Rough Theory

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have engaged in a sustained collaborative interaction with Sinthome from Larval Subjects for some time. The two blogs are criss-crossed with mutual references, trackbacks, and links – the material traces of the threads of our conversations over the past year. And, even when public discussion has grown momentarily quiet, Sinthome’s questions and comments often lie just beneath the surface of what I write. Hopefully Sinthome won’t object if I reflect on some of those questions and comments in this post – at least as a placeholder for discussion at a later time.

The question that is currently echoing in my thoughts concerns the role of the terms “negation” and “contradiction” in my theoretical work. Sinthome has wondered whether these terms might toss readers into a thoughtspace that sits in tension with some of the other ways that I describe the work of critique. I generally describe critique, for example, as a process of exploring and rendering explicit potentials for practice that have been constituted within a determinate situation, but that contain the potential to react back on that situation itself. Sinthome has suggested that this is not how most readers will hear or understand a theoretical system that deploys terms like “contradiction” or “negation” – that these terms are historically and currently associated with a very different, perhaps more proscriptive, or perhaps more abstract, vision of the work of critique. Do I really need these terms – or are these just layers from an earlier theoretical training, which should be discarded for greater clarity in what I am currently trying to express?

I’ll place my reflections on these questions below the fold. I’m unfortunately still in recovery mode – from a complex term and from some rather intense sleep deprivation during the past couple of weeks – and, while I want to capture my fragmentary thoughts while they are still fresh, I don’t believe that the resultant discussion will be quite ready for prime time. Hopefully I’ll be able to pick up these fragments in a more adequate way some time soon. Read more of this post

Sinthome at Larval Subjects has written a beautiful post on how it might be possible to approach theory as something other than a process of classification or conceptual abstraction – or, to frame the point another way: what might be required for immanent critique.

Sinthome begins by expressing a frustration that I have occasionally also voiced here: noting that “theory” is often equated with the construction of classificatory systems whose categories are extrinsic to whatever the theory then classifies. Sinthome argues that this classificatory approach to theory is intrinsically abstract, in a way that ensures that the theory cannot grasp the determinate properties of any actually existing entities:

Rather than seeing the category as a topological space capable of undergoing infinite variation while maintaining its structural identity, one variation is raised above the rest, becomes transcendent to all the rest, and becomes the measure of all the others. As a result, there emerges a gap between the category and existence.

Later in the post, Sinthome explores the essential arbitrariness of classificatory theory – and the ways in which such theory distracts from the development of concepts that capture immanent dynamics that are generated by, rather than imposed upon, the entities whose dynamics we are seeking to understand:

For instance, we might think of the bustle of people at New York’s Grand Central Station on any given day. This is a population. Here we have people of all types. There are an infinite number of ways we could sort them according to representational modes of thought working with concepts or intensions. We could sort them by gender, by religion, by ethnicity, by economic bracket, by jobs, by destinations, and so on.

However, the problem with all of these sorting strategies is that they remain abstract and exterior to the population itself. This sorting strategy relies on resemblance and analogy, as Deleuze outlines in the passage above. They impose external and foreign criteria on the immanent dynamics of the population.

Sinthome sees a critical potential in immanent theory that its classificatory counterpart does not possess. Citing Bergson and Deleuze, Sinthome advocates the development of a form of theory whose “concepts are identical to the thing itself”. Such an immanent theory, Sinthome suggests, would benefit from thinking of its objects of analysis by analogy to populations, which are, in Sinthome’s conception, historically bounded and materially manifest, heterogeneous and dynamic – and, most of all, existent entities:

A population is something that exists somewhere and at some time. Moreover, a population is populated by a heterogeneous diversity of elements, composed of different tendencies or vectors of movement.

Sinthome suggests appropriating Benjamin’s term constellation to describe the object of analysis of an immanent theory, and argues that only such an immanent approach holds genuinely critical potential, as it is uniquely poised to cast light on contradictory potentials within a constellation:

When we think of constellations, by contrast, we instead examine the immanent processes by which the elements that populate the population sort or group themselves into various patterns and forms of organization. That is, constellation thought seeks to investigate the tendencies that inhabit the population, and how these tendencies more or less inhabit the situation. Some tendencies will be small and fleeting, having little impact on the overall organization of the population in question. Other tendencies will be dominant within the population, seeking to dominate the rest or push the others into a particular form of organization. Occasionally there will be divergent tendencies within a population, creating a breaking point, a critical point, where we can no longer speak of a single population but must instead say the population has split, or where the dominant organization of the population undergoes a qualitative transformation such that it is no longer the same constellation as it was before (for instance, the shift from Feudalism to Capitalism).

