Chris Petit / Mordant Music – The Museum of Loneliness (Review)

Chris Petit / Mordant Music – The Museum of Loneliness

Label: Test Centre 

Year: 2013

The fledgling field of Hauntology has by now more or less petered out as a potential source from which to draw political inspiration. Derrida’s gnomic, literary gymnastics in Specters of Marx generated some interest at the time, notably the symposium involving Fred Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and Toni Negri, later published as Ghostly Demarcations. But it was several years after the fact - this time sponsored by Wire journalists Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds, that it re-emerged as a predominantly aesthetic concept with which to appraise musical forms. A whole raft of artists subsequently found themselves being analysed in a most peculiar fashion. There was talk of ghosts of past political possibilities haunting present cultural forms, of non-nostalgic appropriation, of ontology as conjuration, and a profusion of talk on the political value of re-using public educational broadcasts from the 1970s. Artists as different as Burial, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, and the Ghost Box label were drawn into this admittedly minority form of writing as conferences were hastily organised and papers submitted. Predictably, when mediated through the apparatus of high brow music journalism, and subsequently re-filtered through networks of distributors, label promotional materials and countless appropriations by artists and commentators the concept now appears in a somewhat confused and ragged state.

Fortunately this LP, a collaboration between novelist and film maker Chris Petit and reluctant one time hauntological renegade Mordant Music has taken the best of what became the normative description for this music and improvised the rest, producing a dizzying fifty minute trip of text and textual interpretation that breathes new life into the genre. Petit’s themes signal his intent: The Museum of Loneliness acknowledges that the primary modern relation is with the screen, the digital screen as well as the psychological screen; he intones early on the second side. The basic framework may seem familiar; the mapping of cultural memory in the present, the exploding of conventional narrative, the relativisation of accepted idioms, all that might be subsumed under that loose signifier “post-modern”. Petit’s aesthetic  however includes a psychogeographer’s concern with place and an almost obsessive approach to the ephemera of cinema. For the most part though the record revolves around Petit reading of some of the more Ballardian passages from his novels Robinson, The Hard Shoulder, and The Passenger. Mordant Music in turn provides a suitably dystopic and disorientating collage of rhythms, distorted field recordings and warped electronics.

The opening fourteen minutes of side one are perhaps the most uncanny. Petit’s narrative drawn from Robinson tells a vaguely noirish story of moral decay set amid a tattered London Soho. His nasal and slightly sneering tone is well suited to describe with clinical detachment the sordid games of Robinson in his underground video suite. Petit the psychogeographer is given free rein in the climactic fantasy where amid the flood Soho “breaks free from the rest of the city and the smoke and fire; Robinson the dirty roamer of Oxford street gone from the rupture”. This section also introduces the first of the lists that appear on the record. The context is absent, leaving tantalisingly ambiguous the sources for the images that range from William Blake walking down Poland Street (shadowed by a dog) to the only person not laughing in an audience.  Is it a series of cuts from Robinson’s film? a piece of internal cinema? or a synthesis of both, thus deliberately blurring the borders between the digital and psychological screen. Other lists appear on the second side including one musing on what a museum of loneliness might actually be: museum as attitude; the museum of loneliness as a roving parasite; it is not funded by the CIA; it is most at home in the departure lounge; the museum of loneliness believes institutional thinking no longer reads the modern world. The third list which finishes the record harks back to Petit’s former calling as film editor for Time Out magazine and is made up of incidents, items and facts from the history of cinema. The music at this point provides an almost metronomic backdrop to the words which appear as equal parts liturgy and a series of options from an automated telephone exchange; Morricone’s music, Jane Birkin looking through a keyhole, Sue Lloyd to Michael Caine “do you always wear your glasses...

Chris Petit

Here and in the other lists I recall a line from Derrida’s book: “The spectral rumour now resonates, it invades everything: the spirit of the “sublime” and the spirit of “nostalgia” cross all borders” (pg169). Amongst the infinite multiplicity of possible narratives Petit highlights the glaring dead end of hauntology as a form of thought to escape the “eternal now”. The sheer indeterminacy of cultural memory, how it is impossible to distinguish a truly political yearning for past possibilities from a nostalgic appropriation from a mere recalling of minutia from the past, undermines the claim to privileging some forms of recollection over others. One of signatures of post-modernity (or hypermodernity as Petit names it at one point) is the relativity of historical appropriation. Ghost Box records might imagine an alternative 1970s, while Burial laments the death of rave culture, and The Caretaker renders ballroom records from the 20s into creeping miasmas of sound. In each of these cases there is a technique at work much of which can be located in Pierre Schaeffer’s work on the acousmatic object in the 1950s and 60s. The idea made palpable by the advent of disk cutting lathes and soon after magnetic audio tape is that small pieces of sound, be they voices, instrumental sound, or field recordings, could be abstracted from their source and relocated in dislocated form into new compositions. These days we call it sampling. This uncanny effect of dislocation is the basic sonic logic at work in Petit and Mordant Music’s record to which they augment with the literary themes of memory aphasia.

Similarly with the image comes a necessity for intervention, for as Petit says during the excursus on the meaning of the Museum: “with the image bank exploded it behove someone to begin reassembling.” But without any normative criteria with which to appraise the images and competing narratives , with the effacing of the subject to whom this task would fall, the resultant cultural and historical word soup provides little more than the option of a higher gear for contemporary spectacle. A necessity to act, to build a narrative without any solid ground to build on; this is perhaps one way to understand what Derrida means when (quoting Hamlet) he refers to the world as being out of joint.  And so as with Robinson the only thing that matters becomes the myth one makes for oneself. Petit’s record demonstrates the still existent aesthetic possibilities behind these ideas, but crucially it is at its most prescient when taking the post-modern hauntological condition itself as the material to be worked on; there is simply no escape, nothing beyond the spectacle.

