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Figuring the Human : : Aesthetics, Politics and the Humanity to Come

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Chang, Alexander Ezekiel

Publication Date
2013

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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

Figuring the Human: Aesthetics, Politics and the Humanity to Come

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of

the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy

in

Literature

by

Alexander Ezekiel Chang

Committee in charge:
Professor Lisa Lowe, Co-Chair
Professor Rosaura Sanchez, Co-Chair
Professor Page Dubois
Professor Yen Le Espiritu
Professor Don Wayne

2013
 ©

Alexander Ezekiel Chang, 2013

All rights reserved.

 Signature Page

The Dissertation of Alexander Ezekiel Chang is approved, and it is acceptable in quality

and form for publication on microfilm and electronically.

Co-Chair

Co-Chair

University of California, San Diego

2013

iii
 Epigraph

Finale. – The only philosophy that can be responsibly practised in face of despair
is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from
the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world
by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be
fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and
crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.
To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact
with its objects – this alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things,
because the situation calls imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because
consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its
opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a
standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of
existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be
first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very
reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape. The more
passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional,
the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world.
Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the
possible. But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the
reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

iv
 Table of Contents
Signature Page ................................................................................................................... iii
Epigraph ............................................................................................................................. iv
Table of Contents ................................................................................................................ v
List of Figures ................................................................................................................... vii
Preface.............................................................................................................................. viii
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ xviii
Vita.................................................................................................................................... xx
Abstract of the Dissertation ............................................................................................. xxi
Anthropo-Critical Introduction ........................................................................................... 1
The Structure of Knowledge ....................................................................................... 10
Theses on Method ....................................................................................................... 16
Figuring the Human .................................................................................................... 20
Figure 1: The blind spot .................................................................................................... 24
Punctum caecum ............................................................................................................... 24
Aesthetic Anthropologies: Art and the Invention of Man ................................................ 34
Regimes of Art ............................................................................................................ 46
The Aesthetic Ordering of Things .............................................................................. 65
The Breath of Aisthêsis ............................................................................................... 80
History and Class Aisthêsis: Studies in Marxist Affects .................................................. 91
The Contradictions of Postmodernity ......................................................................... 99
Objectified and Living Labour.................................................................................. 111
Affective Displacements of the Capitalist Contradiction ......................................... 125
The Fixed Capital of Human Subjectivity ................................................................ 137
Resisting the Subject of Capital: Negativity and the Politics of Non-Identity ............... 145
The Limits of Politics................................................................................................ 157
Difference and Negativity ......................................................................................... 169
Towards a Marxist Aesthetic .................................................................................... 182
The Polyphonics of Space and Time: Yamashita’s A Tropic of Orange ........................ 199
Space, Time and the Capitalist Nation State............................................................. 212
The Exteriority of Perception.................................................................................... 224
Disarticulating Perception in the Tropic of Orange .................................................. 233
The Aesthetics of Cognitive Mapping ...................................................................... 247

v
Traumas of Production: Representing the Chinese Coolie ............................................. 254
To Trace the Ambiguity of Melancholy ................................................................... 268
Representations of the Chinese Coolie ..................................................................... 274
The Appropriation of Historicity in Trauma Time ................................................... 294
Hegel, Haiti and Zombies: Universality and its Discontents .......................................... 305
Historical Zombies and Zombie Histories ................................................................ 320
The Two Endings of Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend ............................................ 333
Towards a Non-Hegelian, Darwinian Marxist Historicism ...................................... 347
Conclusion: The Utopics of the Human.......................................................................... 358
The Utopic Neutralization of Man ............................................................................ 362
Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 370

vi
 List of Figures

Figure 1: The blind spot .....................................................................................................24

Figure 2: Organization of the color space in English ......................................................189

Figure 3: Organization of the color space in Himba ........................................................189

Figure 4: Greimas Semiotic diagram of Postmodern space .............................................239

Figure 5: Greimasian Neutralization ................................................................................364

vii
 Preface

Cracks in Asphalt—During my fifth year in graduate school, UCSD began constructing

an addition to the medical center. Trucks carrying heavy machinery, rocks, steel beams

and other raw materials would pass through a parking lot near the construction site. This

parking lot was built on sand and the constant stress and strain from the weight of the

passing trucks would cause ruptures—points of tension that could no longer hold—in the

otherwise smooth surface of the asphalt. From that single tear would creep a complex

web of cracks and crevices. My walk to and from campus took me through this vacant lot

and I would delight in watching, day after day, the slow spread of cracks in the asphalt.

Occasionally, a work crew would come and plaster over the developing cracks

with a layer of fresh asphalt in an attempt to halt the progressive disintegration. But

beneath the renewed surface, the cracks still lurked as points of weakness, ready to erupt

once more onto the surface. As I viewed one such patch of asphalt, I wondered about the

very need to plaster over these crevices, the place from whence the machinery and the

raw materials came, the stresses and strains that were induced elsewhere in this larger

system that sought constantly to maintain these surfaces. It seemed that the cracks could

never be entirely eliminated, but that the pressures could only be shifted elsewhere,

spread across a wider area, temporarily hidden from sight. In this way, the system

exhibits an entropic tendency toward rupture that requires ever-greater amounts of human

viii
labor and human energy to suppress. Much must be expended in order to maintain the

orderly façade of that which exists.

Another time, walking through the same parking lot, I noticed an errant weed that

had suddenly sprung up in one of the cracks in the very middle of an otherwise barren

parking lot. This weed, a plant unwanted and out of place, contrasted sharply with the

neatly manicured lawns and trimmed shrubbery that surrounded the rest of the campus.

And yet it seemed to almost flourish in that impossible crevice. The continued existence

of this wayward weed depended on breaking up the solid surface of asphalt through the

slow and steady attrition of its roots as they spread deeper towards the earth below,

seeking sustenance in the barren landscape. There was always something hopeful about

that weed growing green in the middle of a parking lot scorched by the hostile southern

California sun.

I like to think of my dissertation as one such weed that has taken root in and

draws sustenance from the contradictions and tensions in the system of late capitalism.

This system never ceases in its attempts to smooth over and hide its own inherent

contradictions, but every contradiction patched over in one location creates tensions

elsewhere, displacing the force of these contradictions but never fully resolving it; for the

full resolution of the system of late capitalism can only come in its radical

transformation. Instead of a full resolution, the cracks are constantly smoothed over and

concealed through various mythic resolutions. Capitalism then is simultaneously static

and dynamic: static in its attempts to reinforce a singular, unchanging system and

dynamic in the vast system processes and apparatuses that must be developed in order to

ix
maintain that system. The dual character of capitalism as a system comes precisely

through the necessity of managing these contradictions.

However, the foundation, the base, as it were, is nevertheless built on sand and the

greater the machinery necessary to construct the superstructures that enable the system of

capitalist exploitation, the greater the force necessary to maintain the system of roads and

byways along which the heavy machinery of human affect, perception, thought must be

made to trundle. Should these contradictions become so great that there is no longer

adequate force to contain or displace them, there will inevitably be a rupture in the state

of things and something new may well take root in the shattered surface that results.

The terms base and superstructure is not meant to simply hearken back to an

antiquated Marxist model of ideology and its relation to a mode of production.

Architecturally, a parking lot can be thought to belong properly to neither the base nor the

superstructure; rather, it is a space of traversal, a space of movement between existing

structures. If our contemporary mode of production is to be thought as a complex

totality—a social formation and not a single pure mode of production—then one must

attend not only to the superstructures that arise on the skyline and the bases upon which

they are built, but also these streets, avenues, highways, these zones of connection that

allow for the smooth movement of thought from one to superstructure to another and the

tensions and contradictions that arise in this movement. It is precisely in the ordering of

these spaces where thought moves that the possibilities and the limitations of the

thinkable are determined. Contradictions exist not just within each mode of production

taken as a singular structure, but also between them as they are organized under the sign

of a unified totality. Under the late capitalist social formation, the abstract equality of

x
capitalism and the commodity form come up against the forms of identitarian oppression

necessary to maximize the extraction of surplus value. These contradictions ceaselessly

threaten to rupture, altering the passage and the flow of thought, creating new structures

and new formations.

That there are contradictions, and there shall never cease to be contradictions

within capitalism, should give rise to some measure of hope. Contradictions are points of

tension where a set of forces meet, clashing together with each other or pulling violently

apart. When these forces are in balance it creates the appearance of a motionless stability,

but such equilibria are always inherently unstable. The unstable equilibrium of these

forces threatens to rupture into a sudden movement, into the unpredictable new, and the

greater the magnitude of the forces necessary to maintain this equilibrium, the greater the

dynamism of the system when it becomes unstable. Through a coercion which increases

pressures from one direction, or a consent which releases it from another, late capitalism

attempts to maintain this balance, to preserve the stability of its contradictions in a system

of forces which is nevertheless perpetually shifting and dynamic. These contradictions, as

the German aufheben intimates, cannot be resolved in any simple sense, but must be

simultaneously preserved, elevated, cancelled.

Contradictions take place not merely between abstract logical categories; they

manifest in conditions that are lived, and are experienced as a persistent sense of

disjuncture. The curious weed that is my dissertation has sprung up from within the

contradictions of my own privileged space in the University of California at San Diego,

which have produced the conditions of possibility for its emergence. It is a space from

which one might watch the sun set over the ocean and attempt to locate Herbert

xi
Marcuse’s favorite spot on the beach, while a pair of military jets streak across the

horizon, leaving trails of vapor that dissipate in their wake. It is a location that reminds

me always of the privileged and often contradictory position I occupy, and of the forms

of violence necessary to maintain this position—forms that can be as concrete as the

aluminum and steel of the jet planes that arc across the sky overhead or as ephemeral as

their contrails that evaporate into the spaces we breathe.

UCSD is a university that formally holds to the liberal humanist ideology of

equality, an equality that is nevertheless belied by the persistent inequality reflected in its

admission rates—in 2009, 1% of first-time freshmen were identified as African

American, and 3% as Latino—a situation that resulted in what was labeled as the “racial

emergency” in early 2010. This emergency culminated in the placement of a Ku-Klux-

Klan-style hood over a statue on campus and the hanging of a noose in the central

campus library. It is not difficult to see how this moment of overt racial violence that is

contained by labeling it a moment of emergency is, in fact, an expression of the norm

experienced by many of our students both on campus and in their daily lives. This

persistent racial disparity is at once patently visible in my daily life, but also part of a

larger system of creating and extracting surplus by unequally valuing the life and labor of

concrete individuals.

