event mechanics

What I am now going to relate is the history of the next two centuries. I shall describe what will happen, what must necessarily happen: the triumph of Nihilism. (Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power)

One of my goals for the course is to render students incapable of watching TV and film in the passive, mildly vegetative state to which they are accustomed. [...] The inability of people to be affected by things like that, a general apathy with regard to things happening outside their immediate frame of reference, is terrifying. This class is about a society consumed by the insignificant. (Thomas Hibbs, Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from ‘The Exorcist’ to ‘Seinfeld’.)

We need more nihilist popular culture

Writing in Havard’s undergraduate student newspaper about the film Se7en, David H. Goldbrenner, argues that nihilistic popular culture is damaging:

This is why nihilistic pop culture and art are so detrimental.  They help perpetuate the most damaging and destructive attitude that a free and democratic society can hold:  that life is not worth living and that all our efforts will eventually lead to pain and disappointment.  The most frustrating aspect of this is that often such thought is not expressed genuinely but rather because it will shock and entertain and earn a profit.

This is born of common (and often religious) interpretation of nihilism; that it is a state of social being without transcendental values; transcendental values include ‘objectivity’, ‘morality’ and various political manifestations. I suggest everyone reads Nietzsche’s Will to Power, in particular the first sections on nihilism, for two reasons. Firstly, for critics of nihilism, Nietzsche is clearly the primary enemy. Secondly, ‘nihilism’ is not some fantastical apprehension of existential meaninglessness; or it is, but this observation has become banal. We cannot escape from nihilism. Therefore, it is necessary to go to war or fall in love, at least in an existential sense.

To help contemporary audiences when reading Neitzsche, I suggest that you imagine you are reading a blog of someone who you suspect to be mildly insane.

For Nietzsche, as he writes in the preface, nihilism is a historical passage of development through which future societies shall necessarily pass. This is not like Marx’s historical determinism; Nietzsche is instead suggesting it shall be born of its own advent. That is, there shall be an intuitive or qualitative leap whereby the European Nihilist (aka Nietzsche) “has already outlived the Nihilism in his own soul — who has outgrown, overcome, and dismissed it.” Neitzsche’s Will to Power should therefore be read as a guide: How To Survive Nihilism.

The species of nihilism that Neitzsche wrote about in the late-nineteenth now has siblings. To think nihilism as an event (of society, of social relations, of the mind and in bodies) is to appreciate how it can be repeated in different ways. I want to explore the contemporary nihilism evident in popular culture and the culture of the popular. I want to think through both meanings of the phrase “society consumed by the insignificant”: a preoccupation with the trivial and the consumption of society itself.

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The Birth of Expectation

To appreciate the repetition of nihilism means to aske the question, from where does nihilism emerge? Before nihilism, there are only transcendental values. Transcendental values serve as an antidote against practical and theoretical nihilism. In Nietzsche’s era these were primarily Christian values of morality (WtP, pages 8-9). I don’t think this is the case anymore.

Now it is a more complex question, worthy of our developments in the sciences and arts, of predictive extrapolations from the present (algorithmic or otherwise)¹ and governed by expectation:

1. Transcendental values bestow an intrinsic value upon the world, including the values of humans and anything else. Liberal humanism is a derivation of this.² It means you only have to believe and not do any work in appreciating structures of valorisation that everday life enters into as a kind of ritualised gladitorial combat. Everyday our values slay the meaninglessness of its own battle first and then every other violence posed by the question.
2. There is an unthinking simplicity to the perfection produced by transcendental values. The perfection here is of a particular order. It is not the perfection of neoplatonic forms.³ The purest expression of this in the contemporary state of affairs is the utter stupidity of justification via expectation: “What else do you expect?” This is ironically lampooning of the use of ‘shock’ in journalistic headlines: “Politician in Lying Shock” or “Celebrity in Sex Scandal Shock”. None of these are actual shocks. I’d be shocked to find someone shocked by them. The superposition of expectation introduces the same teleological inevitability once granted solely to Good and Evil. Beyond the Expected and Unexpected!
3. The persecution of reality by transcendental values approaches its apogee through knowledge that ‘everyone’ knows. Everyone does not know it, but ‘everyone’ does. Here, expectation of something expectedly shared annihilates difference; that is, the differentials of culture that actually produce meaning. Entire fields of knowledge are organised around bestowing an adequate perception of these most important things, whatever they are, to the everyday innovators of expectation (through Ideas Worth Spreading). Everyone has the ‘right’ to participate in the glorious pursuit over expectation, where we truly value your ‘voice’ because it ‘matters’.⁴
4. Neitzsche argued that the transcendental values of Morality were a measure of self-preservation, to prevent ‘man’ from despising ‘himself’ as ‘man’. Knowledge, he argued, could drive a ‘man’ to despair. Indeed. After the death of God, what possible hope is there? Well, hope itself; hope in hope. Hope is the handmaiden of expectation. Hope bestows expectation with a robustness that only a nihilist would seek to liquidate. Hope prepares humanity to attend the future; both to be present and to worry over it. A future governed by expectation. If the transcendental values of Christian Morality confected the righteous in Nietzsche’s era, then it is now hope itself that fills ‘man’ up when self-awareness empties ‘him’. The awesome power of contemporary predictive algorithms to ‘recommend’ a given passage of action (this book/food/elected official is an appropriate choice) is built over the heads of ‘men’ as though they were the will of ‘himself’ and, at best, a hope of a world to come. Hence, the future itself has become the operative outside of expectation.⁵

In the contemporary era, expectation is a mobile constellation of relations, unburdened by the tradition of tradition.⁶ Like Nietzsche’s Christian Morality (WtP, page 9), this mobile constellation of relations are fuelled by the despair of ever freeing ourselves from them. Hence, we crawl out of the slums of our expectedly shared telos, grappling with the zombie bodies and minds of the otherwise disaffected who can’t go on, but nevertheless go on. This is the stage of the transvaluation of all values.

Neitzsche only had to contend with the differential repetition of one set of transcendental values, but now the constellation of relations between elements in the present, but also through relations to the past and future, that manifest this teleology of expectation broken from its traditional transcendental mooring; it has become Mad Max surveying the wasteland of tomorrow — an immanent mobile force forever pursuing the fuel that will propel it on, on, on. Hope. Are you a student of opportunity?

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Anchors of Affect

There is an aesthetics of nihilism. (Are you excited? What are you excited about? I am very excited… but I don’t know why.) The comically stupid interpretations of nihilistic culture appreciate a nihilistic aesthetic to be one of violence, sex, depravity and so on; essentially, anything resonant with a moral wasteland that expresses the loss of transcendental values (such as Christian Morality).

Nope.

An aesthetics of nihilism is one that appreciates the “long waste of strength, the pain of ‘futility’, uncertainty, the lack of opportunity to recover in some way, or to attain to a state of peace concerning anything — shame in one’s own presence, as if one had cheated oneself too long…” (WtP, page 12). The goal of all expectation is that something be attained: what is the return on investment? Are you excited? What are you excited about? The nihilistic appreciates that even with a return, nothing is attained. Pure waste, but of degrees.

Like a future threat governing the present through technics and an apparatus of ‘risk’ ⁷, the relations of the present to the future pass through various systems of expectation. The future is anchored in the present through affect. How we feel about the future. ‘Hype’ does not simply bestow meaning upon some expected innovation, but on the innovators of expectations, and an entire apparatus of valorisation (‘optics’, targeting entire populations targeting ‘achievements’; now crowdsourced ‘likes’) through the felt-tendency expectedly shared through expectation with others. Are you excited? What are you excited about? You are already targeting the present under remote control from the future: celebrate the autoaffection of drones!