Intersectional Theory and Privilege Checking: On the Misuse of an Idea

1:

A specter is haunting the internet; the specter of unexamined privilege. Out there in the rarefied world of political commentary and op-ed journalism there is an increasing weight being placed on the concept of privilege. This is perhaps not surprising given our current predicament and the anger many feel at elite sections of society. But this seems to be something different from the familiar rhetoric of outrage at a time of recession and social unrest. The accusation that a speaker is privileged and especially the demand to ‘check your privilege’ isn’t just being aimed at wealthy politicians, businessmen and opinion makers but at individuals who ostensibly appear to be on the same side, debating similar issues, and coming from similar social backgrounds.  In recent months the use of the term has been particularly charged in online debates about feminism, racism, sexuality, and issues around transgendered people.

“Check your privilege!” This has become the rallying cry of the Mob when faced with a woman with whom they disagree. (...)(It’s) about playing an inverted game of Top Trumps where the real message is that it’s not who you are but how you were born that determines whether what you have to say is worth listening to”. - Sadie Smith

"Check your privilege", for example, is a profoundly stupid trope that states that only those with personal experience of something should comment, or that if a person is making an argument, they should immediately give way if their view is contradicted by somebody with a different life story. It is hard to imagine a more dishonest intellectual position than "check your privilege", yet daily I see intelligent women who should know better embracing it”. – Louise Mensch

The general premise underlying the demand to check one’s privilege is that certain speakers have a disproportionate advantage in getting their voices heard and as such need to attenuate their interventions into various issues in order not to impose their perspective at the expense of others. On the face of it there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with that, it equates to a general recognition of the need for equality between speakers and to listen to all sides and viewpoints without allowing those with the loudest voice to drown out everyone else. However the reality is more complex. The idea of privilege checking is claimed to be deployed as a part of a family of theories described as Intersectional. Laurie Penny, one of the most prominent exponents of privilege checking, here responds to Louise Mensch:

  

"Intersectionality" is another new bit of equality jargon that the stiff suits in the conservative commentariat loudly claim not to understand – despite or perhaps because of the fact that schoolchildren have been using it on the internet for years. All it means is that you cannot talk in any meaningful way about class without also talking about race, gender and sexuality, and vice versa. These things intersect – that's why we call them intersectional. (Guardian May 2013)

The claim that it’s not possible to say anything meaningful about class without taking race, gender and sexuality into account is a strong one. I’m not quite ready to throw out my Marx, and there are also plenty of good texts on race and gender which don’t accord equal weight to class, so perhaps we should break this down a bit.

2.

Roughly speaking intersectional theories are to do with the way in which agents in different social locations have differing perspectives owing to their experiences and subsequent status as knowers. Knowledge claims are as the theory goes always socially situated.  More specifically these theories build upon ideas from Marxism via feminist epistemology that agents in situations of oppression are in a position of epistemic privilege relative to others regarding the conditions of that oppression.  The standpoint of the proletariat is epistemologically advantageous on questions of capitalist exploitation compared to those of the ruling class for example. Feminist readings of this idea in the 1980s similarly emphasised its application to women’s experience of a world dominated by men. The dominated whether workers or women live in a world structured by others for their purposes – purposes that at the very least are not our own and that are in various degrees inimical to our development and even existence (Hartsock pg241).

 Intersectional social epistemology further develops this insight by incorporating how other social divisions, say on race and sexuality, intersect with those of class and gender. The implication is that social researchers must recognize how multiple axes of oppression intersect and generate variations in knowledge claims on a variety of issues and society as a whole. In particular it emphasises the value of claims made from the margins of society, by those most disenfranchised and distant from the centre of power. The activities of those at the bottom of such social hierarchies can provide starting points for thought – for everyone’s research and scholarship – from which humans’ relations with each other and the natural world can become visible. This is because the experience and lives of marginalized people, as they understand them, provide particularly significant problems to be explained or research agendas (Harding in Alcoff & Potter, eds. pg 54).

Some of the most recent scholarship in the UK has attempted to ground an ethics of testimony by developing the notion of an epistemic or testimonial injustice. This analysis homes in on how social and identarian power can affect the legitimacy and credibility of a speaker’s testimony. Broadly speaking, prejudicial dysfunction in testimonial practice can be of two kinds. Either the prejudice results in the speaker receiving more credibility than she otherwise would have – a credibility excess –or  it results in her receiving less credibility than she otherwise would have – a credibility deficit (Fricker pg17). Paradigmatic cases of this kind include rape victims’ testimony to a trial jury, and the testimony of French Muslim women on their reasons for taking up the hijab.

So interestingly in the literature the concept of privilege is most often used when talking about the epistemic privilege of those marginal groups. Far less time is spent emphasising the material/social or whatever privilege of those at the top. This isn’t surprising as the goal of standpoint theory is to focus on the value for social research and possible avenues of resistance, of the knowledge resources of those at the bottom, rather than taking pot shots at perceived opponents. We can I think immediately refute Laurie Penny’s claim about the inability to say anything about class without including race, gender and sexuality. If I make the claim “people on lower incomes suffer a greater range of health problems relative to those on higher incomes” do I need to take race, gender, and sexuality into account for this claim to be true or meaningful? Seemingly not; although Penny might object that this claim does not differentiate between the specific sorts of health problems affecting say gay and disabled people on low incomes; that alone does not invalidate the claim. Nor again does the fact that I am a person on middle income affect the truth value of my claim.

