Tag Archives: Marxism

Marx’s Philosophical Context

 The short essay that follows is due to appear in the Bloomsbury Companion to Marx in 2018.

            There are four things one needs to know about Marx’s relationship to his immediate philosophical context.

1. In Germany in the 1840s, many people thought of philosophy as an intrinsically revolutionary endeavor. It is, of course, easy to derive revolutionary stances from even the most conventional philosophical starting-points. Philosophy begins by asking the student provisionally to set aside all of her uninspected beliefs, everything she has taken on trust, everything she thinks she knows just because she heard it from her parents or the priest or the neighborhood. The young philosopher who prorogues her views in this fashion may not be promising never to believe anything again, but she is pledging to re-admit only those beliefs she can rigorously justify. And really, how many of her old and merely habitual opinions does she expect will survive such a strictness? Philosophy for her is likely to be a remaking, a putting-out-of-play of all rival sources of belief—religious authority, the creedal bylaws of this or that institution, culture. If generalized across a population, philosophy would amount to the destruction of these latter. This point would hold for most philosophies, but to that classically heterodox profile, philosophers in the two generations before Marx added what we might call the German Idea—the idea, namely, that the mind is active and creative (and not just a screen or empty box). Other positions follow on from there: If the mind is creative and likely to insist on its creativity, it can never stand pat with what it has already created. The mind creates something, fashioning an argument or engineering an object for the building, but immediately turns against these achievements, against its own positions and designs, which it must henceforth regard as obstacles to further creation. The inherently active mind is always moving past what already exists. At any point in time, many people will be beyond, experiencing available social forms mostly as constriction, for which the mind without prompting will begin to devise alternatives, exercising its transformative freedom until such day as the mind’s freedom itself becomes the stuff of social life. The only institutions that the active mind would not feel compelled to move beyond would be ones that themselves affirmed and cultivated the mind’s activity—institutions, that is, that took the creative mind to be their very point. The German Idea thus issues in a distinctive political goal, a demand for institutions that we have made, that we know we have made, and that we are capable of remaking ongoingly. The notion was once widespread that the French Revolution had been a uniquely philosophical event, but that notion is just the start of it. Nor is it enough to remark that Kant, Fichte, and Hegel had all supported the revolution, though this is true. The point is, rather, that by the time Marx started writing in the early 1840s, the younger philosophers most associated with the German Idea, thinkers ten or fifteen years older than him, had fashioned the doctrine of the active and creative mind into an openly anti-clerical and neo-Jacobin position. Philosophy could convincingly pose as the revolution re-done in thought.

2. Marx, who held a PhD in philosophy and who for a time foresaw a career for himself teaching philosophy in Bonn, arrived at many of his core positions by adapting arguments made by older philosophers in the radical cohort. The critique of political economy began as the philosophical critique of religion. Anyone can tell you that their job sucks or that most people are unhappy at work. When Marx first writes about the economy, he immediately makes claims quite a bit more extravagant than these. Chief among them is the idea that in capitalist societies, people relate to capital in the same distorted way that church-goers relate to God. There are three related claims that a radical critic of monotheism might make in this regard:

a) Humans invented God (and HaShem and the Almighty). God has always been a human creation.

b) Having invented God, humans then assigned to Him their own powers of creation. Some devout people act as though they lacked the powers to make and sustain the world, and yet when people worship God, they are actually worshiping their own capacities for thoughtful activity, reverencing the thinking human aggregate—what the Germans call Geist, which translates as both Mind and Spirit (and sometimes as Ghost—Germans talk about the Father, Son, and Holy Geist). There does indeed exist a supremely powerful force in the world, capable of marvels, a force both unseen and in a sense everywhere. It is not wrong to think that there exists an omnipresent spirit. But that force (spirit, Geist, mind) is just thought. Thought spans the world. When Christians go to church, then, they are worshipping thought as though it were something outside of them, a separate entity, and not their own innermost being and accomplishment.

c) Having projected thought onto a non-human and invented entity, humans then subordinate themselves to it. Endowing their own creation with a specious authority, they take themselves to be lesser than it.

Such is the core of the Hegelian account of alienation. What we’ll want to see now is that all three of these points carry over to Marx’s critique of capitalism.

a) People make capital. Everything that counts as capital is a human creation. This is true in at least two different senses. The institutions of capitalism are not inevitable or permanent or a geologically enduring feature of the natural landscape. People have built the institutions of capitalism: stock markets and commodity exchanges, the banking system, the factory system. They’ve invented double-entry bookkeeping. Workers also construct everything that counts as capital in the present. For a start, they make what economists call capital goods—the tangible items that get used in the production of goods and services. They make the machines (that the capitalist owns); they build the buildings (that the capitalist owns); they gather and do the initial processing on the not-really raw materials (that the capitalist buys and temporarily owns). And they obviously make the commodities that the capitalist owns—the finished goods waiting for sale that represent his investment at a certain stage in the economic cycle, although at any given moment not all capital will be invested in capital goods or sitting un-liquidly in a warehouse. One of Marx’s more searching points is that the wealth that is housed in financial assets (stocks, bonds, interest-bearing bank accounts) can also be traced back to work that someone had to do somewhere at some point—mostly someone other than the owner of that asset.

b) Having created capital, people then assign to it the powers of creation. This is true in several senses at once. People think that capital is productive—or that capital sets the entire economy in motion. Or: People think that the machines “are doing the work.” Or: People think that capital is “money making money”—or “putting money to work.” For Marx, these are all mystifications. Capital can’t produce anything. It certainly cannot “make money”—workers somewhere have to be creating something, have to be taking the stuff of the world and making it better, more useful, more conducive to human need and desire. Nor does money work. Only workers work. And yet, from a certain perspective, from a certain position within the social system, it can indeed look like my money is “making money,” magically, without anyone having had to work, though I can think this only because the person working wasn’t me. People in capitalist societies assign to capital the powers of creation that in fact belong to work alone.

c) Once the creative powers of work get misassigned to capital, actual workers are made subordinate to it. A created thing that lacks the powers to create is taken to be the all-creative thing and so allowed to lord it over the real creators.

What stands out from the perspective of 1844 is that this last sentence could serve equally well for the radical critique of God and the Marxist critique of capitalism. At this point, it becomes possible to adapt to the spheres of production and distribution the politics of the German Idea: We demand an economy that we have made, that we know we have made, and that we are capable of remaking ongoingly.

3. Even as Marx adapts the positions of his philosophical friends and mentors, he cautions against the perils of philosophy itself. Philosophy turns out to be one more thing, like capitalism and the state, that the self-organizing working class is going to have to overcome. In the later sections of The Holy Family, when Marx decides to show off his philosophical education, he takes it upon himself to correct the Left Idealist account of eighteenth-century intellectual history, offering to counter the attacks mounted by some radical intellectuals on the “materialism” of the “French Enlightenment.” It is a telling moment. Marx does not call himself a “materialist” nearly as often as the subsequent history of Marxism would lead one to think. The Holy Family thus yields some valuable references for anyone who wants to show not only that Marx was a materialist, but that he regarded himself as such. One of the great surprises of that book, then, is that it is in these very paragraphs that Marx most clearly aligns himself, not with materialism as conventionally understood, but with a classical, anti-philosophical skepticism. This has some far-reaching consequences: He says first that the “materialism” he is promoting is not an ontology in its own right, though he recognizes that there is no single materialism, only miscellaneous and rival ontologies that are made to share that name. Rather than add to the list of contending materialisms, Marx would like to convince his readers to stop caring about ontology, to stop getting bogged down in ontological argument. “Materialism,” he says, is not a system, but a mode of attention, a giving-of-priority to the present and the onrushing future—a theory of practice, one might add on Marx’s behalf, ergo a bracketing of the metaphysics. On the basis of this passage alone, it would be advisable to substitute the word “pragmatism” every time Marx writes the word “materialism,” which silent amendment would head off one persistent misreading of Marx and return our attention to activity, which is where he wants it.  Skepticism or even something rather like Pyrrhonism enters the argument when Marx writes that the person who taught eighteenth-century thinkers how to exit metaphysics was Pierre Bayle, the exiled French Huguenot who, from his perch in Rotterdam in the 1690s, systematically exposed the folly and error of one thinker after another, doggedly taking on the already established mainstays of the late seventeenth-century philosophical scene (Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibniz), and then roasting, one by one, the European scene’s trending intellectual novelties (Newtonianism, Lockeanism). Marx’s way of praising Ludwig Feuerbach is to say that he is a second Bayle—Bayle, whose “weapon was skepticism.”

Another consequence, then: That Marx enrolls himself among the anti-philosophers is, among other things, a heavy blow to the Red Spinozists. He says more than once in The Holy Family: Not Spinoza! The monist ends up first on a list of thinkers from whom we should disassociate the “materialism” he is sticking up for. And then he says that Bayle “refuted chiefly Spinoza and Leibniz”—the implication being that we should follow Bayle and not these others. Anyone rejecting philosophy in some comprehensive way would, of course, at the same time be rejecting Hegel, who is typically thought of as the other candidate vying for Marx’s metaphysical allegiance. The point, then, would be that the entire Hegel vs. Spinoza debate, so recurrent a feature of Marxist philosophy, is misguided, because Marx openly points to a third contender. This, then, is the Marx who argues that communism is not a philosophy, that it does not trade in “ideas and principles”; that communism will not presume to “shape or mould” the thinking of the working classes; that communists will not be teachers; that philosophers always ask the wrong questions because they have inserted themselves into the world in the wrong way.

4. Marx borrowed the attack on philosophy from other thinkers in the radical philosophical scene, indeed, from the very thinkers against whom he wields his skepticism most bitingly. Skepticism was not only an alternative to Hegelianism, but also one of its more distinctive products. Marx got into a race with other Hegelians to see who could exit philosophy the fastest. There is a small difficulty here. When Marx was in his 20s, Hegelian philosophy produced not one but two competing anti-philosophies—opposing programs for talking people out of making philosophical arguments. The German Idea holds that the mind is active and creative. What’s at issue is whether you think that philosophers, just by virtue of practicing philosophy, are liable to overstate or understate that creativity. We can consider each possibility in turn. In the 1840s, that first position—the one that holds that philosophers are likely to exaggerate the powers of thought—was associated with the name Feuerbach. Hegel had already demanded that we naturalize God—that we recognize all claims about God to be claims about Geist, itself to be understood in naturalized and this-worldly terms (which is one good reason to translate Geist as mind rather than as spirit). Hegel had also emphasized what he called realization: Concepts are only worth positing to the extent that they can also be made real. It is one thing to argue, in the spirit of philosophical anthropology or during the last week of an existentialism seminar, that human beings are necessarily and always free. It is another thing to build the institutions that will house that freedom—actualize it, extend it, make it practicable. Hegel, in other words, had already initiated the critique of mere thought, asking his readers to shift their attention from skull-trapped ideation to thought-in-practice.