Measuring the “worth of the world according to categories that can only be applied to a purely fictitious world” (WtP, 15) produces an inevitable revulsion. Life itself is vulgarised (WtP, page 23). Coke does not sell us a drink, but a world within which the drink exists. ⁸ We consume entire worlds. Quench your thirst and your appetite heralds entire worlds. You command this power to connect with entire systems of existential midwifery. Are you excited? What are you excited about? Was Nietzsche wrong to suggest that nihilism is premised on recognising there is no truth? Satisfaction terminates in the purpose of your appetite; this is the belief and truth of expectation.

Appetite here is of the body, but it is animated with the banal majesty of the future-present of meeting expectations. “Does what it says on the box.” “As advertised.” The consumer is entirely disenfranchised of dignity when following this trivial proscriptions. Hence, the manifest disgust when you begin wallowing in the consumption of this world projected by the futurity of “desiderata” (WtP, page 17). Alone with your excitement and the promise of world to come. I am very excited …but I don’t know why. “Give me a target!” demands the drone of futurity.

Is your excitement active or passive? Or, to ask this question another way, did you inherit your excitement? What were the conditions by which this excitement circulated? What are the vectors of its propagation? If you didn’t inherit this excitement, then how was it manifest? Is it part of a burning fury? Did your excitement bubble up through you? Nietzsche proposes two kinds of nihilism (WtP, page 21):

1. Nihilism as a sign of enhanced spiritual strength: active nihilism.

2. Nihilism as a sign of the collapse and decline of siritual strength: passive nihilism.

The nihilist’s capacity to act is increased (what Nietzsche calls “spiritual vigour”) when the goals or missions that once directed you are no longer suitable; the nihilist begins as an existential exploration: discover your own challenges. If you go on even when you cannot go on and subsume you own challenges according to the proscriptions of expectation, then your randomised playlist soundtrack will always and forever play cynicism. This is a passive nihilism, and the cynic’s capacity to act is diminished, like a fast food patron holding up the drive-thru line paralysed by indecision when choosing from the menu. Exhaustion should be welcomed as the inability to possibilise a future and transient zero-degree of nihilism.

If there is no truth, then first there cannot be appetite. The nihilist does not believe his or her own appetite⁹; hence, truth as the satisfaction in the termination of appetite fails to manifest. You feel it in your body; you reject entire worlds. Rather than grappling with the existential dimension of the abject, this is the abject on an existential level.

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Cultures of Nihilism

There are varieties of self-stupefaction manifest as attempts to escape nihilism. I think this is where most critics of nihilist popular culture fall short. They think they are critiquing nihilism, when they are actually critiquing the attempts to escape nihilism (not unlike the scene from Jurassic Park where the intrepid humans wonder at the grace of the stampeding herd and, just before they are almost wiped-out by the excited herd mentality, enters a species of monstrous hunter: ‘Nihilism’). Nietzsche isolates a few examples of such stupefaction:

1. Rising above the malaise through emotional intoxification: this includes popular culture (‘music’), in scandal (‘cruelty of tragic joy of ruin of the noblest’), in blind enthusiasms (‘hatreds’).
2. Escape by falling into an oppressive regime of documenting small joys. This includes attempts “to work blindly, like a scientific instrument” (WtP, page 24) or, as I suggest, a drone.
3. Another form of stupefaction has developed in the ‘so-called’ networked society (the use of ‘so-called’ should signal that I am using a derivative of an ‘expectation’ that governs a certain discourse; the sheer fact that every who reads this knows to that which I am referring is proof). This is the stupefaction of belonging.

Imagine there is a global media culture. There isn’t a global media culture.

There is a global logistical network for the distribution of a limited number of cultural products that audiences imagine belong to a ‘global culture’. There is no outside point of reference for these audiences to gauge whether the cultural products are global or merely appear as global. This is not unlike the way a larger neighbour will dominate the everyday media culture of its smaller neighbour, but this presence is not reciprocated (US to Australia, Australia to New Zealand, and so on). The presumption of participatory relevance is premised on the material conditions for the distribution of culture and the speed with which audiences access these cultural products (such as a mass-synchronised ‘opening’ or ‘release’ that seduce audiences into believing they share the text, which they do not; they simply belong without possibly knowing what it is they belong to).