Although this is quite a general claim it is I think still meaningful, not least in the potential to highlight inequalities in health predicated on economic inequality, and to engender possible demands for extra provision of healthcare to low income families or more general calls for social justice. There is arguably an important distinction to be made between these sorts of empirical claims and those which we might call more perspectival or subjective interpretations; though this distinction itself is a point of controversy. Quite how much objectivity is mediated by subjectivity is one of the big issues that separate both feminist and social epistemologists; although our privilege checkers don’t seem to waste much time considering this important detail. 

Perhaps the point to emphasise here is ‘scope’; the more detailed your analysis the greater need you may have to differentiate between social needs and perspectives, particularly if the aim of your research might be to provide guidance for healthcare provision to a diverse community. On the face of it though there is a great deal that can be said about class and similarly about race, gender, and sexuality without qualifying one’s claims ad infinitum along intersectional lines.

3.

So now let’s look at some examples of how intersectional theory/privilege checking is deployed in recent online discussions. There are literally dozens of blogs, Twitter streams, and articles on the websites of the Guardian, New Statesman and Independent which deploy the notion of privilege in the manner under consideration. For consistency’s sake I’m going to cite four examples from the recent writing of Laurie Penny, who as I stated above does it rather a lot.

“Beauty is about class, money, power and privilege – and it always has been.(…) Even the most stereotypically thin and beautiful woman will find herself dismissed as unattractive if what comes out of her mouth happens to threaten male privilege, which is why feminists of all stripes continue to be labelled “fat and ugly”.” (NS May 2013)

 

“I count myself extremely lucky to have grown up as a political writer in the age of the internet. Suddenly, where once there were only a few privileged pundits talking to each other and expecting the proles to listen, there are writers from all walks of life producing dazzling, meaningful prose and finding their audience.(…) the age in which middle-aged white men pontificated from rarefied platforms and expected to be listened to is over”. (NS April 2013)

  

“Whatever you choose to call it, practical equal rights for women will always be a terrifying prospect for those worried about the loss of male privilege. It’s no wonder that “feminism” is still stereotyped as an aggressive movement, full of madwomen dedicated to the destruction of the male sex and who will not rest until they can breakfast on roasted testicles.”  (NS March 2013)

“Privilege is not the same as power. Nor is it a game whereby only the least privileged people will henceforth be allowed an opinion – the last time I checked, the political conversation was still dominated by rich white men and their wives. These are the people who go into spasms of outrage at the very notion that a black person, or a woman, or a working-class person might have as much right to an opinion as they do on matters that affect them. I'd like to reassure these people that taking away their monopoly on opinions is the very opposite of censorship, and furthermore that their whining is distasteful”. (Guardian May 2013)

So here we have four quotes which together bring in class, race, sex, age, and physical attractiveness, all of which hinge on the articulation of an opposition between a purportedly marginal group and a dominant one.  The last quote is particularly worthy of note as it forms part of a defence of the use Penny makes of privilege in her writing. I think it’s important to distinguish the two things which are at work here: firstly, the use of intersectional theories as an analytic tool utilizing the potential epistemic resources of the oppressed; and secondly the practical deployment of the concept of privilege as part of that strategy. These two aspects - as I think should be obvious now- are quite separate issues, although commentators such as Penny often act as if they mutually entail each other. Moreover as these quotes demonstrate the approach taken here focuses primarily on the negative side of the discourse: the calling out of an opponent’s privilege, rather than making visible the lives of marginalized people. There is a great deal that could be said about the limitations of this kind of privilege discourse; it will suffice for me to highlight three at this point.

Privilege discourse does not accommodate the notion of achieved stance. In the tradition of standpoint theory from the 1980s it was customary to view the epistemic privilege of women as an ‘achieved stance’. That is to say that social location and perspective alone were not deemed sufficient to count as having an epistemically privileged standpoint. What was thought necessary was a practical political engagement centred on testimony which elucidated the shared experience of unequal power relations to the underprivileged group. The primarily negative and elitist approach taken by the privilege checkers does not maintain that tradition. There is no shared standpoint developed amongst the community of online commentators or their peers. Nor is there an emphasis on the testimony of the oppressed. If it appears at all it does so mediated through the lens of the journalist in opinion pieces or asides on the commentators own experience of the issue at hand. This absence of genuine testimony from the margins correlates well with the practice of dismissing the speech of some while valorising others without any reference to the content of the utterances in question. This is clearly a hypocritical or at least contradictory practice for anyone like Penny who sets herself up as a spokesperson on social issues while admitting her own privileged position in comparison to those she writes about.

Privilege discourse maintains an undifferentiated approach to social oppression.  Despite all the talk of multiple social positions the last word in all these machinations on privilege tends to be the overall hegemony of the white middle aged heterosexual male. As the above quotes demonstrate this point is made repeatedly by Penny, as it often is by other commentators who deploy privilege discourse. While certainly having more than a grain of truth to it, their insistence that this be the last word does nothing to provide a roadmap for social change in any of the cases of oppression they highlight. If it is indeed the case that these social hierarchies are multifaceted and structural then the calling out of white male privilege by a minority of well educated online commentators seems somewhat inadequate as a political strategy. Furthermore it entirely misses the advantage claimed for Intersectional theory which is to move away from theorizing domination in simple oppositional terms. There is little in the writing of the privilege checkers that deals with the more nuanced aspects of this work: for example how the interests and power of wealthy sections of minority communities affects those communities ability to accurately represent themselves in the media.   