Feuerbach contends that Hegel’s emphasis on the Infinite or Unbounded is unlikely to survive this translation. Human beings are the bearers of mind, and to emphasize their mindedness is to call attention to their freedom, the fact that they can, for reasons of their own, fashion the world in an infinitely extendable list of different ways. But human beings are not only mind, and this means that the beings who incarnate unbounded mind are also limited and that our theory of creation-without-limit is going to have to be accompanied by an account of need and dependency. Hegelianism does, in fact, tend to produce theories of the God-man, in which a self-exalting humanity promotes itself to the position of Creator. Feuerbach argues in response that this putatively divine and all-making humanity is in fact rather encumbered—that its members are often hungry or vulnerable or aroused, and that they can only think and create from amidst these constraints. The philosophers’ error is to underscore at every turn the achievements of thought while saying almost nothing about my need to eat every five or six hours. Philosophy, then, is best grasped as the specious transfiguration of thinking activity, as the abstraction of thought from out of its mundane and bodily circumstance. One exercise facing the student of philosophy would be, via acts of speculative reconstruction, to restore to abstract thought its origins in practice, to make any canonical philosophical doctrine legible as a way of being in the world. That done, the next assignment would be to go ahead and dispense with philosophy, to quit asking philosophical questions, to avoid framing the problems that arise in one’s life as philosophical puzzles, and to cultivate instead a militant orientation to the stuff of this world, a non-philosophical will to concretion.

The second skepticism, meanwhile, is a forthright adaptation of the German Idea’s great political demand—the demand, that is, for institutions that we have made, that we know ourselves to have made, and that we are capable of remaking ongoingly. The Hegelian, of course, is determined to utter this formulation not only about institutions in general, but severally about each particular thing. We demand a state / a legal system / a language / an x that we have made, that we know &c. Repetition of that kind comes easy, but the slogan is at its most challenging when it turns reflexive, plugging thought into x’s open slot, and so subjecting Geist itself to the politics of Geist: We demand a philosophy that we have made, that we &c. No sooner is this demand spoken than it will generate a misgiving, since I am likely to regard the concepts at the center of my philosophy as true or right—as discovered and not as made. The ideas that I take to be guiding my political conduct are thus rather like the Christian God and will need to be demystified in turn. We create the idea of equality (or freedom or solidarity or the commonwealth or Geist), treat it as uncreated and not of us, and then subordinate ourselves to it. The doctrine of the active, creative mind, followed consequently to its conclusion, turns on itself as thought’s last uncreated term.

Knowing about these conflicting anti-philosophies should make it possible to specify one of Marx’s more important innovations. His trick is to deploy these two skeptical positions against each other, identifying the moment of dogmatism in each and then countering it with arguments drawn from the other. To the ultra-idealist creed of the mind’s endless invention, he counterposes a doctrine of need and material constraint as chastened as any Catholic conservatism. I do not liberate myself by thinking myself liberated. But to any philosophical account of such constraints he responds by restating the precepts of geistliche creativity: Our dependencies are themselves created, and so, too, is any account of human nature that claims to comprehend human constraint once and for all.  There is no human endowment whose historical variations we can safely ignore or whose persistence we can confidently predict. Marxism comes into being not as a philosophical system and not as a new science, but as an ensemble of coordinated and mutually contemptuous skepticisms—as philosophy abandoned … and then re-abandoned for good measure.

 

Against Joy, Part 3

Deleuze Lamennais 4-A
PART ONE IS HERE
PART TWO IS HERE

 

But as ever in such matters, a philosophy, once disavowed, leaves only its worst features behind, its intellectual sludge. Let us take the tally of two important passages from Empire, just to see what they yield. First, there is a passage early in Empire where Hardt and Negri take up a salutary distance from Marx and an old-fashioned Marxist stagism. In particular, they want to do away with any Marxist defense of imperialism, as in: It’s a good thing after all that the British are colonizing India, because colonialism, brutal though it may be, is rooting out Oriental despotism and thus establishing the preconditions for communism. Second, there is the following oddly discursive exclamation: “How hollow the rhetoric of the [early U.S.] Federalists would have been and how inadequate their own ‘new political science’ had they not presupposed [the] vast and mobile threshold of the frontier!” Hardt and Negri, it is important to understand, are sticking up for the idea of the frontier. This sentence comes as part of a long description of the first phase of American constitutionalism, from the Revolution to the Civil War, the Jeffersonian moment, the collective self-making of a frontier society, and the thread that runs through these pages is that whatever has been best about the American experiment depends on the frontier. It is what lends early American politics credibility. Hardt and Negri celebrate the young United States because it was “constantly open to new lines of flight.”

It is necessary, I think, to read these two passages together because in concert they will seem strange and symptomatic where individually each might get overlooked. Hardt and Negri accuse Marx of a certain Eurocentrism and then go off and emulate the master on just this unfortunate point, in precisely the same form. What does it mean to celebrate the frontier? Hardt and Negri make much of the unbounded and open territory of North America:

From the perspective of the new United States, the obstacles to human development are posed by nature, not history—and nature does not present insuperable antagonisms or fixed social relationships. It is a terrain to transform and traverse.

Here, then, is the Marxist defense of colonization, preemptively recanted but unscathed for all that. Need it even be pointed out any longer that the notion of the American continent as “nature,” a wilderness without history, is little more than a murderous cliché, a mental smallpox? Hardt and Negri are claiming that it was the business of colonialism to bring the multitude to the Americas, to unleash its creative potentials in a way that housebound Europeans—but also Indians—could not; “to transform and traverse” nature, where tribal society had merely made an accommodation with it. There’s more in this vein:

The frontier is a frontier of liberty. … Across the great open spaces the constituent tendency wins out over the constitutional decree, the tendency of the immanence of the principle over regulative reflection, and the initiative of the multitude over the centralization of power.

It is the notion of “great open spaces” that is hard to read past. Hardt and Negri turn on its head one of the commonplaces of Marxist history-writing by preferring the American Revolution to the French, holding it out as the Left’s proper spur and model. The problem is that their entire account of the United States depends on this notion of open space, which they sometimes hedge—“empty (or emptied)”—but which they usually just repeat. It has to be said: The notion of “open space” is simply a lie, and I’m not sure what we gain from treating it any differently. Or rather, I think I know what we gain, but the gain itself is disheartening. What we gain is the Deleuzian world of the multitude, the smooth, open world of flows and unconstricted movement. But then what Hardt and Negri are secretly conceding in those parentheses is that the world is never smooth; it must be made smooth. The world is not open, it must be opened, which is to say evacuated. This is where their covert Hegelianism does its scariest work. What Deleuze tends to describe as though it were an ontological guarantee is actually the outcome of contingent and lethal historical processes—or maybe Hardt and Negri would say that they are not contingent, but then they really have written a Philosophy of History. The multitude—and not just empire (or Empire)—has mass death as its historical precondition. In order for Hardt and Negri’s philosophical argument to be true—in order for it to come true in the really-existing world—Indian removal has to happen first.

One might say in Hardt and Negri’s defense that they don’t shrug off mass death; they point right to it. The indigenous, they note, “existed outside the Constitution as its negative foundation”; republicanism in practice was actually pretty bruising. But then, of course, Marx makes the same concession for India. The problem is that they don’t let this admission exert any pressure on the lines of their argument. They include a few sentences on the American holocaust as though merely mentioning demonstrated due historical diligence and then go on to write sentences that seem predicated on its not having happened after all. If you want to face up to the history of colonization, however, you have at least two options: You might say, as Hardt and Negri’s scheme seems to require, that the Indians were the necessary victims of a Hegelian world history of the multitude, which began its highest stage in the Americas, where the (European) multitude-in-itself became the multitude-for-itself, the self-producing subject/object of history. Even Lukács would blush.

Alternately, you can get used to the idea that the material history of the extermination unmasks American republicanism as self-deceiving. Hardt and Negri’s embrace of the Machiavellian or Jeffersonian republican is their philosophy’s weakest strut, depending as it does on an utterly untenable antithesis between republicanism and sovereignty. Hardt and Negri have a lot riding on classical republicanism, the republicanism of Florence and the revolutionary Atlantic; it is supposed to provide autonomia with the dignity of historical precedence, which is also to say that it is supposed to wean today’s social-democratic Left of its fatal attachment to the state.  But this republicanism was itself never anything less than imperialist, a republicanism of dispossession and the plantation. Early English republicanism was a species of political economy. Its most distinctive feature was a theory of agrarian virtue, which argued that a flourishing polity would draw on the capacities of all its citizens. In order for those capacities to remain intact, however, citizens would have to cling to their autonomy, to steer clear of the corrupting ties of commercial and political dependence. And if citizens were to remain autonomous, each would need a plot of land to cultivate; crops and livestock would be the guarantee of economic and thus political independence. This means that republicanism thought of itself from the very beginning as expansive, as requiring ever more land to produce ever greater numbers of virtuous citizens, and when we consult the history books on this score, we find many different versions of the republican land-grab: we find England’s seventeenth-century radicals taking refuge from Cromwell in Ireland, where they dreamt of expropriating the natives; we find England’s revolutionary government engineering a dreadful new organization of labor around the entire Atlantic basin; we find both Machiavelli and Harrington calling for free and democratic republics to conquer other nations. Nothing is easier to undo than the distinction between republic and empire. It is a gross simplification to chalk the entire history of political crime up to Hobbes.

So what does gay science want from you? Among other things, it wants you not to be an Indian. It wants you, in fact, to stop talking about Indians. We can turn, at this point, to a defense of Nietzsche that Michael Hardt wrote some years before Empire. The continuing importance of Nietzsche, he offers, is that he is not Hegel. Nietzsche points the way out of the dialectic, to a non-dialectical form of negation, “an absolutely destructive negation that spares nothing from its force and recuperates nothing from its enemy; it must be an absolute aggression that offers no pardons, takes no prisoners, pillages no goods; it must mark the death of the enemy, with no resurrection.” It is hard to know how to respond to the exterminationist fantasy set loose in these lines, except to point out that this, too, is gay science: Nietzsche is to be preferred to Hegel because he is Hiroshima. The only passage in the pages of Deleuzian Marxism more dumbfounding than this is Eugene Holland’s defense of the enclosure movement—the centuries-long expropriation and immiseration of Europe’s peasantry—as deterritorialization, as the peasantry’s liberation, in other words, a kind of historical free jazz improvised on the bodies of the poor. Hardt and Negri, in turn, offer a defense of the poor that is at once Deleuzian and Franciscan, and it is one of their loveliest passages: “The poor itself is power. There is World Poverty, but there is above all World Possibility, and only the poor are capable of this. … The dominant stream of the Marxist tradition, however, has always hated the poor, precisely for their being ‘free as birds’”—in context, this key Marxist epithet takes on overtones of Francesco preaching to the sparrows. But even this splendid argument has as it grim corollary the insinuated case that only the destitute can be properly militant, that anyone with any patch of land, no matter how meager, is to be written off as a kulak, still waiting for the deterritorialization that will set him free. In Multitude, their follow-up to Empire, Hardt and Negri spell it out: “The figure of the peasant may pose the greatest challenge for the concept of the multitude.” The dissolution of peasant societies, the converging of all life on advanced capitalist forms of production, “is one condition that makes possible the existence of the multitude.” Peasants die so that the multitude may live.