Of course, irrelevant participation does not preclude localised audience-based interpretations that produce the meaning of the cultural products — that is, the ‘text’ of the cultural product — that blossoms into a deep existential meaning for the audience. It is just such deep existential meaning is utterly irrelevant beyond a limited cloister of like-minded aficionados. The feeling of belonging to a mass cultural event, such as a mass-synchronised ‘opening’, is more of an expression of global culture than any normatively-considered, audience-produced meaning of the ‘text’. ¹⁰

Besides shared irrelevance, all that is left is a shared disdain. To produce belonging therefore requires a constant involution of immanent modes of belonging.  Shared disdain is another modality of the pessimism that heralds nihilism. Nihilism as the autoaffection of pessimism.

Mel has a very interesting work in progress paper up on her blog on “The territory of the post-professional“. We sometimes share very similar research interests. I’ve also looked at questions of territory and technological assemblages in my Communications Technologies & Change unit this semester.

In one week we looked at the relation between predictive algorithms and the individuation of subjectivity. Here is the entry for that week:

Buying Stuff Online and How Your Credit Card is You

Transformations of economy, emergence of global market. Globalisation. Function of credit cards as technology of communication/identity. eBay, Steam and online commerce. Amazon.com and the algorithmic production of surplus value.

In the lecture I did a kind of archaeology of the credit card in terms of the shifting composition of socio-technological relations across the long histories of some of the elements that constitute the ‘credit card assemblage’. The required research for this, so as to do the lecture, was a bit crazy. I learnt a great deal! Then I shifted gears a bit to talk about the function of predictive algorithms that are part of online shopping platforms. The de Vries reading is very good on this (and also pretty tough for third year undergraduates). In the context of predictive algorithms and algorithmic-based platforms (that aren’t necessarily ‘predictive’) there are two points I want to make with regards to Mel’s paper, specifically the paragraph introducing ‘algorithmic living’.

Firstly, unlike previous forms of self-knowledge in familiar ‘quantifications of the self’ (Weight Watchers, etc.) determined by a medium/average (statistical sense) of rough (molar) demographic categories, algorithmic indicators are far more mobile and the level of quantification is determined by the ‘resolution’ of the algorithm. ‘Resolution’ in this sense pertains to the ‘machinic affects’ of the ‘counting assemblage’; what are the forms of machinic visbility afforded by the technological assemblage of which the algorithm is but one (protocol) level? What are the ‘actions’ or ‘gestures’ being indeed by the algorithm?

Secondly, the (algorithmic) map (of aggregate molecular ‘actions’ of user-mulitiplicities) has become the (existential) territory (for the individuating assemblage of an ‘app’ or ‘platform’ user). Yes, the map is the territory (I’m phrasing it like that just to fuck with the old school semioticians a little bit:). The classic examples of this are Amazon.com or Google. Amazon indexes various ‘actions’ by users and users this for the ‘suggestions’ section. The capacity to index such actions are one of the affordances (action possibilities) of the platform or what I would call the machinic affects of the algorithm. The machinic affects are determined by the resolution of the algorithm. What actual action does the algorithm index? Visits? Location of mouse pointer or scrolling behaviour? Maybe. Definitely (in the case of Amazon): purchases, wishlist contents, ‘Kindle’ sharing behaviour, and so on. The aggregate map is produced by a multiplicity of such actions, this map then serves as part of the ‘territory’ by which other users of the same platform are individuated (as ‘dividuals’, cf. Deleuze). ‘Territory’ in this context is derived from the later work of Guattari.