Privilege discourse does not argue for the relative importance of the different social locations it highlights. Why should the testimony of “unattractive” people be considered especially valuable? One of Intersectional theory’s own internal limitations is to question whether the identities they highlight represent epistemically relevant categories of social location. This criterion would be met only insofar as the society under consideration is structured along the lines of the category in question. Beauty for example clearly confers considerable advantages to those who are considered to meet their society’s norm for it. Despite this fact though, it is questionable as to what degree western societies are actually structured along the lines of beauty or at least how significant to overall equality and social justice such a structuring might be. Penny’s brief comments on this issue don’t provide much clarity aside from counterpoising the suggested beauty hierarchy with the overarching dominion of male privilege. This is a good example of how privilege discourse does very little aside from noting a series of phenomena associated with difference, and reiterating the hegemony of the White Male.   

4.

The practical consequences of ‘checking one’s privilege’, of shutting up rather than trying to form a consensus is encapsulated by a recent spat on Twitter. The occasion was Penny’s suggestion (a quite correct one I think) that people should not rise to a race-baiting article written by Rod Liddle in the Spectator after the murder of soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich in May. However instead of arguing her position she fell into silence after having apparently had her privilege checked by a number of women including black comedian Ava Vidal. Ostensibly it was Penny’s ‘white privilege’ vis-à-vis someone suffering a racist attack that she was owning up to and subsequently being silenced by.

Now let’s go back to the Marxist reading on proletarian perspective to make some sense of this. Recall that the idea is that the bourgeoisie as a capital owning class have an interest in maintaining the status quo, whereas the proletarian sees more clearly the true nature of social relations as they do not share the bourgeoisies’ interests, are subject to their rule, and have direct experiential access to the reality of exploitation. The essential point here is the misalignment of interests combined with the difference in perspective potentially achieved by virtue of their experiences. It is unlikely that a CEO of a top company and a shelf stacker will have similar perspectives on economic exploitation owing to their different epistemic positions relative to the system as a whole, and their different interests in that system. As such if you wanted to know about the reality of working class life under capitalism you would go first to the shelf stacker not the CEO. I don’t think this is the situation with Penny and her Twitter row.

In her case while she may not have had direct experience of racism relative to the women she was conversing with, nevertheless it is likely they did share the same interest in combating racism. As such while the experiential difference may yield different approaches to achieving their goal there is nothing that should prevent them coming to a shared understanding of what might need to be done, or conversely they could just agree to disagree over the particulars. There was however no justification in this case for Penny to give way simply because the person disagreeing with her on a point of practice was part of a group who were more likely to have the experience in question. This form of self-censorship makes a united response to racism or any form of social oppression far less likely and may ultimately reinforce a feeling of separateness between agents who in fact share common aims.  It‘s also important to recognise that this censorship of self and others is an interventionist rather than structural approach to the problems of democratic speech. In effect what is being practiced here is a form of policing the public sphere, or at least that narrow avenue of the public sphere in which Penny and her privilege checking compatriots operate.

Let there be no mistake; there is a problem with marginal lives being suppressed or distorted by dominant discourses. One need only witness the demonization of benefit claimants and migrant workers to understand this. The question however is whether individuals like Penny who themselves are the product of and work within the framework of that dominant discourse have any legitimacy in playing the role of gatekeeper.

5.

It’s worthwhile reiterating that the discourse on privilege exemplified here doesn’t spend much time exploring the possible untapped resources of knowledge and experience offered by marginalized people. Instead, it spends much of its time weeding out the so called unexamined privilege of the purported dominant group or subgroup, and more often simply among the commentators own peers. This is done not by reference to what the speaker actually says but by appeal to the speaker’s nominal identity (being white, being male, being heterosexual, being able-bodied).  Penny as an Oxford graduate is no doubt familiar with the old Latin phrase ad hominem, which in footballing parlance is translated as playing the man and not the ball. Instead of appraising the statements of the speaker for signs of a partial or ideological perspective they simply appraise the speaker, resulting in what looks very much like a game of discursive top-trumps where the speech of some individuals is rendered invalid before it’s even heard.

To this ad hominem distortion there is I think a further fundamental problem with privilege discourse. Without adequately defining the scope and limits to the situated knowledge claims they highlight, the radicalised intersectional aspect of privilege discourse can begin to revolve in ever decreasing circles.  The idea of different perspectival and epistemic locations gets increasingly conflated with the concept of subjective identity itself, such that the multiplicity of possible identities results in a corresponding multiplicity of possible intersections which without qualification as to their specific epistemic characteristics produces a general demand to shut up about things you have not experienced yourself. Following this logic intersections thus multiply ad infinitum to the point of elevating the banal truism of ontological separation; i.e. that no two individuals can share the exact same experience. At this point radicalised intersectional theory collapses into an extreme form of scepticism where all statements are rendered invalid beyond the life-world of the individual, and thus all those claims pertaining to a shared world are foreclosed from the outset. All the world becomes bodies and opinions, the latter which of course is the domain of political commentators and op-ed writers like Laurie Penny.