Furthermore, it is a university that is succumbing to the increasingly neoliberal

logics that devalues critical thought by subjugating it to the stock market of ideas where

only those forms of knowledge that directly generate revenue can be thought to be of

worth. The persistent defunding of public education serves, on the one hand, to limit the

community to whom education is available, and on the other to separate out the fiscally

xii
profitable realms of academia from the unprofitable, further dividing the sphere of

intellectual labor and determining those disciplines which can, without net loss, be

eliminated from the university’s offerings. It is no surprise then that we in the humanities

never cease to be reminded that the UC San Diego Medical Centers represent the

profitable sector of the university.

In addition to these, somewhat more local concerns, my dissertation has been

deeply influenced by the historical and political milieu that marks the period of its

writing. While I may not directly address all of the conditions that have shaped this

milieu, I nevertheless conceive of my dissertation as being in dialogue with the concrete

historical and political events that have shaped our present, including the persistent para-

political theater of the Left and Right in American politics where all the antagonism and

vitriol serves only to conceal the neoliberal underpinnings of both; the continued wars in

Iraq and Afghanistan; the revelation of the US use of torture in Abu Ghraib and

subsequent conversations in the media; the recent series of political revolutions across the

Middle east, the consequences of which still remain open; and the recent riots in Britain

and various discussions about the limits between politics and criminality that they

inspired. My intention here is not to narrativize or to contain these tensions, but rather to

center them as the field of forces that have served integrally in the formation of my

dissertation. It is precisely these conditions that give a new urgency to rethinking the

central figure of my dissertation: the figure of Man.

Yet to be critical in the Kantian sense one must also investigate the basis of one’s

own production of knowledge, and I write with a conscious unease at the document that I

produce. “There is,” to cite Walter Benjamin, “no document of civilization which is not

xiii
at the same time a document of barbarism” (256). The “barbarism” that is inherent in

every document should be read as more than just the opposite of some conception of

“civilization.” One should read beyond the barbaric fact that that the privilege of my

position in the university and of my writing of this dissertation is structurally predicated

upon the poverty and deprivation of others elsewhere, and enforced by overt forms of

military violence, though indeed this dissertation is also implicitly a document of this

form barbarism.

But there is also a way that “barbarism” can be read as that which is

incomprehensible under a dominant regime of knowledge. The term is etymologically

derived from the Greek, barbar, which literally represents the Greeks’ attempts to mimic

the language of those who could not speak Greek. The linguistic other was thus mapped

onto the social other who comes to represent uncivilized crudeness and violence. In this

way too, this dissertation is also a document of its own barbarism. And there is, perhaps,

no document that more strongly delineates those who can claim the mantle of civilization

from those subjugated under the name of barbarism than the doctoral dissertation whose

very function is to elaborate and reinforce this division. The very act of writing the

dissertation articulates the division between those capable of producing legitimate

knowledge and those whose thought must remain incoherent and illegible to the dominant

ordering of knowledge. This dissertation itself is thus also internally riven with its own

contradictions, but they are contradictions to which I always strive to remain faithful.

And perhaps only a speech that maintains a fidelity to the unspeakable within it, without

pretending to exhaust its unspeakablility, can open the space that will allow for the

emergence of the new.

xiv
 Yet I am also wary of attempting to represent this barbarism, precisely because

the illegibility that defines it as barbaric is predicated on its incompatibility with our

dominant epistemic framework, and any representation that does not at the same time

shift the epistemic standpoint from which we look must be in some way false. Yet

shifting our own epistemic framework is no easy task, and even if there were levers long

enough, there is no place to stand outside our own social and historical conditions.

Indeed, as Theodor Adorno notes in the finale to Minima Moralia, to gain such

perspectives, is “the simplest of all things, because the situation calls imperatively for

such knowledge. . . But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a

standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence” (247).

I thus seek to play in the space of this crevice opened up by the simultaneous

impossibility and necessity of new forms of knowledge that would restructure the

political and epistemic lines between the legible and the illegible.

The task is not to gain a clear representation of things as they are, as though there

can be any unmediated relation to reality, but precisely to open up the space between the

concept and its object. This space of mediation is also the space of the social where

politics proper might once again take hold. In Adorno’s conception, the task of

philosophy is the “attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves

from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by

redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique” (247). If knowledge is to be

thought of as shedding light upon its object, transforming the possibilities of viewing and

understanding the object, this light has never yet been neutral. And under the conditions

of late capitalist globalization, this light never ceases to be projected from the presumably

xv
enlightened West onto its Others. Instead, the distance between the light of knowledge

and the light of redemption must be maintained so that the alterity of the object in its own

self-presentation can be made possible without becoming a mere possession. We would

thus no longer be able to hold to any unmediated reality, but be forced to stay close to the

object through the recognition of its alterity.

What results in Adorno’s formulation is not a pure shining forth of a pristine

knowledge, but rather perspectives that “displace and estrange the world to reveal it to be,

with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the

messianic light” (247). Adorno thus poses a view of the world that emerges from the

standpoint of redemption as allowing for the object to emerge as subject, as that which is

capable of a self-representation that would answer the gaze of the viewer. However,

Adorno concludes, “beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality

or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters” (247). This impossible and necessary

standpoint of redemption thus creates an epistemic framework for a new understanding of

the relation between subject and object, one that will prove particularly pertinent when

the figure of Man becomes the center of discussion.

Referring to the micropolitical analysis of desire, Eagleton reminds us that “[w]e

may forget about totality, but totality, for good or ill, will not forget about us, even in our

most microscopic meditations.” And even the most amateur dialectician will know that

the opposite is also true: Even in our most theoretical confrontations with totality we do

not escape from our pleasure and our desire, our suffering and our need. Indeed, perhaps

only in the heights of theoretical abstraction do we discover the truest expression of these

affective attachments in that rare hope that proves most fleeting of all. In this way, one

xvi
writes abstractly only for sake of the most concrete liberation. In opposition to the

ideology of eternal truths, theory is written with the goal of one day abolishing itself as a

form of knowledge; however, this abolition will be achieved not through an advancement

in thought alone, but only through the transformation of the material conditions that give

rise to it, with which it is inextricably imbricated. This dissertation is written for the sake

of the liberated humanity that is yet to come, which will one day glance upon it as little

more than a dusty artifact of a forgotten age, the broken toy of a culture long forgotten

whose forms of play can scarce be imagined.

– La Jolla, June 2013

xvii
 Acknowledgements

Graduate school, one might say not unfairly, is an exercise in accruing debt;

however, thanks to the Academic Student Workers Union at the University of California,

the onus of my debts are not financial, but deeply personal. There are countless names

that should appear here, for this dissertation is not the effort of a singular individual, but

is the embodiment of the labor of many, and emerges out of a broad network of

conversations, interactions and attachments across multiple fields and disciplines. If this

community has the momentary fortune or misfortune of being united within my writing, I

can only hope to do it justice and adequately work through the depth and complexity of

the concerns it has evoked. And I take comfort in the fact that these concerns will be

taken up elsewhere, traced out in other formations and given voice in other projects by

the colleagues and comrades to whom this project is deeply indebted.

I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my dissertation committee for their guidance and

patience as I worked throughout my project. And I therefore offer my deepest thanks to

Rosaura Sanchez, for whom I always reading over my work one final time to ensure that

it’s Marxist enough; Lisa Lowe, who serves as my constant inspiration and panopticon;

to Page Dubois, who is a constant reminder that perhaps pleasure is not always quite so

terrible as Adorno would have us believe; Don Wayne, whose distant guidance and

urgings towards utopia have been invaluable; Yen Le Espiritu for her continued interest

in my project despite my occasional disappearances; and Lisa Yoneyama, who has served

xviii
as the dialectic of my enlightenment, and was instrumental to the early stages of my

dissertation project, despite her absence from the final form of the committee.

I have also been privileged to work with faculty at UCSD from a variety of

departments, each of which have helped to inform this project. From the Literature

Department, Rosemary George deserves special mention for her continued support and

inspiration, as does Marcel Henaff for his many courses on continental philosophy. I

would also like to acknowledge Stefan Tanaka and Gary Fields form the

Communications Department, and Gabriel Mendez, Roshanak Kheshti, and Kalindi Vora

from the Ethnic Studies Department each for the courses that they have taught, all of

which have contributed significantly to this dissertation.

While I cannot here list out all of my colleagues that have contributed to my

dissertation and my experiences at UCSD, I would like to thank the members of my

French Theory reading group: Kedar Kulkarni, Lisa Vernoy, Angie Chau and Alvin

Wong; the members of my Aesthetics and Politics reading group: Niall Twohig, Chris

Perrera, and Jon Higgins; the members of my Theory reading group: Jun Lei and Satoko

Kakihara; the members of my Affect Theory and Phenomenology readiing group, Juliana

“Nacho” Choi and Kimberly “Burly” Chung; and the members of my latest study group,

Kyung Hee Ha, Nadeen Kharputly, Jane Coulter, Laura Reizman, Crystal Perez,

Mohammed Abumaye, and Vineeta “bear-tiger” Singh.

And, of course, one really must thank one’s mother.

xix
 Vita

2006 Bachelor of Arts, University of California, Berkeley

2009 Master of Arts, University of California, San Diego

2013 Doctor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego

Publications

“Art and Negativity: Marxist Aesthetics after the Affective Turn”. Culture, Theory and
Critique: Special Issue on Marxism and Cultural Studies.

Fields of Study

Ethic Studies
Professors Rosaura Sanchez, Lisa Lowe

Marxist Theory
Professors Rosaura Sanchez, Don Wayne, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama

Cultural Studies
Professors Page Dubois, and Rosaura Sanchez

xx
 Abstract of the Dissertation

Figuring the Human: Aesthetics, Politics and the Humanity to Come

by

Alexander Ezekiel Chang

Doctor of Philosophy in Literature

University of California, San Diego, 2013

Professor Lisa Lowe, Co-Chair

Professor Rosaura Sanchez, Co-Chair

In this dissertation, I argue that the emergence of aesthetics is central to a modern

biopolitical definition of man that serves to enable particular forms of identitarian

oppression. I utilize Foucault’s analysis of the formation of man in The Order of Things,

to examine aesthetics as a discourse that subjects the anarchic range of human praxis to a

regime that produces the figure of man in its modern form and, in doing so, has never

xxi
ceased to produce Man’s human others. I further employ this historical analysis to

examine contemporary forms of affect theory which mediate similar problems under the

conditions of late capitalism, but ultimately displaces the political into the realm of

ontology. Instead, I formulate a Marxist understanding of the problematic through an

analysis of figures of non-anthropophorous humanity—beings within the range of the

human who do not bear the proper name of Man—produced under late capitalism, and

contained in the Chinese coolie in Latin America and the historical zombie that originates

in Haiti. While I draw deeply on historical materials, my immediate concern is with

politics in the present. The political, as Jacques Rancière is not the sphere of consensual

agreement, but the realm of conflict at the basis of determining who belongs within the

limits of the polis and who resides beyond its limits, who can be recognized as having the

capacity for speech and who can produce only the animal cry of pleasure or pain. In this

way, Man itself is the central arena of the political, and a facile liberal humanism serves

to obscure the constant power that must be exerted to maintain the limits of Man.