It is clear that thinking in terms of populations and constellations is hostile to all “a priorism” of theory and those abstract modes of thought that fail to attend to actually existing conditions, populated by their potentials or tendencies, and their antagonisms. It is also clear that this conceptual deployment raises all sorts of questions about material logistics and strategics, focusing on how very small, almost imperceptible differences that are nearly invisible with respect to the dominant organizing dynamics or tendencies of a situation can be made into large, transformative differences.

Since I’ve omitted a great deal above, and also played around with the order of presentation, readers really should consult the original for a fuller exploration of these concepts. What I’d like to do here – and I can’t stress strongly enough that I won’t have time to do this issue justice – is just sketch some placeholders to capture some of the associations Sinthome’s post provoked for me. Hopefully I’ll have some time once the term has ended to return and pick up a few of these threads.

First – and this will hardly surprise Sinthome, who has referred often to Hegel’s critique of abstract thought – this critique of classificatory approaches to theory, and the move to immanent critique as an alternative, couldn’t help but remind me of Hegel.

In one of my favourite images from Phenomenology, Hegel famously dismisses classificatory theory as:

a synoptic index, like a skeleton with tickets stuck all over it, or like the rows of boxes kept shut and labelled in a grocer’s stall; and is as intelligible as either the one or the other. It has lost hold of the living nature of concrete fact; just as in the former case we have merely dry bones with flesh and blood all gone, and in the latter, there is shut away in those boxes something equally lifeless too. (51)

Hegel then counterposes as an alternative form of theory, a vision of “science” that seeks an immanent perspective on what is being analysed:

Science can become an organic system only by the inherent life of the notion. In science the determinateness, which was taken from the schema and stuck on to existing facts in external fashion, is the self directing inner soul of the concrete content. The movement of what is partly consists in becoming another to itself, and thus developing explicitly into its own immanent content; partly, again, it takes this evolved content, this existence it assumes, back into itself, i.e. makes itself into a moment, and reduces itself to simple determinateness. In the first stage of the process negativity lies in the function of distinguishing and establishing existence; in this latter return into self, negativity consists in the bringing about of determinate simplicity. It is in this way that the content shows its specific characteristic not to be received from something else, and stuck on externally; the content gives itself this determinate characteristic, appoints itself of its own initiative to the rank of a moment and to a place in the whole. The pigeon-holing process of understanding retains for itself the necessity and the notion controlling the content, that which constitutes the concrete element, the actuality and living process of the subject-matter which it labels: or rather, understanding does not retain this for itself, on the contrary, understanding fails to know it. For if it had as much insight as that, it would surely show that it had. It is not even aware of the need for such insight; if it were, it would drop its schematizing process, or at least would no longer be satisfied to know by way of a mere table of contents. A table of contents is all that understanding gives, the content itself it does not furnish at all.

If the specific determination (say even one like magnetism) is one that in itself is concrete or actual, it all the same gets degraded into something lifeless and inert, since it is merely predicated of another existing entity, and not known as an immanent living principle of this existence; nor is there any comprehension of how in this entity its intrinsic and peculiar way of expressing and producing itself takes effect. This, the very kernel of the matter, formal understanding leaves to others to add later on. Instead of making its way into the inherent content of the matter in hand, understanding always takes a survey of the whole, assumes a position above the particular existence about which it is speaking, i.e. it does not see it at all. True scientific knowledge, on the contrary, demands abandonment to the very life of the object, or, which means the same thing, claims to have before it the inner necessity controlling the object, and to express this only. Steeping itself in its object, it forgets to take that general survey, which is merely a turning of knowledge away from the content back into itself. But being sunk into the material in hand, and following the course that such material takes, true knowledge returns back into itself, yet not before the content in its fullness is taken into itself, is reduced to the simplicity of being a determinate characteristic, drops to the level of being one aspect of an existing entity, and passes over into its higher truth. By this process the whole as such, surveying its entire content, itself emerges out of the wealth wherein its process of reflection seemed to be lost. (53)