The corrective is obviously that the statement itself must be heard and examined in order to make a judgement. It is not acceptable to dismiss the speaker simply on account of their position, nor is it valid to valorise the speech of the oppressed in-toto without examining the content of the statement and defining the scope of enquiry. Or, as Linda Martin Alcoff succinctly puts it: “the fact that judgement is sometimes correlated to social position does not yield relativist conclusions, because judgements from any location must still be subject to challenge and verification. (Alcoff in Sullivan & Tuana, eds. pg41)” It is precisely this properly democratic aspect of challenge and verification that is missing from the privilege checkers discourse. None of this reflective, nuanced approach is applied by Penny, or her fellow minor hacks and online commentators, who instead practice a kind of liberal interventionism within their online domain. Instead of the possibility of forming consensus between groups on issues of social domination there is just a multiplicity of incommensurate opinions, some of which require silencing, and others which can never be challenged.

Privilege checking I think is thus correctly characterised as a predominantly middle class game played by a tiny group of online activists, bloggers, and social media users, very few of whom appear to spend much time searching out the potential epistemic resources of those most underprivileged in society.  Or, at best they are happy to attempt representing them from afar. These commentators do however have a disproportionate influence on public opinion, at least that part of public opinion that wishes to align itself with “the left”. Their function as an all too visible mediating layer between full on political activism and undecided political audience is the sole reason I find their output of interest at all.

If it is the case as Penny claims in her response to Louise Mensch that schoolchildren have been using her brand of intersectional privilege checking for years, then perhaps that’s because it represents a particularly simplistic and juvenile idea of democracy. It is certainly one which I hope will be short-lived.

References:

Fricker,Miranda – Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford University Press, 2007)

Harding, Sandra – Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is Strong Objectivity, in Alcoff,Linda & Potter,Elizabeth, eds. – Feminist Epistemologies (Routledge, 1993)

Hartsock,Nancy – The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essay (Westview Press, 1998)

Alcoff, Linda – Epistemologies of Ignorance: Three Types in S. Sullivan & N Tuana, eds. – Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (State University of New York Press , 2007)

Work and the Clamour Towards Libidinal Economy: A Response to Mark Fisher

 

Just another day at work?

1. In a recent article for the Occupied Times Mark Fisher makes the argument that recent changes in communicative practices inaugurate a new form of work-life relationship radically different from those of the past. The jumping off point for his analysis are two quotes taken from a recent Guardian article purportedly exposing the hard working lives of CEOs. “I usually get up at 5 or 5:15am. Historically, I would start sending emails when I got up. But not everyone is on my time schedule, so I have tried to wait until 7am. Before I email, I work out, read, and use our products. … I am not a big sleeper and never have been. Life is too exciting to sleep.” “I quickly scan my emails while my son is taking over my bed and having his milk. Urgent ones I reply to there and then. I flag others to follow up on my commute into work. . . . I receive an average of 500 emails a day, so I email throughout the day.”

Drawing on various themes from the work of Deleuze, Guattari, and the Italian post-autonomist writers Fisher concludes that as such labour is essentially communicative and that with the advent of technologies such as email, social networking , smart phones and the like, the temporal distinction between work and life has been rendered “permeable”. Brushing aside the issue of whether we should take the testimony of early bird CEO’s as gospel at a time when corporate excess and elite bonuses are under the microscope, what is more important are the implications of this proposed  new work-life paradigm for the understanding of class relations.

“The good old days of exploitation, where the boss was interested in the worker only to the extent that they produced a commodity which could be sold at a profit, are long gone.  Work then meant the annihilation of subjectivity, your reduction to an impersonal machine-part; it was the price that you paid for time away from work. Now, there is no time away from work, and work is not opposed to subjectivity”.

For some, we can quickly retort, this may be the case. But is there not something perverse mere weeks after over a thousand clothing manufacturing workers were crushed to death in appalling conditions in Bangladesh, in claiming that the old exploitative model of production is a thing of the past? Perhaps I’m just “disavowing” but I don’t believe one has to be a card carrying Trotskyite to note that globalization while linking people communicatively to a far greater extent also produces a highly uneven playing field of working conditions. The industry in which those workers died is not a minor one (Bangladesh is the world’s second biggest clothing manufacturer), nor could we argue that those workers formed part of the global population who find themselves “compulsively gripped by the imperatives of communicative capitalism (to check email, to update our statuses)”. Rather their invisibility and lack of communicative resources is what characterizes their position as exploited, to claim otherwise is absurd.

Similarly, has work in the modern age ever really been opposed to subjectivity? My thoughts turn to former miners in the North East of England for whom their work and the mine around which their community was centered formed such an integral and inseparable part of their lives. The pit closures of the 1980s were so brutal that even now the life-world of many of those former mining communities are still in pieces. We would do well to remember that the notion of a reflective distance between work and life, between the time one sells to the boss and the time that is one’s own is itself a product of capitalist development; a corollary of the Marxian scission between Man and Citizen. We might glibly say that if work was a more pleasant experience then a life that identifies with it might not necessarily be a bad thing.

2. Fisher’s corollary claim to that for the novelty of communicative capitalism is for an extension to the understanding of work itself. “All time is entrepreneurial time because we are the commodities, so that any time not spent selling ourselves is wasted time”…This mode of work makes Sisyphus’s interminable labours seem quaint; at least, Sisyphus was condemned to perform the same task over and over again. Semio-capitalism is more like confronting the mythical hydra: cut off one head and three more grow in its place, the more emails we answer, the more we receive in return”.