Throughout my analyses, I examine the genealogical and etymological traces in the

concepts of aesthetics and of politics in order to formulate them anew in a manner that

remains faithful to the ever-present alterity of the human. This alterity cannot be

dismissed by a simple posthumanism that seeks to abolish the name of Man, but instead

places the human as a point upon our horizon which is, and perhaps must remain forever,

yet to come.

xxii
 Anthropo-Critical Introduction

[T]he struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing
imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e.,
Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents
itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and
therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species
itself/ourselves.
Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being”

I want to begin here by exploring the ends of Man, with the idea of “ends”

understood in its semantic fullness, which allows us to consider a multitude of different

yet related dimensions through which to investigate the problem of Man and its relation

to the human. The emphasis on ends opens up the temporal, spatial, teleological and

ethical aspects of Man and its relation to its others. I explore these ends as the limits and

possibilities of Man and as a basis for thinking beyond the limits of the current

conception of Man. Anthony Bogues notes in Empire of Liberty that “we have not spent

much time thinking of who and what is a human being from the perspective of human

beings who were considered to be non-humans. This means that our answers about the

human typically have a framing, normative perspective that draws from dominant

discourse” (109). These distinctions within the human are nevertheless central to the

political and economic ordering of society, serving as the foundation for the unequal

distribution of vulnerability and the unequal exposure to deprivation. Even as the

1
 2

ideological regime of late capitalism functions through the proclamation of universal

humanity, it is also deeply implicated in the production and appropriation of differences

as a means of ensuring the valorization of surplus value.

The figure of Man might thus be considered as a kind of Benjaminian

constellation in which the various aspects of humanity, including its political, economic,

historical and cultural foundations become crystallized, bringing them together and

articulating them in a singular formation. If, as Marx notes in his “Theses on Feuerbach,”

man is not an essence but an ensemble of social relations, the limited figure of the

ethnoclass conception of the human represents one form in which these social relations

are expressed and contained within the limits of our current mode of production. Man

then can be understood not merely as a biological being, but taken conceptually, it

represents the constant articulation and disarticulation of a series of social relations that

dialectically results from and helps to reinforce the capitalist social formation. I thus

perform a series of political economic analyses that cut across the problems of politics,

economics and culture, none of which can be considered in isolation. Indeed, I want to

understand the term “political economy” here to mean not merely as the combination of

an adjective, “political,” that modifies a more fundamental noun, “economy,” but rather

to express the mutual imbrication of politics and economy that produces the ordering of

social life.

Furthermore, the problem of man is also immediately a problem of knowledge.

Nietzsche’s critiques of epistemology emphasize the anthropological limit of all

knowledge that ultimately must pass through the human subject. But this

anthropocentrism is not merely a biological limit, for the constitution of knowledge is

 3

also a social process. Michel Foucault in The Order of Things takes Nietzsche’s critique

of knowledge a step further by noting that the figure of man that grounds our current

system of knowledge is an invention of a limited European modernity, so that the

structure of our knowledge is not only limited by the human sensuous, perceptual and

abstractive capacities, but the historical episteme which determines the possibility of

knowledge. Foucault both historicizes the modern Western concept of Man and grounds

its creation in the particular epistemic shifts that have occurred in Western thought at the

end of the eighteenth century. The epistemic mutation that generates the figure of man

occurs in the movement from the Classical age, characterized by the ordering of identities

and differences according to the logics of the table, to the episteme of the Modern age

which is based on a self-reflexive ordering within a historically generated and mutable set

of forces. This mutability is related to the emergence and centralization of man itself: “on

the level of appearances, modernity begins when the human being begins to exist within

his organism, inside the shell of his head, inside the armature of his limbs, and in the

whole structure of his physiology” (318). The new biologically limited notion of man, in

all his finitude, becomes the being that renders modern knowledge possible, and thus also

instantiates the subject that receives knowledge and the object to which that knowledge

relates.

It is this emergence of man as both the subject and the object of his

representations and thus the locus of his own knowledge that characterizes the advent of

the modern episteme, what Foucault calls the invention of the “empirico-transcendental

doublet which was called man” (319). This doublet has served as the basis for the

production of the modern sciences even as it has excluded certain populations from being
 4

recognized as part of the order of man. The finitude and limits that became visible in the

move away from a religiously-grounded episteme necessitated the creation of Man as the

figure that would serve as the ground for modern knowledge. “[M]odern man – that man

assignable in his corporeal, laboring, and speaking existence – is possible only as a

figuration of finitude” (318). Just as Man and his finitude emerges from a particular

epistemological formation, “[i]f those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared. .

. one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge

of the sea” (387). The problem of Man as a particular historical construct opens up the

possibility for imagining the temporal cessation of our current conception of man and

opening ourselves to the utopian project of rethinking what may lie beyond. Here the

problem of man is also deeply tied to the epistemological challenges of recognizing the

limits of our own forms of knowledge production and its basis in a particular finitude.

Expanding on Foucault, Sylvia Wynter locates this epistemic shift not only in

modernity, but more specifically in the European invention of the Americas, grounding

this change on the level of abstract knowing in particular historical and material

conditions that served as the basis for this shift. In order to do so, she splits the invention

of Man into Man1 and Man2, which serve as two different descriptive statements and

stages in the invention of modern man, both of which justify particular systems of

exclusion, delimiting Man from the non-anthropophorous humanity beyond it while also

creating the basis for various epistemic shifts that they would entail. According to

Wynter, the descriptive statement of Man1 emerges from the problem of appropriating

the lands of the Americas, which were occupied by those who, having never heard the

word of Christ, could not be appropriately inserted into the slot of the infidel who has
 5

refused Christ’s word and therefore an enemy of the West. Man1 instead emphasizes

rationality, which allows for “the enslaved peoples of Black Africa (i.e., Negroes), that

were made to reoccupy the matrix slot of Otherness—to be made into the physical

referent of the idea of the irrational/subrational Human Other, to this first degodded (if

still hybridly religio-secular) ‘descriptive statement’ of the human” (266). Wynter goes

on to critique the overrepresentation of a particular ethnoclass of the human, Western

bourgeois Man, as the human itself, and it is this genre of the human along with the

system of exclusions and inclusions that it performs that she locates as central to the

entire range of social ills that we have today.

Sylvia Wynter further notes that not only is this figuration of Man historical, but

that not all of those beings who are human equally occupy the space of the Man that can

serve as the foundation of knowledge. Indeed, for Wynter, the figure of man is not only

traced upon that shore, but comes to being through the exploitation and exclusion of its

Others who lie beyond the ocean’s limits. Man has always also been a figure of

exclusion rather than one of universality, and the determination of the limits of Man is

always a political decision that excludes some portion of humanity from the full

participation in the life of the polis. The concept of ends thus also encourages a political

understanding of Man that seeks to examine the borders between Man and his human

others. These borders structure a system of inclusions and exclusions that are always

enforced through various forms of violence. To maintain Foucault’s maritime metaphor,

we might gesture towards Jacques Rancière’s On the Shores of Politics, where he notes

that politics itself was formulated as a means of containing the democratic threat

represented by the sea: “The great beast of the populace, the democratic assembly of the
 6

imperialist city, can be represented as a trireme of drunken sailors. In order to save

politics it must be pulled aground among the shepherds” (1). For Rancière, politics and

the invention of political philosophy serve to contain this threat to order represented by

democracy, for “to shield politics from the peril that are immanent to it, it has to be

hauled on dry land, set down on terra firma” (1). If for Foucault, man is represented by a

face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea, Rancière conceives of the constitution of the

community proper to man as the image of the shore as the perpetually shifting border

which threatens to wipe the sand clean of that image. The tension between shore and sea

is thus the border between the terra firma that constitutes a certain representation of man,

and the anomic structure of his non-anthropophorous others, which are those waves by

which the self-contented figure of man is always threatened.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon’s account, in addition to Wynters’

helps to problematize the end of Man pronounced by Foucault by introducing the

problem of race. Fanon notes that “[t]he black man wants to be white. The white man is

desperately trying to achieve the rank of man” (xiii). Thus while Foucault creates an

rather abstract version of the figure of Man, Fanon concretizes it through examining the

splits within this concept that leads to asymmetrical social relationship. The racism that

results is read by Fanon in a psychoanalytical light, in which the relationship between the

races is “a massive psycho-existential complex” (xvi) that has to be understood both on

the objective and subjective levels. “[S]ociety, unlike biochemical processes, cannot

escape human influences. Man is what brings society into being. . . The black man must

wage his war on both levels: Since historically they influence each other, any unilateral

liberation is incomplete” (xiv). Because of both the unavoidable construction of Man by

 7

society and Man’s objective being, neither a pure subjective ontology nor an objective

science can suffice to describe Man and diagnose the symptom that is racism. “Man is not

merely a possibility of recapture or of negation. If it is true that consciousness is a

process of transcendence, we have to see too that this transcendence is haunted by the

problems of love and understanding. Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies”

(10). The problem of knowing Man, and the epistemologies appropriate to Man become

problematized by the construction of man through his social basis.

Lewis Gordon, in Fanon as Critique of European Man, explains Fanon’s

standpoint in relationship to ontology as a particular form of rejection, while further

problematizing the forms of knowledge developed under the current regime of Man.

“Fanon rejects ontology, but he does not reject the existential phenomenological impact

of what he ‘sees.’ This is because he is fundamentally a radical, critical, revolutionary,

existential humanist” (10). Gordon thus constructs an existentialist understanding of

Fanon that emphasizes Fanon’s “’sociogenic’ approach, an approach standing outside of

phylogeny and ontogeny” (9), and ultimately advocates an understanding of the problem

within both the objective and the subjective standpoints. Here, Gordon gestures

specifically toward the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as an attempt to solve

the problem between the objective understanding of the human constituted by the human

sciences and a more subjective understanding of the human. To rely entirely on either

point of view leads to forms of irrationalism, and uses the insights drawn from

phenomenology to critique two traditions of Fanon studies that rely either on an emphasis

on the objective or subjective tendencies in his writing. This turn to phenomenology is

the result of a critique of the limited forms of knowledge currently available. He

 8

characterizes both Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cedric Robinson as being limited by their

disciplinary traditions: Robinson’s work suffers from “its very limited conception of an

existential dimension in liberation theory” (92). Gates, on the other hand, in addition to

relying on secondary interpretations of Fanon, focuses too much on the literary

postmodernist turn: “Gates implies that we can simply write away reality, or simply write

an alternative one” (101). Thus Gordon emphasizes how the current arrangement of

disciplinary knowledges limits the possibilities of rethinking the problem of Man. “Gates,

a literary theorist, is caught, on the one hand, in the trap of theorizing theory itself by way

of centering literary theory as a standpoint of validation. Robinson, a political scientist, is

caught making the effort to respond to such an assault on theory through the centering of

political theory as a fundamental point of departure” (102). If for Foucault, part of the

production of Man occurs through the production of particular forms of knowledge that

then rely upon him as their ground, Gordon further emphasizes the way that the current

form these knowledges take must also be disrupted in order to imagine a more human

reality.

