On Auto-valorization

I sat in on a presentation by the Team Colors Collective at Modern Times Bookstore the other day. Team Colors Collective take their inspiration from Italian Marxist currents of the 60s and 70s which, diverging from the increasingly aloof and reformist Italian Communist Party (PCI), emphasized direct inquiries into the labor process and the conditions of the working class. This form of worker’s inquiry or “co-research” eschews the distance of academic research, calling for political collaboration with research subjects. Even as the Italian Autonomia abandoned its commitment to co-research in favor of more esoteric and distant theorizing, the anglophone Midnight Notes Collective took up this model in its research into primitive accumulation or “New Enclosures” in Nigeria, extending it to subjects outside of the traditional working class, and now the third-generation Team Colors Collective brings co-research to bear on a wide variety of activist groups.
Let me first admit that I’ve only glanced at their anthology—Uses of the Whirlwind—so the following should be read as occasioned by the TCC rather than in response to them. One of the concepts bandied about by Autonomist Marxism—particularly Antonio Negri—is that workers should refuse to labor for capital and instead produce use-values for themselves (auto-valorization). So, one of the many projects mentioned by the TCC was community gardening in Detroit. Detroit, suffering 50% unemployment and losing population every year, has been abandoned by supermarkets, leaving residents without access to inexpensive food. Here, capital has refused the working class rather than vice versa (even if we connect the fall of Detroit to auto-workers’ wage struggle) but functionally the move is the same—rather than obtain use-values through monetary exchange (and thereby continue to valorize capital), citizens of Detroit raise food for themselves for free. This is great as a palliative measure and at least potentially useful for creating a life-support system for future struggles. Workers who depend less on money to meet their needs can strike for longer or engage in even more revolutionary action. Granted.
But all of this talk about “exodus” from capitalist bondage or withdrawal from labor and exchange fails to appreciate workerist \ autonomist theories of the social factory and, in particular, reproductive labor. The autonomists argued that the entirety of life, waged and unwaged, now works to valorize capital. The reproduction of the working class—all of the things it takes to get workers back to the factory gates and ready to work—requires a great deal of unpaid labor, often carried out by women. Capital does not have to pay the wage the worker would require to pay someone else to wash his or her dishes, or cook food, or care for and socialize future workers, or what have you—it’s done for free by the worker’s household or by the workers themselves. This unpaid labor, therefore, ultimately ends up as more surplus value for capital. Community gardening, then, might very well be just another subsidy for capital, reproducing workers gratis and thereby contributing to the vast pool of unpaid labor that accrues to the employing class.
Of course, that should come with a few caveats. Paying for food valorizes capital, too, and presumably at a higher rate. Moreover, it’s not as if the wage level automatically drops if one worker in a hundred does laundry in her bath tub instead of dry-cleaning. DIY practices might just free up more cash for workers, making life a little more bearable. And these practices have their value as propaganda or consciousness-raising tools.

But focus on self-reliance, estrangement, or autonomy at the expense of direct struggle is counterproductive. There’s always talk in anarchist-leaning contexts about building the new world in the shell of the old, about alternative models, small-scale projects, that anticipate and embody a different mode of politics and production. Let’s face it, these little pockets of utopia hiding in the pores of capitalism are always going to be small, meager, and constrained unless they expropriate the wealth of capital. Even if these enterprises succeed without access to funds or a stable, paid workforce, there’s still the question of co-optation. Capitalism has always been promiscuous—it gladly articulates itself with other modes of production, other ways of capturing value: capital welcomed the labor of slaves in antebellum America and now enjoys the commodities produced by workers in state capitalist China. Indeed, the household has been described by Resnick & Wolfe as a formally communist mode of production—one in which workers appropriate their own surplus value. Capital will always push to enclose, privatize, and subsume these modes of production—restaurants replace home-cooked meals, corporate farming shoves out subsistence farming—but their existence does not pose a necessary threat.  That is not to say that anything that does not bring down capitalism is futile but, rather, that there is a need for policy or institutional change.  I’m attracted to autonomism because it takes seriously the demands of the working class — often to the point of failing to account for ideology or false consciousness — but I think this needs to be coupled with a look at the demands of the capitalist class: what is it they aren’t willing to give up?  Where are the zero sum games between capital and labor?  Where does capital resist labor?  At sites of worker appropriation, when workers reclaim capital.  Auto-reduction, strike actions, the social wage, and expropriation, but not auto-valorization.

Second Order Bigotry

I’ve been reading Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher (kpunk: http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/ ) and one of his arguments is that late capitalist institutions work not by functioning properly but by creating the representation of their current success and future performance. This is how how the stock market operates: traders aren’t interested so much in the actual value a company creates as what other traders’ aggregate perception of a company might be. The best pop culture example is found in The Wire, where police, school administrators, and politicians spend more effort on “juking the stats” than actually reducing crime, improving education, or relieving poverty. Fisher’s point is not that slick PR types are actually duping everyone, manufacturing consent and so on. On some level we all recognize the falsity of public relations, but still act as if there is a Big Other out there that we have to please. This Big Other — defined by its “constitutive ignorance” of the distinction between “what is officially accepted and what is widely known and experienced by actual individuals” – is less an all-knowing deity or stern Father and more like a child who still believes in Santa Claus. It is okay for a politician or a CEO to act in an utterly mendacious way so long as this social fiction isn’t pierced, as long as it is possible to pretend that someone else still believes in their virtue, even if that is obviously not the case. The child might very well be pretending to believe in Santa Claus for the benefit of her parents, who seem to enjoy pretending to believe, etc.

Shirley Sherrod’s resignation and, even more so, the Cordoba House controversy show how racism and bigotry in public discourse have come to work in this way. Often, rather than directly espouse intolerant views, pundits and politicians triangulate with a fictive racist Big Other who might be offended. This was a constant refrain of the pundits during the Obama campaign. More recently, Sarah Palin called the Cordoba House an “unnecessary provocation” that “stabs the heart” of her emotionally traumatized Big Other; the Anti-Defamation League made a similar case for imaginary victims whose “anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.” Even Newt Gingrich – who is more than willing to be openly Islamophobic elsewhere – invoked an “average American” who might perceive the Cordoba house as an affront. Fox News and other cable TV news outlets do this all the time. Whether a given position is actually correct or even effective is unimportant; what matters is polling data, the “narrative,” imaginary public opinion — the views of an invented collective subject who is always a little bit slower and a little more impulsive than the commentators. On its own merits, it’s difficult to justify opposing a Muslim community center based on its proximity from Ground Zero so, instead, this intolerant stance is displaced, half-disavowed even as it is enthusiastically taken up as a rallying point for conservatives. We know very well that there’s nothing wrong with Muslims worshiping in Manhattan, but think of the bigots!