Sisyphus’ task was of course a form of non-productive labour. The rendering useless of his capabilities was implicit to his punishment for showing hubris towards greater gods. Fisher’s claim as the Hydra example suggests is that the communicative practices which many are engaged in to ever greater extent are in fact a form of productive labour, a form of work. An understanding of this claim might be the way in which social networks like Facebook, marketed ostensibly as leisure or purely social activity, are taking up an increasing amount of our time and efforts while simultaneously providing a pool of commercial and personal data collecting opportunities for private companies. However, to render the notion that we are “commodities” intelligible it must be seen in a more nuanced light. The idea of commodification which I think is in play here has more to do with self-production or perhaps self-realization than the notion that we are subjectivised by a purely external power. On this understanding we are never “finished” commodities, otherwise what reason would we have for continually working on ourselves; nor do we so to speak always engage in a process of selling ourselves on social media, unless Fisher views any public speech act as itself an act of self-production/work. Rather is it not the activity of sociality itself which Facebook and others turn into profit producing means? And if so could not this trend just as easily be captured under the familiar headings of commodification or the marketization of social relations, rather than an extension of the paradigm of work?

Updating statuses, uploading photographs and responding to the activities posted by others; is this really the same sort of work as that done by the CEO that gets up early to send emails to colleagues? Does this comparison not conflate a juridical concept of work - implicating contracts, working hours, rights and obligations, with a boarder non-juridical understanding that would implicate all socially productive activity into the concept of “Work”? In the example of the CEO he is obliged to respond to emails as part of his activity as a CEO, however in the case of the Facebook user despite what some seem to believe, you are not obliged to update your status on a daily basis, and you won’t be kicked off the site for refusing either.

Fisher’s text at times suggests a very one sided view of the use of social media and other communications technology. While there are undoubtedly users who feel compelled to upload content on a daily basis, there are many more who perhaps only use it to arrange their social life, or to keep in touch with friends around the world. Similarly there are users who feed the net with every banal thought that enters their head while never uploading a single photograph, participate in a discussion, or arrange an event; just as there are people who never check their work email away from the office despite the technology being available for them to do so. The norms governing the use of social media are in no way as prescriptive as those governing the world of work.  The “productive activity” involved is still leisure (of a kind) but like so many other forms of leisure activity it is framed within a profit making environment. In this we can draw a comparison between the two fields in the sense that the rules and norms are constituted with capital as their ultimate horizon.  However, unlike the work you are required to do to pay the bills, using social media is not compulsory. The degree to which you participate and the finesse that you bring to the activity is to a significant extent highly negotiable and within your own hands. Conversely, employment is still governed under the rubric of the juridical subject of rights and obligations; even so for many, particularly the class of networked educated westerners that Fisher’s text addresses, there is considerable room for contestation and maneuver. Far more room that is than that available to Bangladeshi textiles workers, for whom violent protest against their working conditions is an understandable response.

3. There is a strange ambiguity in Fisher’s discussion of work. It is still an “exploitation” from which there is “no liberation”, and yet at the top “you might now enjoy it (life is too exciting for sleep)”, even though up there you find only more work. Perhaps most striking is the claim that unhappy employees despite being compelled to put on a positive face (a trend perhaps explainable by the domination of service industry jobs which are naturally more customer facing) are simultaneously compelled by the same system of work to provide a somatic sign of discomfort: “The subjugatory libidinal forces that draw enjoyment from the current cult of work don’t want us to entirely conceal our misery. For what enjoyment is there to be had from exploiting a worker who actually delights in their work?”

In claiming that work actually requires suffering from us Fisher describes a world that is comparable to the Red Room in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, a strange metaphysical place from where demonic forces are sent out to harvest pain and strife for the consumption of timeless desiring beings. Unless we accept the premise that capitalist economy is governed by an impersonal psychological imperative towards sadism this claim is clearly somewhat exaggerated. Fisher I think is drawing on passages from the seminar of Jacque Lacan where he makes a comparison (more semantic than philosophical in my view) between the Marxian notion of surplus-value and what Lacan glosses as surplus-enjoyment. The discussion revolves around a pun on the German for surplus-value, Mehrwert, which Lacan twists into the French Mere Verte (green mother). Lacan’s suggestive but as always gnomic text alludes towards a connection between his theory of a fundamental lack constitutive of any subjectivity, and the activity of alienated labour under capitalism. Taking this into account we might then interpret Fisher as suggesting an identity between this jealous green mother and the “subjugatory libidinal forces” that draw enjoyment from the worker.

It’s an interesting perspective which I think may have merit in explaining some more symptomatic social phenomena such as binge drinking at the end of the working week. It has often seemed to me that people in that situation are trying to claw back quickly something that was lost during the preceding week of work. However, the trouble I have with it as a general interpretative principle is that it’s essentially a negative theory that in many ways sets up the same old Marxian opposition between the oppressed worker and dominating capitalist, albeit now in spritely post-structuralist and psychoanalytic garb. It is this essentially negative oppositional characterisation of work which Fisher is transposing onto what I have outlined as the broader non-juridical form of productive activity; what in Italian autonomist literature is sometimes referred to as the “social factory”. Crucially it should be noted that for Lacan, unlike Marx the concepts of loss and alienation pointed to by Fisher function constitutively as the ground of any subjectivity whatsoever, and are not just a historical characteristic of capitalist societies. Thus taking Lacan as our guide in these matters renders the possibility of change or of overturning these states of affairs highly problematic. We should also note that for Lacan alienation is principally alienation into the signifier, into the materiality of language itself. Thus, we might wish to be wary of endorsing the earlier claim that work is essentially communicative, lest we commit ourselves to such a dark perspective on work and productive activity that we find it impossible to escape to the light. 