Gordon thus focuses on the way that the current epistemic formations produce and

support a distorted form of human existence that would require qualitatively new forms

of knowledge to decenter, a knowledge that he locates in the possibilities of Fanon’s

sociogeny. Racism itself institutes a mode of being that cannot be viewed as authentically

human, but rather, living a normal existence under racist conditions is itself a distortion.

“To live a human existence means to be estranged by racism. Affective adjustment under

racist conditions—the ‘well adjusted slave’—is an obscenity. That even the white man is

expected to be well-adjusted in his role as the master in a racist society is also an

 9

obscenity” (11). It becomes necessary to remove Man, here understood as that limited

conception of European Man, from his privileged position as both creator and guarantor

of knowledge and to allow for the possibility of new and original epistemic formations

that might emerge from his absence. “In identifying European man qua European man,

we, following Fanon, signal the importance of decentering him as designator of human

reality. . . in the spirit of Fanon’s call for radicality and originality, the challenge becomes

one of radical engagement and attuned relevance” (103). And it is in this sense that Fanon

embodies a certain critique and crisis of European Man, one that challenges its

boundaries while gesturing towards a need to change them. “In the true sense of kreinein

(‘to decide,’ from which evolved the word crisis), Fanon embodies the crisis of European

man as decision, whether favorable or unfavorable: there is no guarantee either of the

good or the bad in the new. Yet the existential reality is issued. Crisis is the hidden

decision not to decide” (12). If European man represents a decision, it is one that must be

reinforced and thus remade at every moment, opening the possibility that we might

finally come to decide otherwise.

To open up new possibilities for knowledge then, it is necessary to examine the

figure of Man as that figure that grounds all knowledge. At the end of the Order of

Things, Foucault notes that the attempt to make new knowledge would not merely

attempt to return to the things in themselves, as though one could gain any epistemic

purity through the return to bare experience. Instead, it would begin with the fundamental

question: “Does man really exist? To imagine, for an instant, what the world and thought

and truth might be if man did not exist, is considered merely to be indulging in paradox.

This is because we are so blinded by the recent manifestation of man that we can no
 10

longer remember a time—and it is not so long ago—when the world, its order, and

human beings existed, but man did not” (322). However, while Foucault gestures towards

thinking through the fundamental dissolution of Man, Wynter’s and Gordon’s analysis of

the limits of European Man also opens up the possibility of reformulating knowledge

from the standpoint of those who are excluded from the standard form of Man.

What thus becomes visible through this series of critiques is the necessity of

reimagining out forms of knowledge and our forms of being human. In this dissertation I

argue that there is a fundamental relationship between epistemic formations surrounding

the concept of Man and the forms of political, economic and social violence that they

sanction. These forms of violence serve not merely to dehumanize the other, but more

centrally, to continually re-elaborate the distinction between those who fall under the

purview of the order of Man and those who serve as this order’s non-anthropophorous

Others. Here, Man functions as a proper noun—as one specific and unique instance

within the multiple possibilities of categorizing the human—what Sylvia Wynter calls a

particular “genre” of the human that emerges within particular social and historical

conditions. Not only does Man as a genre of the human emphasize the limitations of our

current definition of man through the invocation of the possibility of other genres within

the larger scope of the human, but it also opens up a particular understanding of man in

relationship to both art and knowledge.

The Structure of Knowledge

Knowledge is not the formation of an originary relation to truth; rather it is

historically and socially determined process whereby certain enunciations are made that
 11

have specific effects in the social. All human knowledge is always already representation,

and thus at a distance from the thing in itself, which is what gives it its capacity to

organize reality and make that reality knowable. In this way, the production of

knowledge is always a social process; however this does not mean that all knowledge is

merely arbitrary, instead the nature of its truth must be found on another level. As Marx

notes in the “Theses on Feuerbach,” truth “is not a question of theory but is a practical

question. Man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of

his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is

isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question” (144). Any attempt to consider

either a pure ontology or an isolated epistemology fails precisely because it does not

consider the manner in which all knowledge is ultimately social, both emerging from and

in a dialectical relation with a specific social structure. As Michel Foucault notes in

“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” “knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made

for cutting” (88). Knowledge thus is made and is thus always a human artifact, and this

artifact has its own purpose that it fulfills in the totality of social relations. All thought,

and all theory, is a fundamentally social activity, and so is a kind of praxis, but not all

praxis intervenes in the social totality in the same way; not all praxis attains the rank of a

truth that proves its reality and power by providing new articulations in the social and

opening up new forms of being in the world that work against the domination of the

system of capital.

When all knowledge is an eminently practical question, the production of

knowledge itself must be centered as an important form of social practice. This is not to

claim that social change is merely a matter of thought, but rather to point toward the
 12

necessity of considering thought as a material and social process that at every moment

mediates and is mediated by the modes and relations of production. Thus Marx concludes

“Theses on Feuerbach” with the famous dictum: “philosophers have only interpreted the

world, in various ways; the point is to change it” (145). This statement need not and

perhaps should not be read as an indicator that philosophers had ought to become

activists; rather it emphasizes the way that philosophy itself is a form of participation in

in social and political activity that has the potential to help mediate other forms of praxis

and thereby enable social change. The work of Marx himself can be seen as the prototype

of such thought which has been perpetually fruitful in enabling those who would demand

another world. The truth of thought, when considered beyond the confines of the merely

scholastic, is affirmed on the level of social practice, in terms of the new social

formations that it will allow to emerge. When capital itself becomes intertwined with a

particular episteme, when it serves to produce always limited and particular kinds of

knowledge, it becomes ever more urgent to seek the limitations of knowledge, the

fragmentations where another possible knowledge and another possible organization of

society becomes fleetingly visible in the messianic light of a social order yet to come.

And as knowledge is a thoroughly social category, it is perhaps no surprise that

late capitalism’s micropolitical structuring of the subject is in many ways deeply

imbricated with an epistemology that functions by determining the conditions of

possibility for knowledge as a means of limiting social transformation. If valid

knowledge is assumed to lie on the side of the empirical and the objective under late

capitalism, this mutation in the subject comes to instill itself on the level of perception, in

that encounter between the subject that produces knowledge and the material world from
 13

knowledge it is produced. What comes to be assumed as bare empiricism under the

dominant social order is itself always encompassed in a system that produces the self-

evidence of empirical truth. As Lukács notes in his argument for the dialectic in “What is

Orthodox Marxism?”: “The blinkered empiricist will of course deny that facts can only

become facts within the framework of a system—which will vary with the knowledge

desired. He believes that every piece of data from economic life, every statistic, every

raw event already constitutes an important fact” (5). Facticity itself is always a social

process bound up in the material conditions of production that is never simply extraneous

to knowledge. The production of fact always involves an interpretation in the

determination of the limit between what does or does not count as a fact. Facts, in the

structure of their truth as timeless and reified are “precisely in their objective structure

the products of a definite historical epoch, namely capitalism” (7). And for Lukács the

reified structure of facts occurs in the isolation of singular phenomena from the totality

and the assumption that they are without their own determinations.

Further, Lukács examines bourgeois science that would isolate every phenomena

in order to study it and reduce empirical phenomena to quantitative values in numbers

and numerical relations, in doing so reifying it as something eternal in itself. When

applied to the system of capitalism, bourgeois knowledge is marred by the need to “think

of capitalism as being predestined to eternal survival by the eternal laws of nature and

reason” (11), and thus to produce knowledge that always reaffirms its own ordering of

the world. And this structural effect of capitalist epistemology locates itself not just on

the level of consciousness, but also within the depths of perception itself: “The fetishistic

character of economic forms, the reification of all human relations, the constant
 14

expansion and extension of the division of labour which subjects the process of

production to an abstract, rational analysis . . . all these things transform the phenomena

of society and with them the way in which they are perceived” (6). And because of the

domination of the instrumental rationality that characterizes the capitalist mode of

production any alternate schema, any subjugated knowledge, can only appear as

ignorance or as superstition, as irrationality or as nonsensicality, as falsehood or as

fiction—in short, as nonknowledge precisely because it does not conform to the

predominant procedural laws of knowing. However, even in these alternate ways of

knowing, there is no guarantee of a better world, for these alternate epistemologies are no

doubt themselves deeply deformed by the system that oppresses them, so one cannot take

them up uncritically, but neither can they be uncritically discarded. They must be

approached with caution. The fact that we do not and perhaps cannot know some fact or

another is not an interesting statement unless it draws us towards considering what

constitutes this social practice that we call ‘knowing’ and what forms of inclusions and

exclusions such knowledge always produces.

It is not that knowledge is merely contaminated by the social conditions of its

production, for the image of contamination already presupposes the possibility of purity;

rather, knowledge is thoroughly social, it can only have effectiveness within a particular

social situation which determines its truth or untruth. And this holds true even for the

most empirical of sciences. In The Structure of Scientific Revolution, historian of science

Thomas Kuhn examines the nature of change within the paradigms of the scientific

community. To fit within the scientific community and be a scientist means to function

within a certain set of shared rules that serve “for a time implicitly to define the
 15

legitimate problems and methods of a research field for succeeding generations of

practitioners” (10). And these shared rules serve as the basis for the development of the

knowledge that emerges from within a single paradigm. In this way, the knowledge

produced by science always contains some implicit theoretical and methodological

underpinnings, which allows for the determination of which phenomena are valid objects

of study, the methods of approaching those phenomena, and the forms of criticism

applicable within the field. However, to have developed a series of explanations capable

of encompassing the phenomena is still no guarantee of its nature as truth, for it is still

encompassed by the particular paradigm that it inhabits. “Philosophers of science have

repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed

upon a given collection of data. History of science indicates . . . it is not even very

difficult to invent such alternatives” (76). Thus there is a gap between the multitude of

possible explanations and the singular phenomena that they attempt to explain in which

the criteria for which explanation is accepted lies within the given paradigm itself and not

in some given relation to truth.

