Of teleological suspensions

The athletic and evocative LarvalSubjects blog currently features a discussion on the aims of and possibilities of reflexivity for philosophy / critique: here and here. I’d like to wager a modest contribution in the form of a mutant Kierkegaardian-Foucaultian model. As such, shall we start with Zizek?

Somewhere in the vast archives of culture jamming extraordinaire Slavoj Zizek lies a claim to the effect that the Kierkegaardian triad, aesthetic-ethical-religious, is transposed in Lacan’s imaginary-symbolic-real knot. The consequences of this might be that the fundamental question – the parallactic question of Passage – is similarly a transposition of Kierkegaard’s fundamental question: Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical? That is, our (critical) question would be: Is there a teleological suspension of the symbolic?

It appears quite impossible. Any true rupture with the symbolic order would seem to merely institute a new symbolism, as it were, a new regime of signs. This is a question of some considerable dialogue – it is present in Freud as in Lacan, in Benjamin as in Adorno. But isn’t this impossibility precisely the “aim” or telos of philosophy as critique? This would be the impossibility of freedom, a freedom that must first be recognized as a new symbolic mediation. Freedom can, from the immersed perspective of critique, only be given as that which is not given in the symbolic. Freedom is the unpresented in presentation, the void of the situation. Subtractive freedom.

How can the symbolic be suspended, teleologically? We have many names for this most romantic figure of latter day anti-romanticisms: care of the self, celebration of awareness, traversing the fantasy (in a sense), pure Act, occupation without counting, subtraction, to skim the surface of popular alternatives. We might follow Foucault, in his lecture series on the Hermeneutics of the Subject as he painstakingly develops his notion of care of the self, to be assembled in the third volume of The History of Sexuality.

Foucault effectively claims that the teleological suspension of the symbolic can be accomplished through a set of self-displacing practices known to the ancients as epimeleia heautou, broader in scope and efficacy than gnothi seauton (and not, for that, the very same set of practices, which would be not only undesirable but impossible). Foucault says: “Attending to the self is not…just a brief preparation for life; it is a form of life,” exactly the form-of-life Agamben thematizes throughout his work on politics (the zoe that is its own bios, life that refuses separation from what it can do). This extends to (critical) pedagogy, the truest form of which would probably look something like Deleuze’s paideia or apprenticeship. For Foucault, care of the self involves a certain experimentalism, a ceaseless intensification of life, becoming a body without organs in the throes of individuation. Recall that Deleuze, for instance, celebrates the suspension of individuation we witness in the close-up in cinema – suspension here in the sense of prolongation, moving to the edge of the void without allowing the schizophrenizing-intensifying processes to bring about a collapse of cognizance, but rather to cause an excess of cognizance, a hyper-perception. This would be freedom. Philosophy requires a perpetuality of movement, an utterly ceaseless subjectification/desubjectification circuit. This is not a “leap out” of the dominant symbolic-ideological discourse. This is a productive reconfiguration of the symbolically determined structures of subjectivity, a discernment (hence “hyper-perception”) of the virtualities / potentialities available for actualization in any given social formation. “Leaping out” is impossible – it is a negation. Freedom must be produced, and produced through adjustments to the assemblage – hence my blog’s subtitle.

Small steps toward a theory of practical ensembles

The following post is the first in a rather unorganized series, an endeavor that will undoubtedly take several attempts and will certainly produce several false starts. Having just finished the recently translated lecture series on The Century by Badiou, I’m excited to put some ideas down, even in very rough fashion, regarding a development Badiou’s text produced in my thinking about such problems as community, (political, artistic, scientific, amorous) movements, and groups and the subjectivities of groups. This is something I’d been thinking about for quite some time, and so this is perhaps something I sought out in Badiou, something that many readers would find uninteresting or peripheral with respect to Badiou’s real thematic foci. Of course these readers are correct. Nevertheless.

