to Moses, "…he did not allow these men, habituated as they were to slavery, to perform any action at their own discretion…They could not even eat, dress, cut their hair, shave...or do anything whatsoever except in accordance with commands and instructions laid down by the law." The law no longer deals with infractions, but constitutes the very meaning of social and individual life.All of this is a preamble to my favorite scene in Furiosa. In the scene (in the clip below), Dementus and his federation of biker gangs arrives at the Citadel to challenge Immortan Joe. Dementus makes a speech positioning himself as a populist leader. He tells the people of the Citadel that he is not after them, but only in overthrowing their rulers. He promises them a better life, a better deal, all they have to do is cast down those that rule over and subjugate them. One gets the impression that he has made this offer before, and it seems like a safe bet to present oneself as a liberator. In a world of brutal warlords one imagines there is a lot of dissatisfaction and anger at those who rule the wasteland. Dementus understands Machiavelli's basic point that you can take power by aligning yourself either with the elites or the people. As Machiavelli argues, these two groups are at odds because the elites want to rule and the populace just want to not be oppressed. However, he does not understand what he is up against in confronting the Citadel, what kind of rule it is under. Immortan Joe is not just a worldly leader, but an ecclesiastic one, to use Machiavelli's distinction, one who governs not just bodies but souls. His "warboys" do not see themselves as ruled by Immortan Joe, as under his oppressive power; they want to be seen by him, witnessed, and this witnessing is the key to their dream of life eternal in Valhalla. Their lives are too short, half-lives, to be concerned with worldly rule, they long to ride eternal. They are the product of "a subjection deeper than themselves" to cite Foucault, or more to the point, Spinoza's, they fight for their servitude as if it was salvation. Dementus finds himself hopelessly outmatched. How can you offer people a better deal, more water and more food, if they do not live by bread alone. How do you threaten people with death if they already dream of "riding eternal" on the road to Valhalla? One cannot counter a myth with a contract, offer people more cabbages in this world when they dream of being shiny and chrome in the next world. To cite Spinoza again only an affect can displace another affect, only a dream can replace another dream. Dementus never makes this transformation, never moves beyond ruling bodies and bikes in this world to ruling over some heavenly road, where one rides eternal,  and it is in part his undoing. He remains in some sense a ruler at the level of the contract, of the negotiation. His gang is similar to Humungus', right down to a toady and a vehicle wired for sound. (I remember reading somewhere in an interview with George Miller that Humungus' gang was supposed to be a federation of different road gangs, hence the different aesthetics from mohawks to motorcycle cops. Dementus' gang is the same in this film). Dementus' power is sustained by his ability to offer his gang a better deal, a better contract than they would have without him. Dementus does learn one thing from his conflict with Immortan Joe, and that is true power hinges on being able to sacrifice rather than preserve one's subjects. This can be seen in another scene from the film, Dementus' seize of gastown. Dementus has the perfect ruse, a captured war rig that appears to be under assault. It is all a performance, with Dementus' men playing both war boys and (themselves) as a marauding gang. It is not convincing though, not fooling anyone. In order to sell it they need to kill each other. Dementus learns to be more brutal, but he still lacks what Joe has, and that is the ability to sell this brutality as salvation. True power is subjects that sacrifice themselves. 

I wrote earlier that the central question of Furiosa is "As the world falls around us, how to brave its cruelties? Those cruelties are not just the brutality of the wasteland, the scarcity of resources, but also a ruling class that paradoxically is all the more powerful in its ability to treat its subjects as disposable. It is hard not to see many allegories to the present here. One could think of Trump's famous line about being able to shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, (he also later joked to his own rally  in Vegas about how they were expendable). More broadly, is hard not to see the first scene of conflict between Dementus and Joe as that between a rational politician, offering people some improvement of their living conditions, health care or price controls on the cost of gasoline, and a post-liberal populist offering the people part of some grand vision of nation or god, a chance to ride eternal making America great again. Or one could think of Covid, which has gone from a ghoulish insistence that everyone sacrifice their lives to the economy to everyone yelling "witness me" as they rawdog a pandemic, foregoing vaccines and masks. Post-apocalyptic films are more than our states of nature, they might be the closest thing we have to help us make sense of the perversions of rule and authority we are subject to. 