More generally the move to account for complex and uneven social phenomena like the emergence of new forms of communicative practices by recourse to psychological explanations requires considerable justification, which in this instance is conspicuously absent. Even if we were to take this explanation in a softer more interpretive sense there still remains the problem of demonstrating that subjective pain is a necessary component of capitalist economy rather than an ever present byproduct. The proposed obsolescence of the traditional production paradigm (call it Fordist, or whatever) hinted at by Fisher leaves a major gap in theories of social and political agency into which much of this psychological explanation is I think unjustly poured.

4. Finally, perhaps we might concede that abolishing the antagonistic distinction between work and life need not be construed negatively. As I remarked above, separation of subjectivity into that which is one’s own and that which is not is a prominent mark of the alienation that capitalist society, whether historical or contemporary, produces. If we follow Giorgio Agamben’s recent work then what is at stake in this division is nothing less than the possibility of a future beyond our current predicament. He claims it is this scission between bare life (Zoe in the Greek), the abstract subject of right (ultimate and opaque barer of sovereignty) and the multifarious forms of life abstractly recodified as social juridical identities (the voter, the worker, the journalist, the student, but also the HIV positive, the transvestite, the porno star, the elderly, the parent, the woman) which prevents us thinking the possibility of a new kind of community (Agamben pg7). Conversely, to think a form-of-life in which subjectivity is not alienated in this way, a life in which productive capabilities are not cognized as working for an Other, but rather orientated towards both self and common use is a worthwhile goal.

If it is the case as Fisher states that productive practices in the West, whether strictly work or social production, are moving progressively towards a point of indistinction, then the question we might wish to ask is not whether we can push back the tide of work into its old temporal framework, but rather whether this coming unity of life and work might be re-orientated away from capital. His diagnosis is essentially correct that when we are at the office or when we are engaged in forms of social production like sport and other leisure activities, including the use of social media, the fruits of that activity are channeled away into capital production. Is this not then the crux of the matter? Not that the indistinction between work and life represents a new horror of alienation that progressively sucks up our libidinal life force; but rather that the increasingly networked and communicative practices that characterise Western societies are harnessed predominantly for the benefit of a minority. Perhaps then instead of utilizing the Lacanian framework which would have us ringing our hands at the impending eclipse of a world away from work, theorists of social change might want to consider what sort of changes are required to reorientate emerging communicative practices away from capital and private use towards the possibility of a form-of-life without division, whose powers are directed towards the common use of a community of which oneself is a part. However, in order to begin this task it is first necessary to move beyond thinking work in purely negative and oppositional terms.

Agamben,Giorgio - Means Without End: Notes on Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2000)

Beautiful, Intelligent, and Utterly Pernicious: A Review of Agora

 I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum although some plot details will be needed for the review to make sense. Also this review is to do with the ideas presented in the film rather than the technical or acting aspects.

Agora is ostensibly a biopic of the Neo-Platonic philosopher Hypatia who lived in Alexandria around the end of the 4^th and beginning of the 5^th century AD. Accounts of her life are sketchy and none of her own works, if indeed she wrote any survived. The fairest and most detailed account of her life and the events in Alexandria come from Socrates of Constantinople, a contemporary writing at the beginning of the 5^th century. He was also a Christian and this is worth bearing in mind.  In cases such as this where primary sources are minimal there is predictably, and perhaps necessarily, considerable scope for poetic licence. Added to that there is the obvious need when staging an expensive historical epic to put on something of a show. All of this should not distract us from taking seriously what this film has to say; or rather what it wants Hypatia to say to us as Westerners in the 21^st century. All evocations of the antique world play on the fantasy and dream like perception we have of those times, steeped as they are in the Western cultural consciousness. But like Freud knew, when dealing with dreams what matters is not so much the dream content as the dream work. How does the dream rearrange familiar objects and characters, and what precisely does this arrangement aim to say about our own time?

The cinematography is outstanding throughout, recreating the life of a turbulent multicultural city in the Eastern Roman Empire. Much credit should go to the set designers and location managers who bring Alexandria to life as a crowded, dirty and often dangerous place to as faithful degree as possible. But behind the visual historical fidelity there are I would argue two ideals at work around which the story rotates; these being the character of Hypatia herself, and the Library of Alexandria. Now, Hypatia was a philosopher in late antiquity, but the character Rachel Weisz personifies is far closer to a modern liberal scientist, an independent and secular woman of reason. The role of science (which in the 4^th century was not distinguished from philosophy) is written large in her character. She is seen grappling with problems of astronomy and mathematics, the director even going so far as to suggest she was on the verge of overturning Ptolemy’s geocentric view of the universe. This is a total fiction but crucially it projects a very modern scientific view onto Hypatia, and it is this distortion that we are invited to identify with. Hypatia is to be seen reaching across the centuries as one of us. Her virtue is also exemplified to a preposterous degree as she is seen working with slaves, even allowing one slave to give a presentation to her class. She expounds a doctrine of liberal tolerance to bickering Christian and Pagan students and shows forgiveness in a way Christians would wish to claim only they can.  All this is one side of the antagonistic opposition that the film depicts. On the other side are the religious believers.