What is a group? The aim of a micropolitical inquiry into group-formation is to propose a typology of qualitatively different groups classified by genetic history, and then to study the dynamics between the group types. Groups or we-subjects can be broadly divided into three inconsistent types on the basis of their comportment toward the real of their subjectivities: I. those that maintain a representational relation with the real (parties and states, for instance); II. those that maintain a material or presentational relation with the real (microscopic assemblages, revolutionary/inventive subjectivities); III. those that maintain an ambiguous relation with the real – and this cannot be an intermittent ambiguity, but is instead a necessary ambiguity (e.g., art movements which adhere to the principles of a manifesto or other imaginary identificatory device but at the same time continually effectuate revolutionary changes in what it is possible to do in terms of thought, praxis, etc.).

The real is inconsistent, discontinuous, fragmented multiplicity. Badiou claims that “[t]he real may be encountered, manifested, or constructed, but it is not represented.” The Century, 108. Presentational groups reflect this character of the real: they only exist in particularity, in moments of dissonance (political, artistic, etc.), leaping up from and out of the cold representationalist sea like warm-blooded, iridescent flashes. There is probably no such thing as a “presentational-group manifesto.” There is no possibility of following a pathbreaking leader, no chance of adhering to a doctrine. There is only a spark in search of a powder keg, Breton said. There where the real avails itself of an encounter stands the presentational group. The Idea itself is action, and it has, as Idea, a materiality all its own.

“A demonstration or an insurrection, and more broadly a political sequence, or even an artistic creation seized in the violence of its gesture, are in no way representable. Fraternity is not representable. As I’ve already suggested, the unwarranted appeal to large, inert, macroscopic – and therefore supposedly ‘objective’ – sets (class-in-itself, race, nation…) infects subjectivation by way of its presumed representative legitimacy. But only inertia can be represented.”

Badiou, The Century, ibid.

This is, moreover, one reason why presentational and ambiguous groups are not subject to discussion as such: by the time they’ve become “household names,” by the time it becomes possible to trade opinions about them, they’ve already become inert, qualitatively different. Deleuze, for instance, abhors discussion for this very reason.

Each typological variant has traits unique to it, insofar as some relations resist representation but acquiesce to presentation, or resist presentation but acquiesce to representation, and some cannot be pigeonholed in this way due to a constitutive ambi-valence (ambi = both, multiple; valence = capacity, power).

Badiou gives us a way of thinking about group formation, drawing from Sartre and Lacan:

“Since the being of the subject is the lack-of-being, it is only by dissolving itself into a project that exceeds him that an individual can hope to attain some subjective real. Thenceforth, the ‘we’ constructed in and by this project is the only thing that is truly real…. The individual is thus, in its very essence, the nothing that must be dissolved into a we-subject.”

Badiou, The Century, 100-101.

According to Badiou, a subject is such only insofar as a process of truth authorizes him to say ‘we.’ One can say ‘I’ only so long as one can say ‘we.’ The truth procedure to which the subject attaches and which constitutes the subject presents or represents some real, namely, the real of the we-subjectivity. The party, the state, the faith becomes worth dying for; indeed, it would be an honor. Can we not see in this a valuable insight for thinking about political and religious organizations and the ways in which power is inflected in their operations? Perhaps it is not, as Foucault prophesied, or not only, the law which has taken over the management of decisions over life and death (the quintessential function of biopower); perhaps, instead, the we-subjectivities of representational groups have usurped this responsibility. The legitimacy of saying ‘we’ is guaranteed in the real of the group; after this is secured, after the real has been accessed, the we-subject has a stake in Honor, in upholding the Law of the real, and its very identity is placed in peril in the slightest manifestation of doubt vis-a-vis the veracity of the real of the group; death becomes a way into immortality, a solidification of identity. (It might be possible to move this argument out of the general “ideology critiques” we’re so familiar with. The rudiments of the schema are only taking root.)