 Anyone interested in the politics of affect or the connection of affect and politics has to confront the fact that affects are not just a way of making sense of politics, but are increasingly the way politics themselves are presented and talked about. This follows a general tendency to frame not just politics, but all of social life according to the pop affect theory of vibes. What is a vibe? There are no doubt many answers to this, but my own particular theory is that vibe comes the forefront in the age of social media because that is what we see or know of each other. Or, put differently, a society in which social media is dominant presents itself as an immense accumulation of vibes. When we encounter people through social media we do not learn the usual information that we would often learn when meeting someone. We do not usually ask those questions that would make a first conversation or first date, where are you from? Any siblings? etc. We do not learn facts about the people we interact with online, but we do learn a little about their tastes and interests through what they share and discuss. I would argue that what we primarily learn about people is not what they like or do, but how they relate to their tastes, interests, and activities. Do they obsessively post about the movies they like, do they post a picture of their dog everyday, do they complain about every inconvenience?  This way of relating to what they relate to could be called their vibe. If you want the footnotes I would point out that I am defining vibe in a way that is very close to what Spinoza calls ingenium, especially as this term has been defined by Jacques Louis Lontaine in his work on Spinoza. It would be hard to say when vibes became central to politics. Historians would probably point to the television age, and the debates between Kennedy and Nixon. Reagan also comes to mind as a president who defined himself primarily in terms of a vibe, a way of relating to the idea of something called America. Obama understood and presented himself as a vibe, as being the personification of Hope. It is also worth noting that Obama's post-presidential career has been primarily that of a vibe as well. His curated lists of albums and books exist primarily to perpetuate that vibe. Trump is a vibe.  Part of his appeal is that he offers an expression of the constant sense of anger and nostalgia that is the background of noise of daily life for some many Americans. The last few tumultuous weeks, ever since the assassination attempt on Trump's life, have been a strange vibe shift in American politics. I remember seeing someone post an image on social media of Trump with his fist in the air with a caption that stated that the election was already over. It felt that way, especially after the disastrous debate with Biden the previous month. Then a series of events took place, Biden dropped out, Harris was nominated, and Walz was selected as VP. The last month has been a reminder of Althusser's aleatory materialism, that inevitability is often a retroactive illusion. As Althusser argues, "Instead of thinking contingency as a modality of necessity, or an exception to it, we must think necessity as the becoming necessary of the encounter of contingencies." What appeared to be inevitable, even necessary, suddenly seemed contingent.This shift was primarily a shift in the affective composition of politics. A vibe shift, to use the parlance of our times. This can be most clearly seen in the use of the term "weird" by the Harris campaign, and Tim Walz, as a label for Trump and Vance. The term names not so much a position or policy, but a vibe, a way of relating to one's policies or goals. The term has taken off in part because of Vance.  As much as we can consider Trump to be the embodiment of anger and nostalgia he also has an ability to sell his positions by distancing himself from them. His constant uses of phrasing like "people are saying" and his joking/not joking delivery works for him. It tells his followers what they want to hear, but gives him plausible deniability especially for the major media outlets that go to great lengths to treat Trump as a normal political candidate. Vance, however, has no such ability, and as Gabriel Winant pointed out on twitter, his attempt to be both the thinking man's Trump and a populist, to give intellectual legitimacy to Trump's rage and nostalgia while being a man of the people, just does not work. It comes off as weird. (For a longer read I recommend Winant's long piece on Vance's class politics). The use of the term "weird" by the Harris campaign also marks a shift in the affective composition of the Democratic Party, who suddenly seem less like "temporarily embarrassed Republicans" (to paraphrase Steinbeck) than like people who are proud of their own position and values. (For more clarification on the temporarily embarrassed Republicans line, Adam Kotsko offers a good description of the way in which conservative positions are considered the default positions here) The vibes have shifted from whiny and apologetic to joyful and willing to fight. This affective shift has for the most part been disconnected from any real shift of priorities and policy. There has been a lot of discussion of Harris and Walz's affects, her joy and laughter and his dad jokes, but little about specific policy positions. As of today there is no policy section on their website. Vicky Osterweil has pointed out that there is a massive disconnect between the vibe of the Harris campaign, which is simultaneously hopeful and combative, which seems to represent a different affective orientation than Trump (or even Biden) and the reality of policy. As Osterweil writes,  "A divide has quickly emerged between them and people who have not been sucked up in the emotion, activists and radicals who are incredulous at the enthusiasm, trying desperately to remind these Walz-pilled posters that Democrats are currently behind the genocide in Gaza, that Kamala is in fact already in power. Comrades from Minnesota have pointed out that Walz, who was a national guardsman himself, was the one who sent in the National Guard to put down the George Floyd Uprising in Minneapolis, and that Walz, despite getting to the governor's mansion on a campaign focused on climate and ecological justice, crushed an indigenous led water-protector movement to push forward the Line 3 Fracking Pipeline. The aforementioned enthusiastic supporters are responding with some variation of "yeah, we know, but stop killing our vibe".These two groups are talking past one another. The memers are responding to a structure of feeling, an experience of hope and joy, an affect, one that I sometimes share. On multiple occasions I have been moved by seeing the nominees actually stand up to these creeps and call them what they are, by witty and dismissive press releases or in front of cheering crowds. It's a powerful image, it feels good, at least in the moments where the crowd isn't chanting "USA! USA! USA!" And many of the memes have been really fucking funny.The Cassandras, meanwhile, are speaking with hard-won-knowledge and wisdom from decades in the fight, and are trying to stop people from rushing into the same mistake made during Obama's campaign, or indeed Bernie Sanders' (or Corbyn's, or Syriza's, or Podemos' etc. etc.) They're trying to protect these erstwhile friends from throwing themselves behind a campaign that can only ever betray them. But because they're not acknowledging the power of the affect shift, perhaps because they genuinely don't share it, they are left sounding to the memers like they're arguing against feeling good itself."That is a long quote, but it is a great piece. It outlines what are think are the two inevitable conclusions of this moment. First, it would be foolish to disregard and disqualify the current vibe shift in politics. The emergent sense of political possibility, and the undermining of a particular affective hegemony, the one that presents the anger and ressentiment of Trump as the dominant structure of feeling, are themselves positive development. At the same time, however, it would be equally foolish to treat these vibe shifts as a substantial change in politics, especially since they are sometimes just different vibes for the same policies. The challenge is keeping both of these thoughts together, to maintain both the affective sense of possibility and change, while working for actual change. This would be another kind of parallelism, to cite Spinoza. 