Kuhn notes, that these paradigms shift when they confront phenomena that they

are incapable of explaining within their own framework. However, even within the

context of these shifts, they do not produce a teleological movement towards greater

fidelity to truth. Indeed, Kuhn ultimately suggests that the project of science is not about

a greater movement towards truth at all, but something else entirely. Here, he makes a

parallel to Darwin’s abolition of teleology from the theory of evolution, which opened up

the question of what evolution could mean without a set and specified goal. Thus, “the

resolution of [scientific] revolutions is the selection by conflict within the scientific

 16

community of the fittest way to practice science. . . the entire process may have occurred,

as we now suppose biological evolution did, without benefit of a set goal, a permanent

fixed scientific truth” (172-73). Without the set goal maintained in truth, the production

of knowledge becomes visible as a process of mediation within the community about

how best to conduct that community. Knowledge is deeply embedded in and productive

of particular social relations in ways that are not merely arbitrary or relative, but that

enable certain modes of being in the world. The fact that all our knowledge is produced

within the paradigmatic structures of late capitalism thus produces a limit that must be

overcome in a twofold manner, both through material social practice and through the

production of new forms of knowledge.

Theses on Method

There is a point at which methods devour themselves. . . I should like to

start from there.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

This is not intended to be an interdisciplinary project, nor is it intended to be post-

disciplinary, as the latest trend in cultural studies scholarship would have it. If anything,

both the concepts of interdisciplinary and post-disciplinary rather problematically assume

the primacy of the very disciplinarity they attempt to move away from, whether the work

is conceived as working between the various disciplines or as having transcended them.

Instead, this dissertation attempts to pose itself in a different temporality, along with a

different set of conditions for the production of knowledge, and might be better

conceived as unapologetically predisciplinary. Indeed, the development and reification of

knowledge into separate disciplines might be considered as a historical phenomenon tied

 17

to the ever-increasing fracturing of manual and intellectual labor. What develops is a kind

of mere specialization incapable of moving beyond the confines of its own rules and

procedures of knowledge production. One must thus hold fast to the a vision of thought

that adheres not merely in set of procedural rules applied to an object, or in the insertion

of a set content within a given equation, but in the leap into something new. As Adorno

notes in Minima Moralia, “the value of a thought is measured by its distance from the

continuity of the familiar” (80). The form of thought worthy of the name is thus

ultimately defamiliarizing, rupturing the given set of rules and order through which a

reified form of thought can to be maintained.

The task thus becomes one of attempting to maintain a fidelity to the object while

constantly also elaborating the limits of thought itself, for only a new form of thought can

open up the new possibilities within our objective social conditions. Indeed, the

procedural form of thought that can only function within its own framework becomes

antagonistic to thought itself. Against the closed form of thought embodied in the mere

application of formulae, a form that Adorno locates in research technicians, Adorno

argues that “[t]heir rancor is socially rationalized with the argument: thinking is

unscientific. At the same time, their mental power has, in a number of dimensions, been

prodigiously increased by control mechanisms” (124). There is thus a thorough

rationality to a kind of thought reduced to procedure; but this it can only be the rationality

of the market and of capitalism. “The collective stupidity of research technicians is not

simply an absence or regression of intellectual faculties, but a proliferation of the

thinking faculty itself, which consumes thought with its own strength” (124). And it is

thus the excess of knowledge that becomes reified that must be resisted.
 18

Central here is the way that the concept, through the excess of knowledge, comes

to be taken for the real in place of the actual object. Concepts must be taken as limited in

order to give primacy to the processes from which they arise. In “Art as Technique,”

Viktor Shklovsky notes art’s function of alienation. While our perceptions become

automatized through the repetition of our actions in daily life which eliminates the

possibility of experience, art functions to make the objects of our perceptions new,

disrupting automatized perception and allowing us to experience the object once again.

If the concepts have come to stand too readily for the processes they represent, much as

our automatized perception of the object stands in for the actual experience object, theory

may well function analogously to Shklovsky’s understanding of art but in the realm of

thought. It serves to make the concept visible as concept, which is always a more difficult

task than to adhering to the smooth world of ready-made concepts. Adorno writes in the

“Introduction to Benjamin’s Schriften” on precisely this defamiliarizing aspect of Walter

Benjamin’s thought:

“Benjamin’s philosophy is in fact inhuman: the human being is its locus

and arena rather than something existing in and for itself. The horror one
feels at this aspect of Benjamin’s text probably defines their innermost
difficulty. Seldom do intellectual difficulties stem from mere lack of
intelligibility; they are usually the result of shock. The person who does
not want to surrender to ideas in which he senses mortal danger to his
familiar self-consciousness will recoil from Benjamin. (228-29)

The alterity of this other form of thought that attempts to rupture the accepted movement

of the concepts can only be experienced as a kind of shock in which one’s own self-

consciousness is at stake. Thought and the concepts it employs must always come to grip

with the externality of the objects it attempts to comprehend, which opens up a space of

possibility.
 19

Own dominant epistemic formation has been deeply shaped by capitalism, which

operates on the levels both of epistemology and aesthetics. These two aspects create the

social links between the bare materiality of the world and the way it impinges on the

socially produced human consciousness, shaping the ways that we make sense of the

world. But the political possibilities of difference erupt both in the internal contradictions

within capital, and in the disruption between the senses that have been shaped and

automatized by capital and the materiality that is also exterior to it. The inadequation

between the order of discourse and the order of being is thus the space of possibility

where every encounter between discursively limited consciousness and sheer material

being has a disjunctive potential that can radically disorder what is taken as given.

Because the object known is always other than the object that exists there is always the

tension of contradiction between knowledge and its object, or, as Adorno notes in

Negative Dialectics, “the object of a mental experience is an antagonistic system in

itself—antagonistic in reality, not just in its conveyance to the knowing subject that

rediscovers itself therein. The coercive state of reality . . . must be retranslated from that

region” (10). The tension between the concept and its object is, and must remain a space

of contradiction, so long as the system of knowledge makes the claim to the complete

encompassing of existence. Contradiction is not merely an abstract logical category, but it

describes lived experience, particularly that lived experience in which capital

The goal is not simply to dwell in a reified state of unknowing, but rather to make

this state productive in order to criticize the current organization of the social world.

There can only be the appearance of stability, for everything is in reality always in flux,

in the same way that one can never step into the same river twice. But what this means is
 20

also that there is a series of forces that attempts to contain the flow of movement such

that solidity can appear, and this solidity is always a reification of these ongoing

processes which are themselves creators of the image of stability but also always subject

to their own potential flux and change. Every encounter between the world and the

subject, between the object and the concept, between two moments of these

fundamentally different orders of things in which there is no system of adequation, but

which capital and the epistemic formations that emerge from it must pose as an

adequation, is the possibility of an encounter which overruns the prevailing system of the

given and allows a possible access to another ordering which may consist of the very

ordering of order itself.

Figuring the Human

In my first chapter, I argue that the historical emergence of modern aesthetics is

central to the biopolitical definition of man that enables particular forms of contemporary

identitarian oppression. The formation of aesthetics in mid-seventeenth century Europe

was not merely the giving of a proper name to an ahistorical appreciation of art and

beauty; rather it marks a fundamental mutation in the order of knowledge that structures

the dialectical tensions from which Man emerges. I build upon Michel Foucault’s

analysis of the formation of Man in The Order of Things and Sylvia Wynters’ critique of

the present ethnoclass conception of Man in “Unsettling the Coloniality of

Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” by analyzing aesthetics as a discourse that subjects the

anomic range of human praxis to a regime that produces the figure of man in its modern

form and, in doing so, never ceases to produce Man’s human others. I proceed through a
 21

cultural studies analysis of early philosophical texts, including the aesthetic and

anthropological works of Kant, Schiller and Hegel, to locate aesthetics as the central

pivot that creates and mediates the divisions between the objectivity and subjectivity, and

the animality and humanity of Man.

I then go on to examine the discourses of affect which have taken a similar

position to aesthetics within our own historical moment. While affect attempts to perform

a return to an ontologically pure being to formulate a new kind of knowledge, I argue that

ultimately this determination of ontological purity is itself a social determination that is

produced within the conditions of late capitalism. The attempt to escape from social

identity into pure ontology then functions as a means of avoiding any discussion of those

socially determinant forms of oppression that go into the production of such identity.

Instead, in my next chapter, I attempt to formulate a Marxist aesthetic which attempts to

recuperate the forms of alterity that affect theory locates, without reducing it to a bare

ontology that escapes sociality.

After examining how the problem of the relationship between Man and

knowledge has been posed by a number of contemporary theorists, I go on to analyze a

set of figures that have historically served to elaborate the distinction between Man

proper and the non-anthropophorous humanity from which he must continually

distinguish himself. I attempt to think through the constitution of the human from the

perspective of those beyond its limits by first examining how these limits were

constructed and then going on to examine particular figures who have been posed at or

beyond these limits. I employ my understanding of aesthetics to analyze two figures of

non-anthropophorous humanity—beings within the range of the human who do not bear
 22

the proper name of Man—in order to elaborate the material and historical field of

dialectical tensions that gives rise to and is mediated by the figure of Man. These chapters

focus on the Chinese coolie in Latin America, the zombie as it emerges in colonial Haiti.

In my chapter on the Chinese coolie, I read four contemporary novels from both

Latin America and the United States and their historical production in our current

moment against the economic logics of neoliberalism and increase in sweatshop labor in

the U.S. In these readings I make use of scholarship on trauma, history and memory to

understand the political function served by the remembering of this figure and attempt to

formulate an ethical relationship to this traumatic past. In my next chapter, “Hegel, Haiti

and Zombies,” I analyze how the figure of the zombie accrues a historicity that lingers in

a residual form in each reimagining. I focus particularly on the colonial past of the

zombie as it emerges in Haiti which allows me to deploy Seth Gramme-Smith’s Pride,

Prejudice and Zombies: The Classical Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent

Zombie Mayhem in a critique of Susan Buck-Morss’ Hegel, Haiti and Universal History.

I argue that the figure of the zombie radically alters any possible universal history, filling

it with the “ultraviolent zombie mayhem” that marks colonial modernity. The closed

totality of an Enlightenment universal history, represented perhaps by none other than

Austen’s original canonical work Pride and Prejudice, must be made to admit of an

absurdity that opens up the aporetic nature of universality itself.

While I draw broadly on cultural and historical materials, my immediate concern

is with politics in the present and my final section reformulates the concept Man from

those excluded from its purview. I understand politics in its strict definition, not as the

sphere of consensual agreement, but the realm of conflict that forms the basis for
 23

separating those who belong within the limits of the polis from those who must be

excluded, those recognized as having the capacity for speech from those believed to

produce only the animal cry of pleasure or pain. In this way, Man itself is the central

arena of the political, and a facile liberal humanism only serves to obscure the constant

power that must be exerted to maintain the limits of Man. In my first chapter of this

section, I examine a series of postcolonial science fiction texts in order to argue that the

alterity of the human cannot be dismissed by a simple posthumanism that seeks to simply

abolish the name of Man, but instead places the human as a point upon our horizon which

is, and perhaps must remain forever, yet to come. I continue by examining how an

understanding of the human that remains open to the persistent negativity of any

universal disrupts the field of human rights discourse and points to a qualitatively

different form of politics, a politics of negativity.