Hegel’s vision of immanent critique, however, relies on a rejection of the ontological distinction between subject and object (such that immanent knowledge is posited to be possible, because such knowledge involves the recognition of what consciousness has externalised from itself), and then on the notion of a necessary, immanent, developmental logic (such that forms of consciousness that do not express Hegel’s system do not have to be rejected via an appeal to some form of “objective” truth, but can rather be relativised as partial and incomplete forms of consciousness):

The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition between true and false to be fixed, the more is it accustomed to expect either agreement or contradiction with a given philosophical system, and only to see reason for the one or the other in any explanatory statement concerning such a system. It does not conceive the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive evolution of truth; rather, it sees only contradiction in that varietv. The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole. But contradiction as between philosophical systems is not wont to be conceived in this way; on the other hand, the mind perceiving the contradiction does not commonly know how to relieve it or keep it free from its onesidedness, and to recognize in what seems conflicting and inherently antagonistic the presence of mutually necessary moments. (2)

And:

The systematic development of truth in scientific form can alone be the true shape in which truth exists. To help to bring philosophy nearer to the form of science-that goal where it can lay aside the name of love of knowledge and be actual knowledge-that is what I have set before me. The inner necessity that knowledge should be science lies in its very nature; and the adequate and sufficient explanation for this lies simply and solely in the systematic exposition Of philosophy itself. The external necessity, however, so far as this is apprehended in a universal way, and apart from the accident of the personal element and the particular occasioning influences affecting the individual, is the same as the internal: it lies in the form and shape in which the process of time presents the existence of its moments. To show that the time process does raise philosophy to the level of scientific system would, therefore, be the only true justification of the attempts which aim at proving that philosophy must assume this character; because the temporal process would thus bring out and lay bare the necessity of it, nay, more, would at the same time be carrying out that very aim itself. (5)

For Hegel, determinate negation (Sinthome probably thought I was never going to get back to this question…) involves this kind of immanent exposition of how a more adequate concept emerges through a necessary developmental unfolding of the notion. Competing forms of thought are therefore not dismissed abstractly – by arguing that they are “wrong” or result from mere errors of thinking. Instead, they are positioned as necessary moments within a developmental process that has ultimately generated a concept more adequate to its notion – a concept that contradicts competing forms of thought, but that also stands in a necessary relation with them.

The question – and this takes me back to Sinthome’s post, and also to my own appropriation of the concept of determinate negation, which, I must admit, is not terribly Hegelian – is how we conceptualise immanent critique, if we wish to reject, or at least not make an a priori commitment to, the notion of a necessary developmental logic: how can we make sense of the existence of the forms of theory of which we are critical – how can we conceptualise them as something other than mere errors of thinking – while incorporating something like Sinthome’s insight that really existing entities might be best conceptualised as arbitrary configurations. How can we make sense of immanent critique in a context in which we have come to experience our world as aleatory and heterogeneous – to be adequate to the sorts of historical insights expressed in one of Sinthome’s earlier posts:

Just as Parmenides begins from the axiom that being is one and proceeds from there (and is followed in this by much of the philosophical tradition), Badiou asks us to begin from the premise that being is inconsistent multiplicity.

I am happy to follow Badiou in this axiom as I believe it is the central axiom of that episteme characterizing contemporary thought. Whether we are speaking of Heideggerian ontological difference, Derridean differance and dissemination, Deleuzian different/ciation, dynamic systems theory, Foucaultian archaeology and genealogy, or Lyotardian discourse analysis and differends, and so on, the thought of our time begins with the premise that being is difference or multiplicity, or that the one (whether in the form of wholes, substances, or entities) is an effect or result.

I hope I am not overextrapolating to suggest that the concepts Sinthome is unfolding in the current post – of constellations, populations and assemblages – are intended to be adequate to the ontological sensibilities discussed in this quotation. The question for immanent critique then becomes how we have taught ourselves such things about being – or, to translate the question into the vocabulary of Sinthome’s current post, what really existing configuration generates, as part of its process of auto-organisation and sorting phenomena of the world, these particular forms of perception and thought?