 The pile that I am working throughI think that it is safe to say that Foucault never really got that interested in the revival of Spinoza that took off in France in the late sixties. As far as I can tell the only sustained reference to Spinoza appears in his lectures on the Will to Know, and there in that text, he considers Spinoza much in the same way that Nietzsche did, as someone who named the will to knowledge, but did not criticize or problematize it. As Foucault writes,"Undoubtedly, there is hardly a philosophy which has not invoked something like the will or desire to know ( connaître ), the love of truth, etcetera. But, in truth, very few philosophers—apart, perhaps, from Spinoza and Schopenhauer—have accorded it more than a marginal status; as if there was no need for philosophy to say first of all what the name that it bears actually refers to. As if placing at the head of its discourse this desire to know ( savoir ), which it repeats in its name, was enough to justify its own existence and show—at a stroke—that it is necessary and natural: All men by nature desire to know ... Who, then, is not a philosopher, and how could philosophy not be the most necessary thing in the world?"Deleuze argues that philosophers do not often see their proximity to other philosophers. It would then be wrong to let Foucault have the last word on this relation. Pierre Macherey has suggested that Spinoza could be seen as an unrecognized precursor to Foucault. His focus on the institutions of the ancient Hebrew state prefigured Foucault's own assertion that the "soul is the prison of the body." However, it is perhaps Deleuze who suggests a stronger connection through the concept of parallelism. I should make it clear that parallelism is not a good reading of Spinoza, it is a term that Spinoza does not use, and does not adequately represent the relations between ideas and things.  However, one of the things about reading Deleuze, or reading Deleuze productively, is that he forces you to think of other standards other than textual accuracy. His monstrosities of reading might not be accurate, but they are often interesting. I recently returned to Deleuze's Spinoza, or Spinoza through Deleuze, one of my first philosophical loves, but one that I have moved away from in recent years as I have read more on Spinoza. What follows are a few paragraphs in which I try to think through the productivity of Deleuze's engagement with Spinoza. Deleuze makes parallelism central to his reading of Spinoza. The order and connection of things is the same as the order and connection of ideas. These two attributes are parallel lines, two different expressions of the same substance. They are both immanent expressions of god or nature. Spinoza's idea of an immanent cause destroys any ontological hierarchy that would put minds above bodies, god above nature, destroying transcendence as an image of thought. Louis Althusser argued that Spinoza's concept of immanent causality posited an entirely new figure of causality, an alternative to the linear mechanical causality of empiricism or the expressive causality of Hegel. Moreover, he argued that this causality was the unstated presupposition of Marx's concept of the mode of production. Rather than think the mode of production as a base made up of forces and relations of production upon which there would rest a superstructure of politics, ideology, and religion, situating everything on a vertical axis of causality and determination, it was necessary to think of the mode of production as an immanent rather than linear or expressive cause. As Althusser writes, "…it implies that the structure is immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, that the whole existence of the structure consists in its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects." In other words, everything that could be seen as an effect of a given mode of production is also its cause, the condition of its reproduction. The ramifications of this concept can be seen most clearly in Althusser's influential work on ideology (itself heavily influenced by Spinoza) ideology is at once an effect of the mode of production, and its apparatuses, but it is also a cause, a necessary condition of the relations of production.