What is interesting about Mel’s focus on ‘time’ and its management as a mode of self-governance is that by taking into account the above process of individuating there are two versions of temporality are in play: intensive and extensive. Management of time is traditionally ‘time’ as extension; there is  a range, which is divisible into ‘units’ of time. The individuation of a subject is an intensive process and operates at the level of ‘anticipation’ (relations of futurity) and ‘retention’ (relations of pastness). The ‘past’ in this context is literally and practically active; a multiplicity of ‘pasts’ from a multiplicity of users indexed according to their actions ‘feed’ (‘feed’ in the sense of both ‘appetite’ or ‘appetition’ (Whitehead) and ‘user feeds’ ie who you follow) into the pure present of algorithmic mapping and serve as a dynamic/selective virtual architecture that scaffolds the embodied process of the individuating subject who is actively anticipating his or her ‘next’ action. The ‘next’ action is the subject of such operations; this ‘next’ is an intensive temporal relation.

Management of time is only traditionally premised on the extensive dimension, as contemporary ‘social’ platform-based apps also include a valorising function which tempers time with a qualitiative experiential dimension. If you had a good time, then you’ll ‘like’ the shared photo. If you ‘like’ the book and ‘rate’ it on Amazon, then you bestow the assumed extensive time taken to read the book with a valorised experiential quality.

Below is the title and abstract of a paper I shall be presenting this Friday as part of our working papers seminar series. It is based on about the first third/half of a paper I am trying to finish about the garage-assemblage. Actual paper does not really engage with Summernats.

Title: “Show us your tits”: Summernats, Gender and Simondon’s Techno-Aesthetics

Abstract: A genealogy of the Summernats street machining festival must include the mid-1980s historical turning point of where it shifts from the Street Machine Nationals run “By street machiners for street machiners” to the 1987 spectacular Summernats event. The Street Machine Nationals was organised around the display and appreciation of the street machine projects understood as the outcome of the creative labour of enthusiasts. The Summernats event shifted the composition of relations where the elite street machines (still appreciated as above) were used to individuate a much larger market of the interested public. This spectacular mode of car enthusiast festival was pitched as a “party”. A constant critique of this party-like event is its explicit masculine character best captured by the misogynist demand: “Show us your tits”. “Show us your tits” is a demand for visibility and invitation for females to ‘belong’ to the hyper-masculine experience of the event.

In a 1982 letter to Jacques Derrida, philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon outlines what he describes as “techno-aesthetics” and explores technology and the technical from the point of view of aesthetics. Early in his letter Simondon includes a comment from the architect Eupaulinos (in Paul Valéry’s version of Socrates’ dialogue with Phaedrus): “Whereas passersby merely see an elegant chapel, I see the exact proportions of a girl from Corinth whom I happily loved.”

The seemingly incongruous relation between Simondon’s techno-aesthetics and the misogynist cultural practices of Summernats I shall stake out in this paper involves thinking about the way men heteronormatively aestheticise technology through gendered anthropomorphisation. I shall argue that the libidinal-affective intensities of the female form are mapped onto the non-human intensities of (pre-digital) technology. Later gendered relations to technology map the intensities of war to the non-human intensities of computers, particularly in gaming cultures. I shall read Simondon’s theory of the individuation of environment-subjects in terms of Felix Guattari’s theories of the multi-dimensional subject. The pre-individual field of the subject co-individuated with technology at an intensive level (such as found in the homosocial spaces of enthusiast car culture) transversally connects different experiences from any given subject’s development (‘individuation’). The point I shall make is that in the case of Summernats, the misogynist domination of women is a consequence of the reproduction of heteronormative and intimate relations with technology (and other men) that ward off the anxiety of wayward libidinal-affective desire.

In the recently published translation of Roberto Esposito’s The Third Person is this remarkable passage (148-149) found in the section on The Event (it is a large extract below that ends with the block quote from ATP):