“A New Currency of Pain and Desire”: Pornography and Post-Fordism in Crash

“A New Currency of Pain and Desire”: Post-Fordism and Pornography in Crash
Crash by J. G. Ballard was published in June of 1973, the year that David Harvey cites as the beginning of the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism (189). In the United Kingdom, symptoms of Fordism’s senescence and post-Fordism’s troubled birth were already evident. The recession of 1973-5 began in January of that year hitting the UK even harder than the US and, while 1973 would prove relatively calm in comparison, the UK had just witnessed a massive spike in industrial actions in 1972 that resulted in almost twenty-four million work days lost (Turner 11). While we cannot view 1973 as a complete and total break with Fordism—labor militancy would continue strong through the 1970s and post-Fordist features like the neoliberal state would have to wait until Margaret Thatcher—this year nevertheless represents a critical moment of transition. While past readings of Crash have primarily focused on the text’s relation to psychoanalysis or Jean Baudrillard’s notions of simulation and symbolic exchange, this paper will historicize the novel as a reaction to the crisis of Fordism and an anticipation of what would come after it. In particular, I will argue that Crash uses the pornographic form to think through the real abstraction of immaterial labor and explore the crisis of value this form of production implies.
To better get a sense of how Crash thinks through abstract equivalence, I will examine one of its intertexts, the pornographic novel Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. Both novels explore the connections between sex and death, violence and ecstatic abandonment, using the image of the bullfight. In Story of the Eye, Simone and the narrator attend a bullfight in Madrid featuring famed matador El Granero. The two spectators find themselves aroused by the death of a black bull, “a solar monster,” and sneak away to have sex (Bataille 70). When they return, they find that El Granero has castrated the bull and presented them with its two testicles on a plate, recalling the peeled hard-boiled eggs Simone masturbated with in a previous scene. Simone compulsively inserts the bull testicles into her vagina while watching El Granero’s next fight and, at the moment of entry, she witnesses the horn of a rampant bull enter into El Granero’s eye socket and dislodge his eye, killing him. The narrator notes that these instances “were without transition or connection, not because they weren’t actually related, but because my attention was so absent as to remain absolutely dissociated” (73). This “coincidence” (75) or libidinal association between the severed eye and severed testicle produces in the characters a “blinding obsession” (76) that ultimately compels them to reenact the scene with the eyes of a murdered priest. In both texts, we see a relation of equivalence between two disparate acts expressed through simultaneity or coincidence. Thus, for example, in Crash sex becomes synchronic with the mechanical movement of the car wash or the speed and trajectory of an automobile. Crash highlights this intertextual connection through multiple references to the bullfight. James Ballard is cut from the wreckage of his first automobile accident by firemen who “peer down at him like the assistants of a gored bullfighter” (Ballard, Crash 23). Later, during a reenactment of a “Spectacular Road Accident” (85), stunt driver Seagrave’s vehicle is likened to a “a myopic bullfighter running straight on to the bull’s horns” when its fenders become entangled with another car (86). Finally, when the world is transformed into a car crash pornotopia during James Ballard’s LSD trip, he sees the pedestrians transfigured wearing “suits of lights, as if [he] were a solitary visitor in a city of matadors” (209). While the terms shift—either car, driver, or pedestrian might be figured as a matador—it is clear that Crash is deploying similar textual strategies and drawing on the same constellation of images.
While they are thematically and formally similar, there are important differences between the ways these texts articulate equivalence. For Bataille’s narrator, this equivalence is clearly a matter of psychological association, taking place in “a profound region of [the] mind” (Bataille 105). These associations are produced through resemblance (“wide eyes” look like “white eggs” (44)), verbal association (“urinate” sounds like “terminate” (45)), or temporal coincidence (as in the bullfight). None of this is fundamentally different from Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the associations that overdetermine hysterical symptoms, as in the case of Elisabeth von R. (176), and, indeed, both Freud and Bataille call upon the unconscious to explain these connections. Bataille’s pornographic novel equates testicles, eggs, the sun, and eyeballs—but only within the mind of a given subject. Not only do we learn what the characters are thinking when they make these connections, we are even told how the imaginary author, Lord Auch, first determined this “kinship between distinct elements” while watching his blind, paralytic father attempt to urinate into a “small container,” his eyes rolling back in his head (106-7). Throughout, Story of the Eye is very careful to emphasize the psychic history and present state of mind of the spectator who associates these terms, clearly marking these equivalences as psychological or metaphysical rather than material.
Crash, however, thinks through equivalences in very different ways, avoiding purely psychological explanations. In James Ballard’s crash with the Remingtons, we do learn about his mental state. He tells us that, in his “exhausted mind” the geometry of his damaged car “seemed…to be repeated in everything around him” (Ballard, Crash 22). We are also told about his “uneasy euphoria,” his “unpleasant fantasies” and a persistent feeling of detachment and unreality (23-4). More often than not, however, the relationship between the car and the body is presented as an objective fact. Even in this early scene, we are told that James Ballard is “aware that the interlocked radiator grilles of their cars formed the model of an inescapable and perverse union” (25-6). It could be argued that this is a case of misrecognition brought on by trauma and that the rest of the narrative, mediated as it is through James Ballard, simply reflects his unreliability. We may be locked within James Ballard’s fantasies for the duration of the novel, participating in his confusions. This explanation is unsatisfying in that it fails to take into account the social nature of the equivalence. James Ballard’s is not an individualized obsession. He is shown to be participating in a thriving subculture of aficionados who all make the conflation between automobile and body, car crash and orgasm. In his essay, “Ballard/Crash/Baudrillard,” Nicholas Ruddick maintains that the novel actually depicts “psychopathology operating at a cultural level” (357). By mapping the terms of the unconscious onto the external reality of the novel, Ruddick is able to represent the actions and attitudes of this group as a psychological allegory of the “individual unconscious” (359). Ruddick’s analysis holds true in J. G. Ballard’s previous work, in which he addresses the fraught relationship between the personal psyche and “apparently external sociological phenomena,” often taking the form of technology (259). “Manhole 69,” for example, describes a procedure that eliminates the needs for sleep and, with it, the unconscious. The experiment goes awry, however, when the patients become hyper-conscious of their own “identity,” unable to process anything or perceive anything else (Ballard, “Manhole 69” 66). “The Subliminal Man” connects this kind of narrative to a critique of consumerism and car culture, describing roadside advertisements that send subliminal commands to their viewers: “BUY NOW … NEW CAR … YES” (Ballard 424).
However, Ruddick’s case does not hold up as well for J. G. Ballard’s work after The Atrocity Exhibition, including Crash. J. G. Ballard seems to have anticipated Fredric Jameson’s claim that unconscious is no longer “autonomous,” having been thoroughly colonized by “the degraded form of information, manipulation, and reification” (121-2). Whereas in J. G. Ballard’s previous narratives the unconscious represents an equally dangerous and promising space outside of modernity, it is now incorporated and subsumed. Thus, Adrzej Gasiorek writes, “In Crash, the permeation of the social life-world by technological power invites us to ask if we can properly speak of ‘desire’ at all in this context” (96). J. G. Ballard represents this loss of psychic integrity as indistinction between inner and outer worlds. We can see this in J. G. Ballard’s short piece “Crash!,” in which he notes that “Freud’s classic distinction between the manifest and latent content of the inner world of the psyche now has to be applied to the outer world of reality” (98-9). With the breakdown of the distinction between interiority and exteriority, psychological and material, Freudian psychoanalysis persists only as a technical discourse, one of the many scientific or pseudo-scientific methods of analysis and control that circulate through J. G. Ballard’s fiction.
What this suggests is that, while the unconscious might seem to return in the violence of the urban landscape and its technology, we must look first and foremost at the material conditions which shape, mediate, and determine it. Beyond metaphor and simile, the novel expresses the relationship of equivalence through a variety of purely physical vectors. In addition to numerous incidents of synchronicity, Ballard dwells on moments in which one object deforms or impresses upon another. Particular attention is paid to the automobile’s mark upon the body, as when the pattern of Ballard’s car’s “radiator emblem” is stamped upon Mr. Remington’s hand (Ballard, Crash 20) or the “imprint of the outer quadrant of the instrument binnacle” appears as a scar on Ballard’s shoulder (178). This tangible evidence of contact highlights the materiality of the exchange that occurs in the crash. Furthermore, we also see a number of instances in which the chromium, paint, instrument dials, or windshield of the car reflect the image of a body, alluding to the objective unity of the two (e.g., 143). By far, however, the most common way Crash expresses equivalence between the two terms is geometric form. More than a resemblance, the geometric congruence of the erotic body and motor vehicle shows that the relation is quantitative rather than qualitative. This relation’s calculability is underscored by the novel’s persistent rhetoric of precision and measurement; the novel describes each figure using anatomical and automotive terms of art, correlated by tropes drawn from the hard sciences: “model” (e.g., 29), “formula” (7), and “equation” (172). In sum, these images seem to suggest that the equivalence between body and vehicle is not an ideal or psychological association but, rather, the result of a material process that equates the two items quantitatively. The relationship between the two, I would argue, is exchange-value.
As Marx explains, qualitatively different kinds of labor are reduced to the same quantitative measurement—average socially necessary labor time—through the exchange of commodities (Capital 142). Unlike the equivalences presented in Story of the Eye, real abstractions are not “mental categories”—they are “social, historical, ‘transindividual’ phenomena” (Toscano 275). In this real abstraction, the labor of a welder becomes commensurable to that of a bricklayer despite the differences in use values produced (e.g., a widget versus a wall). Here, Ballard has simply pushed this further by hinting that, after the crash of Fordism, the labor of producing sexual pleasure or knowledge or culture falls under the same measure of value labor of producing car parts. By using the car crash as a metaphor for and adjunct to sex, the novel thematizes the increasing importance of immaterial production under post-Fordism by showing that the labor of producing affect, social cooperation, communication, or knowledge becomes abstractly equivalent to the labor of producing an automobile.
For obvious reasons, the automobile stands as an exemplum of Fordist production which, like all modes of capitalist production before it, is predicated on the manufacturing of material commodities. At the moment of Crash’s publication, however, the British automotive industry was in turmoil. The largest British car company, the British Leyland Motor Corporation, was undergoing a drastic decline in market share that would eventually result in its bankruptcy in 1975. Itself the product of a series of government-backed mergers, the BLMC would be bailed out and partly nationalized before its complete demise. In his article “The Red Rose of Nissan,” John Holloway attributes this in part to the breakdown of the Fordist regime of accumulation. In classic Fordist fashion, BLMC workers were given the devil’s bargain:
Accept the deadly, deadening alienation of boring work in return for high wages which will allow you to live the life of mass consumption, which will in turn generate demand for the products of ever more deadening work. (368)
This was bolstered with strong trade unionism, including the system of “mutuality,” under which management was required to obtain the consent of shop stewards before new technologies or work practices were introduced (369). However, workers, emboldened by the past successes in collective bargaining and suffering under the weight of what Holloway calls “accumulated boredom,” began to “revolt” against the stultifying conditions of production, staging an increased number of strikes (1,800,00 work days were lost from 1969 to 1978 as opposed to 377,600 between 1950-73), as well as other forms of protest such as absenteeism and sabotage (369). This labor militancy spurred not only the financial collapse of BLMC but also the development of new and more effective means of worker domination and control (375). Already, then, in the late 60s and early 70s, Ballard can feel the judders of the crumbling Fordist compromise and anticipate the new regime of accumulation that would replace it. And what better way to mark the crisis of Fordist production than to wreck a Lincoln?
With the decline of the Fordist regime comes a shift toward the dominance of immaterial production (Hard and Negri, Empire 281). The car crash, as an object of technoscientific study, a cultural spectacle, and a libidinal cathexis, functions as the point at which material and immaterial labor collide. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri identify two principle forms of immaterial labor—“intellectual or linguistic” and “affective labor” (Multitude 108). Intellectual labor produces “ideas, symbols, codes, texts, linguistic figures, images, and other such products” while affective labor “produces or manipulates affects such as feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement or passion” (Multitude 108). Immaterial represents a break from material labor insofar as it includes activities once thought to be relegated to the private sphere—the sphere of consumption and reproduction (Lazzarato 133). Furthermore, unlike material production, immaterial production is virtuosic. Paolo Virno points out that, like performing musicians, immaterial laborers carry out “an activity which finds its own fulfillment (that is, its own purpose) in itself, without objectifying itself into an end product” (52). Moreover, just as every virtuoso needs an audience, these laborers also “require the presence of others” to complete their jobs (52). Producing affect and communicating information or linguistic content does not produce a tangible, material commodity and yet here it is represented as abstractly equivalent to commodity production. We will return to the implications of the virtuosic nature of immaterial labor for value later.
Crash clearly registers the shift from material to immaterial production, as well as from the secondary to the tertiary sector. Thus, we are only given a single, indirect piece of evidence about material production—Ballard notices “a smear of blue paint left by some disaffected production-line worker” on his car (Ballard, Crash 79)—and even this seems to indicate crisis. We do, however, meet a plethora of service workers or immaterial laborers. In many ways, the prototypical post-Fordist worker is Vaughan, a so-called “TV scientist” (63). Vaughan’s new profession effectively combines both dominant strains of immaterial labor, intellectual and affective. Previously in his career, Vaughan acted as a spokesperson for post-Fordist informatization—touting “the application of computerized techniques to the control of all international traffic systems” (63). As a TV scientist, Vaughan not only manipulated and conveyed data to his audience but also “projected a potent image, almost that of the scientist as hoodlum” (63). After his crash, Vaughan continues performing this kind of labor, doing scientific cognitive work while generating cultural and affective spectacles in the form of car crashes. Most of the service workers in the novel, however, do much more mundane tasks. James Ballard works in the culture industry—television advertising—while his wife is a travel agent, delivering vacation experiences for her customers. We also meet waitresses, stewardesses, airline personnel, social workers, computer programmers, doctors, nurses, and usherettes—all jobs in the tertiary sector largely organized around providing immaterial labor. The class composition of the novel reflects the growing service economy under post-Fordism (Harvey 147). According to OECD Labour Force Statistics, in the UK there was a steady increase in the percentage of the population employed in service sector jobs between 1960 to 1981, amounting to a 13.9% jump (qtd in Harvey 157). Shifts in other first world countries were comparable. However, while the novel is insistent on naming the professions of even the most minor of characters—we learn, for example, that a woman in a photograph is a “menopausal supermarket cashier” (Ballard, Crash 97)—we almost never witness characters working. The affective worker we do see at labor is the prostitute.