Althusser's transformation of the concept of immanent causality from an ontological or even theological problem, ultimately about the relationship between God and nature, to a social or political ontology, of the relation of base and superstructure, production and reproduction, is the necessary precondition of Deleuze (and Guattari's) Spinozism, especially as it develops into a social and political theory. This influence poses a problem, however, in that is as a concept immanent causality requires an understanding of what the cause is, of what it is that makes it so the order and connection of bodies and ideas are the same. In Spinoza that something is substance, understood as god or nature, in Althusser it is the mode of production, or more specifically the capitalist mode of production. To understand what it is for Deleuze one has to take a detour through Foucault. In Deleuze's book (and courses) on Foucault, he often writes to produce an ontology that Foucault was not interested in, reading Foucault's historical studies for an ontology of assemblages, diagrams, and forces. Deleuze focuses on the fact that Foucault's analysis of power, especially the works of the seventies on prisons, abnormality, and sexuality, analyze both relations of forces, in the architecture of schools and homes, and the emergence of new statements, regarding delinquency, perversion, and sexuality. What strikes Deleuze is that the two series, of the arrangement of bodies and the articulation of statements, relate without determining or expressing each other. "There is a mutual presupposition operating between the two forms, yet there is no common form, no conformity, not even correspondence." The arrangement of bodies does not cause or reflect the arrangement of ideas, what is called the form of expression, and the arrangement of ideas does not cause or determine the arrangement of bodies, what is called the form of content. They are both independent yet parallel. This is because both can be related back to something else, Foucault did not have a clear term for this something else, although he used terms like episteme, dispositif or apparatus to refer to the total articulation of bodies and things, of spatial relations and relations of knowledge, but often just framed this relation with his own parallelism of power/knowledge. The slash would be both the division and articulation of the two terms, their separation and relation. Deleuze calls this element the diagram or abstract machine that acts as a "non-unifying immanent cause that is coexstensive with the whole social field." As Deleuze goes onto write, "What do we mean here by immanent cause? It is a cause which is actualized, integrated, and distinguished in its effect. Or rather the immanent cause is actualized, integrated and distinguished by its effect." Deleuze like Althusser invokes Spinoza's immanent cause, only in this case it is also read through the two attributes, things and ideas, redefined as power relations and discursive structures, it is a cause that not only exists in its effects, but exists in the differentiation of two different series. Moreover, this cause can itself only be perceived, only be grasped, by reading Spinoza's ontology through Foucault's social theory, and vice versa. Of course the differences are just as striking and important. Spinoza's Ethics develops an entire ontological argument as to why substance, God or nature, has to be an immanent cause, and why this cause is known by us, in terms of things and ideas, grasped by us under the attribute of thought and extension. Even though there are more attributes than we know (one of the arguments against parallelism). There is nothing like that in Althusser's borrowing of the immanent cause. His argument is that Marx is trying to think a new concept of causality and that Spinoza is his only precursor on this obscure terrain. That is one way of understanding the translation or detour, from the ontological to the social. Foucault is even less inclined to explain why power and knowledge, non-discursive and discursive apparatuses are all that we know and perceive. He is content to demonstrate that every change at the nature of statements, at the nature of knowledge relates to, but does not reflect, a change in the organization of power. The detour through Foucault makes it possible to see the way in which this intersection of Foucault and Spinoza, Spinoza read through Foucault, is at work in A Thousand Plateaus. Or, more to the point, it is in A Thousand Plateaus, that one can grasp the extent to which the combination of Spinoza's propositions of the immanent cause and parallelism become their own social ontology (read through Foucault's reflections on Power/Knowledge and Hjemslev's linguistics.)  On the one hand it is a machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another; on the other hand it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies. Then on a vertical axis, the assemblage has both territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away.

An Assemblage is an apparatus, defined as both a relation of bodies and a relation of ideas, a body and a mind in Spinozist sense. This formula gets its own historical example, drawn from neither Foucault nor Marx in the next paragraph. As Deleuze and Guattari write,  Taking the feudal assemblage as an example, we would have to consider the interminglings of bodies defining feudalism: the body of the earth and the social body; the body of the overlord, vassal, and serf; the body of the knight and the horse and their new relation to the stirrup; the weapons and tools assuring a symbiosis of bodies—a whole machinic assemblage. We would also have to consider statements, expressions, the juridical regime of heraldry, all of the incorporeal transformations, in particular, oaths and their variables (the oath of obedience, but also the oath of love, etc.): the collective assemblage of enunciation. On the other axis, we would have to consider the feudal territorialities and reterritorializations, and at the same time the line of deterritorialization that carries away both the knight and his mount, statements and acts. We would have to consider how all this combines in the Crusades.La Datcha by Gilles Aillaud and othersFrom Spinoza, to Althusser, to Deleuze and Guattari, there is a fundamental transformation of what it is occupies the place of the immanent cause. For Spinoza it is ultimately God, or all of nature. For Althusser it is the mode of production that is the immanent cause. Deleuze and Guattari follow Foucault in expanding the definition of this cause beyond the economic aspect to a encompass a diversity and multiplicity of institutions. In doing so they in some sense return to Spinoza, but not the Spinoza of Part II of the Ethics, but of Parts III and IV, and the political treatise, in which politics has to be understood as a relation of bodies (and minds). As Deleuze and Guattari write,  We think the material or machinic aspect of an assemblage relates not to the production of goods but rather to a precise state of intermingling of bodies in a society, including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations, and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one another.  Deleuze and Guattari's transformation could be understood as completing immanence, as destroying any last remnant of hierarchy, that of God above nature, or base above the superstructure. "An assemblage has neither base nor superstructure, neither deep structure nor superficial structure; it flattens all of its dimensions onto a single plane of consistency upon which reciprocal presuppositions and mutual insertions play themselves out." There are only bodies and enunciations, nothing more, two parallel lines, defining each assemblage, and the abstract machines that organize them.