It has been a historical commonplace ever since Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to depict the story of the late Empire as a gradual conversion to Christianity and absolutism, and with it (even perhaps because of it) the disintegration of the classical world and the entry into the Middle Ages. Christians have been the fall guy in this story for a long time but Agora is singularly unique in its portrayal of all religion as intolerant and destructive. We see Pagans attacking Christians, Christians attacking Pagans, Christians attacking Jews and Jews attacking Christians. Alexandria however was known to be an especially volatile city long before Constantine gave the nod to Christ, with riots and violence of all kinds being perpetrated by forces imperial, religious and otherwise. But director Amenabar want us to see this complex period in a very particular light.

The set piece of the first half of the film is the storming of the Serapeum, the temple dedicated to the Pagan god Serapis. Now here is where the other ideal, the library of Alexandria comes in. I won’t deviate with a lengthy excursus on the history of the library but the main point to note is that the fate of the library is unknown. It is known that one part of the Serapeum was used to store books that were recovered when the original Royal Library of Alexandria was destroyed (how this happened is also disputed). There were at least two other occasions prior to 390AD that the library may have been destroyed but even then whether all or even most books were lost is unknown. Second point to note is that there is no evidence that after the Serapeum was closed when Pagan worship was banned under the edict of emperor Theodosius I that any books were burnt, or even that any were still stored in the building. But ideals have a hold on the contemporary mind, and when the modern viewer unsullied by the nuances and incompleteness of historical data witness the spectacle of bearded religious hordes gleefully burning the contents of what we are told is the greatest library on earth, full of the wisdom of humanity, it is not the rational mind that is being called upon to respond. The cinematographer knows your pain and when the mob enter the domed classroom smashing the instruments and tearing up books, the camera rotates 180 degrees; it is the death of the classical city, the world turned upside down.

Another striking image is a high angle (God’s view) shot of the Christians scuttling about like insects burning books in the courtyard. The image of book burning is not the only stock trope of 20^th century ignorance called upon in the film. It should by now be clear how the director has arranged the pieces in his dream, what fundamental antagonism he want you to witness and deplore. No, not Gibbon’s 18^th century thesis of Decline and Fall, but the post 9/11 world of clashing civilizations; the world of secular scientific reason under threat from the intolerant religious barbarians. Despite Agora’s generally intelligent screenplay there are still moments of almost brazen didacticism. How naive to think we had finally changed laments Roman prefect Orestes after one bloody conflict, aping the Oxford view ala Richard Dawkins. Bishop Cyril publicly reads a notoriously misogynistic passage from the bible (1 Timothy 2:8-15 if you want to look it up) and is seen amongst a baying crowd of Christian monks called the Parabalani venerating an executed man as a martyr; a word we now commonly associate with terrorism and fundamentalism. The latter scene is of particular note as it ignores sources that report this was not a popular move; other Christians being uncomfortable with the title martyr as he had been executed for attacking a Roman official not for refusing to deny Christ. 

In the last instance what all of this serves to obscure is the central role of power in the sorts of conflicts we see in Agora. Even Wikipedia, that bastion of detailed analysis has the events in Alexandria into which Hypatia was drawn as to do with Bishop Cyril and prefect Orestes. In a city like Alexandria the prefect could often end up an isolated figure with the army away on the frontier and being faced with a mass of near starving poor on the one hand and tax dodging civic notables on the other. Owing to the institution of Christian charity which the film does depict but without comment, the Bishops of major cities were increasingly important figures, not least in their potential ability to mediate between the imperial administration and the mob. This function of free speaking to power was a role which had often been afforded to philosophers in earlier times. The Christian Socrates of Constantinople reports that Hypatia was “of careful mind in performing the public duties affecting her city, [her] self-possession and freedom of speech derived from her culture”. She could do little however in the Roman administration’s struggle to maintain order between the various sects and groupings in Alexandria despite being the prefect’s preferred council. The Bishop however could speak to the Christian mob and the poor. The role of the philosopher and the ideal of the classical city that she carried with her was slowly displaced. Despite Orestes old world sensibility the tide had turned, he could not afford to ignore Cyril in this new climate. These are the wider events that the story of Hypatia brings to tragic focus, not the very modern ideological perspective that this film wants to present.  For let us not forget that the idea of a clash of civilizations and the unquestionable correctness of western reason has been used and is still being used to justify military intervention in Islamic world. It is after all from recent conflicts that Agora derives many of its images. Be they woman hating fundamentalists, book burning bearded fanatics, or murderous men after martyrdom, this director, like Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris before him damns all faith but principally takes aim at Islam.

I would not go so far as to call Agora propaganda for militant atheists, although I’m sure they’ll like it. What stops it being propaganda is the film’s mostly intelligent screenplay, the wonderful attention to visual if not historical detail, and the very fact that this story from a little exposed era of history has even been given such epic cinematic treatment at all. I identify with Hypatia as so many have done down the centuries (even Christians), but I do not identify with the crude and obscurantist perspective that the film makers want to project onto her. If philosophy means anything it is the solemn and necessary duty to subject power to critique. Agora’s perspective is borne of power, the power to bomb civilians with unmanned drones, to manipulate public opinion through mass media, and to stoke up fear and prejudice and call it enlightenment. Power re-writes history in its own image, the duty of critique is to unravel it.