The individuation of life, of a life, is not the same as the individuation of a personal subject. The category of ‘haecceity’ intervenes between the two. It, too, designates something – individuating it – that is very particular, but not necessarily a person, a thing, or a substance. A season or a time of day, for example, are haecceities that are just as determinate as individuals as such; but they are not coextensive with them – just like a shower of rain, a gust of wind, or a ray of moonlight. What these connote, besides their movement due to the combination of their molecules, is a capacity to be composed with other forces, due to which they undergo an effect (or an affect), thereby being transformed and transforming the others into more complex individualities, themselves subject to the possibility of further metamorphoses. A degree of temperature can be combined with a certain intensity of whiteness, just as this may combine with a surface to the point of being identified with it. What changes with respect to the plane of the subjects, besides a certain spatiality that is irreducible to predefined boundaries, is a temporality that does not have the stable form of presence, but rather the form of the event, extending between past and future. Haecceity never has an origin or an end – it is not a point: it is a line of slippage and assemblage [concatenamento]. It is made up not of people and things, but of speeds, affects, and transitions; just as semiotics is composed of proper nouns, verbs in the infinitive, and indefinite pronouns. Haecceity is composed of third persons, traversed and liberated by the power of the impersonal:

The HE does not represent a subject but rather makes a diagram of an assemblage. It does not overcode statements, it does not transcend them as do the first two persons; on the contrary, it prevents them from falling under the tyranny of subjective or signifying constellations, under the regime of empty redundancies. [ATP, 265]

Esposito isolates something very interesting here, regarding the category of ‘haecceity’ and its intervention between the individuation of life and the individuation of a personal subject.

In Empire, Negri and Hardt argue that the ‘possible’ resides in the passage from the virtual to the actual, and that the art of politics is to operate upon the possible to create and affirm a new politics and a different passage.

Esposito is capturing a different relation here, where ‘haecceity’ is a dimension of all assemblages. Properly I’d call ‘haecceity’ the being of event, and what Esposito is describing in the above passage is the part of Deleuze and Guattari’s work that conceptualised a sense of events that cannot be easily, if at all, reconciled to “a person, a thing, or a substance”.

Deleuze and Guattari’s ATP can be read as a masterful exploration of ‘scale’ in both extensive and intensive, and they basically furnish readers with a conceptual vocabulary to assist in this. Esposito is highlighting the importance of the concept of ‘haecceity’ for thinking about the concrescence (to borrow a term from Whitehead, but using it in a different way) of different impersonalities. The impersonal of the season or time of day is expressed (through assemblages, as elements of assemblages) with the impersonal dimension of a life, which in a normative sense belongs to a person.

The question of scale here is important, but very difficult to sufficiently discuss, as language conspires discussion to be locked into ‘objects’ and ‘things’. Esposito is indicating a certain combination across both intensive and extensive scales that does not belong to subjects or to objects, and it is not the pure fourth-person singular of the event of the chaosmos; it is somewhere in between. This is very important when trying to think events, as it is too easy to be trapped in a reduction (back-formed from language) that reduces events to things or objects, with the most recent form of this found in most variants of OOO. A more nuanced account of events is required for a number of reasons, least of which is for an adequate grasp of ontology. Haecceity as concrescence of different impersonalities is a move towards such an account.

There has been some productive discussion on Twitter around Jessica Irvine’s piece in Fairfax publications today Unpicking the Collective Whinge. In this post I shall engage with Irvine’s piece in the context of some of the discussion from Twitter and finish with a bit of an exploration into post-ideological politics. Irvine is working to diagnose a specific problem she identifies in the current Australian political climate: 

I’ve figured it out. I’ve figured out how Australia’s economic vital signs can be so good – low joblessness, low inflation, trend growth – and yet Australians can remain so resolutely miserable.

[...]

There can be only one answer: we are, as a nation, chucking a full-on, all-screaming, all-door-slamming teenage temper tantrum.

I agree with the problem she is identifiing, but not the diagnosis. My colleague Jason Wilson’s observation is that this diagnosis is typical of (small-L) liberal political punditry and I believe he is writing a blog post on the matter.

Nation of Whingers

For international readers, ‘whingeing’ is a bit like whining, but in Australian culture it has a particularly nationalistic inflection due to the characterisation of ‘whingeing poms’. Irvine is arguing that ‘whingeing’ is the modus operandi of most of the nation.  ‘Whingeing’ in this context means attempting to extract more value from the current composition of arrangements (‘rentseeking’), normally via some kind of government-based dividend (reduction of regulation or increased welfare). She is collapsing two (or more) responses to the current economic situation in Australia, both of which are micro-economic responses to the apparently positive macro-economic well being of the entire national economy. Rather than diagnosing the problem as ‘whingeing’ my suggestion is that the current situation needs to be dissected to separate (at least) two levels social and political anxiety. 