At this point it would seem that Deleuze and Guattari have departed entirely from any relation to Marx, to reduce everything to bodies and enunciations, a flattened social ontology. However, the determining cause, they thing that defines and articulates these parallel lines of bodies and thoughts, is as Deleuze and Guattari argue, a vertical axis of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari define deterritorialization in terms of capitalisms tendency to transform activities into abstract labor, and disparate and different objects into commodities. By transforming what is qualitative and divergent into what is quantitative and comparable capitalism deterritorializes activities and objects from their place and roles to become interchangeable quantities. As Deleuze and Guattari write:  Marx said that Luther's merit was to have determined the essence of religion, no longer on the side of the object, but as an interior religiosity; that the merit of Adam Smith and Ricardo was to have determined the essence or nature of wealth no longer as an objective nature but as an abstract and deterritorialized subjective essence, the activity of production in general. Deleuze and Guattari's argument with respect to Marx follows and extends the most sweeping lines from the Communist Manifesto that "all that is holy is profaned, all is solid melts into air." Capitalism is identified with a fundamental problem of deterritorialization. However, unlike Marx and Engels, who saw this deterritorialization working in one direction, as the bourgeois ceasely revolutionized production, globalized production, and transformed all values into marketable values, Deleuze Guattari argued that deterritorialization has as it is necessary counter tendency reterritorialization. As Deleuze and Guattari write:  Civilized modern societies are defined by processes of decoding and deterritorialization. But what they deterritorialize with one hand, they reterritorialize with the other. These neoterritorialities are often artificial, residual, archaic; but they are archaisms having a perfectly current function, our modern way of 'imbricating,' of sectioning off, of reintroducing code fragments, resuscitating old codes inventing pseudo codes or jargons … These modern archaisms are extremely complex and varied. Some are mainly folkloric, but they nonetheless represent social and potentially political forces … Others are enclaves whose archaism is just as capable of nourishing a modern fascism as of freeing a revolutionary charge … Some of these archaisms take form as if spontaneously in the current of the movement of deterritorialization …Others are organized and promoted by the state, even though they might turn against the state and cause it serious problems (regionalism, nationalism).  In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari continue this line, framing money, labor and rent, as three different deterritorializations, all of which transform fundamentally qualitatively different things, activities, and places into quantitative units. This quantitative comparison is inseperable from a monopolistic appropriation. In the first case, direct comparison reduces the various activities to one homogenous activity, in the case of labor, or the various objects to instances of one homogenous object, in the case of the commodity. The second case, monopolistic appropriation, is not a secondary accumulation imposed upon this comparison but is its necessary precondition. As Deleuze and Guattari write, 'Surplus labor is not that which exceeds labor; on the contrary, labor is that which is subtracted from surplus labor and presupposes it. It is only in this context that one may speak of labor value, and of an evaluation bearing on the quantity of social labor, whereas primitive groups were under a regime of free action or activity in continuous variation'.  It is the monopoly, the appropriation by force which constitutes the very ground that compares different activities, different objects, making them interchangeable. This deterritorialization is intimately intertwined with capture, with the capital as the monopolistic appropriation is the necessary condition of quantitative comparison. It is also inseparable from reterritorialization, which falls primarily on the state, or the nation. "It is thus proper to State deterritorialization to moderate the superior deterritorialization of capital and to provide the latter with compensatory reterritorializations." The state is a model of realization of the global deterritorialized axiomatic of capital. In other words, states are situated once in terms of an axiomatic of worldwide flows, their place in the axioms of labor and money, that they realize, or actualize, and this actualization requires them to reterritorialize these flows in terms of nations, people, and traditions. To take one immediate example, the way the nation, and the idea of the nation as being made up an idea shared people or shared history, helps the state regulate the flows of labor. The border, and the nation, are ways of realizing and reinforcing the differences of labor power that traverse it. It is this generalized process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization that becomes the "vertical axis" determining and situating the parallel lines of collective assemblages of bodies and statements. If it is possible to say on this point that Foucault makes it possible to transform Spinozist parallelism in to a social and political theory, demonstrating how bodies and ideas, machinic assemblages and collective assemblages, constitute parallel lines actualizing power relations, then it is possible to also argue that an engagement with Marx, with Marx's understanding of capital as a history of abstraction makes it possible to further develop the ontology. Bodies and ideas, assemblages of content and expression, are not just situated in terms of the specific articulation of power relations, but in terms of the more expansive relations of deterritorialization and reterritorialization that traverses it.Of course the ultimate question is what do all of these transpositions and translations offer us? What does it mean to read Spinoza through Foucault, and both through Marx? Where does this conceptual collage get us. It seems to me, and this is the larger point to make, is that ultimately, and by Deleuze's own standards, all of this only matters if it makes it possible to grasp the central question asked by Spinoza, but also (in their own way) Marx and Foucault, why do people fight for their servitude as if it was salvation. One of Deleuze's (and Guattari's) central points, and one that brings him closer to Marx than to Foucault, is that it is precisely the deterritorialization of labor and activity, that ties our desires to capital. Money is a real abstraction and one that offers the promise, and the hope, that we all could become capitalists.  All this is something for the longer paper to work out. 