The same question applies to those forms of thought Sinthome criticises – although a full expression of this point, I would suggest, would need to alter slightly the terms in which Sinthome formulates this critique. Sinthome argues:

There is an abstract and Platonizing tendency of thought that is difficult to avoid. Whenever faced with a phenomenon we ask the question what is it, and immediately set about trying to find a category, concept, form, or Idea to which the phenomenon belongs. The category or form thus becomes transcendent to the phenomenon in question, such that the category doesn’t function simply as a sortal or descriptor of the phenomenon, but instead becomes a normative measure of the phenomenon, determining the degree to which the phenomenon approaches the Ideal set up by the category.

A bit later, Sinthome underscores the need to reject such forms of abstracting thought, explicitly contrasting it to thought that orients itself to an existing constellation:

Of specific importance to this notion [of the constellation] is its emphasis on the arbitrary nature of the configuration and its status as an assemblage. What a constellation seeks to capture is the organization of a really existing configuration, rather than an abstract thought divorced from really existing configurations. (bold text mine)

Tacitly, this formulation is not completely adequate to the framework Sinthome has outlined, which would require an analysis of the constellations or assemblages that give rise to such abstract thought – and, for that matter, to the alternative form of thought that would be oriented to really existent phenomena. Such analyses, however, are difficult to provide within the confines of a blog post and, in any event, the point of this post was to outline concepts, not to put these concepts into play against any particular concrete example to which they might be applied. My comments here are therefore simply placeholders noting where Sinthome’s concepts would point over time.

What I did want to suggest, though – and I must necessarily be very gestural here – is that it may be worth considering what peculiar characteristics an assemblage might need to possess, for it to generate particular kinds of abstract thought as one aspect of its distinctive forms of self-organisation. This is, as I mentioned in another discussion over at Larval Subjects, what I take Marx to have been attempting in Capital. What is interesting in Marx’s analysis is that he doesn’t interpret the abstract forms of thought he analyses as conceptual – as something that result from generalising or abstracting away from more concrete, really existent, phenomena. Instead, he interprets them as plausible expressions of forms of abstract social practice: Marx’s work, as I understand it, suggests the possibility that abstract forms of thought might express a dimension of social practice that enacts an on-the-ground indifference to the determinate specificity of concrete entities – a dimension of social practice that appears as it is, abstract.

In such a case, perversely, only abstract theoretical categories would be appropriate, as the really existing configuration possesses practically abstract dimensions – it generates what I generally call real abstractions. Of course, in this case, those abstract categories would only themselves be adequately grasped once they were no longer understood – as they tend phenomenologically to present themselves – as conceptual abstractions or generalisations obtained by stripping away the specificities of concrete experience. Instead, certain forms of abstraction would have to be recognised as the historical, material specificity of a particular dimension of concrete practice – a recognition that would entail a form of theoretical work like what Sinthome proposes, which would seek to uncover the way in which a particular form of abstraction was assembled through determinate forms of practice.

To return to Sinthome’s question of what I mean by “determinate negation”: as with most of the categories I appropriate from Hegel, and from the critical theoretic traditions that flow out of his work, I deliberately mean this term in two senses. In a broad sense, I understand a “determinate negation” as a form of critique that doesn’t reject other forms of thought as “mere” errors of thinking, but instead explains why those forms of thought might be plausible – and also why, in spite of that plausibility, those forms of thought should still be rejected. This form of critique is related to the exploration of the nature of a specific context – in the case of my own work, to an exploration of certain very abstract historical patterns generated by our global social assemblage – and to the development of a self-reflexive theory that can point to contradictory tendencies generated by the auto-organisation of that global assemblage, so that the theory can relativise dominant tendencies within this assemblage by pointing to the ongoing generation of other determinate possibilities.

In a narrow sense, however, I also suspect that there is a peculiar form of practical negation that inheres in our global assemblage itself – such that we often (plausibly, but incorrectly) perceive ourselves to be engaging in conceptual abstractions – arriving at concepts by generalising away from the qualitative determinacy of our concrete experiences – when instead these abstractions actually are the qualitative determinacy of one dimension of our concrete experiences. My instinct is that something deeply practical in origin is disguising itself as mere thought – and attracting criticism for being mere thought – such that we symptomatically then seek transformation by trying to penetrate the abstraction, moving to something that looks less abstract, to something that matches our concept of the concrete. Instead, I think we should be doing something more like realising that our distinctive form of abstraction is already concrete – already grounded in a form of practice whose significance we repetitively overlook, as we focus instead on penetrating the abstraction to unveil and overturn forms of practice that are more recognisably “social” or “intersubjective”, and that we tend to conceptualise as more “concrete” or more “real”.