There are weighty philosophical matters at issue here. One of the stock charges filed against Hegel is that he functionalizes negation; that is, he sees all negativity as having functions—philosophically, for a start, but also historically—in a manner that justifies all mass-killing as progress, redescribes every invasion as an encounter and every conquest as a fusion. Negation becomes the path through history. The alternative to such high-minded apologetics might seem to be a Deleuzian or Nietzschean philosophy without negativity. But it turns out to be remarkably hard, at this level, to tell the difference between the Hegelian approach and the Nietzschean. Consider Book IV of the Gay Science, which contains some of the most Deleuzian, yea-saying passages that Nietzsche ever wrote. It is in these pages that Nietzsche raises the bar on the notion of a philosophy without negativity. I will have to learn, Nietzsche writes, to make do without critique of any kind. I do not want to accuse; I will not even accuse the accusers; I will so distance myself from ressentiment that not even ressentiment will vex me. Then, scattered about the next two books, we find a whole series of passages in which Nietzsche goes out of his way to praise all those things we normally think of him as seething against: Religion is a dynamic force in history; it serves life. Morality is a dynamic and creative force in history; it, too, serves life. These passages are all offered as lessons in what it means not to accuse the accusers. And then at 307, Nietzsche makes a crucial argument: Negativity itself is not negative; it is creative and life-serving. Nietzsche has lain bare the very mechanism by which negativity gets functionalized. Anti-Hegelianism, as the negation of the negation, becomes indistinguishable from its antithesis, just as Hegelianism is easily understood as a Deleuzian philosophy without negativity, if Hegel’s point is that negation (contradiction or the limit) always yields some new, positive term. Everything is positive: Massacres are positive, subjugation is positive. “We do not intend here to weep over the destruction and expropriation that capitalism continually operates across the world…”

It is, finally, one of the strangest features of Hardt and Negri’s writing that an argument whose historical horizon is largely medieval should at the same time be so progressivist, calling for “new barbarians” on one page and glossing over the near-extermination of Native America on the next. Hardt and Negri may be the new Goths, but they are also the new Whigs—odd, no doubt, but there is all manner of precedent for this unlikely combination. In its earliest seventeenth- and eighteenth-century formulations, radical Whig ideology was medievalizing through and through. The notion here was that the ancient Saxons had practiced a rough and spontaneous republicanism, which had been terminated only by the Norman Conquest and the imposition of French tyrannies—monarchy, aristocracy, sovereignty. The original program of Whig radicalism, then, was directed at the progressive recovery of the primal liberties of Mercia and Wessex. England was to be at last decolonized, made Gothic again—you might think of this as an English-republican version of primitive (African or Latin American) communism and you wouldn’t be far off the mark. Hardt and Negri’s medievalist fantasies are actually of a piece with their conspicuous attachment to early modern political theory, which entertained medievalist fantasies of its own. This attachment is so pronounced, in fact, that Hardt and Negri sometimes seem to think of the present as part of some very long seventeenth century: In order to make sense of the present, they instruct us in Multitude, we will need to understand Hobbes, the English Interregnum, the enclosure movement, the battle between absolutism and aristocracy, the Baroque, and curiosity cabinets. But then what is the upshot of this seventeenth-century short course? For this we can look to Negri, who is fond of a formulation that he has borrowed from the following century’s Edmund Burke. Again and again, Negri praises the early North American colonists as “English Tartars,” praises their “Tartar sense of freedom.” The still Deleuzian claim here is that it is the English colonists who were the continent’s real nomads, its real tribesmen or better Indians, its glorious, rampaging savages. One is permitted to wonder whether any of this is much of an advance for a communism—to unseat Lenin only to put Leatherstocking in his place.

One important question remains: Does a Deleuzian politics bear some exceptional animus towards peasants and indigenous peoples? Does the multitude become universal only when these two classes are no longer around to exclude? Or is there some broader process by which the multitude can expel various groups, and not just Burundian subsistence farmers and the Hopi, from its not-so-general assembly? It’s hard to say. The important thing to know about Commonwealth, the third volume in Hardt and Negri’s trilogy, is that it is largely an exercise in auto-critique, full of qualifications and concessions and takebacks—full of claims, I mean, that we don’t much associate with Hardt and Negri: that the Left needs to stop talking so much about sovereignty and to start thinking about capitalism again; that vitalism is a politically ambiguous ontology booby-trapped with openings to authoritarianism; that often it will not be enough to flee the scene of one’s oppression, that sometimes one will have to fight. It is in this spirit of revision that Hardt and Negri undertake in Commonwealth to clear some space in the multitude for native people after all, sticking up, via Mariátegui, for the indigenous commons and the figure of the emancipated Indian, provided, however, that an Andean communism is not understood as authentically precolonial but appears instead as resistance to colonization, hence as an act of self-modernization. They even call out “liberal oligarchies throughout Latin America” for “mobilizing a … ‘race-blind’ ideology, attempting to Hispanicize the indigenous population with the goal of eradicating the ‘Indian’—through education, intermarriage, and migration.” The problem even here, though, is that Hardt and Negri have already in the same volume said that they also favor indigenous people when they have been in large part de-indigenized, and this predilection will now squat incoherently alongside their attack on neoliberalism. The Oneida and the Spokane are always going to have a hard time joining the multitude, for the simple reason that I can name them as such; those names—rival identifications, really, and imperfectly transferable to regions outside the eastern Great Lakes or inland Washington—will retard the entry of the indigenous into the universal non-class. Preferable, then, are “mestizas/mestizos, Black Indians, ‘half-breeds,’ Indians excluded from their tribes and other hybrid figures, constantly moving across borders through the desert.” The issue isn’t just that this list is the American Southwest transparently re-described as Glissant’s Caribbean. The issue is that even on the evidence of Hardt and Negri’s own rhetoric the program of the multitude coincides with the neoliberalism that it claims to oppose: Neoliberals should be chided for encouraging Indians to intermarry, but the multitude deserves praise for preferring breeds to bloods. Latin American elites harry indigenous populations by forcing them to migrate, but an ontology of becoming requires its Indians to be in perpetual motion anyway. What on one page Hardt and Negri call “becoming-multitude” they before long rename “eradication.”

So a Deleuzian Marxism has special problems comprehending native people. Even its most direct overtures to the indigenous end up misdelivered. But then it’s not clear whether any of us, native or otherwise, were ever going to make it into the multitude anyway, whatever its putative universalism. This is the issue that anyone who refuses to talk about Deleuze’s Hegelianism will be unable to face squarely. But then Deleuze’s debt to Hegel is so naked that it should be difficult not to talk about: Nothing is more central to Deleuze’s thinking than the idea that philosophy is a project of de-reification. To the philosopher’s gaze, “the actual object dissolves.” Metaphysics should help us discern the processes that “reconvert object into subject,” and it is important not to read this last word—“subject”—as meaning “the human,” since any such dereifying process “has only the virtual as its subject.” Ontology, then, will direct our attention towards the virtual as cosmic Master Subject; I might recommend that we go ahead and call this cosmic subject Geist, but then it turns out Deleuze already has, in the second Cinema book: “Subjectivity is never ours, it is time’s, that is, soul, spirit, the virtual.” If we follow the route of philosophy and learn to think from the position of this more-than-human spirit-subject—from what Deleuze calls the position of the “the virtual Whole”—then we will undergo the “becoming-God of the human, a becoming infinite of the finite.” This particular becoming is what Deleuze and Guattari call their “eschatology,” “the apocalypse,” la fin. To help history achieve its proper endpoint, one will have to assist in the world’s derealization; philosophically educated people, in other words, will have to become “the manservants of the abstract”—will have to develop a “passion for abstraction.” That so many readers have nonetheless declared Deleuze and Guattari  materialists goes back, I think, to a nifty rhetorical trick, whereby they seem again and again to affirm the materiality of the worldly terms that they actually mean to liquidate, simply be retaining the corporeal names for such terms even in their liquidated form, such that the negated body becomes “the body without organs,” negated space becomes “perfectly smooth space,” and so on. Of course, Deleuze and Guattari don’t think of such liquidated terms as in any sense outside of the world, but what we’ll want to note all the same is that once translated back into a materialist frame—once declared immanent—such abstractions, which Deluze sometimes calls “the Idea,” are to be preferred to any of their more determinate rivals. The becoming world aspires to the condition of the sloshing sea, or of desert light, or indeed of thought itself, which is after all of non-things the most glabrous. “When people are asked to apprehend some concept, they often complain that they do not know what they have to think. … The mind, denied the use of its familiar ideas, feels the ground where it once stood firm and at home taken away from beneath it, and, when transported into the region of pure thought, cannot tell where in the world it is.” Philosophy as liberating groundlessness, disorientation, abduction—that’s paragraph 3 in Hegel’s shorter Logic.

It is in this context that we must evaluate the key role that Hardt and Negri assign to “the immaterial.” That word gets us, indeed, to one of their most oft-repeated claims: that “immaterial labor” and the making of intangible goods are the present’s big opening onto communism, which will accordingly be an immaterial communism, an ethereal politics for a derealized socius. It might be hard, at first, to know what Hardt and Negri mean by this work-without-matter, but all you have to do to grasp their meaning is gather together the near-synonyms that typically, in Empire and its sequels, appear alongside the word “immaterial”: “linguistic,” “communicational,” “intellectual,” “cognitive,” “affective.” At its baldest, Hardt and Negri’s account of “immaterial labor” amounts to the claim that we are all culture workers now—that we are all producers of text and image and saleable experience—and that all work on the planet has come to resemble, more or less, a media job. From this claim follows two others: that intellectual labor has a special knack for eluding the old modes of industrial labor discipline (which is good news, since all labor now tends towards the condition of intellectual labor); and that immaterial goods make communism possible because they can easily become common—because, that is, ideas, images, and the like are directly shareable and so exempt from logics of scarcity. The argument, we’ll want to note, is implausible at every point: No-one with knowledge of Korean animation factories—or of Barry Gordon’s Motown, for that matter—could claim that culture-work has ever been impervious to Taylorization. Nor are those who drive UPS trucks likely to agree that all work in the present involves novel degrees of thought and art. More important, it is difficult to see how Hardt and Negri’s claims about immaterial production could ever be generalized. When they claim that communism is at hand because mp3’s and jpeg’s can by copied without limit, one wishes naturally to ask whether they also have plans for the sharing out of things that are not in the same sense copyable: rain boots, ethambutol, rice. And when they have repeated the bit about the mp3’s for the sixth or seventh time, one simply concludes that they have no idea what to do about the rice—that communism, in other words, will be immaterial or it will be nothing. A communism thus de-realized loses its will to propagate material things, and the multitude that is this communism’s group-subject has no need of the people still fated to make and service such things. Go back to those adjectives: Your place in the multitude depends to some large degree on your being able to describe your job as “intellectual,” communicative,” or “cognitive”—to your producing “images, codes, knowledges, affects.” A communism for the creative classes wriggles free of its dependence on the old European proletariat; such is doubtless a large part of its appeal. It also does without Chinese garment workers, Amazon warehouse wallahs, and Turkish strawberry pickers.