That the exemplary scene of immaterial labor is prostitution should clue us in to the fact that the hegemony of immaterial production does not spell the end of work or economic and social exploitation. Leopoldina Fortunati observes that prostitution work, like any other waged work, involves selling one’s labor power (43). Crash portrays the hiring of sex workers as a labor market transaction: Vaughan is described as “arguing in an abstract way about time and price” with two call girls (Ballard 139). What this suggests is that the labor of prostitution and, by extension, immaterial labor at least potentially involves unremunerated labor-time and therefore the production of surplus value (Fortunati 44). While immaterial labor entails the same unequal exchanges as material labor under capitalism, it also has its own special problems. As a number of theorists have pointed out, the commodification of immaterial labor is intrusive and demoralizing (e.g., Virno 63). Hardt and Negri cite affective labor as “extremely alienating: I am selling my ability to make human relationships, something extremely intimate, at the command of the client and the boss” (Multitude 111). The novel’s many scenes of joyless and impersonal paid sex bear this out. The sullen prostitutes are repeatedly described as “tired” (Ballard 24, 62) and at least one of them is disgruntled enough to take a bite out of James Ballard’s penis (Ballard 24). Obviously, flight attendants and television-scientists are not exposed to the violence and sexual trauma that illegal sex workers experience in the novel (e.g., Ballard 191). It would be hyperbole to say that, for example, selling one’s capacity to do creative work or to make someone feel welcome is just like prostitution but, at the same time, we can see some of the occupational hazards of affective labor in other characters. Even as characters work to produce moods and experiences for others, they experience a flattening of affect in their own personal affairs. The most obvious example is Catherine and James Ballard’s “sexual relationship,” which becomes “almost totally abstracted” into a series of “games” that seem to have little to do with intimacy or love (Ballard, Crash 83). Characters come to experience the most extreme moments of sex and death with “professional detachment”—it is all just part of a day’s work (190). Crash thereby shows the ways in which capital colonizes, instrumentalizes, rationalizes, and exploits the most private aspects of immaterial workers’ being, leaving them deadened and mechanical.
Crash presents a much more bleak vision of the conditions and possibilities of immaterial labor than many Autonomist Marxists, including Hardt and Negri. In some respects, critics have been unfair to Hardt and Negri. Timothy Brennan’s essay “The Italian Ideology” is a good example of the most common critiques of immaterial labor. Brennan argues that Hardt and Negri’s thoughts on immaterial labor “bear a striking resemblance to the sort of analysis offered by The Economist and the Wall Street Journal” (101), as well as Robert Reich (103) and even Thomas Friedman (105). Brennan perceives Hardt and Negri as overly optimistic, cheerleading for a multitude that seems to mirror if not embody “the sovereign, freely experimenting, hybrid subjects of corporate utopia” (116). Yet many of these criticisms could just as easily be laid at the feet of Marx, who quoted Adam Smith as much as Charles Fourier. Hardt and Negri, as well as other immaterial labor theorists, are right in working through the same concepts as bourgeois economists and subjecting them to Marxist immanent critique. However, Hardt and Negri—like Marx—do seem to have taken on board some of the unwarranted hopefulness of the bourgeois economists and, here, Crash provides a useful corrective. No solidarity arises between the immaterial laborers of the novel—they do not constitute a new political subject. The multitude is still yet to come.
The question remains, however, why does the novel use pornographic sex to expose the conditions of immaterial labor? In order to answer this question, I will examine contemporary responses to pornography in the late 1960s and 1970s. Much of the attention in the UK surrounding pornography centered on its effects on moral values and judgments. Anti-obscenity crusader Mary Whitehouse, however, saw a political and economic dimension to pornography, as well. Whitehouse, in her paranoia and moral outrage, claimed a close connection between pornography and Communism, arguing that Soviets had infiltrated the industry (Turner 136). While most pornography in the early 1970s did nothing more subversive than introduce heterosexuals to oral sex—which is perhaps subversive enough—a number of critics recognized that pornography is capable of doing something more radical. In her “Polemical Preface” to The Sadean Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, Angela Carter argues that “pornography involves an abstraction of human intercourse in which the self is reduced to its formal elements” (4). In this abstraction, pornography tends to contract men and women down to their sexual anatomy and presents them as “false universals of sexual archetypes” devoid of any context (16). Once voided of all particularity, the abstract pornographic character functions as a stock figure or, ideally, a series of sexual positions that any reader could inhabit. Susan Sontag recognizes this logic and sees it in economic terms. Her essay, “The Pornographic Imagination,” is worth quoting at length; in it, she argues that the “total universe” of the pornographic imagination, “has the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fed into it, reducing everything into one negotiable currency of the erotic imperative. All action is conceived of as a set of sexual exchanges” (Sontag 66). So as to maximize these exchanges, pornography flattens out the sexual world, leveling barriers to intercourse including “sexual preference and sexual taboo”—free love as tree trade (66-7). Sam Francis, positing Sontag’s essay as a direct influence on J. G. Ballard, explains this structure of exchangeability in Crash (164). Crash opens up even more opportunities for exchange by promiscuously ignoring distinctions between animate and inanimate, human and automobile, so that “crash impacts and erotic caresses become abstract, interchangeable signifiers” in an open and pornographic “exchange economy” (Francis 164). More than just an exchange of signifiers, however, I would argue that pornography provides a critical way of representing real abstraction. Whether swinging a hammer, tightening a bolt, or fucking, the subject’s labor is abstractly equivalent to every other. Each laborer—just like every pornographic figure—becomes interchangeable with every other through the process of commodity exchange. The Marquis de Sade’s libertinage is the pornographic correlate to Marx’s formal equality.
Yet something seems to be wrong in the way in which exchangeability functions in Crash. In a typical pornographic novel, the indifference to character development allows the reader to identify with and inhabit the various roles of the novel, filling in the emotional gaps and supplying the particulars to fit his or her erotic enjoyment (Sontag 54). This readerly enjoyment is part of why pornography is sometimes viewed as a sub-literary genre. Critics have denigrated pornography as instrumental, existing only to produce arousal, and on this count argue that it fails to fulfill conventional definitions of the aesthetic such as Kant’s notion of art as purposive without purposiveness (Carter 12, Sontag 47). In the report by the Longford Committee Investigating Pornography, which appeared a year before Crash, Lord Clark retreads this argument, placing art in the “realm of contemplation” as opposed to pornography, which is merely an “incitement to action” (presumably masturbation): “This is my objection to painting with a communist programme, and it would also apply to pornography” (100). Crash—acutely aware of pornography and its own status in the genre (e.g., Ballard 48, 69)—seems to internalize and supersede these critiques, producing a thoroughly aestheticized, purely formal pornography. The use-value of titillation is jettisoned and all that is left is the exchange-value of pornographic logic. By abstracting all sexual pleasure from the novel, J. G. Ballard lays bare the workings of value under capital—and reveals its crisis.
The most obvious way J. G. Ballard short-circuits vicarious enjoyment is by placing the commodity into the series of erotic exchanges. The libido fails when J. G. Ballard attempts to eroticize the automobile and it is this failure of pleasure that helps us to realize the incommensurability of the exchange’s terms. When imagined a priori, the comparison of the automobile to the sexual act and vice versa should work. Carter lists a host of figures which “poeticize, kistchify and departicularise intercourse” such as “wind beating down corn, rain driving against bending trees, and towers falling”—images which all serve to glorify an active male principle and uphold a passive female principle (8). There is no shortage of metaphors for sex, including any number of mechanical or inorganic tropes—the usual cartoon images of pistons pounding, rockets taking off, fireworks exploding, and so on. What produces the sense of unpleasure and estrangement in the novel is the persistence with which it works out the equivalence in precise, quantitative, and obsessively completist terms, up to the point of equating the car crash with orgasm. The novel attempts the impossible task of exhausting sex completely by creating a one-to-one ratio between sexuality and auto mechanics. That is not to say that sex—or immaterial labor—is a necessarily warm and human activity filled with irreducible meaning that cannot possibly be exploited and subsumed by capitalist exchange. (This is more or less the position of the Longford Report, which condemns the “unscrupulous manipulation of sexual excitement employed for profit” (210), a manipulation that requires the “extraction” or abstraction of the sexual relation from its “normal” qualities and context (409).) The point here is materialist rather than humanist. Sex and other kinds of immaterial labor cannot be valued in comparison with material labor because they cannot be determinately quantified: “How can one evaluate a priest, a journalist, a public relations person? How can one calculate the amount of faith, of purchasing desire, of likeability that these people have managed to muster up?” (Luciano Biancardi qtd in Virno 57). Again, the novel does not merely imply that the ministrations of a prostitute or a TV scientist are priceless. Rather, it points to the fact that immaterial labor is often virtuosic, producing no commodity, and therefore unable to be meaningfully measured by average socially necessary labor-time. Immaterial production presents undecidable questions such as what is a unit of affect and how do we decide how much time it takes to produce it?
These kinds of questions seem to drive J. G. Ballard’s scientific pastiche in Crash but also in his other work. What is striking in pieces like “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” is their complete lack of systematicity. While the language of “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” mimics that of a scientific report—we learn that “motion picture studies of Ronald Reagan reveal characteristic patterns of facial tonus and musculature associated with homo-erotic behavior” (Ballard, Atrocity Exhibition 105)—the over-all structure is arbitrary. There are section headings (e.g., “Ronald Reagan and the conceptual auto disaster” (105)) but no sense of necessary order or connection between sections. Even the sentences seem to be arranged in a schizophrenic fashion, with no continuous logic or syntax connecting them beyond thematic similarities (c.f., Jameson 28-9). Moreover, at times, the contents of the summarized reports read like Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia; we learn that “A series of imaginary genitalia were constructed using (a) the mouth-parts of Jacqueline Kennedy, (b) a Cadillac rear-exhaust vent, (c) the assembly kit prepuce of President Johnson, (d) a child-victim of sexual assault” (Ballard, Atrocity Exhibition 106). This simultaneous heightening of scientific rhetoric and breakdown of syntactical ordering can be seen in Vaughan’s research in Crash, as well. Vaughan’s research tools and data are presented in list form, at times spanning pages of the novel (e.g., Ballard 133-6). These lists have no formal coherence or closure, nor do they seem to produce any sort of hypothesis or conclusion. It seems as if Vaughan and the imagined author of “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” might never cease compiling images and information, that their studies can never be completed, only abandoned. This endless and schizophrenic data-mining functions as a symptom of the crisis of exchange value brought on by immaterial labor. It shows the failure of any attempt to determinately measure and quantify virtuosity.
Marx hints at this possibility in the Grundrisse, where he suggests that the automation of industry will eventually abolish labor-time as the measure of value (709, c.f. Virno 62). In Grammar of the Multitude, Paolo Virno explains that what has changed in immaterial production is that now capital exploits human capacity itself, including linguistic, intellectual, affective, and social faculties—“potential as such, not its countless particular realizations” (66). Whereas before we saw the real abstraction of exchange value, we now see a new form of abstraction—the “general intellect,” the collective knowledge and capabilities of the working class exploited by capital (64). The crisis of value, then, does not bring about communism as Marx understood it. Rather, wage relations persist, maintaining the distinction between remunerated and unremunerated life (Virno 103). Surplus value now is not only discrepancy between “necessary labor” (the amount of labor equal to the wages paid) and “the entirety of the working day” but also “the disproportion between production time (which includes non-labor, its own distinctive productivity) and labor time” (105). Now that all activity is potentially labor, our entire lives work to prepare and produce that labor.
Pornography provides a way of representing and criticizing the new relations of immaterial production that come into being after the crisis. In Crash, J. G. Ballard draws on the figure of the pornotopia or pornographic utopia in order to do this. Steven Marcus describes the pornotopia as a construct outside of determinate or mundane time and space that allows the “boundless, featureless freedom that most pornographic fantasies require for their action”—the “isolated castle” or the “secluded country estate” where sex might take place uninterrupted indefinitely (269). Crash, however, frees the pornotopian impulse entirely, avoiding all spatialization and concretization. Instead, the novel speaks only of pornographic “possibilities”—“infinite futures that would flower from the marriage of violence and desire” (Ballard 156). James Ballard’s dream of erotic and traumatic potentiality reaches full bloom when he penetrates the leg wound of Gabrielle. In this moment, he wonders, “What wounds would create the sexual possibilities of the invisible technologies of thermonuclear reaction chambers, white-tiled control rooms, the mysterious scenarios of computer circuitry?” (Crash 179). This leads him to envision “the accidents that might involve the famous and the beautiful, the wounds upon which erotic fantasies might be erected, the extraordinary sexual acts celebrating the possibilities of unimagined technologies” (179). Here the novel explores the new kinds of subjects produced by immaterial labor. While Hardt and Negri foresee the creativity, cooperation, and flexibility required by immaterial labor producing an autonomous and polymorphous multitude, Virno observes a new work force of “opportunists,” subjects trained to “maneuver among abstract and interchangeable opportunities,” changing to exploit “possibilities” as they arise (86). Under post-Fordism, the immaterial laborer must move not only from task to task but also from job to job, versatile and independent but also precarious and unprotected by Fordist collective bargaining or the Keynesian welfare-state (Harvey 150-52). The novel’s open-ended fantasies of new sexual apertures and unspecified erotic futures offer a way of picturing this emergent labor situation. Just as the immaterial workers must reshape themselves opportunistically in order to suit the flexible needs of capital, the bodies of the sexual subjects in Crash are violently transformed in order to allow for innovative fetishistic practices. As capital’s demands for flexibility increase, it becomes impossible to figure them as anything other than pure possibility and empty futurity.
Crash, then, stands as both a novel of the end of Fordism and a novel of the beginning of post-Fordism. One almost gets a sense that this tension is worked out on the generic level. In order to represent an emerging post-Fordism, J. G. Ballard strains pornography to the point that it enters another paraliterary genre—science fiction. At moments the novel seems to reveal a kinship to the motorized and movable landscapes of speculative architecture like Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon or Archigram’s projects such as the walking city or the plug-in city. Thus, Ballard imagines the cars driving across “the plain of the landscape of all possible trajectories of [Catherine’s] flight” (Crash 209). Indeed, the novel ends with an ultimate fantasy of fluid circulation, as Vaughan’s semen merges with the “unceasing flow” of automobile and aircraft traffic, spreading “to the instrument panels and radiator grilles of a thousand crashing cars, the leg stances of a million passengers” (Crash 224). These utopias of mobility and change represent deterritorialization, the breakdown of the old fixities of Fordism and modernity. On the one hand, post-Fordism is not without its liberties—Ballard finally allows himself to act on his attraction to Vaughan while Dr. Remington ends the novel with Gabrielle. Capital becomes less concerned with policing bourgeois or puritanical morality and more amenable to induced difference, experimentation, self-expression, self-direction, and play. On the other hand, post-Fordism has its own special horrors, figured in the frightening insecurity of the automobile accident and the invasive mutations it produces. Crash therefore demonstrates the power of capital to adapt and change, exploiting its own crises and the alternative visions they inspire to produce new forms of domination and exploitation. Capital pulls itself from the wreckage, transformed.