My work is aimed at this real abstraction – at understanding the assemblage that generates it, for I regard it as every bit as aleatory in origin, every bit as contingent, as the definition of assemblage would suggest. I also, though, regard this dimension of social practice as incredibly difficult to see – because it hides in plain sight, easily confused for mere thought, for mere concept, and therefore difficult to point back to the distinctive forms of practice to which it is, in spite of all our impulses to dismiss it as conceptual error, the adequate expression. To unearth these forms of practice, it helps to seize another Hegelian concept – that things appear as they are – and to ask ourselves what things might be, that they appear in such an abstract way. The answer to this question is, in the narrow sense, what I mean by determinate negation.

Updated to add: Sinthome has posted a response continuing this conversation over at Larval Subjects.

While I have been distracted from serious writing, a beautiful cross-blog discussion has broken out, provoked by an unlikely source: Zizek’s ill-conceived review of 300. In many significant respects, this cross-blog discussion shares some concerns with the discussion of apocalypticism from earlier this year – and, once again, I find myself intervening at an extreme tangent that does not directly address the discussion’s explicit concerns. For a sense of what other people are actually talking about, I’d suggest starting with Daniel’s recent post from Antigram, which gathers together a good selection of the most recent set of links en route to its own substantive contribution. In this piece, I’ll pick up on bits and pieces from various contributors without, however, trying to place these in the context of the original discussion.

I’ve been watching with particular interest the contributions of Steve Shaviro at The Pinocchio Theory, who has been unfolding a challenging series of posts revolving around the question of how to conceptualise negation and affirmation. I’d like to explore this series of posts in some detail here – with apologies for the inevitable crudeness with which I’ll no doubt translate Steve’s concerns, and in the hope that he will not mind my appropriation of his work for my own idiosyncratic purposes here. I should note in advance that I will outline Shaviro’s position in greater detail than I “need” for the specific point I’m trying to make in this post – I’ve done this because, time permitting, I hope to return to Steve’s specific vision of “obliqueness”, and his critique of common concepts of negation and affirmation, in a later post and, for economy, wanted to outline the main lines of his argument in one consolidated place. This means, however, that I must ask readers’ forbearance for a certain extravagance of detail below.

Shaviro begins by questioning what he takes to be the form of negation deployed in Zizek’s work, arguing that Zizek appears to understand negation as a kind of mirror opposition or direct reversal of the positions he seeks to criticise. Shaviro argues that this approach remains bound to the very forms of thought it seeks to criticise, caught in a dichotomy that unites it with its object of critique:

There is something drearily reactive about always trying to prove that the opposite of what everyone else thinks is really correct. It’s an elitist gesture of trumpeting one’s own independence from the (alleged) common herd; but at the same time, it reveals a morbid dependence upon, or concern with, the very majority opinions that one pretends to scorn. If all you are doing is inverting common opinion, that is the clearest sign possible that you are utterly dependent upon such common opinion: it motivates and governs your every gesture. That is why you need so badly to negate it. Zizek totally depends upon the well-meaning, right-thinking liberal ideology that he sets out to frustrate and contradict at every turn. His own ideas remain parasitic upon those of the postmodern, multicultural consensus that he claims to upset.

Zizek, unlike the free-market economists and evolutionary theorists, justifies his contrianism in Hegelian terms; he’s performing the negation of the negation, or something like that. But this is exactly Deleuze’s Nietzschean point, that a critique grounded in negation is an utterly impoverished and reactive one. Zizek’s favorite rhetorical formulas all always of the order of: “it might seem that x; but in fact is not the exact opposite of x really the case?” Zizek always fails to imagine the possibility of a thought that would move obliquely to common opinion, rather than merely being its mirror reversal; and that is why I find him, ultimately, to be so limited and reductive.

Shaviro thus suggests that a more fundamental critique would require a move beyond a concept of negation that simply inverts its opposite, and thereby takes up the opposing pole in a dichotomy that leaves negation inextricably bound with what it criticises. Instead, Shaviro points to the potential for a kind of critique that moves obliquely in relation to its object – a concept to which he then returns in the following post.