 R L

Figure 1: The blind spot

Punctum caecum – A basic ophthalmological experiment lays bare the fundamental

structure of knowledge. To perform the experiment, one need only to close one’s left eye

and affix the gaze of one’s right eye on the R inscribed at the top of this page (or to close

one’s right eye and gaze fixedly at the L). Then, by moving the page towards or away

from oneself, one can discover a distance where the second mark seems to disappear.

This disappearance reveals the blind spot of the eye, the punctum caecum. Anatomically,

this blind spot corresponds to the area where the bundle of optic nerves passes through

the optic disc of the retina; it is the point of encounter between the physiology and the

psychology of seeing, the point where light impinging on photoreceptors is translated into

neural signals that are transported to the brain. Rather than being, as was once generally

believed, the most sensitive portion of the retina’s surface, this juncture between the optic

nerve and the optic disc lacks photoreceptors entirely; it is the center of the eye’s

unseeing. This punctum—a point but also a puncture—is a wound that pierces the heart

24
 25

of vision, enabling the process of seeing while simultaneously marking the limits of its

possibility.

Human vision constitutes its field by erasing the traces of this internal caesura

through both the physiological and psychological mechanisms of binocular vision which

suture the puncture and provide the illusion of wholeness. With both eyes open, the

lacuna in the field of vision of one eye is integrated with field of vision from the other,

effectively making the blind spot invisible. By isolating the field of vision to one eye, as

in the experiment above, the blind spot is made to appear. However, the punctum caecum

does not appear as a gaping hole in the field of vision, but becomes visible only through

the disappearance of the second mark. When light falls on the region of the punctum

caecum the psychological mechanisms of human vision fill the void of neural stimuli by

plastering it over with patterns from the background. In this instance, the whiteness of the

sheet that constitutes the background is interpolated into the space of the letter that would

otherwise be nothing but the absence of perception, thus presenting the continuous white

page where in fact nothing that has been seen. This active interpolation leads to the

mark’s disappearance and renders the gap invisible so that what seems at first the

disappearance of the letter is in fact an excess of appearance that results from the

hyperinvestment of attentional capacity. Absence here becomes visible only through the

excess generated to conceal and smooth over the empty space that remains.

What becomes immediately apparent is the cunning by which the space where

vision is impossible is effaced and integrated into the structure of the visible. In a

perfectly Derridean formulation, one might say that this moment reveals the manner in

which the unseen is constitutive of the seen. This constitution occurs not only on the
 26

physiological level where the point of blindness at the optic nerve’s intersection with the

optic disc allows for vision, but also in the play of the excess and absence of perception

within the visual process that makes up the field of vision. Vision emerges dialectically

from the fissure between photons impinging on the retina and what emerges as visible to

the subject. The unseen thus resides not merely beyond the borders of vision—at the

edges marked out by the pupils where the rays of light do not shine onto the receptors of

the retina—but within the fundamental structure of seeing itself. The edges between

seeing and unseeing are, as it were, everywhere in the field of vision.

There is thus no simple relationship of adequation between the radiance of the

material world and the field of vision constituted by the human subject. The spectrum of

radiant light is always both in excess of and insufficient to the thresholds of human

vision, existing in the infrared and the ultraviolet, radiating outwards in all directions and

not just into the human pupil, flickering too quickly to be registered in biological

processes. But at the same time, human vision is also always insufficient to and in excess

of the radiance of the world. On the one hand, exposure to the sheer excess of the light

would lead to nothing more than the blind aphasia of excess; and on the other, the

filtering of the light by the human eye does more than subtract some portion of the light,

for this the subtraction of the excess is also the addition of structure which allows sense

to be made. There is, within both human vision and the radiance of the world, a

fundamental inadequation that makes it impossible for one to be simply translated into

the other, and it is the space between these two inadequacies that makes human meaning

possible. In this way, vision as sense is always more and always other than the shining

forth of light in its bare materiality. What constitutes vision, as a capacity of making
 27

sense, resides not simply in the object, nor solipsistically enclosed in the subject, but in

the dialectical play between object and subject which is in the final analysis a process that

can only be imaged as social.

The punctum caecum is thus the point that restructures the field of vision around

its constitutive absence. In this sense it functions akin to Lacan’s anamorphic object. In

Lacan’s reading of Holbein’s The Ambassadors, the anamorphic object undermines the

symbolic order of the rest of the painting, forcing the spectator to literally glance askew

to make the totality of the painting legible. Viewed from the front, the painting presents

the portrait of two men, one a merchant and the other a clergyman. An indecipherable,

phallic stain projects from the bottom of the painting. At an extreme angle, this splotch

resolves itself into a death’s head; however, in gazing at such an extreme angle, the rest

of the painting becomes incomprehensible, and one is left only with the skull as the

singular point of meaning that pierces the veil cast by the symbolic structure of the

painting. The anamorphosis of The Ambassadors thus serves to radically restructure the

painting’s meaning; no longer is it a celebration of the various regalia of power arrayed in

the background—the globes, quadrants, sundials and lutes—but their denegration in the

face of the skull that gazes out from its empty eye sockets, piercing the spectator who

stands admiring these worldly symbols. Only by looking from an angle of radical

incomprehensibility does the anamorphic splotch, that object which is truly to be

comprehended and which decisively alters the meaning of the painting, become available

for interpretation. The final meaning of the painting itself emerges not from one point of

looking or the other but from the movement between the two glances (92).
 28

The punctum caecum, too, can only be glanced at from askew; it is quite literally

detectable only in the corner of one’s eye. Indeed, when the distortion in vision first

becomes visible, one is immediately tempted to look at it, to stare fully into one’s own

unseeing; yet, to follow this impulse is to erase the effect that made the absence visible.

To catch a glimpse of the punctum caecum one must dissociate one’s visual gaze from

the center of one’s attention, and develop within oneself a certain doubleness of looking.

And just as the death’s head radically restructures the meaning of The Ambassadors, so

too does the punctum caecum restructure the meaning of the entire field of vision. The

anamorphic skull is initially both an absence and an excess: the absence of meaning and

the excess of pigment that splays the skull across the painting. The punctum caecum, too,

is this play of absence and this excess: the absence of photoreceptors in the eye that

would allow for full vision, and the excess that supplements the field of the visible to fill

in that void. However, whereas there is a proper angle of viewing that renders legible the

anamorphic splotch in The Ambassadors, with the punctum caecum there is no such

angle, for it represents not a play of legibility and illegibility on canvas but the center of

illegibility embedded in the eye which enables the entire process of legibility. It is that

point in vision that exceeds vision, and in exceeding both supports and undermines it.

In order to render the page legible, the eyes must be in constant motion so that the

macula lutea, the structure of the eye responsible for the high acuity vision necessary for

reading, can focus on small sections of the page. The macula lutea can only resolve a

narrow field light at the center of the eye’s vision so that keeping one’s gaze fixed causes

the letters outside this field to remain blurred and indecipherable, making reading

impossible. This movement necessary for reading thus constantly displaces the punctum
 29

caecum, moving it to the edge of vision where the psychological processes of filling the

gap are supplemented by the mobility of the eye to make the gap seem to disappear.

Attempting to fix one’s gaze firmly fixed on the R or the L at the top of the page renders

all the other words illegible and glancing down to read causes the distortion that made the

punctum caecum visible to disappear. The conditions of legibility necessitate the

disappearance of that point which makes vision itself possible.

If one were to repeat the experiment by gazing fixedly at one of the words on the

page instead of the R or the L at the top, the punctum caecum is filled in with a pattern

transposed from the background of letters that surround the blind spot, and is further

made undetectable by the limited angle of resolution of the macula lutea. In the space of

the punctum caecum these marks, these words, appear that were never written and can

never be read. For a time, they overwrite and stand in the place of the text that was

written while itself playing in between the space of legibility and illegibility of the

original text. It is impossible not to wonder: what do they say, these spectral marks that

have been produced to obscure an absence? What would the void itself say if it could

speak? And yet the very act of positing a void that could speak performs the same

violence of filling in the void that can only exist as absence, as an incomprehensible

nonexistence. This play between the visibility and invisibility, and legibility and

illegibility, within the punctum caecum thus restructures the question of what it means to

see, so that the real meaning of seeing is not to be found simply in the objects that appear

in the field of vision, but in the totality of structures that encompass them and make them

visible. The punctum caecum is the puncture in vision that always gestures beyond the

limits of vision and towards the basis upon which it rests.

 30

In this way the punctum caecum has a special kinship to that other punctum

developed by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. In Barthes’ reading of the photograph

the punctum is the excess that overflows the field of fixed and intentional meaning

constituted by the studium. This exceedance constitutes the composition of the

photograph through the element that formally does not belong in the picture but which, at

the same time, cannot but be in the picture. To use Barthes’ example, it is “one boy’s bad

teeth” (45). Thus this punctum is a prick, a piercing, where the uncoded real leaks into the

photograph, a moment which is not and cannot be posited by the photographer because it

exists in the failure of the photographer’s ability to fully compose the image. These bad

teeth, these points of rupture also point to a “blind field” (57) composed of the totality of

the individual’s life outside the photograph and which the photograph can never capture.

Whereas in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, the point of anamorphosis that ruptures the

symbolic order of the painting is made manifest through the intentionality of the painter,

in the medium of photography the real disrupts the symbolic ordering through those

elements that allow the beyond of the photograph to intrude. If the mechanisms of the

camera capture the rays of light that emanate from a subject, the punctum is both an

excess and a failure of this capture that points towards the intractability of the subject and

the fullness of the life that resides beyond capture.

Barthes emphasizes that this punctum does not just operate on the plane of a given

symbolic order nor is it confined to the surface of the photograph itself, but it is also

operative within and beyond the viewing subject: the punctum “shoots out of [the

photograph] like an arrow, and pierces me,” it is a “sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also

a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also
 31

bruises me, is poignant to me)” (27). The punctum can thus be understood as that thread

of the real that erupts through the plane of the photograph and punctures through viewing

subject, ultimately suturing them together. To read a text—here it may be useful to

remark that the word “text” has its origins in “textile”—is more than to simply glide

across the smooth veil of its constituted meaning; rather it is to be pierced by the thread

of the real that also punctures through the warp and the weft of the text’s surface. One is

transfixed to the text not by the symbolic structure, but by this thread that reaches from

beyond the text by which we are captured, and which pulls ties closer to the text but in

doing so also draws us beyond it. However, one can be drawn through the woven surface

and into the space of the real only, as it were, with the ease by which a camel might pass

through the eye of a needle. So instead one is captured and affixed to that surface of

meaning, and left to perhaps do no more than distress that smooth surface, to unravel a

loose thread, to point to the void that lies in the beyond.