 Perhaps it is time to have fun with Hegel. In the past year I have now read two books that have taken up a relation to Hegel that could be referred to as playful, which is not to say that the stakes or questions of these books are not serious. The first was Gray and Johnson's Phenomenology of Black Spirit, which posed the scandalous, and even heretical question, what if the subject of Hegel's Phenomenology was black. The second is Matthieu Renault's Maîtres et Esclaves: Archives du Laboratoire de Mythologiques de la Modernité. Both books in different ways show how that Hegel's thought can be all the more productive,  and all the more interesting, if one changes from the question what did Hegel mean (admittedly not an easy question) to what does Hegel make it possible to say. (Also oddly enough, both books read Hegel's dialectic against the actual struggle of Frederick Douglass to liberate himself from his master). Renault's book is as much about Kojève as it is on Hegel, or more to the point, it begins with what Kojève did to Hegel. I have commented before on this blog and elsewhere of ambivalent I am about Kojève's take on Hegel. On the one hand, it is itself an incredibly productive reading of Hegel, which makes a few pages, six in some translations, not just a passage on self-consciousness, but on life, death, war, work, and desire, everything that makes us human, but it does so in a way that interrupts and in some sense misrepresents the trajectory of Hegel's thought, turning a moment in its development as it end point. As I wrote in The Politics of Transindividuality:"[Kojève]'s powerful but interrupted reading of this passage is incredibly influential, defining a central passage in the history of twentieth-century philosophy. Kojève's interpretation shifts the passage from its place within the development of the Phenomenology to a set of questions about the role of desire, work, and death in the constitution of human existence and history. Kojève's influential reading is interrupted because it more or less starts and begins with this passage, making provisional statements in a dialectical development of statements into independent theses and conclusions. The limitations of this anthropological reading must be traversed rather than avoided, since they are all drawn from the aspects that constitute so much of the passage's appeal, and influence, for rethinking relations. The passage is situated between the anthropological invariants that illustrate it and the dialectical presentation that animates it."Or, to put that same point in a more informal tone, suitable for a blog, Kojève always reminded me of a story from grad school. Once in a seminar on the Frankfurt School dedicated to discussing the introduction of Adorno's Negative Dialectics, a friend once insisted that we need to spend more time in class talking about the opening lines of the book, the lines "Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried." After a long discussion of this passage, its invocation of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, and its conclusions about the soviet union, revolution, and the place of philosophy, etc, class was over. I turned to this friend and asked, "do you really think that the opening of that book is so important, more important than the rest of introduction?" They said, "I do not know; I only read the first page." Reading Kojève always feels like that, like he never quite got past the master and slave section of the Phenomenology so he decided to just spend his whole lecture talking about that. In doing so Kojève not only produced a new interpretation of Hegel, but he set down a strategy for future seminar students: when you haven't done all the reading just talk on and on about the part that you read, making it central.Renault's book goes in a different direction, asking what if we took Kojève as not an interruption of Hegel and a partial reading of Phenomenology, but a production of a new myth, a myth of masters and slaves, struggle, work, revolution and recognition. It is this story that would be retold again in again, by Sartre, Fanon, de Beauvoir, etc., as a way of making sense not of Hegel but of the struggles that defined the twentieth century from anti-colonialism to feminism. Renault goes all in on this reading, on treating this story of masters and slaves as a modern myth. Here is how the book opens:"Year 157 after the Mega tsunami which submerged 92% (approximately) of the inhabited land on our planet, eradicated almost all traces of civilization and generated chaos from which we are barely emerging. We, members of the brand new Mythological Analysis Laboratory of Modernity, are providing the public with an unprecedented archive of the world that existed before."I have to admit that I did not expect such a beginning to a book on Hegel. I also admit that this is always my favorite part of any post-apocalytic story, the part where some relic form our world, the world that "existed before," is interpreted or misinterpreted. I would add that this is one way to write to the future, to assume that any reader that might exist will be looking at us from a different world. I do not want to suggest that Renault's book is a work of post-apocalytic science fiction, even if it borrows it as a framing device. It uses this lens for a rather creative interpretation  the master and slave is presented, as a myth, and as Lévi Strauss would remind us, myths are inseparable from their variations. The book treats many different authors from Francis Fukuyama to Axel Honneth, Sandra Harding to Angela Davis, as many variants on this fundamental myth.  This due to both its framing device, which is written in some distant future in which all these texts appear less as individual books written in particular places, as they do variations on the same theme, more like an oral tradition, like a folk tale. This conceit has its own methodological dimension as well. As Renault states in a closing section of book, a methodological section,  "A myth never exists as a monad; it subsists under the form of a multiplicity of parallel versions, often concurrent, sometimes contradictory, or even strictly opposite of each other, by virtue of a subtle variation of rules. We argue that the truth is not in myth but between them."What makes Hegel/Kojève amendable to such a reading is not just the different variations of this story, but the fact that the story touches on what could be considered fundamentally mythic territory, that of the separation and constitution of humanity from the rest of the animals, what could be called, anthropogenesis. Moreover, in its various readings from Kojève to Fukuyama, it does not just engage with the beginning of history, with the origin of humanity, but its ending as well, the infamous end of history. Of course we could raise the question here that perhaps what lends itself to myth, these stories of origins and ends, are not really proper objects of philosophy, are questions that philosophy cannot actually answer. As Althusser argues the questions of the origin and end of the world are theological questions that philosophy inherited. In a more prosaic form, Stefano Geroulanos' book The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins, poses the question what if we thought about society, humanity, etc. without resorting to some putative origin, some human nature, and instead recognized that we are always already in the midst of something