In this next post, Shaviro aims the concept of an oblique criticism, not just against Zizekian negation, but also against Deleuzian affirmation. Here and in the next post, Shaviro wields Deleuze against Deleuze, arguing that Deleuze in places suggests a problematic image of affirmation as a simple inversion of negation:

Deleuze himself is at his least convincing when, as in the early Nietzsche book, he seeks to expel the negative, converting it to affirmation, via a process that itself seems just as ‘dialectical’ as anything ever dreamed up by the epigones of Hegel (the negative magically turns into the positive, when it goes to the extreme of what it can do, and becomes “active destruction”). Affirmation is at best a merely ethical stance; it doesn’t work either as an aesthetics or as a politics. And at its worst, affirmation is just as hideously and insidiously new-agey happy-faced as k-punk says.

In parallel with his critique of Zizek, Shaviro suggests that this vision of affirmation hugs too close to what it seeks to transform. Once again, Shaviro points to the possibility for oblique criticism – for criticism that would somehow step outside the plane of current social configurations, rather than aligning itself with some specific position on that plane. Shaviro argues that only through such an oblique positioning can critique hope to develop new alternatives – to be a creative force. In the final post in this series, Shaviro then develops this point through a brilliant dissection of the opposing meanings of negation that flow from different readings of Hegel by Deleuze (via Kojeve) and by the Frankfurt School.

Shaviro here makes a quite beautiful argument about the ways in which Hegel’s concept of negation is understood in opposing ways in these two traditions – a move that does not, however, prevent the two traditions from arriving ultimately at a very similar set of critical concepts:

So the Adorno/Marcuse version of negativity is really rather different from the negativity that Deleuze rejects — they come out of very different ways of reading Hegel, and they refer to very different processes. Deleuze rejects the Kojeve/Hegel view of negativity as the proper form of production; but the negativity of Adorno and Marcuse is not a form of production or of labor; to the contrary, it is something that resists the capitalist world’s relentless drive to production. (This role of negativity as resistance corresponds to the Body without Organs in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought: the BwO is their attempt to think non-production or anti-production in an alternative way to that of negativity).

Shaviro next moves to a discussion of the ways in which Zizek combines – inappropriately, in Shaviro’s view – elements from these two very different appropriations of Hegel. Shaviro here points to what he sees as an unresolvable tension between Zizek’s Lacanian metaphysics and his desire for the category of negation to operate as a historical-social-political category:

Now, Zizek’s negative, I think, fuses elements of both of the strains that I have just described. Via Lacan, Zizek goes back to Kojeve’s labor of the negative, which Lacan transforms into the idea that desire equals lack. But Zizek, unlike Lacan, also wants this negative to work socially/historically/politically in the ways that Adorno and Marcuse want it to, as something that disrupts and subverts the facade of “false totality” and “affirmative culture” we are faced with today. Both of these strands come out of Hegel, but do they really fit together?

I am inclined to think that they do not. Because, once you have defined desire as lack, you are committed to a whole metaphysics of (economic) scarcity and (psychological) unfulfillment. These end up being conceived (as they are by Zizek) as bedrock conditions that will exist in any social formation whatsoever; anything that says otherwise is condemned as delusive fantasy, as a denial of the fundamental antagonism of the Real, or a denial of the knot of castration, or what have you.

Now, I tend to be as leery as anyone of utopian thought (at least, insofar as “utopian” means a vision of static perfection, without any sort of tension or difficulty or dissatisfaction — the actual use of the idea of “utopia,” in a theorist like Ernst Bloch, is actually much more complex than this). But I think that Zizek’s militant anti-utopianism goes further than this, and that it makes difficult, or impossible, the very sort of negativity, with its critical and transformative function, that we find in Adorno and Marcuse. This is why — as per the discussions on this blog, and others, over the last week or so, in regard to Zizek’s reading of 300 — the only negativity Zizek can think of in the current political context is a fetishization of “discipline” and “sacrifice” in opposition to the alleged hegemony, in our neoliberal culture, of “hedonistic permissivity [sic]”. For all Marcuse’s criticisms of the pseudo-satisfactions of consumer society, and even for all his advocacy of a dose of straightforward political repression in order to oppose the “repressive tolerance” and “repressive desublimation” of American bourgeois society — for all of this, I cannot imagine Marcuse finding the jouissance that Zizek does in discipline and sacrifice. This is because he has a more sharply honed vision of Hegelian negativity than Zizek does.