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The Word from Nowhere: Literarity and the Utopian Novel

Critics often interpret literary utopias as political plans or proposals without attending to their aesthetic qualities. Contrary to blueprint readings, the form of the literary utopia should not be read as mere “sugarcoating to the pill” (Morris, “Looking Backward” 353-4) designed to promote its effective contents—a series of social, political, and economic arguments (e.g., as in Woolf 240). In order to correct this kind of reductionism, we must locate the specific differences between the literary utopia and other forms of discourse: what does it mean that the utopian novel is literary? Jacques Rancière’s original and unconventional thinking provides a useful way of answering this question. While the utopian figures in much of Rancière’s writing, including extensive histories of the Saint-Simonians, his theoretical remarks on the subject are scattered, unsystematic, and slight. For example, he often uses the term in its colloquial and pejorative sense (i.e., a non-existent and impractical vision) or as another term for a spatial representation. Instead of focusing on Rancière’s direct comments on utopia, then, I will apply his more productive model of political aesthetics to the utopian novel, using News from Nowhere, or, An Epoch of Rest by William Morris as a case study. Applying Rancière to Morris, I will argue that the literarity of the utopian novel enacts a kind of linguistic equality through its erasure of the distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate speech.

Much of Rancière’s thought centers on what he terms la partage du sensible, translated variously as “the partition of the perceptible” or the “distribution of the sensible.” This is the mechanism that determines the dividing line between

those one sees and those that one does not see, those that have a logos—a memorial speech, an account to be kept up—and those who have no logos, those who really speak and those whose voice merely mimics the articulate voice to express pleasure and pain. (Rancière, Disagreements 22).

For Rancière, the distribution of the sensible is a necessary precursor to any political intervention in that it defines the field of what we might even consider as political or apolitical. Thus, aesthetics—broadly, the determination of what can be perceived and counted as meaningful—is comparable to a Kantian “transcendental precondition” for political thought and action (Kollias 84). This leads Rancière to explore the ways in which the formal properties of art reinforce or disturb the perceptual apparatuses that enable different political systems.

Literature represents a particularly disruptive artistic form for Rancière. With literature, the positions of authorized speaker and intended listener dissolve so that it becomes “the new regime of writing in which the writer is anybody and the reader anybody” (Rancière, “Literature” 14). Literature effectively dismantles systems of legitimation or propriety. Literature is not modeled on the speech of the present “orator,” who respected and capitalized upon “social hierarchy” by “addressing appropriate kinds of speech-acts to appropriate kinds of audiences” (Rancière, “Literature” 14). Instead, the regime of literature is best characterized by the orphaned letter of Plato’s Phaedrus, which speaks indiscriminately and without the guidance and guarantee of a father (Rancière, “Literature” 14-5). For example, the military command proceeds from an authorized speaker (the commanding officer) to a select audience (the subordinate) and demands a proper response (unquestioning obedience). The poem, on the other hand, is utterly promiscuous, having no customary rhetorical situation or accepted interpretation. This has clear political-aesthetic implications. Because literature is no respecter of established roles or communities, it appears as equalizing or declassifying, a potential threat to any unequal division (Rancière, Aesthetics 39-40). Ultimately, literature produces a democratic aesthetic revolution, creating “a partition of the perceptible in which one can no longer contrast those who speak with those who only make noise” (Rancière, “Literature” 15).

It should be noted that literature is only a special case in a larger field of what Rancière calls “literarity” or the “excess of words” (Chambers 39). According to Rancière, literarity is not simply the property of the literate; the uncontrollable movement of words, our inability to permanently fix them within a system of legitimation or limit their use and reception to any class of speakers, is a “fundamental condition of the human animal” (Chambers 37). We can see this subversion in non-literary writing as well as in speech. Thus, just as later speakers would redeploy passages from written documents like the Declaration of Independence or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in their political struggles, illiterate peasants of the medieval and early modern eras appropriated and altered the language of the Bible for their own: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?” Literature, then, is not coextensive with literarity; it simply consists of a historical regime of writing which demands that we attend to literarity in its unruliness.