At this point, it becomes important to hold apart two distinct arguments we might make about transversal philosophy and schizo-Marxism. We can hail Deleuzian thought, in eulogy, as one of the great emancipatory projects of its generation and still want to explain our disappointment with its course. We know that Anti-Oedipus took 1968 as its prompt, because its authors tell as much; and we know that the most important sections of A Thousand Plateaus were first published in the lead-up to the Italian Movement of 1977 and the Bologna uprising, which huzzah’d Guattari as one of its teachers and heroes. We will need the intellectual historians and sociologists of knowledge to explain to us, then, how such books have ended up in the appreciative hands of the Israeli Defense Forces and the dot-com philosophers of the utopian-but-profitable Internet. It will not be enough to say that the Israeli military is “abusing” Deleuze by “taking his ideas out of context”—or that the paid poets of web and wire are “appropriating” schizoanalysis by putting it to non-Deleuzian ends. A theory that expects thought to be divvied up, composted, and recycled—a theory that, indeed, prefers thought when it is mobile, beyond itself, and out of context—confers no authority on those who would object to its repurposing. Anyone who says that Deleuze and Guattari need to be “reclaimed”—that they need to be retrieved and led back to their proper place—is defending his masters in terms they would not recognize. So we might instead frame our disappointment with Deleuze as a simple matter of theory and practice, and this in some classical sense: Deleuze and Guattari recommended rhizomes to us; we have tried them out at some length, typically in the form of “networks”; and we can say now upon reflection that they just aren’t working out, that they have never been as smooth as promised, never as horizontal in their growth. Networks continue to generate winners and losers. Our yams all have lumps. We might not have known in 1980 that a world of maximally deregulated flows—the Deleuzian pure economy uncontaminated by power—wasn’t much more than the left-wing path to neoliberalism, but there is no excuse for not knowing that now.

So that’s one way to refresh your thinking about Deleuze: You can chart who has been reading him in the generation since his death, and this ecumenically, taking care to expand the list beyond the people you went to graduate school with; you can note who sounds most like Deleuze even when they don’t cite him; and you can identify their institutional affiliations and the audiences they seem to be addressing. At that point, you will likely be forced to conclude that the ostensibly dissident Deleuze bubble inside the academy has coincided with a not-at-all dissident network bubble outside of it—with, I mean, the inflation of the word “network” to one of our generation’s master terms. What I would like to suggest now, though, is that we could also just go back and read Deleuze and Guattari again, paying careful attention to their political rhetoric, bringing forward their many historical claims, taking seriously their notion that some polities—some types of polity and not others—have been the proper vehicle of the élan vital. And if we do that, then we will see that we needn’t have been all that surprised by the emergence of what some future intellectual historian is bound to call Right Deleuzianism. It would have been enough to read the books, since the core Deleuzians all verbally champion versions of the administered society; they have been imaginatively invested in such systems, persistently and throughout their writings. Saying as much also means that we will have to get the periodization right, and here, too, the task is to avoid a certain belatedness. For we didn’t have to wait for an advanced post-Fordism to discover that Deleuze had been hijacked (because every Stanford grad now thinks he’s a silicon nomad, &c). It wasn’t a hijacking. All the Deleuzian theorists ask, if sometimes only in passing, which forms of government—or perhaps non-government—are in keeping with the rhizome or horizontal network of becoming. It is wholly misleading, in this context, to talk about Deleuzian “anarchism,” as most readers casually do, since the polity that Deleuze and Guattari themselves most often advert to is not autonomia, but its opposite, which is empire.

We need to proceed slowly here. Hardt and Negri are nakedly urban and indeed “metropolitan” in their political preferences: “The metropolis might be considered … the skeleton and spinal cord of the multitude. … The metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to the industrial working class.” Not the reservation, village, or town; not even the regional city or small-nation capital; the metropolis. There are few passages in which the Empire trilogy so gracelessly abrogates its own universalism. To be part of the multitude you actually have to live in a particular kind of place. There will be no communism on the periphery, or at best a weedier version of it. But Deleuze and Guattari argue nothing of the sort. Indeed, this is where Hardt and Negri might seem to be least like their forebears, whose geographical imaginations tend rather towards the pastoral and the outlying—towards Berbers and deserts and the steppe. If we’re tracking intellectual debts, we can say that Deleuze and Guattari often draw on political anthropology and especially on those anarchist anthropologists who have helped us all understand how it is that societies can thrive even in the absence of formalized government. Some tribal societies, we read in A Thousand Plateaus, have been wholly knowing about their headlessness, embarked on a political project to resist the state—not just pre-state, by the ticking of some some civilizational and evolutionary timeline, and so fated to pass from big man to chief to king, but actively anti-state. They also repeat the claims of sexual anthropology in the mode of Malinowski, Mead, and Reich, to the effect that tribal people have been spared repression, sexual constriction, and neurosis: “in the primitive socius desire is not yet trapped.” Mostly, though, their non-metropolitan bent appears not as a set of borrowed ethnographic claims, which one might ask an anthropologist colleague to confirm or disconfirm, but as a pervasive idiom or ethnically ecstatic prose style. If you feel that Hardt and Negri’s position smacks too much of Paris-London-Berlin, you might find that you prefer Deleuze and Negri’s version of what are after all mostly the same arguments, though this will depend largely on your tolerance for Euro-primitivism and philo-Orientalism. Here are some claims from Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

-“There is much of the East in Kleist.”

-All things open to the world, capable of self-organization and self-transformation, are “like Arabs or Indians.”

-“The Orient” is a name for any smooth space. So is “the Sahara.”

-Central African “medicine men” already perform schizoanalysis on village neurotics.

-This Id is “peopled” with “races and tribes,” “swarming, teeming, ferment, intensities.” This makes black people and Kalmyks akin to what “passes through the veins of a drug addict.”

-“I am a beast, a n****r”—that’s Rimbaud, quoted to vigorous nodding.

-Asia is to be preferred to Europe because “the East” has no trees. Or perhaps there are some trees in Asia, but Asians themselves act as if there weren’t, shunning trunk and branch, unseduced by arborescence. And the people of the East neither cultivate stemmy plants (no upward-growing crops for the Khmer!), nor keep livestock in their villages.

-“I return from my tribes. As of today, I am the adoptive son of fifteen tribes, no more, no less. And they in turn are my adopted tribes, for I love each of them more than if I had been born into it.”

Perhaps you’ve already decided that this list isn’t all that interesting, that it’s all just so much standard-issue négritude blanche. You’d have a point, but even so you might want to linger over that last entry long enough to register, first, that those sentences make most sense if spoken by a metropolitan and non-native: I return from Indian country (and to France or Britain or Boston); and second, that its attitude is oddly possessive: MY tribes—the stance, then, of an adventurer and collector and ethno-tourist. And once you’ve spotted this, it becomes harder to say that Negri is metropolitan and Deleuze isn’t. Indeed, what is distinctive about schizoanalysis or rhizomatic thought—what distinguishes these latter from a generic French Third Worldism—is that Deleuze so often lets his enthusiasm for tribes and nomads slide into an enthusiasm for empire itself. By some transitive property, the colonizers take on the virtues of the colonized; the French and British empires take on the virtues of stateless societies. I’ll let Deleuze and Guattari tell it:

-“The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots.”

-“In one way or the other, the animal is more a fleer than a fighter, but its flights are also conquests, creations.”

-Europeans must learn to adopt “the American meaning of frontiers: something to go beyond, limits to cross over, flows to set in motion, noncoded spaces to enter.”

-“Kipling understood the call of the wolves, their libidinal meaning, better than Freud.”

-“England … is Germany’s obsession, for the English are precisely those nomads who treat the plane of immanence as a movable and moving ground, a field of radical experience, an archipelagian world where they are happy to pitch their tents from island to island and over the sea. The English nomadize over the old Greek earth, broken up, fractalized, and extended to the universe. … The English inhabit. For them a tent is all that is needed.”

-The French colonies in Africa were an “open social field” in which black people demonstrated how sexually liberated they were by dreaming about “being beaten by a white man.”

-Anti-imperialism was a neurotic condition. Left to their own devices, that is, tribal people were not neurotic. Under colonial conditions, however, some of them became neurotic: “the elders who curse the White man, the young people who enter into a political struggle.”

To this list I need to add two observations that cannot be discretely quoted:

-The third chapter of A Thousand Plateaus is presented as a lecture by a fictional character, whom the authors present as their great Edwardian predecessor, the one who “invented a discipline he referred to by various names: rhizomatics, stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics, pragmatics, the science of multiplicities.” But this character, Professor Challenger, is not Deleuze and Guattari’s invention; he’s been borrowed rather from Arthur Conan Doyle, whose most famous Challenger story recounts how the professor defeated a horde of “ape-men” with the help of a “devoted negro.” Forget Spinoza, in other words: Deleuze and Guattari appoint as their own tutor and co-author one of the heroes of imperial adventure fiction.

-Deleuze dedicated an entire, standalone essay to a British-imperial war planner, a spy in lands that the British would later colonize and re-settle, a colonel in the British Army and advisor to Winston Churchill in that country’s Colonial Office. This figure is held out to the reader as a model to be emulated, one of history’s great schizos, “making Spinoza’s formula his own,” an avatar of creative becoming, a creature of “pure intensity” with “a dissolved ego” and a “gift for making entities live passionately in the desert, alongside people and things, in the jerking rhythm of a camel’s gait.” T. E. Lawrence possessed a “disposition” towards non-identity “which led him far from his own country.”