We might here finally take up that not unproblematic metaphor linking vision and

knowledge; however, if in the history of philosophy vision has been taken up as an

expression of the natural light of reason, here we make this link not for the presumed

acuity of vision but because it, too, is cut by its own internal caesura, its own punctum

caecum. The field of knowledge is organized around this central absence which must be

constantly effaced, lest it disrupt all that has been made to appear. Thus knowledge is

best understood not as a positivist venture of additive accumulation, not a free expansion

towards its own self-arrogated end, but a response to a wound marked by the

impossibility of knowing. This wound constitutes the structure of knowledge itself. The

production of knowledge is the practice of concealing the unknowable. The historical

 32

materialist is one who recognizes that the structure of knowledge is always punctured and

also punctuated by this point of unknowability and attempts to take the side of the

material, of the real that ruptures the given structure of knowledge and draws us towards

the alterity that exists in the beyond of knowledge. The goal is not simply to make

present what has been absented, which would do little more than integrate the absence

into the given structure of knowing, but rather to confront the all too smooth operation of

knowledge with the central puncture that makes it function and, in doing so, to

disarticulate that structure. While is impossible to bring the real into the realm of

symbolization, the historical materialist attempts to make the negativity that exists in the

unbridgeable distance between the concept and its object operative against the prevailing

reified structure of instrumental rationality. The point is not merely to make more

knowledge, but to unmake the system of knowledge organized by capital, which seeks

always to conceal this central chasm, and thus to open the way for other articulations.

Critical theory—critical from the Greek κριτικός, a medical term referring to not

only to discerning but also to cutting; and theory from θεωρία, referring both to looking

and to contemplating—is that discerning, cutting look that attempts to open the space

beyond the internal limits of what is given. But, like the prick of the punctum, it field of

operation exists in both directions, cutting both into the object that is its focus and into

the subject that beholds this object. If knowledge can be thought of as that totality of texts

that organizes the ensemble of social interweavings in which one is always captured,

critical theory is the attempt to trace these threads back to their fundamental rupture, to

articulate that subtle beyond, and to reorganize these threads in ways that allow for the

negativity within its field to become operative. In this way the practice of critical theory
 33

is perhaps nothing other than knowledge trying to see into its own unseeing, to perform

that impossible feat of looking itself in its own eye. With its gaze firmly fixed upon its

singular object, the critical theory is nevertheless sensitive to the absences and the

excesses which can only appear as distortions at the edges of its vision and which

restructure the vision of all that surrounds it, and it is there that it makes its cut by

constantly elucidating and taking up the point which pierces it, in which it is ultimately

blind and yet by which it is able to see.

 Aesthetic Anthropologies: Art and the Invention of Man

One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most
constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. . . . In fact,
among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and
their order . . . only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is
now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man
to appear. And that appearance . . . was the effect of a change in the
fundamental arrangements of knowledge. . . . If those arrangements were
to disappear as they appeared . . . one can certainly wager that man would
be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
– Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

[M]an is not a biologically defined species, nor is he a substance given

once and for all; he is, rather, a field of dialectical tensions always already
cut by internal caesura that separate—at least virtually—
‘anthropophorous’ animality and the humanity which takes bodily form in
it.
– Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal

It has become somewhat of a cliché to claim that art is central to the formation of

the human; one has been repeated in disciplines as distinct as the contemporary

paleoanthropology of Ian Tattersall in Becoming Human: Evolution and Human

Uniqueness and the aesthetic philosophy of Immanuel Kant at the end of the eighteenth

century. Indeed, in recent years there have been no fewer than two books sharing the

same title that emphasizes the relation between art and the human: Luc Ferry’s Homo

Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age (1994) examines the relation

between the twin developments of aesthetic theory and modern individualism; and Ellen

34
 35

Dissanyake’s Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From (1995) attempts to establish an

ethological, Darwinian basis for the development of art. Both texts attest to an

anthropogenic structure in which Homo sapiens—the Man that Linnaeus glossed in his

1735 Systema naturæ not with a description but with the adage, “nosce te ipsum {know

yourself}” (26)—is displaced by a Man defined by the aesthetic capacities which he is

conceived as exercising to attain the rank of Man. As Agamben notes, in Linnaeus, the

fact that Man as Homo sapiens is defined “not through any nota characteristica, but

rather through his self-knowledge, means that man is the being which recognizes itself as

such, that man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human” (26). The

dominance of the concept of Homo aestheticus attests to a contemporary shift away from

the historical emphasis on the human as this being that determines itself through self-

recognition and towards a concept of the human whose knowledge is caught up in the

limits of his sensuous perception.

This transformation of the dominant concept of Man from Homo sapiens to Homo

aestheticus has rather less to do with any inherent or ontological substance of the human

than it does with the social transformation of the status of self-knowledge and of

aesthetics. The fact that this articulation between art and the human can be asserted

almost without reflection attests to the depth of its naturalization, which is to say, the

extent to which it has become properly cliché. However, that this formulation is cliché is

perhaps only a greater reason to examine it, for the problem with the cliché is not merely

that it repeats a banal assertion; more centrally, the cliché obscures a thought that stands

in a more intimate relation to its objects, a thought that is repressed in and through the

dominant formula of the cliché. In writing, the cliché marks a kind of void where
 36

language itself has been reified and ceases even to represent the objects to which it refers;

it lingers as a thought that need not be thought, an empty form without content. And it is

perhaps this essential lack of content that allows the assertion of art as the essence of the

human to be filled out with so many different contents, from an analysis of the

contemporary artworks of Gerhard Richter to the analysis of fossilized remains from sub-

Saharan Africa.

What is of interest here is not primarily the truth content of this assertion, but the

process through which the articulation of art and the human structures a paradigm that

gives general form to thought across multiple disciplinary fields. Indeed, one might go so

far as to agree with the assessment that there is a fundamental relation between the

development of art and the emergence of the human; however, this is true only when we

understand both as historical formations that emerge at the beginning of Western

European modernity. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault argues that at the heart of

the transformation that leads to the emergence of Man is the fundamental mutation in the

order of knowledge that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century in which the

principle of finitude and the limits of human knowledge become central to the Western

Man’s understanding of himself: “our culture crossed the threshold beyond which we

recognize our modernity when finitude was conceived in an interminable cross-reference

with itself. . . modern man – that man assignable in his corporeal, laboring, and speaking

existence – is possible only as a figuration of finitude” (318). And not only does Man

emerge as a figure of finitude, but he becomes the central figure in grounding the

structures of the modern episteme, a movement that takes place through the formulation

of the aesthetic. This Man is thus intricately tied to the epistemological structures through
 37

which it emerges, as is the modern phenomena of linking the human to the development

of art. The Man that has become human through his aesthetic practices has furthermore

become Man only through the centralization of human finitude in the mid-eighteenth

century.

While Foucault addresses the historical development of the concept of Man in The

Order of Things, he largely leaves aside the question of aesthetics; however, one can

without difficulty recognize that our modern conception of aesthetics, too, is of relatively

recent historical invention and similarly imbricated with the problem of finitude. The

system of fine arts that is universalized in the attempt to establish the anthropogenic

function of the aesthetic is coincident with the modern invention of the Man and is fully

articulated for the first time only in the middle of the eighteenth century. In contrast to

the modern system of the fine arts, the visual arts during the Italian Renaissance were

closely related to the sciences and to literature, and were not decisively distinguished

from the mechanical arts. Michael Kelley notes that Charles Perrault’s 1690 Le cabinet

des beaux-arts categorizes the fine arts as “eloquence, poetry, music, architecture,

painting, sculpture, optics and mechanics. Thus, on the threshold of the eighteenth

century we are very close to the modern system of the fine arts, but we have not yet quite

reached it, as the inclusion of optics and mechanics clearly shows” (421). It was not until

1746 that Abbé Charles Batteux’s Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe codifies the

fine arts in its modern form, including “music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and the dance.

He adds a third group that combines pleasure and usefulness and puts eloquence and

architecture in this category” (422). The historicity of the system of fine arts thus throws

into question the presumed universality of art which is instead revealed to be an invention
 38

of Western Europe that took place during the middle of the eighteenth century.

Furthermore, this historical context allows us to locate the invention of the aesthetic as a

response to the crisis brought about by the recognition of the finitude of the human.

My aim here is not simply to negate the idea that art is central to the development

of Man. Rather, I want to situate our current, limited conceptions of both art and Man as

historical formations employed to produce particular structures of inclusion and exclusion

at the beginning of European modernity. It thus becomes clear that they are mutually

caught up in a qualitatively different problem: the problem of the political. Just as much

as Man is defined by his finitude, the Man that emerges at the end of the eighteenth

century is one whose internal dialectical tensions are mediated by the concept of the

aesthetic. Thus there is, indeed, an anthropogenic function to the aesthetic; however, this

function is not ontological, as those who attempt to consider the evolutionary function of

art imply, for neither art nor Man can be taken as simple ontological substances. Rather,

both are historical concepts that emerge in an epistemic formation in which they must be

constantly cross-referenced with the limits of human finitude. A historical approach to

this coeval emergence allows us to consider the social and historical transition that occurs

at the beginning of modernity and, as expressed through the continued dominance of the

relation established between art and the human, continues into the contemporary period.

Thus the attempt to formulate the aesthetic as an ontologically inherent capacity of the

human must be disarticulated to recognize the sociality and the historicity of the process

whereby art itself has come to be considered the producer of Man, and to examine the

how this process is implicated in the organization of global systems of exclusion.

 39

While Foucault generally does not discuss the material conditions that lead to the

epistemic shift at the center of the invention of Man, more recent scholarship ties this

invention directly to the emerging conditions of colonial modernity. In this way, the

source of the epistemic shift that emphasizes the finitude of the human is located in an

earlier encounter between Western Europe and the land masses that were to become the

Americas. The epistemic ordering of things taken up by Foucault is linked to the

organization of peoples and places under the developing structures of colonial modernity.

As V. Y. Mudimbe notes in The Invention of Africa, “colonialism and colonization

basically mean organization and arrangement. The two words derive from the Latin word

colere, meaning to cultivate or to design” (1). The ordering of knowledge through this

new episteme also corresponds to a new ordering of the world, along with the human

beings that inhabit it. And the violence of this central ordering radiates outward from the

West, casting the rest of the world in its own light. In this way, the restructuring of

knowledge that Foucault locates in the mid-eighteenth century can be seen to have taken

place in response to a more primary and more material encounter. Sylvia Wynter moves

Foucault’s periodization of the invention of Man further back historically, and examines

its emergence as a much longer process that begins at the specific date of 1492 which

marks both Columbus’ encounter with the Americas and the rise of the modern state and

its centralizing order in Spain. These events become representative of a much more

fundamental focus on finitude in the epistemic order underlying the Western system of

subjective understanding.