From here, Shaviro returns to Deleuze, completing the critique he began in the previous post, and arguing that Deleuze ultimately moves away from conceptualising the critique of negation as a move to affirmation. Shaviro develops this point through a discussion of the relationship between Deleuze’s work and certain Kantian concepts, arguing for a vision of desires as productive – and of lack as a consequence of the counter-production of the society in which desires are invested. Shaviro then unfolds an example of the ways in which such counter-production might unfold in a capitalist context, in a critique again aimed at Zizek’s attempt to conceptualise capitalism in terms of hedonism, which could then be “negated” via the valorisation of discipline:

Capitalism, for instance, creates abundance on an unprecedented scale. But capitalism also needs to produce lack — to deny that very abundance it produces to the very people who produce it — in order to perpetuate itself, since its entire logic (what Deleuze and Guattari call its “axiomatics”) is grounded in the notion of perpetual competition over perpetually scarce resources. That a tiny capitalist class thus gets to appropriate the surplus that is taken away from everyone else is only a sort of side-benefit; it’s what happens when the supreme goal of a society is capital accumulation rather than expenditure or even just pleasure. This is also why consumer society, no matter how vehemently it exhorts us to spend money, or to “enjoy,” is never so fully hedonistic as Zizek seems to think.

It is worth noting here – and this point brings me to my initial interest in writing on this series – how Shaviro ends each post. In the first post, Shaviro leaves us, essentially, with the declaration of an impasse – with the statement that Zizek’s limitations are symptomatic of our current, collective inability to think beyond our present moment:

Zizek’s theories are little more than yet another demonstration, or symptom, of the situation that he himself has pointed to: the fact that, in the current climate, we find it difficult to imagine any alternative to capitalism; that in fact we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Zizek’s thought itself is one more demonstration of our current blockage of imagination.

By the second post, Shaviro has moved beyond this declaration of an impasse, and begun asking how we might move forward – disavowing that he might, individually, know how to break through the impasse, but suggesting that a breakthrough might nevertheless be possible for someone to think:

It’s not that I have any solutions to offer (I am essentially clueless), and a prospective solution will most likely have nothing whatsoever to do with Nietzschean/Deleuzian affirmation. But isn’t there something wrong, and painfully constricted, with Zizek’s fantasy of negativity and terror as the only riposte to Hardt/Negri’s implausible utopianism? Isn’t this a situation where we most need to move obliquely? Isn’t the problem, perhaps, that both negativity and obliqueness strike us as little more than clever advertising slogans? (”obey your thirst”; “think different”). I’m all to aware that we have reached the point where positivity and affirmation are all too comfortably ensconced in the business schools; but negativity (whether in ZIzek’s version, or that of Adorno, or that of the Situationists) is ensconced there also.

So the solution is ?????

By the final post, Shaviro is still asking, but the question has begun to gain some specificity, some determinacy – to point, perhaps, toward a solution of a specific kind. Moreover, Shaviro assumes an active relationship to the problem – even venturing to suggest a starting point for thinking through to a solution:

The remaining question, for me, is this. If we accept, as I think we should, Deleuze’s critique of Hegelian negativity in the forms of desire-as-lack and the Kojevian labor-of-the-negative, to what extent can we still deploy negativity in the Adorno and Marcuse sense? I think that this is possible — which is also to say that the Frankfurt School’s version of Hegel can be reconciled with Kant in a way that Kojeve’s version of Hegel cannot — but the way of doing this is still something that needs to be worked out. (And, though I know that my current tendency to drag Whitehead into everything must be wearying to some people, I can’t help wondering if Whitehead’s logic of relations — which is very different from Hegel’s logic — isn’t a good place to start).

So in the course of a brief space of time, we’ve moved from the declaration of an impasse, to a set of fairly targeted questions about how to move forward, to a fairly clear programmatic outline of some key issues that need to be resolved – and even a proposal for a starting point. The movement of the posts themselves, I would suggest, implies that perhaps we are not so much at an impasse, but at a moment when, tacitly, we can sense that an impasse is verging on breaking down. In this respect, perhaps it isn’t an accident that two of the sprawling cross-blog discussions in recent months – this one, and the earlier discussion of apocalypticism – should both have revolved around the issue of how certain forms of perception and thought might be symptomatic of an impasse and of failure to imagine alternatives to present organisations of social life – perhaps we should ask: have such symptoms become so visible, so irritating, precisely because they are the symptoms of an outgoing configuration – precisely because we have tacitly already sensed the subtle force of an emergent imagination, now seeking articulation?