This line of inquiry has a history. Micropolitics (Deleuze & Guattari’s word in A Thousand Plateaus) or the politics of collective desire would probably be the correct moniker, though in the framework of the latter thinkers, this name is redundant. We see plenty of precedents in the history of modern thought: Gabriel Tarde’s micro-sociological and -criminological inquiries; Gilbert Simondon’s notion of collective individuation, however underdeveloped; Sartre’s late investigations into the praxis of practical ensembles, in the Critique of Dialectical Reason; Foucault and the microphysics of power; Jacques Donzelot in The Policing of Families, a central micropolitical text; perhaps Bourdieu, Stiegler, and DeLanda today, not to mention Badiou’s lectures here cited and undoubtedly in Logiques des mondes (my French isn’t near strong enough, so I eagerly anticipate the translation). This is a sort of offhand list of resources; I would venture the claim that a micropolitical approach to group-formation and group-activity is not a determinative focus of any of the above figures or works.

I would like to end this rather scattered, allusive, and no doubt disappointing post with a constructive, and revealing, excerpt from Badiou, once again. He writes: “From the end of the seventies onwards, the century has bequeathed to us the following question: What is a ‘we’ that is not subject to the ideal of an ‘I,’ a ‘we’ that does not pretend to be a subject?” (Badiou, The Century, 96.) He concludes this quite central essay, “Anabasis,”:

“[T]oday, everything that is not already mired in corruption raises the question of where a ‘we’ could originate that would not be prey to the ideal of the fusional, quasi-military ‘I’ that dominated the century’s adventure; a ‘we’ that would freely convey its own immanent disparity without thereby dissolving itself. What does ‘we’ mean in times of peace rather than war? How are we to move from the fraternal ‘we’ of the epic [note: where alterity is recognized only as the alterity of the adversary] to the disparate ‘we’ of togetherness [note: in Paul Celan's sense, perhaps closer to an alterity of impossible friendship], of the set, without ever giving up on the demand that there be a ‘we’? I too exist within this question.”

Badiou, The Century, 96-97.

What is a multiplicity?

A fundamental question! Philosophies of the multiple or manifold today abound, as philosophy recovers from its linguistic detour. So much has been said on the idea of the pure multiple, and yet, it seems, what really needs to be said has not been. Far be it from me to enunciate philosophy’s subject; but I think I can put forth some suggestions, if only in clarification.

Deleuze is the first true, systematic thinker of multiplicity in the philosophical / ontological sphere. For Deleuze, everything is multiplicity. Most importantly, however, “multiplicity” usually refers to a virtual Idea or problem, the unextended, creative plenum of ideality folded into the material world as we know it in a banal sense. The notion that “everything is multiplicity,” and especially in the latter sense, is what allows Deleuze to move beyond the structuralism with which he begins. (For Deleuze’s seminal ontological works, Difference & Repetition and The Logic of Sense are undoubtedly attempts to provide ontological orientation to the basic operations of structural anthropology, ethnology, and linguistics; what emerges from this attempt is a theory that supersedes structuralism tout court: “post-structuralism” might be less accurate than “genetic structuralism,” however.) Though the two works just mentioned contain much more rigorous presentations of the idea of multiplicity, it is in Deleuze & Guattari’s What is Philosophy? that we obtain the most basic insights into the nature of multiplicity. One could turn to practically any page in this text and find a slightly different “definition” of multiplicity on each one. Yet there is a constancy of thought as well, as each supplementation or erasure can be assimilated with the claims put forward in Difference & Repetition concerning multiplicities as Ideas, in the discussion that begins with an analysis of Kant (“Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference”). I will quote an excerpt that is all the more revealing in that it comes at the end of Deleuze & Guattari’s brief inquiry into Badiou’s set-theoretical ontology in Being & Event:

By starting from a neutralized base, the set, which indicates any multiplicity whatever, Badiou draws up a line that is single, although it may be very complex, on which functions and concepts will be spaced out, the latter above the former: philosophy thus seems to float in an empty transcendence, as the unconditioned concept that finds the totality of its generic conditions in the functions (science, poetry, politics, and love). Is this not the return, in the guise of the multiple, to an old conception of the higher philosophy? It seems to us that the theory of multiplicities does not support the hypothesis of any multiplicity whatever (even mathematics has had enough of set-theoreticism). There must be at least two multiplicities, two types, from the outset. This is not because dualism is better than unity but because the multiplicity is precisely what happens between the two. Hence, the two types will certainly not be one above the other but rather one beside the other, against the other, face to face, or back to back. Functions and concepts, actual states of affairs and virtual events, are two types of multiplicities that are not distributed on an errant line but related to two vectors that intersect, one according to which states of affairs actualize events and the other according to which events absord (or rather, adsorb) states of affairs.”

-Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 152-153. Emphasis added.

Even the One, they claim at some earlier point in this text, is a multiplicity, having multiple elements which grant it consistency (in this case, being and non-being, themselves multiplicities, and so on ad infinitum). Everything is multiplicity, but are we by that sweeping claim to understand that everything consists of smaller elements, can be broken down into component parts? Is this a new mereology? Not at all. And the reason is deceptively simple. Let us take an analytic approach and follow this thread nevertheless. Take any empirical thing or state of affairs. At the very least, it is constructed of physical components: chemical elements, protons and neutrons, etc. Now strip this physical item of all its properties, down to the single, smallest possible component particle (it does not matter what it is – quark, lepton, something smaller still). It is still a multiplicity by virtue of its relation to other quarks, leptons, whatevers. Let us take another step: strip this particle of all relation to other things. It remains a multiplicity by virtue of its genetic history and its relation to the potentials insisting in it, which are just as real as this physical particle, though non-actual, unextended. Furthermore, as any physicist will tell you, even this (purely academic) minute particle is in a state of flux, and can thereby be said to constitute a field of individuation in itself, which field can only be understood as a multiplicity in becoming (different/ciating into ever more multiplicities).

What is a multiplicity? A field of exterior relations – what I prefer to call proximities.

Deleuze & Guattari point up a competing theory of multiplicities: Badiou’s. A brief detour: Badiou takes Deleuze & Guattari’s criticism seriously, and his more recent writings on Deleuze reflect this more than does his work stamped with the proper name of his critic. The intensive, the entre-deux is appreciated as the “beyond” of the One and the Multiple: “‘[B]eyond’ clearly does not mean a synthesis or a third transcendent term. ‘Beyond’ means in the middle, wherein Being is what activates the essential falsehood of the true and virtualizes the truth of the false through the rhizomatic-network shifter between virtualization and actualization.” (Badiou, “Deleuze’s Vitalist Ontology,” Briefings on Existence, 65.) In short, as Deleuze & Guattari claim, there must be at least two types of multiplicity because there is a third.

Badiou’s idea of multiplicity, the set (which, moreover, refuses definition because to define necessitates a counting procedure, where the parts or elements of a set, pure multiples or sets themselves, can only be thought as what-will-have-been-counted), always comprises the name of the void as minimum of Being, the “point of Being” of any situation. The void or multiple of nothing subtracts itself from any presentation, unpresents itself, and hangs over as remainder, “phantom of inconsistency.” In this way, all sets or multiples are themselves multiples of multiples: even the multiple of nothing is a multiple of multiples insofar as the void “insists” but resists presentation.

What is a multiplicity? Insofar as belonging, inclusion, and subtraction are relations, a field of relations.

Badiou, unlike Deleuze & Guattari, does not suggest that all relations are exterior. Indeed, for Badiou, there are intrinsic relations that, by virtue of this thesis, expose the entire ontological theory of sets as multiples of multiples to the criticism that a dialectic of negation is operative, even if synthesis cannot ever be complete (if only because there is no set of all sets). Subtraction is not negation, to be sure. But the logic of sets is indeed a logic of contraries. After all, the unpresented grounds (abyssally, it is true) the presented and reacts in relation to the presentation of the presented, precisely by a dialectical procedure of unpresentation or subtraction. Subtraction or unpresentation itself escapes the charge of dialecticism, but its relation with presentation is unquestionably dialectical, and this because of its intrinsic predisposition to negate the presented, because it includes within itself its other as itself. The same claims hold a fortiori for the presented, for every presented implies an unpresented and a process of unpresentation.