which is as much a product of history as it is its precondition.Of course Renault is not actually investigating the origin, or the end of history, but how these concepts are continually dialectically rewritten. As much as one might want to read the Master and Slave as an account of anthropogenesis, of the constitution of human desire in the desire for another's desire, for recognition, than one also has to consider that not every human in Hegel's story goes through this process of humanization. Many of the variations of Hegel's story consider the condition of non-recognition more rigorously than Hegel did. Such non-recognitions are split in two, race and gender, are two ways that humans are seen as less than human, as not only failed recognitions, but as refused the terms of recognition itself. Renault cites Fanon, on this anti-dialectic in which whiteness is the model for recognition that must be imitated but never duplicated. The history of colonialism and anti-colonial struggle suggests that the path to recognition, to full humanity, takes more complicated paths than a simple struggle for liberation.The same could be said for gender. As Renault writes, "The dialectic of master and slave has always been doubled by another, the dialectic of man and woman." This dialectic is also a question of humanity, and its relation to its animal existence, and to dependence more broadly. It also has its own and different ideal of recognition, one found not through struggle but through love. Reading the different versions together, the way in which masters and slaves, recognition and non-recognition, has been used to make sense of not just slavery, but also colonialism, patriarchy, and racism, makes it possible to complicate the dialectic, adding multiple contradictions, or, more to the point, grasping that in actual human conflict there is always more than one contradiction at work. Renault is also the co-author of an interesting little book on DuBois' Double ConsciousnessIn the variations of the Master/Slave dialectic the failures are as interesting as the successes. One of the strange things about Kojève's interpretation is that it seems to posit and ending which does not take place. The slave arrives at self-consciousness through labor, through their transformation of the world, but this self-consciousness does not end at liberation, at overcoming the master. Instead we get Hegel's discussion of stoicism, skepticism, and unhappy consciousness what Kojève calls ideologies, because they are in some sense justification of a revolutions failure.  The stoic is content to be internally free, and the skeptic and unhappy consciousness continue this move inward. If Hegel gives us a failed revolution, or an internalization of recognition, what would it take for this revolution to become real, become actual. This framed a question which animated Kojève and some of his immediate followers, what is a post revolutionary society. Is it a society of masters, or is it a society of slaves? These questions are made more pressing by the question of capitalism itself, which is hard to map onto a division between masters or slaves. As Renault writes, "It is true that the rights of the capitalist seem to construct an image of a synthesis between aristocratic law and bourgeois law: it admits that property can be acquired without work, in the manner of masters, and without struggle, in the manner of slaves. but it is a magic trick, an abstract synthesis, formal, and negative in the non-dialectical sense of the term, which assimilates the absence of struggle to a kind of work and the absence of work to a kind of struggle. Only the slaves without masters, the bourgeoisie, could invent something so twisted. No less tortured is the reconciliation between aristocratic property, the substrate of circulation, and property identified with its monetary value, its exchange value, in a constitutive confusion between circulating and fixed, (le meuble et l'immeuble), a pseudo-synthesis which has as its name "Capital."If capital is unthinkable outside of the dialectic of master and slave, forcing us to entertain both the notion of a society of slaves, as every bourgeois serves capital, and a society of masters, in which everyone is recognized as a citizen, then we can ask the question is it truly our myth. One of the odd temporal displacements of Kojève is that coming after Marx (and Heidegger) he read Hegel in both a Marxist and Hegelian manner. As Renault puts it Hegel + Heidegger = Kojève, to which we could add Marx, or at least Marxism, as another factor of the equation (Hegel/Marx +Heidegger= Kojève). Which is not the same as reading Hegel as Marx did. It has always been my contention that Marx was not much interested in masters and slaves, finding it to be too conceptual, too abstract, for an understanding of labor as an actual relation. As Marx says of the Phenomenology, "The only labor which Hegel knows and recognizes is abstractly mental labor." Some of the fascination of the master and slave in the twentieth century, fascination left in Kojève's wake, always seemed anachronistic, LARPing feudalism in the middle of capitalism. As Renault writes, "If Hegel had glimpsed the premises of the world to come, observed the first stages of capitalist production and even depicted in earlier texts a dialectic of technology and society, he proved incapable of grasping these transformations and had preferred taking refuge in idealism, the abstract work of the spirit." Renault's reading of the different figurations of master and slave is definitely provocative and interesting, but is it enough to answer the question of what makes this story our myth? What is about this story of conflict and recognition that makes it appear as the structure of our history and world? Althusser perhaps offers an answer in his discussion of Kojève and the turn to Hegel in the twentieth century. "But, little by little, new myths and masters emerged and gained prominence: they met the needs of a world plunged in crisis. Grosso modo, it can be said that the bourgeois philosophers changed masters when their world changed form, and that they made their transition from Kant to Hegel when capitalism made its from liberalism to imperialism...The philosophy of liberalism, which had, despite all, maintained a certain optimism and confidence in science and history, now began gradually to disappear: there sprang up philosophies of 'experience', 'action,' 'intuition', 'existence,' 'life', the 'hero' and, soon enough, of 'blood.' The world was emptied of its reason and peopled with these myths. Reading the master and slave as myth, as variations on the same theme, makes it possible to see the connections and deviations of the different readings, revealing to what extent it holds sway over our critical theories, but understanding why it is our myth, the myth of the modern world, requires a history of our present, not a look back from an imagined future. This makes it sound like a dislike the book, I do not. As much as I did not think it answered the question it posed, or our myth, it did propose a creative and fascinating version of scholarly research. I find myself drawn more and more to books that do not exactly do what is expected of a monograph or study, books that reveal the person as much as the scholar. I mentioned Gray and Johnson's book in this list. I would also add Leih Claire La Berge's Marx for Cats (which I have an actual review coming out soon). 