As literature, then, the literary utopia constitutes an attempt to deregulate and democratize political speech acts. The utopian, who is neither a politician nor a political scientist, usurps the position of a proper or official rhetor. More so than other forms of literature, the literary utopia directly poaches upon the territory of authorized discourse and this, I would argue, is why it often draws such scorn. Friedrich Engels registers the seeming arrogance of this move when he depicts the founders of utopian socialism as self-proclaimed “individual [men] of genius” whose discovery of the political economic “truth” is merely a “happy accident” that might just as well have occurred “500 years ago” (686). It is this indifferent and accidental quality that is the hallmark of the utopians—the utopian might be anyone at all. In other words, utopian discourse presupposes a radical egalitarianism, a redistribution of the sensible in which there is no division between legitimate and illegitimate speakers, appropriate and inappropriate subjects, or proper and improper audiences. Because the literary utopia is first and foremost a linguistic performance, the only prerequisite for entrée into utopian political discourse is the capacity for language, affirming what Rancière terms the “equality of speaking beings” (Disagreement 33). Engels’ critique of utopian socialism is stood upon on its head.

We can see an example of this rhetorical anarchism at work in the first lines of News from Nowhere, in which an unnamed “friend” begins the story of William Guest (Morris 43). We know nothing of the scene of enunciation for this story, only that it is spoken in the present moment (“Says our friend”) (43). In other words, it is a framing tale that provides no frame, serving only to highlight the lack of a stable context or rhetorical situation. The friend only tells us William Guest wants the story to be “told to our comrades and indeed the public in general” and that the friend “therefore proposes to tell them now” (45). This does not provide us much in the way of clues; friend’s very immediacy in the unspecified and therefore universal “now” suggests that she or he might be anyone speaking at any given moment to any group of people (c.f., Hegel 64). While the allusions to shared comrades and the presumed familiarity with which the friend refers to leftist political fractions might suggest that the friend is speaking to sympathetic socialists, even these points of orientation are undercut by the fact that Guest’s intended audience also includes “the public in general” (Morris, News 45).

The indeterminacy of the narrative voice is made even murkier by a strange rhetorical move the friend makes. At the moment William Guest awakes from his sleep into a future utopia, the friend announces that

I think it would be better if I told [these adventures] in the first person, as if it were myself who had gone through them; which, indeed, will be the easier and more natural to me, since I understand the feelings and desires of the comrade of whom I am telling better than any one else in the world does. (45)

In some ways this is an embellishment on a common distancing technique in literary utopias: the narrative of Utopia is related by Hythloday, whose words are then recounted by the voice of Thomas More. Here, however, the relays seem to become confused: William Morris writes of the narrator who tells of a friend who relates the story of William Guest, but in the first person, who describes his utopians. At each step of the way, any of these figures (William Morris, the narrator, the friend, William Guest) could be collapsed into one other. For example, William Guest might be William Morris’s pseudonym, or Guest could just as easily be a conceit of the friend telling his story. The text invites this ambiguity with the indiscriminate use of “I,” the anonymity of the two mediating storytellers, and the play of names (William Guest’s shared first name and generically allegorical surname). The first chapter sets up this aporia—only to reveal that resolving it is a matter of indifference. The novel does not return to the framing narrative and nothing seems to hinge on determining the text’s patrimony. By deliberately confusing the identity of the speaker, the novel emphasizes the Rancièrean errancy of the letter under literature. The story of utopia does not proceed from an accredited or even nameable source. Instead, the narrative appears on its own as a dream without a clear and certain dreamer.
News from Nowhere’s denial of any authorial propriety is perfectly consonant with William Morris’s politics. William Morris opposed the division of labor, including the division between those who plan work and those who execute it (Kinna 511). Morris shared this notion with Karl Marx and countless other socialist thinkers, who viewed the subdivision of production into ever-smaller tasks as alienating, narrowing, and immiserating. This position led Morris to envision a world in which workers might perform any job and take part in all steps in production without specializing or being tied to a particular role. It is appropriate, then, that the position of imagining this utopia is left unassigned. As Petts suggests, Morris viewed “all human beings as potential artists” (33). The role of utopian dreamer is therefore open for anyone to fill. This notion might rankle more orthodox Marxists who assign revolutionary tasks based on class (e.g., the revolution of the bourgeoisie produces formal democracy while the proletarian revolution will achieve communism). As we saw before, this indifference to class and historical conjuncture is part of why Engels opposed the lone genius model of utopian socialism. Indeed, Perry Anderson argues that Morris’s vision of classlessness would be impossible were it not for his “material substratum of…sensuous ease and freedom” as an artist and a man of great wealth (163). Yet, while utopian writing may be retrograde or idealist in that it fails to take into consideration the class position that produced it, it also opens up the field of social imagination to subordinate or even subaltern classes. The literarity of the utopian novel suggests a distribution of the sensible in which anyone might claim a voice, regardless of their position.

At times these discussions of equality may sound as if Rancière is denying the historicity and situatedness of the speaker and calling for a return to the bad faith universalism of the liberal or even Cartesian subject, with all of its attendant problems. However, it should be remembered that Rancière maintains that the subject is never a pre-given, nor does it exist outside of its conflict with the unequal ordering that he terms “police logic” (Disagreement 29). On the contrary, Rancière maintains that subjects are “created” by “modes of subjectification” which work by “transforming identities defined in the natural [i.e., normative] order of the allocation of functions and places into instances of experience of a dispute” (Disagreement 36). Workers or women, for example, already have a part in the police logic but only when they challenge the distribution of the sensible and attempt to claim an equal and intelligible voice, “logos” as opposed to “phone,” do they become subjects (Disagreement 36-7). Subjectification, then, is a historical achievement within a contingent system of power, perception, and language. In Samuel Chambers’ Rancièrean analysis of the politics of Mexican migrant workers in American meatpacking plants, he notes that “to speak from a fixed or given location within the partition of the sensible may be to not speak at all” (47). The attempt to speak as if one did not proceed from a given standpoint, to deny that one must always speak as an immigrant (or as a worker, an African-American, or a woman), therefore represents a strategic move not only within a particular local dispute but also within the broader politics of aesthetics. By extending linguistic equality to everyone and thereby universalizing logos, Rancière’s subjects make a partial step toward dismantling the distribution of the sensible that maintains a binary between rational speech and animal noise.

Another way that literature opens up the distribution of the sensible, expanding the range of who might speak and be heard, is its attack on expertise. One does not have to be a criminologist to write a crime novel or a historian to write historical fiction. This is particularly evident in the utopian novel, which describes an entire social system and therefore includes a limitless array of topics. Given the vast breadth of areas the utopia must cover, the utopian writer is necessarily an amateur and a polymath. The utopia therefore acts as an assault on what Rancière calls “enforced stultification,” a distribution of the sensible which “breaks the world of intelligence into two” and “installs the division between the groping animal and the learned little man, between common sense and science” (Ignorant Schoolmaster 7-9). The place we can best see the utopian breakdown of the categories of expert and inexpert is their representations of pedagogy. For William Morris, education is presented as an asystematic and open-ended process. There are no authorities whose aim is to determine and force the outcome of children’s learning (Morris 98) but, rather, children are “encourage[d]” to “learn to do things for themselves” (65). Since there are no teachers, there is no method of explication; children are allowed to simply “imitat[e] their elders” (68) in whatever tasks seem interesting to them. The distance between adults and children disappears while the confining spaces of the home or the schoolhouse are eliminated in favor of the forest (65) or the workplace (68). Meanwhile, adults remain in a permanent state of self-education, further erasing the distinction between learning and learned (98). As a result, childhood seems to dissolve altogether, so that children act as adults and adults seem as though they are enjoying a “second childhood” (132). This seems to suggest that Morris’s utopia gives us a preview of an intellectual “emancipation” which “repudiates the division between those who know and those who don’t, between those who possess or don’t possess the property of intelligence” (Rancière, Ignorant Schoolmaster 71). The novel’s denunciation of stultification, the distinction between the knowledgeable and the ignorant, represents a reinforcement of Rancière’s thesis of the fundamental equality of speaking beings and further works to sabotage the distribution of the sensible which would cast certain kinds of political speech outside of the realm of concern. Here there is no distinction between ignorant noise and learned discourse. By the same taken, Morris does not distinguish between the science and organization of the revolutionary vanguard and the irrational spontaneity of the masses they must “educate” (c.f., Lenin 82). Thus, in Morris’s account of Communist revolution, it is the workers’ history and experience—not the manifestoes of professional worker-revolutionaries—that provide the best “education” of the people (149-50).

It might be argued that this libertarian theory of self-instruction, while fairly common in utopian novels, is not an essential or universal feature of them. While this is true—a number of utopias do describe a division between intellectual authorities and subordinate students—I would maintain that the utopian novel itself represents a vehicle of emancipated teaching. Many theorists have viewed literary utopias as pedagogical tools. Drawing on E. P. Thompson’s analysis of William Morris, Ruth Levitas maintains that utopias provide an “education of desire” through the experiential, non-cognitive communication of “a radically different set of values” (124). This education allows us to break the stranglehold of “bourgeois common sense” and, ultimately, work toward the realization of utopia (ibid). Levitas’s model of utopian pedagogy does not imply that the literary utopia invites our agreement on a series of specific facts or propositions; we might accept the values of a given utopia without assenting to its particular institutions. Yet, as Perry Anderson points out in his critique of Thompson, it is impossible to separate desire from knowledge or values from beliefs: “moral awareness is not to be simply elided with affective sensation: it is always a matter of intellectual conviction as well” (164). What this suggests is that the education of desire is no different than any other school mastery—at best there is only a difference of emphasis. Indeed, this model of utopian pedagogy still frames pedagogy as a form of persuasion or propaganda, one that maintains a particular hierarchy (i.e., disciplined versus undisciplined desire) and aims to produce a consensus.

This is fundamentally different from the kind of laissez-faire education propounded in News from Nowhere, which rails against the coercion and paternalism implicit in schooling (Morris 97-8). Instead, the novel suggests that the student should learn whatever “his own inclinations impel him to seek,” even if that is contrary to what we might want him to learn (98). How, then, does the utopian novel provide the reader with the means and opportunity for auto-didactic learning? How is it that the utopian novel refuses to act as schoolmaster? It is its literarity that allows it to slip free from any pretense of learned explication. According to Hector Kollias, under Rancière’s conception of literarity there is a “loss of any given criteria for identifying and judging it” (84). That is to say, literarity suspends all principles of legitimation for both the production and reception of the word (Chambers 39). With this regime of writing, the word shucks off any guarantees of legitimacy and thereby invites its own dissensus. Whereas the proposal, the manifesto, or the lecture submits itself for approval, the literary utopia makes no referential truth claims and instead announces itself as fictive, as “utopian.” For all of its overt didacticism, we may still read the utopia just as easily as no place or the good place, as a hallucinatory dream or as an anticipatory vision. It should come as no surprise, then, that the most common response to the utopian novel is not acceptance but argument. This is not the result of imaginative resistance or some other flaw in the utopian method of persuasion—the literary utopia by its very form deliberately refuses to assert its own reality and impose its argument upon the reader, allowing her to engage in her own process of interrogation and construction without the tutelage of the authorized voice of the schoolmaster or the orator. In so doing, the literary utopia refuses stultification or any other hierarchical division of the distribution of the sensible.