Comment: Harbingers of the new Art?

Vandal Punches Hole in a Monet in Paris.

Everyone’s seen this by now. What hasn’t been recognized is the potentially quasi-evental nature of this shattering of impressionism’s surface. Is this the social, intercalary or autocatalytic response to impressionism and neo-impressionisms, a bit of feedback from the socius to Art, or perhaps to the bureaucrats and curators of commodity-art? A challenge, no doubt. Or is it merely childish nihilism nevertheless producing unspeakably offensive results?

Natural right, immanent power

I attended a presentation tonight given by the Federalists and which featured a talk by a noted Constitutional law scholar. Throughout his discussion of originalism and formalism as doctrinal forces operating conjunctively (sometimes in tandem, sometimes in tension) in contemporary Supreme Court jurisprudence with respect to questions of criminal procedure, I kept coming back to an observation made by Deleuze in a lecture he gave on Spinoza, Hobbes, and natural right, which goes,

“[W]hat is this history of power, and of defining things by power[?] I say: there was a very important moment, a very important tradition, where it is very difficult, historically, to get one’s bearings, if you don’t have some schemas and reference marks, some points of recognition. It is a history which concerns natural right, and this history concerning natural right, it is necessary that you understand this: today this appears to us at first glance very out of date, as much juridically as politically. The theories of natural right, in the manuals of law, or in the manuals of sociology, we always see a chapter on natural right, and we treat it as a theory which lasted until Rousseau, including Rousseau, up until the 18th century, but today no one is interested in it, in the problem of natural right.”

Deleuze, “Power and Classical Natural Right,” 9/12/1980, 2-3.

And Deleuze goes on to revitalize the question of natural right in political theory, inflected with his distinctive idea of quantitative distribution as power. But what I want to call attention to in quoting this passage is that Deleuze quite rightly locates the end of rights discourse in Rousseau. Chronologically perhaps this is not quite accurate, but this is not what is at issue: Rousseau is the culmination of rights discourse, the pinnacle of the pyramid. Rousseau has some beautiful – “romantic” – writings on the question of fundamental rights and their role in structuring social organizations. What is fascinating for an American in such a state of affairs is that Rousseau has a remarkable presence in the Federalist Papers (tonight someone called these documents “ratification propaganda,” to the chagrin of many in the room) as well as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other utterly central items of national interest. In civil law countries (continental Europe), Rousseau and the discourse of rights are not determining forces, at least not in the same way he and it are here in America. Libertarianism and other conservative ideologies would be impossible without this discourse; and such brands of thought and praxis are trademarked Americana by now. Moreover, if not merely the “end” / culmination of natural rights discourse appears with Rousseau but also its death, from Deleuze’s vantage point, it is evident that a sort of metempsychosis has brought it across the Atlantic and localized it at the very heart of American law and politics.

Natural right theory, or natural law, has as its core maxim the notion that innate and naturally-determined (or, more typically, theistically-determined), “inalienable rights” exist, and marks as the function of such regional sciences as jurisprudence and ethics the defense and upholding of such rights. As naturally-determined, these rights enjoy Universality. There is more to say on this peculiar Universality. But it is enough to note that, like Husserl’s Bedeutungen in the Logical Investigations, Vol. II, Inv. I, § 35, rights are not created, but discovered; they have no genetic history, but rather exist in their own particular ideal realm as analytic unities. Doctrine serves to “translate” these ideal unities into empirical rules.