 I used to listen to a film podcast, I forget the name of it, the worked on the premise that there were certain films, that should be outside of discussion, films so good and revered that it did not make sense to talk about them. They were put in a penalty box of sorts. I often thought the same thing about certain passages that appear again and again in theoretical and philosophical discussions of the present. A few that come to mind are Jameson's often cited remark about it being easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, Benjamin's "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism," and Marx's first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. All of these seem to apply to our moment, a moment of ecological collapse with seemingly few alternatives to capitalism, of a civilization that shows itself to be more barbarism than anything else, and, with respect to the latter, it seems like we are living in farce of all of history's tragedies. For example of the latter, we are experience turn to fascism that is more concerned with the sexual politics of candy and the racial politics of superheroes. All of our Hitlers look more like lesser Napoleons. It is precisely because these phrases seem all too explanatory that they are suspect. They offer a theoretical phrase that describes the present so well that it does not bother to explain it.  I would say that is true about all of them the real question is why can't we imagine the end of capitalism, can we escape a history of civilization that is also barbarism, and a repetition of tragedy of farces. The ready to hand nature of the quote, its ability to sum up the moment, is also what makes it difficult to think about it. Especially as each of these quotes posits as an axiom what needs to be explained as a process. Lately I have also begun to think that maybe we are seeing a reversal of the relationship between tragedy and farce. I can think of two examples of this, the first is Bush's famous Mission Accomplished banner of May 2003. This was ridiculed at the time, but years later when Obama and then Biden removed troops from Iraq and Afghanistan their victories, although less symbolic seemed no less invented. It was unclear exactly what purpose these invasions had served, and there seemed to be little concern with the current state of the country after the invasion or what the invasion was supposed to do, just a declaration that it was over.  This declaration moved to the back page of the newspapers, and the lack of a spectacle made it all the more passable. A similar point can been seen with respect to COVID. In 2020 Trump announced that we would have less cases if we did not test as many people. This "know nothing" stance was mocked by many of his critics. However, when the government cut funding for testing and stopped sending out testing kits during the Biden administration the effect was almost the same. Less tests meant less positive cases. The absurd statement became normalized by not being stated at all. The farce became a tragedy. Or, more to the point, what seemed farcical when it was announced or staged as a big production, became a tragedy when it was allowed to go on quietly. All of which raises the question as to what to do with way in which reality exceeds its satire. As we come through another presidential election there are plenty of instances of Trump saying absurd and ridiculous things, about sharks, batteries, and as often the case, water saving toilets and showers. It is hard not to laugh at these things, but it seems to be that it would be wrong to mock them. For two reasons. First, and most obviously the entire Daily Show response to politics has been less than effective. All of those comedy routines that "destroyed" different political positions, not only left them entirely in place, but even fueled them. "They" are laughing at us is one of the things fueling contemporary right wing movements. Part of the appeal of Trump's rallies is that they allow his audience to laugh at those who they imagine to laugh at them. There is an entire strategy among the right which does something mockable, even cancellable, only to bask in the victim status it confers (even admitting to shooting a puppy, which actually did not work out). Being owned by the libs is a way of owning the libs, of showing how cruel and judgmental they are and how brave and authentic your are at the same time. As Machiavelli argues, a ruler must appear to be of the people, and there is no quicker way to do that these days than being mocked by what remains of a media elite. Second, since we are thinking, at least obliquely, about the imagination and its limits, these farces, these excesses, seem to have as their function a redrawing of what is thinkable, defining an excess to which all other options seem rational. One of the fallacies of "free speech absolutism" is that it considers every position to be worth debating, or even mocking. This overlooks the fact that civilization, if we wanted to use such a word, is in part defined by what it considers to be barbaric, by what it sees as not even worth debating or mocking because it is beneath it. Debating torture, even with all of the ticking time bomb scenarios, is actually a step back from considering it to be beyond the pale. In other words we are living in an age in what is considered reasonable, is all too often, a pale shadow of what is mocked as excessive. One last note about satire. I have been watching the fourth season of The Boys. Some have criticized this season for going too far in its satire. Much of this excess is nothing other than a representation of what has already taken place in our world. A conspiracy theorist labels all of her opponents as pedophiles, and someone shows up with a gun searching for the basement prison of children. These are both events that have actually happened. I am not sure if this is a solution to the problem of doing satire in the current moment, since they are just keeping up with reality. Of course the show revels in going too far with its other aspects, the gore, the sex, and so on. I do not really have a conclusion here, just the suggestion that we have gone beyond the relationship of tragedy to farce suggested by the Marx quote, just as we have gone beyond the relation of barbarism and civilization suggested by the Benjamin quote. To which I would add perhaps we can then move beyond what we can imagine in the future, imagining an end to capitalism and not just an end of the world, especially as the latter moves from the speculative imagination to the frightening present.