In his most perceptive statement about utopianism, Rancière argues that utopia constitutes “the unacceptable, a no-place, the extreme point of a polemical reconfiguration of the sensible, which breaks down the categories that define what it is to be obvious” (Aesthetics 40). For Rancière, utopia functions in this way not because it can be set into “practice” and produce a specific radical change but, rather, because it appears as “‘unreal,’” as a “montage of words and images appropriate for reconfiguring the territory of the visible, the thinkable, and the possible” (Aesthetics 41). Whereas realist discourses demand a coincidence of opinion or at least shared terms, the literary utopia challenges the limits of what might be thought and said and in so doing provoke potentially infinite disagreement. Thus, News from Nowhere begins with a fractious argument and ends with uncertainty about the narrative it describes. There is a risk here. As Donald Rumsfeld suggested, “Democracy is messy.” The literarity of utopia might allow a democratic redistribution of the sensible, representing a dialectic movement toward the achievement of a concrete utopia, or it could produce an introverted and quietistic aestheticism stricken by the paralysis of perpetual indeterminacy.

What this antinomy indicates it that the freedom that aesthetics allows the literary utopia is also its limitation. By intervening on the level of the politics of perception, the utopia fails to take into account the structural and above all material constraints at work. That is not to say that the utopian author should be “doing something” instead of merely writing. Rather, the utopian does not consider the practical limits of any given rhetorical situation. This predicament is best exemplified by a series of exchanges between police officers and student protesters during the Mrak Hall occupations. Often, protesters would hail the police officers, asking them to join them in protest or, at least, to refuse to take part in the evacuation and subsequent arrests. The protesters knew full well that their speech would not be heard and counted as meaningful. Furthermore, they were also aware that the police officers were prevented from acting upon their private consciences by a variety of forces, including not only the everyday threats of disciplining, job loss, or legal repercussions but also the workings of ideology and the positionality of each officer. In other words, students spoke to police as if they were both groups of equal, rational, free speaking beings when in fact they were implicated in a system that constructed them as anything but. Rancière fully acknowledges that this equality is not yet achieved and may never be achievable. Instead, he describes equality as “a mere assumption that needs to be discerned within the practices implementing it” (Disagreement 33). He goes on to describe egalitarianism as a “one-off performance” (Rancière, Disagreement 34), a kind of “break” that is “antagonistic” to police logic (29). For Rancière, then, equality can never be “institutionalized” or “organized” (Disagreement 34). Rancière’s notion of equality presents itself as a kind of utopia. It functions in what Mark Robson calls the “world of the assumption, of the as if”—we may be contained within the police order, but we shall act on a “kind of fiction,” as if an egalitarian logic were now possible, as if all parties might be included and recognized, as if each subject possessed equal intelligence or discernment and could speak with equal validity (90). We can see a clear overlap between Rancière’s thought and Engels’s description of the utopian socialists. The utopian socialists—naïve dreamers that they were—worked under the false assumption that utopia can be achieved “by propaganda, and wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments” (Engels 687). In other words, the utopian socialists spoke as if we were already equal beings, free to be persuaded by anyone with a good argument. The obvious Quixoticism of this operating assumption should not lead us to scoff at the utopians—it should compel us to damn our own unfreedom.

 
Works Cited
Anderson, Perry. Arguments within English Marxism. London: NLB, 1980.
Chambers, Samuel. “The Politics of Literarity.” Theory and Event 8.3 (2005): 1-51. Web.
Engels, Friedrich. “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.” The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed.
Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978. 683-717.
Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.
Kinna, Ruth. “William Morris: Art, Work, and Leisure.” Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000): 493-
512.
Kollias, Hector. “Taking Sides: Jacques Rancière and Agonistic Literature.” Paragraph 30.2 (2007): 82-97.
Lenin, V. I. “What is to Be Done?” The Lenin Anthology. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton,
1975.
Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of Utopia. New York: Philip Allan, 1990.
Morris, William. “Looking Backward.” News from Nowhere and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 1998.
—. News from Nowhere, or, An Epoch of Rest. News from Nowhere and Other Writings. London:
Penguin, 1998.
Petts, Jeffrey. “Good Work and Aesthetic Education: William Morris, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and
Beyond.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 42.1 (2008): 30-45.
Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota
P, 1999.
–. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1991.
—. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. New York:
Continuum, 2004.
—. “The Politics of Literature.” SubStance 33.1 (2004): 10-24.
Robson, Mark. “Jacques Rancière’s Aesthetic Communities.” Paragraph 28.1 (2005): 77-95.
Woolf, Virginia. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” A Bloomsbury Group Reader. Ed. S. P.
Rosenbaum. Oxford, UK: 1993. 233-250.

Public Health Insurance, Friedrich Hayek, and an Anne Coulter

The other night I felt the need to get offended, so I decided to watch a little Fox News.  But, instead of Glenn Beck’s scheduled histrionics, I found myself confronted with something called an Anne Coulter.  With sharp analytical acuity, the Anne Coulter equated health care cooperatives, the public option, and socialized medicine – all the same thing – before prescribing “free markets” as the solution to any possible health insurance concerns.  I have to admit, I turned Fox off the fourth or fifth time the Anne Coulter repeated the exact same statement about free markets ”historically” driving costs down.  But it got me to thinking about how, beyond Republican slogans, health insurance really fits into neoliberal thought.

It’s useful to return to the grand daddy of free market ideology, Friedrich Hayek.  Hayek, being a much more serious thinker than the Anne Coulter, gives very specific reasons for supporting free markets.  Hayek’s main argument in The Road to Serfdom, one that Milton Friedman would later adopt, is that the needs and desires of the populace are too varied and change too quickly for central planners to take them into account in their production decisions.  As a result, central planners – working on bad or outdated information - overproduce or underproduce goods.  Furthermore, these production decisions are often biased by the planner’s value-judgements: certain goods are favored over others for ideological or tactical reasons.  This misfit between the needs of the people and the decisions of the central planners is what causes central planners to become tyrants: rather than adjusting the plan, the planners force the people to accept it.[1] 

That is not to say that Hayek does not have a place for the centralized state at all.  Hayek, unlike some of his successors, recognizes that the state must create the preconditions for the market and provide for social welfare.  Things like policing fraud or deception, public infrastructure, environmental regulation, and any necessary product or service that cannot be produced profitably fall under the scope of the state according to Hayek.  He also includes a more general category of goods best provided by collective institutions: “common ends.”  To understand common ends, we have to examine Hayek’s notion of the market.  For Hayek, the market is the economic manifestation of pluralism.  Everyone can do with their money what they please, fulfilling their own individual ends; to borrow from Hayek’s disciple Milton Friedman, everyone can vote their own tie.  With the state, however, this multiplicity of ends becomes a single end or, at best, a single suite of ends.  The majority or the dictatorship decides, leaving the preferences of the minority or the powerless unfulfilled or even suppressed.  However, according to Hayek, there are situations in which individuals can unanimously agree on ends and, by voluntary agreement, enter into collectives to fulfill those separate but identical, common ends.

It seems, then, that there are three related questions to be answered before we can apply Hayek’s thoughts to the current health insurance debate: (i) is health insurance a good like those described in Hayek’s negative account of central planning, (ii) is publically provided health insurance helpful in facilitating free competition in the market, and (iii) is it possible for health insurance to be a universal or near-universal common end? 

I would argue that health insurance is fundamentally different from the commodities that Hayek’s central planner oversees.  Unlike the demand for widgets and sprockets, the demand for health insurance does not vary wildly and unpredictably.  While preferences for plans and level of coverage might differ somewhat, the need for health insurance is fairly stable.  Any economically rational individual would choose some kind of health insurance if it was within his or her means and the rate at which individuals voluntarily change plans is probably measured by years if not decades.  So the economic calculations involved providing for health insurance are not comparable to those facing Hayek’s frustrated central planner.

If Hayek would not rule out publically provided health insurance as an instance of bad central planning, would he include it under the state’s purview as a precondition of or an aid to the market?  I think he should.  While it is clear that health insurance is a profitable industry, the state might still provide it as part of its duty as adjutant to the market.  Employer or privately provided health insurance distorts the labor market: many individuals remain in undesirable jobs for fear of losing coverage.  And, of course, there are issues involving the burden of health insurance upon small businesses and the unlevel of position of American companies vis-a-vis companies in countries which do provide health insurance.

Finally, there is the question of common ends.  In many ways, health insurance is already socialized: it is the collective management of risk.  Health insurance consumers realize that they cannot bear the cost of health care on their own, so they join together with others under the umbrella of the insurance company.  As the health insurance industry stands now, each company might be described as a Hayekian common end.  But would a publically run health insurance company qualify, as well?  I see no reason why not.  The public option meets several of the descriptors Hayek gives for common ends: it covers a “limited sphere,” it would be entered into by voluntary agreement, and it is a means to fulfilling the individual’s desires rather than an ultimate end.

In light of what we have seen, it should come as no suprise, then, that Hayek – progenitor of neoliberalism – goes even further and endorses universal, government run health insurance in the Bible of the free market movement.  After arguing that the state should provide a minimum of social welfare for its citizens, Hayek states:

Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.  Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of the assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong.  There are many points of detail where those wishing to supersede it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes; and it is possible under the name of social insurance to introduce measures which tend to make competition more or less ineffective.  But there is no incompatibility in principle between the state providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom.  (emphasis added)

It seems as if the first intellectual of the free market movement is more of a health insurance radical than Obama!  I wonder if anyone’s told the Anne Coulter?