Such metaphysical (literally onto-theological) obscurities should give us reason to pause. This Thomistic (not Aristotelian!) theory has survived legal realism (despite its transparent status as “transcendental nonsense,” in Felix Cohen’s words, however imprecise from a philosophical standpoint) and critical legal assault. In a sense. Battered and bruised, for sure, but nevertheless still breathing. Isn’t this astonishing?

In a future post, I will take up the question of the genesis of practical ensembles in order to try to account for social phenomena like this. But for now, let me limit my inquiry to the role of natural right theory in American Constitutional jurisprudence, and gesture toward a Deleuzian critique.

Originalism, a critical commentator at tonight’s talk said, is largely absent in all other Constitutional discourses in the world today. It is, in sum, a distinctly American juridical phenomenon. It demonstrates the fondness with which our culture relates to origins, traditions, and so on. Appeal to the original intent of the framers of the Constitution in order to resolve contemporary issues of law – which, of course, no soothsaying framer could have possibly foreseen – is a relatively uncontroversial approach (in Constitutional Law courses, in undergrad as in law school, students are told that “original intent” is one of the five major categories of argument the proponent or opponent of a particular position can make). Originalist arguments are frequently, notably by conservative Justices such as Scalia and an army of lesser federal judges in Circuit Courts, granted what amounts to a default status, as if divining the original intent of the framers automatically resolves the matter at hand. Of course this is reductionistic, but I think it is generally accurate. Critics often complain that originalism has no such claim to default status, that the Constitution is not an inert artifact but a “living document” changing with the social conditions of a particular time, or various other similar arguments of varying degrees of sophistication, all hinging on the notion that the original intent of the framers is more or less irrelevant. In a cultural sense, what is revealed in this phenomenon (and the degree of radicality attributed to the otherwise typical commentators attacking this appeal to historical authority) is the American fetish of the arche.

The Constitutional law scholar presenting tonight formulated a distinction under the proper names “Scalia” and “Breyer” and identified these names with two approaches to Constitutional jurisprudence: archaeological and architectural, respectively. The archeaological or ex post, retrospective approach is fundamentally conservative (in a broad sense) while the architectural or ex ante, prospective approach is fundamentally progressive and pragmatic. The archaeological jurisprudence of Scalia features an emphasis on originalism and formalism and seeks to find the delicate balance between the two notions that will generate “just results,” i.e., clear, bright-line rules in accord with the original intent of the framers. Though the speaker did not suggest as much, the architectural approach of Breyer could just as easily be splintered into a dichotomy featuring an appeal to origins as one part, though no default status is thereby attributed (rather, original intent assists in the decision insofar as it is pragmatically and efficiently possible to allow it to do so). Both of these approaches, then, manifest this fetish of the arche in the properly juridical sphere, indeed, in the highest court in that sphere (for Americans).

Isn’t there some tertium quid, some third way? Some way that does not privilege the arche and which nevertheless attains justice, inasmuch as that is possible? Yes, there is, if we are able to recognize the dividuality, in Deleuzian terms, of the nation-state: original intent (assuming completely arguendo that this is both possible and desirable to divine) loses its status as authority or legitimating ground insofar as the nation has qualitatively changed since the ratification of the Constitution, by way of a redistribution of intensive quanta. Intensive factors such as populations and socio-cultural pluralities and processes of pluralization, the immaterialization of labor, and so forth have operated to constitute a new field of cultural individuation, one that is qualitatively different from that at work in 1787 (or 1819, 1865, 1929, 1945, 2001…).

And this is what allows me to say fetish: such a situation is manifestly symptomatic of a sort of political delirium.

The appeal to origins can be refashioned, Deleuze tells us, as long as we recognize that it is not essence, not “nature” in this sense, that gives “rights” (useless representations, he tells us elsewhere) – no, “natural right” must be understood on the basis of a conception of “essence” as power, as what a body can do, what relations it can enter into and which will work for the heightening of capacity of that body. A Deleuzian natural (immanent, not innate) right (power) theory! It is worth thinking about.