What we’ll have to say at this point is that colonialism was always Deleuze’s preferred rhizome. This could, I realize, seem perplexing. His followers certainly write in denial and disbelief. “He made only occasional passing remarks about colonization,” observes one of his translators—of a philosopher who seems in fact to have written about little else. But let’s grant the Deleuzians their turmoil. From some angles, the coincidence of anarchy and colonization will be the biggest puzzle in all of rhizomatic thought. But that coincidence is, in fact, anchored in arguments that Deleuze and Guattari make and is thus not just a fluke of their rhetoric. The treatise on nomadology begins by arguing, on the authority of Pierre Clastres, that war is radically opposed to the state: War and the state are opposed principles or antitheses. You probably consider war to be one of those few activities that governments strictly reserve for themselves, but you’d be wrong. War is, properly considered, outside of the state. At first you might think that this claim, on the face of it absurd, is just one more instance of Deleuzian pataphysics, something on the order of in-Asia-there-are-no-trees. But there is actually a case to be made here, a case in some respects quite astute. The point is most clearly grasped in terms of political philosophy, for what Deleuze and Guattari have done is identify a weakness in Hobbesean accounts of sovereignty, one of whose more widely accepted claims is that states should (and do) establish a monopoly on force. But what does one ever mean by “monopoly on force”? What could one ever mean? What we usually mean is that the only members of a society who are licensed to use violence against others have been authorized to do so by government, that they tackle and clobber only in the state’s name. But as soon as we say this, we have already made a big concession, which is that the sovereign does not, in fact, possess a monopoly on force—the king or president does not sit in chamber holstering the nation’s only gun—but requires miscellaneous armed proxies and deputies: cops, sheriffs, marshals, soldiers. The monopoly on force inevitably involves the extensive sharing-out of force and is thus never a monopoly. To this argument, Deleuze and Guattari append an observation borrowed from historical sociology, to the effect that in tribal societies, war is what puts adult men in motion, preventing them from sinking back into stasis and statehood and bourgeois inertia; that’s an argument whose medievalizing versions get attached to names like Lancelot and Sir Gawain. It is during war that a nation’s citizens, armed and abroad, are least under sovereign review. This reasoning, at any rate, is what produces the distinctively Deleuzian defense of empire, since if you hold that warfare is antithetical to government, then you might be justified in arguing that colonization was not the extension of the European states; it was their antithesis and negation—in some literal and liberated sense outside of them. Anarchism is one name for a politics against the state, and it is mentioned in Capitalism and Schizophrenia basically not at all. Its other, less familiar name is empire, and it, unlike Kropotkin and Emma Goldman, appears on nearly every page.

But then what of the home front? Does the Deleuzian account of Europe and North America seem any more credible than the Deleuzian account of Senegal or Lebanon? Not really. Ultimately, the various versions of gay science all go back to a puzzling misdiagnosis of capitalism—our capitalism, Northern and consumer capitalism—as ascetic. It is only in the face of renunciation that joy seems like a political program in its own right. But the Weberian account of an austere and Puritanical capitalism was always a partial observation and has long since been rendered historically obsolete. The better life will require of us more than that we moon Benjamin Franklin. Of course, there is a special sense in which even consumer capitalism really is ascetic. The pleasures that it offers are secretly a form of work, just so much recapitulated labor, an administered leisure characterized by routine and command—“must-see TV,” they call it. But then this is a trick that consumer capitalism actually shares with Deleuzian thought and especially with Deleuze and Guattari’s own prose—this ecstasy that is really effort. Anti-Oedipal prose wants to register as delirious, but most casual readers find the style exhausting, a buffeting, disoriented prose of parataxis and unelucidated concepts. Deleuze’s defenders call it a writing experiment and ask that we acclimate to it in small doses. But the prose signals, I think, a properly political dilemma. Deleuzian politics is an endless orgasm of irrepressible creativity and productivity and wandering; it grants no calm or sanctuary, and the prose merely rehearses in advance this particular punishment, which does not know how to distinguish between the nomad and the refugee, between a line of flight and a death march. The reader tossing aside A Thousand Plateaus in frustration is already rejecting the Deleuzian dystopia, this coerced restlessness, this constant coupling of organs, this jumble of part-objects in indiscriminate connection, this drubbing that calls itself joy.

Boy scouts

 


A FEW NOTES

-Deleuze and Guattari’s biographer quotes the former, speaking in 1988: “We, Félix and I, always fancied a universal history, which he [Foucault] hated.”

-If you have any doubts about what it took for North America to appear as “empty,” have a look at David Stannard’s American Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

-To get a handle on the colonial dimensions of English republicanism, you might begin with Robert Brenner’s Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (London: Verso 2003); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000).

-All my Hegel-talk risks being a bit misleading. The differences between Hegel and Deleuze would in most contexts be more important than their similarities, since Hegel points our attention towards achieved complexity and does not use “abstract” as a term of praise. A kind of hyperdetermination,  the coexistence in a single order of all the determinations and potentialities-now-made-real, is to be preferred to the lack of determination. When all is said and done, the Deleuzian eschatology owes more to Schlegel or the 1790s Fichte; what is rhetorically curious is that Deleuze, in order to communicate Schlegelian positions, compulsively poaches so many motifs from a textbook French Hegel that he claims to have surpassed.

-Eugene Holland says that the expropriation of the English peasants was their deterritorialization. In this, he has merely found a historically more proximate instance of a claim that Deleuze and Guattari make about the Roman Empire in Anti-Oedipus, that it “decoded the producers through expropriation.”

-On Whig medievalism, see Christopher Hill’s “The Norman Yoke,” in Puritanism and Revolution (pp. 50-122); Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England (New York: Octagon, 1972); J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, rev. ed.); R.J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688-1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1987).

-Anarchists have long been prone to imagine themselves as white Indians, Indian fighters, and Davy Crocketts. In the late 1970s, some Italian autonomists took to calling themselves the Indiani Metropolitani. And here’s Bakunin writing to the Russian tsar: “In my nature … there has always been a basic flaw…. Most men seek tranquility; in me, however, it produces only despair. My spirit is in constant turmoil, demanding action, movement, and life. I should have been born somewhere in the American forests, among the settlers of the West, where civilization has hardly begun to blossom and where life is an endless struggle against untamed people, against untamed nature—and not in an organized civic society.” (qtd in Gornick’s Goldman bio, p. 44)

-One might “conclude that the ostensibly dissident Deleuze bubble inside the academy has coincided with a not-at-all dissident network bubble outside of it—with, I mean, the inflation of the word ‘network’ to one of our generation’s master terms.” The person I have heard say this most clearly is Alexander Galloway. Ask to see his unpublished “Forget Deleuze.”

Against Joy, Part 2

X privatization
PART ONE IS HERE

This is the moment to return to Empire and “the joy of being communist.” Nietzsche, as the sole author of The Gay Science, is something of an anomaly. All great comic acts work in pairs: Deleuze and Guattarí, Hardt and Negri—these are our Gay Scientists, the zanies of this generation’s theoretical vaudeville. If you want to figure out what gay science wants for you, you will have to reckon with Deleuze and company, because it is in their writing that gay science gets round to advancing an actual political program, though that last phrase may, in fact, be off the mark. Deleuzian thought, and especially the Deleuzian brand of Marxism, is perhaps the grandest utopian philosophy of its time, and this makes its political status unusually hard to parse. Deleuzian thought works by taking the preoccupations of the twentieth century’s great critical theories—the Frankfurt School or deconstruction—and shifting them into an improbably affirmative mode. Everything that Adorno most wanted and thought he could not have—everything that he mourned for as historically foreclosed and philosophically pie-in-the-sky—Deleuze declares to be already at hand. Deleuze will teach us to think multiplicity, will show us that thought is after all fully adequate to the singular and the heterogeneous and the non-identical, that reification was never the problem we took it to be. He will teach us to think the union of subject and object—will teach us, in fact, that they were never really apart. And he will teach us to think the union of desire and labor; what capitalism has put asunder, ontology will reunite. This utopianism, moreover, is frankly avowed. Deleuzian philosophy offers itself in the service of “a new earth and a people that does not yet exist”—that’s Deleuze writing alongside Guattari. And Negri continues in the same vein: In any proper understanding of politics is “implicit the idea that the past no longer explains the present, and that only the future will be able to do so.” Any philosophy of the State—and most philosophy, from this perspective, turns out to be philosophy of the State—“is a juridical doctrine that knows only the past: it is continually referring to time past, to consolidated strengths and to their inertia, to the tamed spirit.” Radical thinking, by contrast, “always refers to the future.” To these remarks we might finally add the familiar observation that Hardt and Negri’s Empire refuses Left nostalgia in all its forms, all that downcast social-democratic hankering for the nation-state or the trade union or other institutions of a not-yet globalized world. It beckons to us from the communist yet-to-come.

The great surprise of Deleuzian thought, then, is that it is completely fixated on the past. This is perhaps clearest in Deleuze’s efforts to build a philosophical counter-canon: Spinoza, Hume, Sade, Nietzsche, Bergson; Negri has added Machiavelli and Marx to the list. When all is said and done, Deleuzians are unusually concerned with pedigree; they want us to know that their metaphysics comes with papers. But this historical fixation takes other, more complex forms, as well, and in order to make this point clear, it would help here to work out the modes of historicity that operate in Empire, still the central and indispensable text of Deleuzian Marxism. I say “modes,” in the plural, because Hardt and Negri’s arguments unfold in several different historical registers at once, and there is no obvious way to bring these registers together.

We can begin with the notion of historical repetition or the cycle. This is tricky: Marxist history-writing usually has more cycles than a washing machine, but Hardt and Negri’s Deleuzian framework officially prohibits any such perceptions, the reason being that Deleuzian history is supposed to be an aleatory affair, mutation-prone, directionless, rambunctious. In his book Insurgencies, then, Negri makes a point of washing his hands of historical recurrence: “the times of history are not those of a sentence, of an empty, suicidal repetition”; and Empire, likewise, devotes an entire sub-chapter to the polemic against cycles. It’s just that Hardt and Negri’s declared commitments on this score are mostly at odds with the substance of their historical account. This is already apparent in the book’s title, Empire, which is pregnant with the weight of historical repetition, the sinking realization that our postcolonial world has defaulted on its prefix, that the imperial dead are walking again. And yet whatever cycles make themselves felt in Empire, they aren’t, finally, the familiar Marxist ones; there are no waves of boom-and-bust here, no rounds of uneven development, no long centuries. What Hardt and Negri have done, in effect, is borrowed a notion of history from Nietzsche and Heidegger: The past, on this scheme, is a matter of some single event—some single catastrophe—happening over and over again, but amplified each time, ramified through repetition. For Heidegger, history’s key events have been the rise of Platonic philosophy, the rise of Latin Rome, the rise of Christianity, and the rise of industrial technology—except these aren’t really different events, but versions of the same event, the forgetting of Being. Nietzsche’s roster reads much like Heidegger’s—history turns on the rise of philosophy, the rise of Christianity, the rise of the court nobility, the rise of the bourgeoisie—and the one event or historical type that these all reduce back to is what we might call the negation of life.