[1] Much of this argument depends on a false dichotomy between free market capitalism and centralized, authoritarian, state socialism; Hayek does not admit any alternatives.  Hayek rationalizes the exclusion of a third way in the form of Keynesian liberalism with an argument that is a bit like the capitalist obverse of the Frankfurt School’s administered society: once the state reaches a certain critical mass, its influence extends to all of society and the market just gradually withers away.  Meanwhile, more libertarian forms of socialism are dismissed as chimerical, utopian idealism.

Animals + Damaged Bodies in District 9

District 9 is a film that seems to trumpet its own allegorical significance.  From its setting (post-apartheid South Africa) to the pseudo-documentary style of the film’s bookends, the film seems to instruct its viewers that, though it is a film about grizzly tentacle aliens, it’s really about human social and political issues.  However, in the process of trying to figure out who the “prawns” really represent, it is easy to forget that they are not simply “animalized,” as one reviewer on Jane Dark’s Cultural Revolution argued; rather, these are aliens that are already non-human animals.  Obviously the prawns look like Bug Eyed Monsters, at times they lope around on all fours, they scavenge, they eat cat food and raw meat, and on and on.  Their animalistic qualities might be passed off as part of the extraterrestrial-as-alien conceit—superficial differences that must be overcome so that we might realize we’re all human underneath the chitinous scales—were it not for the fact that the District 9 aliens seem to lack all of the specificity that we’ve come to expect in a genre-typical alien culture.  We learn about their variant reproductive functions and their carnivorous diet, but not about their rituals, beliefs, art, etiquettes, etc.  Their translated dialogue is completely prosaic and utilitarian, free of alien idioms or allusions.  Even their social structure is presented as biological or hive-like—the ruling caste disappears so the workers disintegrate like queen-less ants.   Other than their language, the prawns seem to have no culture of their own.

It might be countered that the film—being an earthling documentary following a sort of Eichmann figure—is only modeling a particular, narrow, human perspective.  For example, we never learn what the aliens call themselves or even what the more neutral human term for them is: they are always just “prawns.”  Perhaps they have a very rich cultural life that we just don’t know about.

I think that the revelation of this bias or ignorance is certainly part of what is going on, but the view of prawns as ethnic or racial others or as an underclass fails to account for the sheer amount of animal gore in the film.  Part of what makes the prawns so alien is that they are exclusively meat eaters, pictured in the film buying, eating, and feeding their gestating young skinned animal carcasses.  We see prawns feasting on not only the bodies of animals—hanging from the roofs of huts or slung about by butchers—but also entire animal heads.   It is difficult not to make the connection between the broken bodies and severed faces of animals and the trafficking of prawn meat and prawn vivisections also featured in the film.  Indeed, it often seems as if the splatterpunk horror of exploding flesh is the one thing that connects all life forms in District 9: the ray gun turns out to be the great equalizer in more ways than one.

My point is not that we should ignore the clear analogies the film wants us to make between prawns and various oppressed groups.  Instead, I would argue that the film uses the animal to reinforce these connections.  Nor is the animal simply a metaphor for degradation.  While the metaphor is at play, I would argue that the film sketches out an ethic of shared vulnerability—there is a continuum of suffering between human, alien, and animal in the film as each are shown exterminated or reduced to bare life.  This, I think, is part of the reasoning behind the more banal, conventional, violent action sequences of the film.  By the end of the movie, we experience a reversal: the casualized violence inflicted upon the prawns is brought to bear upon their human oppressors.  While there is some action flick exhilaration, and a little “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” sentiment involved, we are ultimately made to feel squeamish and uncomfortable about each death, regardless of which species is killed.  It is no surprise, then, that the symbol of the protagonist’s new kinship with the prawns is his bloody, wounded hand transformed into an alien claw that seems to suggest that an injury to the alien or the inhuman equals an injury to ourselves.

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Archigram

I don’t know much about utopian (or “visionary”) architecture other than what I’ve seen in galleries and read about in passing, but I get the impression that utopianism played a bigger role in 20th century architecture than in literature. Le Corbusier’s impossible megastructures loom large, appropriately enough, and, perhaps in response, a number of groups produced interesting, experimental utopian designs (e.g., OAM’s “Exodus, or Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture” and the Ant Farm’s various projects). Then there’s the Archigram Group: http://www.archigram.net/projects_pages/walking_city.html.

When I first started reading about the Archigram group’s plans from the 1960s, I assumed that it was all a bit tongue-in-cheek—something like one of the Yes Men’s put ons. Using a mix of collage, drawing, and blueprint, Archigram projects things like cities of disposable architecture or customizable towers made of standardized parts. I read it is as one part capitalist critique, one part ambiguous utopia, and one part retro-futurist romp. But, no, one quickly realizes that Archigram’s utopias are unambiguous, that this is a celebration of capitalism rather than its reductio ad absurdum. Archigram’s visions serve as perfect exemplars of what Lefebvre terms “abstract space,” a homogenous yet fragmented space that represents the triumph of exchange value over use value. In Archigram’s world, each room or building is a prefabricated capsule, gasket, tent, or vehicle that can be bought, reconfigured, moved, or switched out at will. Whereas the Modernist architects looked to the sphere of production for their inspiration (i.e., factories), Archigram is inspired by the sphere of consumption; contra Le Corbusier, Archigram claims that the building is “an appliance for living in.” And so, in this endless exchange, there are no stable places or places with enduring significances. Instead, homes, villages, and cities are constructed and dismantled on a temporary, ad hoc basis. Archigram’s utopians are animated first and foremost by the consumerist freedom of choice: in the future we will be able to buy the shiniest new spaces, discarding the old ones whenever expedient. As a result, Archigram’s utopia appears like the Situationist city’s devil twin.

Archigram makes no apologies—its ideology quite explicit. For Archigram, emancipation is defined as the following:

Goodies: more obvious fruits of high living standard plus obvious mass-production. Fruits of success / fruits of choice. The power to choose. Customizing the mass-produced  object. Art customizing. The individual’s effect upon his [sic] environment. Water/underwater as sport/fun/English ‘playing about in boats’ Choice of wardrobe Switch-on fun. In the brain fun. Hobbies. Airplanes. Moon probe. Personality. Oddballs. Simulated individualism. Pastiche styling as fun. (78)

Emancipation, then, is a choice between a series of pre-given menu choices, induced differences within the capitalist system: “Have it your way!” The road to this (false) utopia is through a sort of techno-fetishism: societal ills are simply technical problems, “man vs. the machine,” that can be sorted out through innovation and conscientious, consumer-oriented planning and design. However, Archigram’s utopian potential remains unexhausted. Archigram’s utopia is not merely compensatory or ideological. It has an unspent subversive charge to it and I think Adorno might help to show why.

(I’ve only read Negative Dialectics in excerpt, so hopefully someone will tell me if I have it wrong.) As I understand it, Adorno’s negative dialectic involves discovering the nonidentity between the concept and the object. According to Gillian Rose, Adorno’s notion of the concept is synonymous with the predicate: “the man [the object] is free [the concept].” In this case, Adorno (drawing on the old Marxist playbook) would point out that “the free man” has only obtained political emancipation, as well as the “freedom” to sell his labor-power to capitalists. The concept “freedom” therefore remains unfulfilled: the man is still constrained by economic necessity, is unable to control the conditions and product of his labor, etc. etc. (Think of George W. Bush’s abuses of the concept “democracy” versus, say, the promises held by Laclau and Mouffe’s “democratic imaginary.”) Analysis of an ideological use of the term “freedom,” then, points toward the utopian connotations contained within the concept, even if they are only grasped negatively by their failure to be achieved. If we use this schema, utopianism is about creating imaginary objects that better fulfill their concepts. For example, a utopia might replace the formal equality of a capitalist democracy with a true equality where everyone has equal access to the means of production. Here, the imaginary object is better reconciled to the concept of equality than the real one. Using this method, utopians critique both the object and its concept as they exist in the present system. However, Adorno would undoubtedly point out that the utopian object always fails to become completely unite with the concept; there is always some remainder that indicates the utopia’s limitation. This persistent nonidentity is not simply the mark of utopia’s defeat; it is also a spur to further utopianism, further reevaluation of the object and its concept.

Under this framework, Archigram attempts to better fulfill the concept of consumerist freedom and, in the process, shows both the inadequacy of its object—Fordist capitalism—and the poverty of capitalist concepts of choice. This double move draws our attention to further utopias that might instantiate notions of freedom from restraint and freedom to play and create more fully.

This dream remains unrealized and, instead, we are living in something more like Archigram’s utopia than even their blueprints. A number of theorists have observed that, in a tentative and atheoretical way, utopias prefigure future solutions to the problem of their moment. Archigram’s science fiction becomes material reality under the regime of flexible accumulation. Like Archigram’s groovy denizens, the Post-fordist workers experience both increased autonomy (of a sort) and increased contingency or precariousness.  And while space is not yet a cheap, throwaway commodity, it is (was?) the subject of intense speculative trading.

Motorman and the Rumsfeldian Unknown Unknown

David Ohle is one of Ben Marcus’s biggest influences and it shows. Both Motorman and Age of Wire and String feature imaginary worlds where day-to-day objects and events have become rearranged, changed, and made unfamiliar. But, while Marcus’s stories use the unknown to create the teasing effect of knowledge, Ohle’s novel reminds us again and again that understanding is beyond our reach. Motorman is set in the future and\or another world, one largely populated by dyslexic, humanoid “jellyheads;” overcast by erratic, artificial, “government moons” and suns; and wracked by freak weather events. The (human) protagonist, Moldenke, has incurred the wrath of a (seemingly) powerful man named Bunce, possibly because Moldenke (may have) killed two jellyheads. As all those qualifiers indicate, the novel casts doubt on the motives, identity, and history of all the characters. That is not to say that the novel is a mystery—neither the facts of the situation nor the character’s motives are presented as puzzles or problems. Instead, the novel gestures toward the ideological category that Donald Rumsfeld would later term the “unknown unknown.” Though Moldenke and his friend and correspondent Dr. Burnheart are scientists who pride themselves in getting to the bottom of things, they fail to ask questions that any habitual science fiction reader would demand to know. Moldenke’s world is encased in what Victor Shklovsky calls the “glass armor of the familiar,” taken for granted and therefore unnoticed and uninterrogated. Even if Moldenke were to formulate some inquiry into planetary conditions, it becomes clear that the unknown unknown variables involved are endless. The world itself seems to take the structure of the exams Moldenke receives from his mentor: in one circuitous question, Moldenke is asked to react to a scenario in which a bone falls from a tree and hits the side of his shoe. Moldenke speculates that it is the bones of a flood victim who climbed to safety only to be bitten by a poisonous snake. Burnheart counters that no flood occurred, no poisonous snakes inhabit the unspecified region and, in fact, the bone was placed in the tree by a mischievous friend.