1. At the level of what Irvine calls ‘business’, she describes how they are “chucking hissy fits about workplace laws and taxation”. Shes notes that “most of the tantrums come from big business in Australia – the banks, resource companies and retailers that generally operate under little competitive pressure and enjoy a captive customer base.”
2. At the level of ‘consumers’ and Irvine’s deployment of a collective ‘we’ (which I’ll take to mean salaried employees and non-big business owners) and others who have high household debt. They are “complaining about the cost of living and wailing about any attempts to wind back a bloated welfare system”.

Rather than bundling up all responses to the apparently positive macro-economic health of the nation in terms of ‘whinging’ it makes better sense at an analytical level to separate (at least) two responses and critically engage with them on their own terms. In response to Jason’s comments, in my tweets I suggested there was a kind of dissonance being experienced because of the apparent contradiction of the relatively good macro-economic health and wellbeing of the national economy versus the experience of dominant neo-liberal modes of workplace management and performance-based audit culture. In a performance-based audit culture all workplace activity is measured against performance-based indexes. Certain ‘targets’ need to be met: sales targets, satisfaction targets, conversion targets and so on. This is a naked attempt to extract more labour from workers, particularly when the ‘targets’ are not realistic. But it is only own example of the ‘insecurity’ experienced at the level of the individual or household. The pressure experienced by individuals and ‘households’ radically increases once a huge debt burden is factored into the equation. The sloganistic description of this mode of capitalism is to “Privatise profits and socialise risk.”

I’m updating this post 23/5/12 with comments from Ross Gittin, economics writer at the Sydney Morning Herald, who hits the nail on the head with his column about the self-interest of business people who frame changes to superannuation and tax regulations in ways to suit themselves:

I want to make a further critical point about why it is necessary to separate the two levels and I want to relate to the move from ideologically-based poltical arguments to a post-ideological context. The problems of big business are not ‘our’ problems. ‘Our’ problems are not the problems of big business. Irvine’s piece would’ve been far stronger had she made this explicit distinction in her column.

On the Shared Experience of Anxiety

 The current mainstream media continually produces stories that attempt to forge a connection between the experience of dissatisfaction because of insecurity with the current government or state of affairs. This is the absolute travesty of media reports about the mining tax or the so-called ‘carbon tax’. The Australian newspaper has been particularly virolent in its efforts to forge this connection and then using it to attack the current minority Labor government under the aegis of ‘holding them to account’. The end result is that the very real feeling of insecurity at the level of the individual or household is rearticulated as the consequence of the ‘same’ problems that ‘business’ is using to win rentseeking concessions from government.

In late-1970s versions of Marxist-inflected media studies, this would’ve been interpreted as a classic example of the hegemonic effect of the mainstream media being in the pockets of capitalists. Basically the media is being used to suture over apparent class contradictions. The ‘consumers’ and ‘householders’ have come to perceive the world in ways that benefit the ‘business’ classes. Fear and anxiety are often used as the currency or building blocks of such an approach. If you experience ‘fear’ or ‘anxiety’ then whatever the situation is must be ‘real’ as you otherwise would not feel such emotions. The now ubiquitous ‘moral panic’ is an example of this work. Isolate a ‘folk devil’, represent them as the cause (rather than symptom) of some stuctural tension, and reap the political capital benefits.

The current situation is different. ‘Insecurity’ is experienced as anxiety or even dread about whether or not ‘we’ are able (and importantly continue to be able) to afford the ‘costs of living’. ‘Costs of living’ bundles up a large number of diverse expenditures for a diverse range of people. Does it refer to current costs of health insurance? Or rent and housing? Mobility in the form of ongoing registration and fueling of a vehicle? Time and money costs of public transport? Food and clothing? Irvine reduces all this to a paternalistic and cynical ‘lolly prices’:

True, lolly prices were rising, particularly on consumer sensitive items like petrol, food, education and health. But average income gains were more than enough to offset the rises for most, if not all, Australian households.