At this point it becomes necessary to have a look at “the multitude,” which is Hardt and Negri’s central concept. Roughly, “the multitude” is Hardt and Negri’s version of “the proletariat” or simply “the people”; it is the keyword for a democratic and communist politics. As such, it would seem yawningly remote from Nietzsche’s writing or from Heidegger’s. But “the multitude” actually marks a novel attempt to combine Marx and Nietzsche. The most familiar attempts to absorb Nietzschean and Heideggerian arguments into Marxism—I’m thinking again of Adorno—generally begin by jettisoning the proletariat as the subject of history; such is their overture to Nietzsche, their sacrifice. They work, if you like, by giving Marxist answers to Nietzschean and Heideggerian questions. (Who killed the free and creative individual? Capitalism did. What makes it impossible for us to care for, rather than to dominate, objects in the world? Capitalism does.) Hardt and Negri, in these terms, find an unlooked-for way of bringing the proletariat back into Marxist theory: They resurrect the working class via Nietzsche (and others), by making the proletariat the avatar of a vitalist ontology—“the plural multitude of productive, creative subjectivities,” Hardt and Negri call them, “the real productive force of our social world,” united only its “desire for creativity and freedom,” “the real ontological referent of philosophy” even. In this Spinozist and Nietzschean guise, the proletariat can now resume its once hallowed position as the universal class—not in the old Marxist sense in which the proletariat represented, or perhaps even messianically incarnated, the collective interests of humanity—but in some new sense, for the simple reason that the multitude really is universal, as a matter of stipulation: Nobody is excluded from it. “The multitude,” as a term, accomplishes conceptually what the classical proletariat was supposed to accomplish historically: It expands to swallow up all the other classes, leaving it a class without antitheses or others, without lumpens and peasants and bourgeoisies high and petty. The multitude is the human aggregate, but seen from a certain perspective, as dynamically producing the entirety of the social world, as the power that continually brings the world into being. Empire, in this light, often reads like history-from-below raised to the level of metaphysics. It does not claim, in the manner of English Marxism, that if you look at the historical record, you will happen to notice that workers and women and the poor have helped make history. It gives an ontological version of that argument—that the only way of properly understanding the world is to conceive of it as made and continually re-made by the combined efforts of its myriad inhabitants. And so anything that oppresses the multitude, anything that restricts its vitality or stifles its endless resourcefulness, is a negation of life, even a form of Seinsvergessenheit. Exploitation and oppression are reclassified as ontological (and not just economic or political) transgressions. And that thing—that agent of ontological oblivion—is, as Hardt and Negri have it, identifiable: It is sovereignty, the founding of state institutions at the expense of the multitude. Sovereignty, understood now as the multitude’s betrayal, is history’s single event, its recurring disaster. Sovereignty came to pass when the absolutist state triumphed over Machiavellian humanism and has taken root again in each of the various great revolutions, in their failures as in their miscarried successes, and is taking form still at the World Bank and IMF. History is one long Thermidor, ever and again.

Such, then, is one version of historical repetition as it shows up in Empire, but there is another, this one connected to the half-familiar figure of Polybius, the ancient Greek historian of Rome. Hardt and Negri draw heavily on Polybius; he gets five indexed entries, several more unindexed references, a chapter heading and then again a sub-chapter heading—all to himself. Polybius’ signature argument was a theory of the mixed constitution, the notion that the best government would be one that combined all three of the classical constitutional forms—government by the One, by the Few, and by the Many—and it is for this idea that Hardt and Negri turn to him. But the theory of the mixed constitution strongly presupposes a theory of historical cycles, as well. Polybius held that any unmixed polity was fated to pass through a rondel of constitutional forms in both their benign and wicked versions: from the One to the Few to the Many, from monarchy to tyranny to aristocracy to oligarchy to democracy to anarchy, and then again, please, one more time from the top. The mixed constitution, in these terms, was meant to mobilize the political energies of all its members and thus to counter the entropy inherent in each unadulterated constitutional form. It offered itself as a path out of history, or at least a path out of the constitutional cycle, the one way of bringing stability to polities whose organic impulse was towards degeneration. The crucial point for our purposes is that nearly all of the canonical writing on empire—I mean Gibbon and such, but now also Niall Ferguson and Hardt and Negri themselves—is at least tacitly Polybian, activating a set of historical analogies or allusions or full-scale allegories, in which one empire, usually Rome, is meant to stand in for another, Britain or the U.S. or the global non-state that Hardt and Negri describe. Like Rome, Hardt and Negri write, the “Empire we find ourselves faced with today is also—mutatis mutandis—constituted by a functional equilibrium among…three forms of power.” What matters here is not the substance of the claim; I’m really only interested in the word “also,” which indicates the form of the argument, its historical parallelism. In a sentence whose terms are entirely Polybian (the “three forms of power”), that “also” cannot help but trigger a perception of historical cycles, whose business it is to generate resemblances. “We are once again in a genetic phase of power and its accumulation….”

At this point, a question poses itself. Hardt and Negri summon us against or beyond Empire. They want us to imagine Empire’s end. So if empire, with or without its capital letter, is subject to historical repetition, then is the resistance to empire similarly cycle-bound? Are there historical models that anti-imperialists and communists can look to? Does communism have its own also’s and once-again’s? Hardt and Negri’s answer is dictated by their Polybian frame. If Empire is Rome redux, then life after Empire will be a new Middle Age: “a new nomad horde, a new race of barbarians, will arise to invade or evacuate Empire.” Here, then, is a discovery: Hardt and Negri’s writing is medievalist, no less than Nietzsche’s, though theirs is a medievalism with the Christianity put back in: Empire’s very last paragraph holds out Francis of Assisi as the model of the communist militant. Nowhere is the connection between gay science and medievalism more striking than in this passage. What does gay science want from you? The “joy of being communist”—that phrase occurs in the last paragraph alongside Francis—wants you to be a thirteenth-century monk. And these analogies are anything but slapdash or opportunistic; they have an elaborate conceptual underpinning. Reduced to its essentials, Hardt and Negri’s writing is medievalist because of its hostility to sovereignty, to the state and state-like institutions. They are envisioning a society thoroughly decentralized, a sovereignty so scattered as no longer to deserve the name, and for European writers, the chief historical image of this society without sovereignty, whether avowed or not, is feudalism, though Empire’s most distinctive formulations, as above, push back beyond feudalism, looking for some zero degree of statelessness, a Europe of pre-feudal tribes. Hardt and Negri are the new Goths.

There are other places we could look in the Deleuzian corpus for evidence of this medievalism—to Deleuze’s predilection for scholastic philosophy, for instance, which was made clear to you the day you had to look up the word “haecceity”; or to Eugene Holland’s description of shizoanalysis as “a return to alliance-based rather than filiation-based social relations”; or to Hardt and Negri’s general emphasis on exodus or escape—what they call “savage mobility”—which is redolent of medieval city air, the kind that sets peasants free. This last might seem like Deleuzian boilerplate, but is actual quite remarkable. Again and again throughout their trilogy, Hardt and Negri take their cues from E.P. Thompson and the early subaltern studies historians. That is, they seem to embrace a certain politicist version of Marxism for which all history turns on the balance of class forces (rather than on the magisterial unfolding of some ineluctable structural logic). But unlike these historians, Hardt and Negri mostly lack a concept of class struggle or conflict or contradiction. This is one of the most distinctive features of their philosophy, the way they revise those thinkers to whom they claim a debt. The multitude does not fight. It flees. The multitude remains the agent of history, to be sure, but only in its capacity for flight. Smack at the heart of Hardt and Negri’s autonomia is the notion that the struggle for communism cannot be a fight against capitalism; it must be rather a simple getting-on with the business of living a different life—though sooner or later someone is going to have to work out how Hardt and Negri’s politics of escape is to be reconciled with their insistent claim that capitalism has completed its conquest of the globe, that “there is no more outside,” since the possibility of mass exodus would seem to depend on the notion of inside-outside in a way that class struggle does not. Is desertion really desertion if, like the hapless cartoon convict who misdigs his tunnel, you merely end up in the next cell block over, one more version of the same place, just another of capitalism’s antechambers?

So much, at any rate, on the subject of historical cycles. What we must see now is that there is a second mode of historicity at work in Empire, a progressive and even Hegelian theory of history, which is even more surprising than the cycles, since Deleuzian thought is, on the main, almost hysterically anti-Hegelian. The Deleuzian caricature of Hegel is quickly sketched: The Hegelian dialectic is incapable of accommodating genuine multiplicity; it is engineered, in fact, to reduce the manifold to sameness, which makes Hegel the homogenizing, speciously unifying philosopher of the state. More: Hegel is the philosopher of contradiction and negation, and gay science demands that we adopt instead a programmatically positive philosophy. And yet Empire is Hegelian not despite Deleuze but because of him. Hardt and Negri’s philosophy of history is not some deplorable lapse from Deleuze’s anti-dialectical ontology, but that ontology’s necessary outcome. Under the cover of a frantic anti-Hegelianism, the gay scientists smuggle back in everything that the critique of Hegel nominally seeks to abolish.

This is going to take some explaining. Deleuzian philosophy involves a basic confusion of ontology and politics. It claims that all its arguments derive from an ontology of non-identity—that multiplicity, in other words, is the basic stuff of world, that the way of the world is to be no particular way. We needn’t get hung up on the details here; given enough time in the library, you can scissor-and-paste yourself any ontology you like. It is enough for us to know that the ontology of non-identity is supposed to yield an ethics or a politics; the notion here is that to hand yourself over to multiplicity is the only way to be in tune with the world’s deepest ground, to vibrate with the sources of existence. This may seem straightforward enough, but only because I have been phrasing the matter casually. A moment’s reflection uncovers only wreckage. Here’s the sticking point: How exactly does Deleuzian thought pass from ontology to politics? How does it get from one to the other? If multiplicity and change are the most basic features of existence itself, then how are sameness and inertia even possible? And if sameness and inertia are not just undesirable but ontologically excluded, will it ever make sense to describe multiplicity as a political imperative or ethical norm? You cannot be said to defend something that was never in danger. Once you opt for an ontology of multiplicity, you give up the possibility of a politics of multiplicity. Multiplicity stops being something longed for but denied and becomes instead a simple existential datum, which need merely be harvested. An ontology of multiplicity betrays the principle of non-identity that it claims to promote, rendering the world identical with the philosopher’s best description of it.

An example will help. Consider again that slogan “There Is No More Outside,” which turns out, in Empire, to have a sub-chapter of its own. The argument here is one with which their project has become much associated: The opponents of capitalism must stop trying to imagine someplace outside of capitalism to which they can return. Capitalism has completed its conquest of the globe. There are no more backwaters or pre-capitalist Brigadoons. There may be something beyond capitalism—past it, out the other side—but there is no longer and never again will be anything untransformed by it. The philosophical reference points are familiar here: Spinoza, mostly—a theory of pure ontological immanence, to the effect that it has always been a philosophical mistake to think of the world as having an outside. The main business of these pages, in other words, is to extend Hardt and Negri’s attack on sovereignty to an attack on the very concept of the outside, since sovereignty’s evils all go back to that basic couplet of inside and outside, such that any talk of “outsides” merely replicates everything that is worst about the state, its establishment of institutions that transcend (or claim to transcend) the productive life of the multitude. But then, in these same pages, Hardt and Negri cite Fredric Jameson to the effect that postmodernity is the new condition of not having an outside. But how can you have Spinoza and Jameson side by side? It doesn’t work, because one of them is making an ontological claim and the other is making a historical claim, and clearly we have to choose between the two. Something that is ontologically in the bag—multiplicity, immanence—cannot also be the product of history.