Suggestions of such articulations are not found solely in the rapidly growing determinacy of Shaviro’s posts, but across the conversation, as discussants from a wide range of perspectives each, in slightly different ways, challenge approaches that adopt a passive stance toward the present context. Joseph Kugelmass thus rejects the concept of radicalism and seeks a politics that moves past “dramatic gestures of alienation”. Daniel from Antigram demands a shift from declarations of values to a focus on material forces. Sinthome from Larval Subjects has been progressively unfolding a powerful series of posts – too numerous to cite or summarise adequately here – sketching the contours of a vibrant materialist theory, and demanding, in relation to the current discussion, that we attend seriously to the question of the impact of the forms of social transformation for which we advocate – a position whose charge reflects a sense that our advocacy could engender real world results:

When I hear calls to give up enjoyment such as they are issuing from Jodi Dean or Zizek, I hear the thesis that somehow social change should consist in rendering our living conditions even more intolerable than they currently are. Why is this a form of social transformation that anyone should desire? To put it in crude and less than trendy-jargonistic terms, if social transformation does not lead to better work and living conditions, better, more equitable, more just, more satisfying, and more meaningful ways of relating to one another, more freedom to pursue our desires and cultivate ourselves, why should these forms of social transformation be desired at all?

I am being very gestural here, and I want to be careful not to overgeneralise from these discussions or overstate their common elements. Nevertheless, I think it may be worthwhile to keep in view the question of what such discussions might mean – to ask why such conversations and debates might be happening now, and what they might generate into the future. Regular readers will know that I have long been fascinated with the issue of whether Minerva’s owl must always fly at dusk – with the problem of whether we can engage in a critique that is not simply backward looking or critical of what we want to abolish – but that also captures and provides us with a forward-looking critical orientation in relation to what we are trying to create. Discussions like this – where the shortcomings of an earlier form of theoretical or political orientation appear to come suddenly and intuitively into view – therefore always pique my interest. They make me think of Marx talking about how we only set ourselves problems we can solve – that problems don’t appear as problems until their solution lurks within our grasp, frustrating us with its non-realisation – or about Benjamin arguing that we only envy what we could, potentially, have possessed. Is it possible that recent expressions of frustration with our collective lack of imagination, with our inability to conceptualise alternatives, themselves already attest to certain imagined alternatives just beginning to find articulation?

If so, then it may be important to pay particularly close attention to the sorts of alternatives and starting points that are being articulated in discussions such as this – not simply in the blogosphere, of course, but in more mainstream forms of discussion as well. The temptation in moments of transition is be backward looking – to direct our fresh insights and sensibilities at those forms of thought or practice that we want to reject: we often experience ourselves to be in direct conflict with the targets of our critique, because they seem to be (and often are) constraining the realisation of whatever we are trying to bring into being. And such conflicts can be important. But – and here I think Shaviro’s notion of obliqueness offers a crucially important concept – such conflicts, fought solely on the plane of what we are seeking to abolish, can also distract us from whatever it is that we are in the process of creating. It is often simply easier to criticise the shortcomings of a moment we are leaving behind, than to grasp the contours of the moment we are in the process of generating. Both, however, can be important to the realisation of emancipatory goals.

One question central to my own work is whether and how it might become possible to be self-reflexive in our critiques – to adopt a critical stance toward what is emergent, as well as toward what we want to change. My instinct is that a first step in this self-reflexive process is to take seriously our own criticisms as generative dimensions of our context – to recognise that, by offering a critique or expressing frustration with existing forms of thought and practice, we are already suggesting that a break with those forms of thought and practice has been made, and then to set about investigating the nature of that rupture. The question is then whether we can tease out the implications of such a notion of self-reflexivity well enough that, to speak fancifully, it becomes possible to launch Minerva’s owl into the dawn of whatever we are now creating, or whether the owl of Minerva flies always and only at dusk.

But it’s well past dusk here – and I don’t want still to be writing this post when dawn rolls around. I’ll leave things here for now, and hopefully find the time later in the week to pick up on some of the other important dimensions of Shaviro’s posts.