‘We’ don’t have a large degree of control over most of these costs. We can ‘choose’ not to have private health insurance or ‘choose’ not to have a car, but the quality of life can change considerably. If this was an ideological move, then the average punter would believe the same thing that the ‘business’ class believes. To some extent they do, but the point I want to make is that this is premised on a shared experienced of anxiety.

Post-Ideological Politics?

In Anti-Oedipus, French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and post-Lacanian psychoanalyst, Felix Guattari, (in)famously declared: “There is no ideology and never has been” (4). They were discussing literature, describing it as a ‘machine’. They were primarily concerned with the way ‘desire’ is invested throughout the social field and developed the concept of ‘machines’ to reframe the problem.

The ‘literature machine’ is an assemblage of books, people, cultural events, language, logistical apparatuses of the publishing industry and so on that cuts off or opens up flows of desire; using ‘desire’ as a resource, such ‘machines’ produce the social field itself. Desire is in ‘scarequotes’ because Deleuze and Guattari modify the classic neo-Freudian conceptualisation of ‘desire’ as a ‘libidinal force’ to argue that ‘desire’ has an ontological valence actualised as the ‘social reality’ encountered as the product of ‘machines’.

In more recent developments engaging with similar problematics this ‘desire’ is more often discussed in terms of ‘affect’. This was also the trajectory of Deleuze and Guattari’s own work developing from Anti-Oedipus to their follow up volume A Thousand Plateaus.

What I find fascinating about Irvine’s latest column is that it is an example of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘Oedipalization’. The social field is described in terms of being a ‘family’ with the paternalistic government trying to deal with the ‘teenage tantrums’ of both ‘business’ and ‘us’. It is up to the government ‘parents’ to intervene:

In the teenage economy, the returns from rentseeking – or seeking special treatment from mum and dad – are higher than the returns from productive pursuits, like actually innovating business practices. Business chucks a tantrum because it’s easier to manipulate mum into given you $20 than going out and getting a job and earning it yourself.

What then of the character of post-ideological politics? There has long been an anxiety about post-rational politics. This means thinking about politics as involving emotion, feeling and ‘affect’. Some authors describe this in terms of the aestheticisation of politics and turn to the great facist movements of the 20th century. I don’t think this is the case here, however.

To feel this level of anxiety about the current state of affairs means ‘you’ are thinking through a range of issues, calculating household budgets, contemplating how various macro-economic indicators will affect your micro-economic wellbeing. Rather than affect being purely autonomous, the current political discourse locates it within a framework of macro-economic wellbeing. For example, within the machinery of political commentary ‘interest rates’ function as a thermostat of anxiety and the affective contexture of the nation more generally.

Interest rates and commentary about interest rates are used to ‘modulate’ the affective state of a large group of anxious people. As Brian Massumi notes if you take seriously the colour-coded terror alert system developed to inform US citizens about possible terrorist threats, then you should always be in a state of alertness. There is no ‘safe’ setting. As Massumi puts it: “The alert system was introduced to calibrate the public’s anxiety.”

Using Anxiety as a Political Resource

The contradiction between macro-economic wellbeing and micro-economic anxiety is being used to fuel a politics of frustration.  What Irvine misses in her column is that most of the activity of ‘us’ that she describes captures those things we are meant to be doing as fully functioning members of society. Having families, buying homes, trying to maintain a career and so on, yet the anxiety around future micro-economic conditions is still apparent. What if a general anxiety about ‘costs of living’ was precisely the point of the current neoliberal machinations? What if the duopoloy of Coles and Woolworths benefit from an anxiety about fuel and food costs? What if banks and other loans and credit card providers produce anxiety about ther products (intentionally or not)? Who benefits from this politics of anxiety?