Or perhaps it can—but then that’s where Hegel comes in. Deleuzian thought requires a marvelously old-fashioned theory of alienation; it depends on the notion that it is possible to be estranged from ontology, that what is most fundamental to the world can still be haphazardly at work within it. Hence Eugene Holland: “Difference and multiplicity are what is given ontologically; they then get betrayed and distorted by operations…that result in identity.” Or Hardt and Negri: The society of control inflicts “alienation from the sense of life and the desire for creativity”; it terminates in “the privation of being and production.” We don’t normally think of the Left Spinozists as having much patience for the young Marx, but on this point Hardt and Negri are content to defy Althusser: “We find ourselves being pulled back from exploitation to alienation, reversing the trajectory of Marx’s thought.” There is not much to take issue with here; it is pleasing, in fact, to see the ban lifted on a still useful concept, though the theory of alienation does call sharp attention to everything that is strangest about the Deleuzian account of the state, this singular, occult institution that is able to disrupt ontology itself, to deprive us of being or rend the very fabric of time.

But Hardt and Negri’s real path out of the Deleuzian conflation of ontology and politics is a Hegelian philosophy of history, in which what has latently been true of the world all along has nonetheless to become true in history, has to achieve its truth. The big surprise awaiting readers of Empire’s first sequel is Hardt and Negri’s announcement that the multitude doesn’t exist yet, that “the multitude needs a political project to bring it into existence,” that we have to “investigate what kind of political project can bring the multitude into being.” One might have misheard them as saying that the multitude simply is or that it is the proper way of understanding all human aggregates. But the multitude is, in fact, only “implicit, … existing as a real potential.” When his political program begins to collapse, the Spinozist helps himself to Aristotle after all. “The multitude … has a strange, double temporality: always-already and not-yet.” Other instances of Deleuzian progressivism are easy enough to spot: in Hardt and Negri’s notion of history as a one-way street—a “march of freedom and equality,” no less—in which the multitude, whose desire for liberation has already brought Empire into being, “must [now] push through Empire to come out the other side”; in their Smithian celebration of capitalism as an enrichment of human capacities; or in Deleuze and Guattarí’s own periodizing scheme, which divides historical societies up into “savagery,” “despotism,” “capitalism”—and which would have seemed cutting-edge in Edinburgh in 1780. But the Hegelian philosophy of history, for which no single passage from Empire can be adduced, is the book’s secret and most powerful frame. Hegelian history cannot stand accused of being insufficiently Deleuzian. It is the culmination of Deleuzian thought—or at least its rescue.

But as ever in such matters, a philosophy, once disavowed, leaves only its worst features behind, its intellectual sludge….

MORE SOON

Cell colony

Against Joy; or, Deleuze’s Empire

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Exclamation points have played a distinguished role in the history of Marxism. It helps if every other one is upside down. The exclamation point is the mark of solidarity, of commitment, the manifesto in a single keystroke. We don’t, it is true, often see them in Marxist theory, as opposed to, say, Marxist graffiti. But Hardt and Negri’s great communist trilogy is crammed with exclamation points: “One big union!” “Papier pour tous!” They even quote the spray paint from a Paris wall: “Foreigners, please don’t leave us alone with the French!” There are pages where Hardt and Negri’s prose fairly bursts and pops with exclamation points, as though they were writing Xhosa. Exclamations, not all of them marked, are this writing’s stamp, its most conspicuous stylistic feature, and as such demand to be accounted for. What are they doing there? What is their effect? What’s the difference between a book with lots of exclamation points and one without?

This clearly has something to do with what Hardt and Negri call “the joy of being communist” and what their intellectual forebears call “gay science”—the sense, that is, that a radical politics cannot take root in the thin soils of melancholy and umbrage, but must nourish itself instead on the sheer exhilaration of collectivity and creativity and free innovation. The exclamation point is a streak of that delight, the mark of its strong feeling and guileless spontaneity. It is a smudge of affirmation, of really, really meaning it. More: The exclamation point is meant, like a rocketship with its falling booster, to propel readers back out of the text, to shunt them back into a world of real objects or at least to smash them against the bedrock of the writers’ sincerity. It is through punctuation marks that even ordinary writing overcomes its own ingrained positivism, its tendency to reduce the world to rubble, static things and discrete events. Commas introduce relation to the simplest sentences, as periods do disjunction. Dashes and semicolons establish relation and disjunction at once; they sunder even as they join, which makes them the typographical face of dialectical thought. Question marks summon an Other into being and then send that Other out to scrutinize the world with fresh eyes. Exclamation points do the same in the form of a command. They indicate the end of the text as text, placing some demand on us as readers that we cannot fulfill as long as we continue in that contemplative state, as long, that is, as we do nothing but read. This accomplishment, however, is also the exclamation’s failure, for the exclamation point, as the signpost to something outside the text, reveals itself to be external, imposed from without, and thus a positivity in its own right. Whatever cannot be done within the sentence has to be done to it. The exclamation mark is the sentence’s fate, its doom, a grenade lobbed by an unseen hand.

The exclamation point’s natural habitat is now the children’s book and the supermarket tabloid, the comic balloon and the screaming headline, and this is its finest boast. Hardt and Negri’s exclamation points borrow their energies from these forms, from the young and the poor; they mean to put such energies in the service of thought. The exclamation point is similarly at home in advertising, but from this sphere exclamatory thought borrows only its fiercest contradiction, its con, its intertwining of joy and command. The exclamation point is the billy club of Konsumterror. It is, after all, children and the poor who get ordered around with impunity, and the shouts in storybooks or supermarket papers find their echo in a parent’s rebuke or barking foreman’s order. There is a poem by Robert Herrick, first published in the 1640s, called “Corinna’s Going A-Maying.” It is one of the period’s most winning pastoral lyrics, some seventy lines on England’s customary spring celebrations, full of kissing games and cream-cakes and country cottages hung with blossoms. The first thing that strikes one about the poem, however, is that its title is a misnomer: The poem is addressed to Corinna, the poet’s lover, who refuses to get out of bed and is thus in danger of sleeping through the May games. Corinna precisely isn’t going a-Maying; such is the entire occasion for the poem. The poem’s heading, in other words, is oddly reversed, and anyone noticing as much has a chance of also spotting the poem’s key lines, which casual readers inevitably skim past. About halfway through the poem, the poet describes the flowers on the houses and the crowds in the fields and then asks: “Can such delights be in the street / And open fields, and we not see’t? / Come, we’ll abroad; and let’s obey / The proclamation made for May.”

It’s that last line that should give us pause. Rural games were, improbably, one of the great political flashpoints of the early seventeenth century. The games were ordinarily played on Sunday afternoons and on the old medieval feast days; reform-minded Protestants accordingly saw them as Catholic, crypto-pagan holdovers and wanted them abolished. But the Stuart kings, cloaking themselves in a kind of agrarian populism, the way a U.S. president might chow barbecue or sport a cowboy hat, promoted the games in official legislation, not mandating them exactly, but encouraging them and forbidding the Puritan opposition from trying to spoil the fun. The Crown’s stated rationale for sponsoring the maypoles and morris-dances was blandly functional: The games would bind the peasantry to the state and the state church; they would prime the bodies of the poor for war; and they would keep the poor from organizing in opposition to the state (in the taverns or conventicles in which they would otherwise while away the week’s few spare hours). This, then, is the proclamation in question: “Let’s obey / The proclamation made for May.” The merriment that the poet has been advocating turns out to be obligatory. Delight modulates into obedience and thus into un-delight. A poem that had seemed to hum and croon of rural amusements mutates into a poem about law and its enforcement; it seems a shame that Herrick never wrote a Corinna-cycle—“Corinna’s A-Paying Her Taxes” and so on. If, upon running smack up against the state, you go back now and begin reading the poem again from the start, you will surely notice that it is, in fact, made up of nothing but commands. Its pitch is that of a parent hectoring a teenage layabout: “Get up! get up for shame!”—modern editions are quick to supply those exclamation points. The poem’s title is not a statement of fact, for Corinna, to her credit, never budges; she persists in her springtime, sitdown strike, a kind of consumer boycott on the wildflower. Her genuine idleness—and not Puritan asceticism—is the liberating alternative to this royalist poem’s regime of compulsory pleasure. The title, by contrast, is the king’s wish, the law’s resolve. One must imagine it spoken through clenched teeth: Corinna is going a-Maying.
If there is a politics of the exclamation point, it is here. The exclamation point is the mark of forced Maying. It always bears a trace of the imperative, of coercion and prohibition, even when it seems only to revel. So this is what we need to look for any time we are enjoined to be jubilate, the moment of conscription that attends joy’s grin and flush. Hardt and Negri want us to go a-Maying, though they have a different May Day in mind. They summon us to gay science. They want us to Do the Dew. “Big government is over!” So let’s ask: What is gay science’s command? What does it want from you?

• • •

What does gay science want from you? We can start with the term itself, or rather with its provenance: Where does the phrase come from? What is the history it carries with it? The term comes, first of all, from Nietzsche, for whom it means something like the free and creative vocation of thought. This notion is trickier than it may at first seem. We normally think of knowledge as coming under headings of truth and falsehood, accuracy and error. Knowledge is supposed to be knowledge of something—of songbirds or Balzac or Kondratieff waves. It is thought that corresponds to really existing conditions in the world; it is the means by which the mind assimilates that world. To speak of “the free and creative vocation of thought,” then, is to call our attention to all those modes of thinking that do not function like knowledge, that do not report and describe and depict, that mean instead to bring new things into the world. But to call this creative vocation of thought “gay science”—gaia scienza, joyful knowledge—is to bring knowledge itself back under the rubric of productive thought, to strip it of its character as knowledge. If we follow Nietzsche, we must stop judging knowledge by the exactness of its representations. Rather, we must judge even knowledge by its non-epistemological qualities, its capacity to engender new forms of life, so that an innovative blunder or lie is always to be preferred to a conformist truth. That is what gay science wants from you, and the term will name the utter elation of this antifoundationalism, the thrill of a world without ground, without factual or ethical constraint.