The import of Moldenke’s incomprehension or incuriosity becomes clear when we examine his distant and tenuous relationship to other people. To be known by others appears as a terrifying scenario: Moldenke’s tormentor, Bunce, claims to know every last detail of Moldenke’s life and has tapes of everything everyone has ever said about him. At the same time, however, the opposite is equally if not more unpleasant; Moldenke’s complete psychological alienation manifests as the inability to know other people. His relationship to his romantic interest, Cock Roberta, is characterized by absence, lack of emotion, and frustrated communication. They are described as like two “ghost crabs” that repeatedly check for one another in the same burrow but never show up at the same time. Meanwhile, Moldenke believes that his only ally Burnheart knows little of him and he isn’t even sure of who Burnheart himself really is. Then there are the jellyheads—nameless, servile entities who Moldenke seems to think nothing of, even as they die. They are inscrutable—their very faces are featureless, gray balloons—and therefore of no concern.

We only have to go as far as the text to see this attitude applied to a real world group. Over the course of the novel, we learn that all of the remaining black people—save one Roosevelt Teaset—have died in a government-orchestrated disaster. When Roosevelt Teaset’s twenty artificial hearts fail, his corpse is put on display, complete with cotton field diorama, next to the remains of the last banana plant. Moldenke sees the display and he feels that something “isn’t quite right” so, ever the scientist, he pays off the “dustboy” to let him examine the cadaver after hours—only to discover that it is a fake. These events—which, taken together, only make up about a page—pass almost entirely without comment. Moldenke simply notes: “Now I know it… What’s missing from the Teaset display. Teaset is missing” (107). While Moldenke is almost as impenetrable as any of the other characters in the novel, it’s apparent that he fails to move beyond this superficial discovery to more critical questions. What’s missing from the display—and Moldenke’s dystopia—is not merely a genuine dead body. As Moldenke slides through this bizarre setting, only becoming more confused and never quite realizing it, he seems to exemplify one of Thomas Pynchon’s Proverbs for Paranoids: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”

Repost: Age of Wire and String Review

The Age of Wire and String: Stories by Ben Marcus is a great book, one of the few that has made me laugh out loud. The anthology made up of a series of interrelated, surreal short fictions accompanied by glossaries of imaginary terms. For an example, here is its definition of a “Wind Bowl”:

Pocket of curved unsteady space formed between speaking persons. They may discuss the house, its grass, some foods, the father inside. The wind bowl will tilt and push across their faces, that they might appear leaning back, arching away from each other, grasping at the ground behind them as if sleeping. (14)

The Age of Wire and String does with language what Codex Seriphinianus [1] does with graphic design: in a thoroughgoing, analytic fashion, the text lays out the absurd so that each step in its incomprehensible arguments seems to follow naturally and intuitively from the previous one. Dream logic reads like logic, opaque mysteries are described in the clear, expository style of encyclopedia entries, form and content clash, reverberate, and play upon one another. As a result, the reader often experiences strange and gratifying “Aha!” moments as fantastic elements seem to fall into place—the hidden relationship between dogs and storms, the nature of ubiquitous, floating food particles. I particularly liked how the text creates expectations through its careful, didactic rhetoric and then promptly explodes them, almost as a joke; in one of the terms sections we are informed that a “Nagle” is a “wooden fixture which first subdued the winter Albert. It occurs in and around trees and is highly brown” (27). Meanwhile, “Tree Bread” is “The victuals in concert with tree systems” (42). Of course.

Like the Codex, The Age of Wire and String is an estranged version of everyday life. The recurring terms are often those most densely packed with association—“food,” “the house,” “dogs,” “the father,” proper names, etc.—words that are redefined and placed in a system of alternative meaning, causing them to become ever more overdetermined as the stories progress. Loaded with this new significance, the personal collapses into the cosmic: all historical or archeological periods occur in the last 30 years, societal shifts are measured in hours, Midwestern states seem to represent the known world. Furthermore, as in magical thinking, the text presents a paranoid world where casual actions or events can have powerful effects, everything is interconnected, and mundane objects contain hidden messages. What’s remarkable about all of this is how well it hangs together: The Age of Wire and String teaches the reader to think a certain way so that, even afterwards, one might find oneself accidentally applying its ideas and nomenclature to the real world (in a not un-Tlönian way).

In sum, it’s experimental, outré, and very enjoyable. All of my poet and non-poet friends should read it.

[1] Codex Seriphinianus by Luigi Serifini is out of print and somewhat rare; I had to do a nationwide ILL search to view it. Used copies will run you $500+. However, there appear to be .pdfs of it floating around on the Internet. If you obtain a copy, drop me a line.

Repost: Ecotopia + Utopian Violence

Ernest Callenbach’s utopian novel, Ecotopia, is fairly straightforward and predictable, up until the bloodsports. In Callenbach’s world, the Pacific Northwest has seceded from America to form a decentralized, eco-friendly, “stable-state” nation. As part of its transformation, Ecotopia has undergone demilitarization, favoring instead a small defensive army (the size of Canada’s, we’re told) with citizens supporting as militiamen when necessary. However, while Ecotopia has become a less violent country, there remains an unfulfilled violent impulse in men (though not women) that the social system must find a way of channeling and defusing. To this end, Ecotopians engage in a ritualized war game similar to those practiced in stateless, hunter-gatherer societies (c.f. Archeology of Violence by Pierre Clastres). The young men of Ecotopia band together on rival teams, stand along opposite sides of a ditch, and lunge at each other with spears until they either break through the other line or injure someone. This dangerous sport results in hundreds of deaths per year, as well as the hospitalization of the American narrator. What is striking about this narrative is that the violence in it appears so unproblematic and leaves the reader completely undisturbed. The narrator’s wounding is not a social breakdown or personal trauma but, instead, an excuse for him to receive some erotic massage by a generous nurse while he convalesces.

This cavalier attitude toward utopian violence is not unique to Ecotopia. This notion perhaps begins with the Marquis de Sade’s apology for murder in the utopia in _Philosophy in the Boudoir_ and continues through the dueling featured in The Female Man and “Nobody’s Home” by Joanna Russ and Bolo’bolo by P.M. In a number of utopias, we find this fantasy of violence without trauma. The reasons for this become clearer if we use the categories put forth in Zizek’s book on Violence: “objective” and “subjective violence.” Zizek describes subjective violence as “violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent” (crime, war, riots, etc.) while objective violence consists of “symbolic violence”—the violence of language—and “systemic violence,” “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (1-2).[1] Contrary to liberal humanitarians, Zizek maintains that it is _objective violence_ that is of primary importance because it acts as the preconditions that make subjective violence possible. Instances of subjective violence, then, appear as merely the local epiphenomena of a universal field of objective violence. What these categories allow us to see is that, in literary utopias, there is only subjective violence but never objective violence. When an act of violence is committed in our existent world, it is motivated and set against the background of objective violence. In utopia, however, it is torn out of that context and becomes simply an anomaly, an accident. Spousal violence, for example, becomes a lover’s quarrel, never an instantiation of patriarchy. Violence in utopia, when it does not take the form of utopia’s defense, often depends solely on “passion” and is therefore particular, individual, and exemplary of nothing beyond tragic folly or “human psychology.” This is borne out by utopian responses to criminal violence, which are often ad hoc and typically focus on the criminal’s rehabilitation rather than retribution or the maintenance of legal or societal order. Because objective violence is absent, subjective violence is no longer a consequence and reminder of our own oppression, it no longer summons up pervasive fears and anxieties, and it does not foreshadow a future crackdown or provide an alibi for further violence, it is simply something unfortunate and unlikely happening to someone else.

However, I don’t think the disappearance of objective violence fully explains why violence is untraumatic in utopia. While objective violence might structure much of our horrified response to subjective violence, there still remains the fact that nobody wants to get pierced with a spear. Here we need to look to utopian characterology. As the commonplace goes, utopian characters are shallow and uncomplicated figures. We often find their emotions are strong but immediately evident and easily assuaged. In _Ecotopia_, a utopian might scream and cry at her or his “mate” and then, five minutes later, head off for some conciliatory love-making. As part of what Fredric Jameson calls the “plebeianization” of utopian character, they appear to be all surface and no depth; private consciousness disappears along with private property. What that means is that, for the utopian character, there are no defense mechanisms or “protective shields” to break through, no secret, psychological sanctum to violate. Therefore, because the (fanciful) Freudian model of trauma presupposes a certain mental topography—an unknown inside that the traumatic stimulus penetrates and imprints upon—that the utopian simply does not possess, trauma becomes impossible. As a result, the violence in utopian novels comes to appear unthreatening, “just part of life,” so that we do not immediately scoff and throw the book down when we are told that Ecotopians like to stab at each other with spears.

Edit: Why is this important? I’m not sure – it’s just a note. Part of the reason is that this demonstrates how so many utopian novels work dialectically or relationally: the character of a violent act changes when it is embedded in a new, utopian totality. This not only allows us to “look backwards” at our own violence, placing it within its social and psychological context, but also speaks of a libertarian strain of utopianism best exemplified by Charles Fourier. For Fourier, the nastiest of vices change to virtues once they are organized in the right series. So the ethics of Fourier’s utopia, and these utopias of violence, is not to exterminate or imprison that which is undesirable but, instead, to structure a system around it that allows this element free expression with minimal harm. This way of thinking provides an antidote to more puritanical versions of utopia.

[1] Incidentally, I think this distinction is part of the reason Deadwood viewers are more sympathetic to Al Swearengen’s thuggery than George Hearst’s gangsterism: Swearengen, who likes to get in close with the knife, is the paragon of subjective violence on a “human scale” while Hearst is the cold herald of further objective violence. To adapt de Sade, “[objective violence] cannot be accessible to the human passions that legitimize the cruel act of murder” (119).