But the phrase is not, in fact, Nietzsche’s coinage, so the question simply re-poses itself: Where does the term come from? Where did he find it? It turns out that the phrase—not gaia scienza, as Nietzsche has it, but gay saber—refers to the Provençal troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and means the art of composing love poetry. This piece of information immediately suggests two further points: First, it clarifies Nietzsche’s argument. Gay saber is the science that is not science, knowledge understood as art. Nietzsche has selected from the history of European culture the phrase in which epistemology most obviously gives way to aesthetics. The only science that mattered would be indistinguishable from poetry. This, in fact, is a commonplace of Nietzsche commentary. The second point, then, is more curious because less commonly made: Nietzsche doesn’t borrow his term from just anywhere; he borrows it from medieval court culture. And taking this point seriously will bring into view Nietzsche’s pervasive medievalism, his thoroughgoing preoccupation with feudalism and the warrior nobility. Thus, even if we confine ourselves to the pages of The Gay Science itself, we will find, not only a collection of original songs, appended to the main text and designed to give the book the appearance of a medieval chansonnier, but endless talk of “the noble person,” men working “by force of arms,” “conquerors,” “descendants of old, proud families,” full of “reputation and honor,” the “knightly caste” who “treat each other with exquisite courtesy,” “aristocratic taste,” “a warlike soul,” “cultures with a military basis,” “refinement of noble breeding,” “men of leisure who spend their lives hunting, traveling, in love affairs, or on adventures,” “men of violence,” “bold and autocratic human beings,” “human beings who give themselves law.” So what does gay science want from you? It wants you to be a nobleman, to commit yourself to the refeudalization of Europe. The fit Nietzschean reader must function “as the dutiful heir to all nobility of past spirit, as the most aristocratic of old nobles and at the same time the first of a new nobility.” Nietzsche wants to dub you.

Gay science, in other words, is a machine for generating Quixotes, untimely aristocrats or noblemen without portfolio, ecstatically living out their creative delirium and made incomprehensible to others by their outlandish passions. It is fundamentally atavistic, designed to foster a “recrudescence of old instincts,” to “restore honor to bravery,” to conjure the “late ghosts of past cultures and their powers,” who will appear now as “rare human beings.” Nietzsche is philosophy’s own Lord Baltimore, who, in the 1630s, tried to revive feudalism on the eastern shore of North America: He obtained a land grant from the English crown on the model of an eleventh-century palatinate; named the territory Maryland; and then carved the region up into estates, complete with serfs and seigniorial rights and the rituals of sworn fealty. Maryland was meant to be feudalism’s Massachusetts, the experimental ground of an aristocratic utopia. The gay science, in these terms, offers itself as a Chesapeake of the mind. It is, in Nietzsche’s own words, “a strain from the old older of things European…a seduction and return to it.”

The notion of history that underlies this project is worth elaborating. Nietzsche’s writings, whatever their fragmentary character, produce a comprehensive account of European development, and the pivot point in that history is the rise of the absolutist state and the court nobility. The noblesse de robe stand at the beginning of Nietzsche’s modernity narrative, as Descartes does for Heidegger and primitive accumulation does for Marx. What’s at issue here? The problem, as Nietzsche sees it, is that the court nobility—all those chancellors and councilors and Keepers of the King’s Chamberpot—arose at the expense of an older, knightly caste, who were not bound to the monarch or were bound only by ties easily cut. At court, then, the feudal warlords allowed themselves to be turned into Jews, relinquishing their autonomy in exchange for the dubious honor of serving the king, lord of lords, as his Chosen People, the sticking point here being, of course, that a Chosen People always lets someone else do the choosing, so that its very claim to privilege secretly admits defeat and dependence. The nobility became just another people of the law. This transformation, usually dated in Western Europe to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, actually functions as the culmination of a much longer history, which can be recounted in a few different ways: As the great social historians tell it, this is a story, above all, of institutional changes: In the ninth century, there arose for the first time a special class of noble administrators, “dukes” and “earls” as names for bureaucratic offices; around the thirteen century, this nobility was converted into a distinct legal class; in roughly the same period, there sprang up a caste of stewards and other petty administrators; and over the following centuries, the state would gradually crystallize, centralizing its powers, establishing its monopoly over violence and taxes. The key point about monopoly, from the perspective of gay science, is that it tends to subsume the monopolist himself, who never possesses sole power, but requires ever larger staffs to superintend his realm. The structure tends to become autonomous, to sideline even the sovereign, until there emerges a system without a proper ruler, a system whose head is merely its highest servant. It is at this point, then, that the institutional history tips over into a history of the new subjectivities that these institutions generate, or an ideological history, if you prefer: a history of chivalry, first of all, which is the code by which the old armigerous nobility allowed itself to be christianized; of the pious peace brotherhoods that sprang up during the feudal centuries—sacred vigilantes, ready, in the name of Christ’s concord, to put and end to all that knightly hack-and-slash; of courtesy and everything summed up in the notion of the “civilizing process,” the protocols of conduct—the handkerchiefs and steak knives—that increasingly came to regulate elite bodies. Each of these histories tells a tale of the nobility’s gradual castration, its embourgeoisement or caging. And what we call modernity or bourgeois society is merely the conclusion of this long process, a strange mutation in human affairs by which the upper classes, of all people, came to constrain themselves, to give up the ordinary prerogatives of their power, the joy of rule. Bourgeois society is a place of pervasive unfreedom, the one perverse social order where not even the rulers are free, a society of boundless restriction and self-restraint, the compulsory shame of mutual interdependence.

The word that best encapsulates this historical sea-change is “gentle.” How is it, Nietzsche asks, that the old fighting classes, the pugnatores, metamorphosed into “gentlemen”? How did the nobility, the genteel, come to take as their closest cognates the gentle and the gentile, the tenderhearted and the Christian (with Christians understood here as little more than Hebrew wannabes). Nietzsche’s project, then, is to cut the European nobility free from this crippling constellation—not the really existing nobility, perhaps, but some hypothetical nobility yet to come—to imagine the nobility de-Hebraized, de-Christianized, de-feminized, de-gentrified. And his basic strategy is to reach back behind the long history of the civilizing process—back behind the histories of the state and chivalry and etiquette—so that he can find in early medieval Europe the image of a gloriously raw nobility, a warrior Europe of Ostrogoths and Visigoths, of Franks and marauding Vikings. One hesitates, finally, to call this a medievalism, because that term generally connotes a certain Victorian piety, a cowled churchliness, and Nietzsche’s is a medievalism that fully avows its own most wickedly Gothic qualities, its high terror, its gory sublimity. This point is worth dwelling on, because Nietzsche is typically taken to be a special kind of classicist, the mutant philologist who wants to refashion Europe on the model of pre-Socratic Greece. But Nietzsche’s notion of the pre-Socratic can only be understood as ancient Greece re-described to resemble the early medieval West—a tribal Hellenism of tragic ritual and Homeric warfare. Nietzsche’s historical master trope, the one into which all his other historical mythemes get sutured, is the barbarian; he cycles through the set periods of European history and singles out the barbarian qualities of each—the barbarian Greece of Dionysus, the barbarian Rome of imperialists and slaveholders, the barbarian Renaissance of the Borgias, and so on. One effect of this is to undo the usual distinction between the classical and the Gothic, producing the image of a savage antiquity that largely assimilates the former to the latter. Nietzsche’s philosophy is not a break with nineteenth-century thought but merely a recombination of its most familiar components.

But this recombination does not emerge by sheer will or chance. What makes the perception of savage antiquity possible, at the level of material relations themselves, is the modern reconfiguration of Europe around its horizontal axis, separating the metropolitan North from the now semi-peripheral South. Southern European underdevelopment—the long process by which Italy and the Levant, once the center of the Mediterranean world-system, were relegated to the hinterlands of the Atlantic economy—yields at length new images of the classical world: not a refined and civilized South, but a rude and wild South, a South that will henceforth seem archaic, at least by the standards of Berlin or Liverpool. It is this world-historical shift in capitalism’s geography that allows Nietzsche to run together barbarism, antiquity, and medievalism; and out of this conflation Nietzsche will invent an unusually stark modernity narrative, premised on a divide between our cowering modernity and an undifferentiated pre-modernity, in which there was no antiquity as such. The past, it turns out, has always been creative, innovative, given over to rupture and barbarian transformation. Modernity, then, is the first truly classical age—static, weighed down by restraint and proportion and equipoise—which is to say that it is not modern at all, if by modernity we mean all-that-is-solid-melts-to-air. That modernity, the era of dynamism and splendid transience, belongs to the long-ago. And so the Gothic, when set against an inert, geometrical classicism, will suggest not only the outmoded, not only ruined abbeys and moldering fortresses. It will, in those very glimpses of decay, as also in the busy finials and exalted spires of Gothic Revival architecture, suggest historical vitality—not stagnation or arrest, but historicity itself. The Gay Science is the philosophical high-water mark of this Gothic modernism, the equivalent in thought of a Victorian railway station built to look like a castle or a factory disguised as a basilica.

If you want to figure out what gay science wants from you, then, you have two choices: You can treat gay science as a philosophical argument—the creative vocation of free thought; or you can treat it as a historical allusion—the Gothic art of knightly poets. The vital point, however, is that these accounts correlate, which means that there is really no choosing between those options. It is through philosophical argument that Nietzsche means to effect his medievalist historical revival. If we sign on to the philosophical project—if, that is, we learn to treat knowledge as something other than knowledge, learn to see all thought as creative—then we will help end the tyranny of truth and science and bring into being a “genuinely savage” future. Nietzsche calls upon us to de-epistemologize our modernity, to initiate an un-civilizing process that will destroy science as a separate sphere, with its own practices and institutions: telephone surveys, public schools, government accounting offices. And medieval Europe serves Nietzsche as the model of this non-epistemological society, in which there will be no more knowledge for its own sake. It is impossible to embrace gay science in purely philosophical form; the phrase itself is a permanent memento of the medievalism that underpins its seeming abstraction. If the American Revolution, like the French Revolution after it, was classicism’s uprising, all columned buildings and proud republicans and paintings of Washington-in-toga, then Nietzsche aims to give medieval Europe an insurgency of its own, a Gothic 1776, and The Gay Science will be its Common Sense.

4492985114_0fdde1dfdfSt. Pancras railway station, London

 

MORE SOON…

 

A FEW NOTES

-For more on commas and semi-colons, see Adorno’s “Punctuation Marks” in the first volume of his Notes to Literature.

-Herrick’s poetry begins to make sense once you’ve read Christopher Hill’s Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England and Leah Marcus’s Politics of Mirth.

-Hardt and Negri’s tag lines all go back to a passage early in Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus: “write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots! Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point!”

-The bit about the Jews comes straight from Nietzsche—see The Gay Science, #136:  “the Jews take a pleasure in their divine monarch and the holy which is similar to that which the French nobility took in Louis XIV. This nobility had surrendered all its power and sovereignty and become contemptible.”

-For more on the European nobility, see the classic works of medieval social history: Bloch’s Feudal Society; Duby’s Early Growth of the European Economy; and especially Elias’s Civilizing Process.

-The photograph at the top is Vincent Diamante’s.