According to Wynter, the central event represented by 1492 can be understood as

a transformation in the feudal Christian episteme of the medieval period in which divinity
 40

served as the ground for both knowledge and the political order. Columbus’ “discovery”

of the Americas was contingent firstly on the “new statal order in the context of

crusading Christianity” and secondly, “[b]efore being ‘discovered’ their existence had to

be made conceptualizable, for Latin-Christian Europe and its mode of subjective

understanding” (24). In the first instance, the Western European encounter with the

Americas is made possible through a transformed political ordering in which the Church

ceases to be the central organizing power, as it was in feudal states, but instead becomes

an appendage of the state itself. This entails a movement from the relatively stable system

of individual states centrally governed by the Church under the feudal order to one in

which competing states become capable of global expansion through the expropriation of

non-Christian territory. The production of appropriable territory involved a

reconceptualization of the geographical and anthropological structures of the world that

transformed the land thought completely uninhabitable by rational, Christian humanity

into land that could be seized from its apparently un-“rational”, non-Christian inhabitants.

Furthermore, the emphasis on otherworldly redemption “was now transferred together

with its earlier goal to that of the new this-worldly goal of the growth, expansion, and

political stability of each European state in competitive rivalry with its fellow European

states” (14). The encounter between Western Europe and the Western hemisphere was

made possible by a new political order that was centrally organized around the possibility

of the conquest of the non-Christian.

As Wynter notes, this second factor of making the existence of the land masses

that were to become the Americas conceptualizable required a much larger shift in the

articulation between Christian theology and the dominant episteme. According to the
 41

medieval Christian geography, “[i]t was only by the intervention of God, that the earth of

the temperate zone and Eastern Hemisphere. . . was itself held up by an Aristotelian

‘unnatural’ and Christian ‘miraculous’ motion. . . above its ‘natural place’ below the

water” (22). And only by this divine providence was this region of the globe made

habitable for mankind. The boundaries of God’s providence were marked by Cape

Bojador for the Torrid Zone, which was thought to be too hot for human habitation, and

the Straits of Gibraltar, beyond which was the Western Hemisphere which was thought to

be devoid of land, since the earth, which was conceived as not upheld by providence,

would have remained in its place under water. Thus in order to convince his potential

supporters of the feasibility of his voyage, Columbus had to challenge the fundamental

order of knowledge that gave rise to mainstream Christian geography. Central to this

challenge against the Scholastic order of knowledge was the premise that “the Creation

had indeed been made by God on behalf of and for the sake of humankind . . . redefining

of the relation between God and man on more reciprocally egalitarian terms . . . making

possible human inquiry into the organizing principles behind Creation” (27). This

humanistic redefinition of the relation between God and Man allowed for Columbus to

challenge the representation of a nonhomogeneous and arbitrarily divided earth. More

centrally, it served as the basis for the new epistemic order that made it possible to go

beyond the mere observation of phenomena towards seeking an explanation for their

functioning, which lies at the center of the emerging rational scientific worldview.

This transformation in the possibilities of knowledge that makes habitable the

non-European world to the dominant ethnoclass Man is premised on an innate violence

that separates out and subordinates the land’s indigenous inhabitants. Thus the encounter
 42

with the Americas was both part of and helped to reinforce a much larger shift in the

epistemic structure of colonial modernity which then set the groundwork for the second

movement into human finitude with the development of the biological sciences.

However, Wynter notes that vestiges of the distinction set out by the feudal Christian

episteme remained in the consequent epistemic orders. The borders drawn by mediaeval

Aristotelian cartography that divided the earth into habitable and uninhabitable realms

continue to mark the distinction between the rational beings that shared the prevailing

subjective understanding, and its non-rational others that did not take part in this

subjective understanding. Part of the shift involved the redefinition of original sin from

one primarily centered around a binary constructed between the spirit and the flesh, to

one that was phrased in “terms of mankind’s alleged enslavement to the irrational or

sensory aspects of its human nature, that the earlier supraordinate goal of spiritual

redemption and eternal salvation of the feudal order was replaced by that of rational

redemption, through the state as intermediary” (14). Those beyond the bounds of the

Western state were then also beyond the pale set out by rationality, which allowed for

atrocities to be committed against them in the name of and for the sake of the rational.

With the advent of an episteme centered around Man’s finitude, and the development of

the biological and evolutionary sciences which result, this same mapping of humanity

had carried over with the peoples of Africa and the Americas conceived of as racially

dysselected by evolution.

Despite the epistemic shifts that have occurred, the modern invention of race in

the sixteenth century and the ceaseless attempts to find a biological and genetic basis for

race in our own contemporary moment are thus intricately connected to the
 43

habitable/uninhabitable division of the human instituted by the feudal Christian episteme.

“Like its medieval counterpart. . . the color line had come to inscribe a premise parallel, if

in different terms, to that which had been encoded in the feudal Christian order, by the

line of caste that had been mapped onto the physical universe as well as onto the

geography of the earth” (39). While the shift away from the feudal Church order of

knowledge made it possible to conceive of people dwelling in the regions of the world

that were once thought uninhabitable, these epistemological transformations nevertheless

preserve the unequal divisions within the human made by the feudal Christian ordering of

things. Thus, any politics of resistance must take up these residual vestiges of the feudal

Christian order that reside not just in the depths of contemporary social structures, but

also within the epistemic formation which underlies and makes possible these structures.

Domination occurs through the imposition of one particular form of knowing under

which all other integrations of the human lifeworld into a structure of knowledge are

subsumed as irrational and made illegible. One might say, echoing a much older formula,

that politics is epistemological and epistemology is political; thus politics must also

reckon with its own structures of knowing and their implication in the division of the

human, just as any form of knowing must wrestle with the systems of division it justifies

and their role in the production of knowledge. Furthermore, the bourgeois attempts to

ontologize truth displace and obscure the fundamentally political nature of epistemology,

structuring the social order through an allegedly privileged relationship to truth that is, in

the final analysis, thoroughly conditioned by historical and social forces.

That art, too, is caught up in these epistemic orders is evident enough that it

perhaps need not be said; however art in its coming to define the human takes on a
 44

specific role in the relation between knowledge and the human. Aesthetics is invented in

the moment when the epistemic structure shifts from a knowledge that can be primarily

guaranteed by the divine order to one that is located in the faculties of human sensuous

perception. One need only gesture towards the epochal shift that takes place between

Descartes’ Meditations, where God can still serve as the ultimate guarantor of human

knowledge, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where the knowledge of God is

withdrawn and serves instead as a central and irresolvable antinomy that shows the limit

of pure reason. In this structure of finitude brought about by divinity’s withdrawal as the

basis of knowledge, human apperception itself becomes an object of study that will

ultimately be used to ground the possibility of knowledge and the social order. This shift

leads to a related crisis in the social as the intersubjective relations ordered by a relation

to the divine become unmoored, necessitating the formulation of a new basis for the

epistemic order. This new basis is ultimately found in the concept of aesthetics which

comes to ground the new forms of knowledge production and of the intersubjective

relations developed with modernity. Even science, with its emphasis on empirical

observation is grounded in the aesthetic mediation between the sensuous and the rational.

However, much as the order built on the divine that preceded it, and despite the

ostensible universality that it expresses, the aesthetic institutes and maintains a system of

political division that functions as a system of domination.

In this way, if one is to speak of art’s coming to substitute for the role of religion,

then it is not merely in the sense of the shift of the auratic from the divine to the aesthetic.

In fact, this transference of auratic power occurred much later, after a much more central

transformation in which, in the context of Western European civilization, art comes to

 45

replace a series of epistemic formations that were once intricately bound to the order

upheld by the feudal Church. But precisely because art is not religion, this replacement

also entails a series of transformations in the structures for which it has become the basis.

What makes art central to our current consideration is the way in which aesthetics comes

to ground an entire edifice of knowledge that is structured around the problem of Man’s

finitude. For this reason, the concept of the aesthetic not only defines Man, as in the

notion of Homo aestheticus, but it functions as a central monad that contains the totality

of social existence in miniature. Walter Benjamin writes of the monad in the “Epistemo-

Critical Introduction” to Origin of German Tragic Drama that “[t]he being that enters

into it, with its past and subsequent history, brings – concealed in its own form – an

indistinct abbreviation of the rest of the world of ideas, just as . . . every single monad

contains, in an indistinct way, all the others” (45). The modern concept of the aesthetic,

with its central role of grounding our contemporary epistemic order, can be seen to

contain and mediate within it all the social and political divisions made within the human.

The project of aesthetics develops out of Man’s limited relation to the world, out

of Man’s fundamental finitude, in order to stabilize a social system from which the divine

had withdrawn as the absolute guarantor of human knowledge and as the ground of

intersubjective human relations. The concept of the aesthetic served as the basis for

structuring the Western European subjective understanding that sprang forth from the

colonial venture at the beginning of modernity. However, from its inception aesthetics

has also contained within itself a tension between the simple ontologization perception

and thus the knowledge that develops out of it, and a negativity that pries open gap

between knowledge and its object. The shift into the epistemic structure of finitude
 46

founded on the structure of the aesthetic offers both new limitations on and also new

possibilities of human knowledge and thus of how this knowledge articulates the

divisions within the human. As Wynter notes, the new episteme offers the possibility of

finding “the explanation of our human behaviors not in the universal psyche of the

ostensibly pure bio-ontogenic subject, but rather in the process of socialization that

institutes the individual as a human, and therefore, always sociogenetic subject” (47).

Even as these structures of knowledge defined by the finitude of Man have been used to

institute and naturalize inegalitarian political structures, they still continue to offer the

possibility of a knowledge adequate to equality. Aesthetics, as an analytic of the finitude

of human existence attains its highest end not when conceived of merely as a mode of

representation or as a study of human perception, but only when it is in itself the practice

of an immanent negativity that anarranges the given order of perception and in doing so

makes legible hidden structures of legibility.

Regimes of Art

In Artforms, an introductory but representative textbook on the visual arts by

Duane Preble, Sarah Preble, and Patrick L. Frank, the epistemic violence of instituting

the concept of aesthetics as the basis of the human becomes visible. Artforms begins by

rhetorically establishing the universal anthropogenic function of art: “Is it necessary for

us to give physical form to things we feel, think, and imagine? Must we gesture, dance,

draw, speak, sing, write, and build? To be fully human, it seems that we must. In fact, the

ability to create is one of the special characteristics of being human” (3). As many other

texts, Artforms thus assumes the Western system of the arts as the basis for humanity;
 47

however, the text also recognizes the existence of cultures that do not necessarily

incorporate artistic activities in the same epistemic structure as the West. “There are

societies whose languages have no word for art,” Artforms admits, “yet people in these

societies are abundantly creative and live artfully. The Balinese. . . say ‘We have no art—

we do everything as well as we can’” (4). Thus, the aesthetic concept of art developed in

the West comes to encompass a specific set of practices which threatens to exclude from

humanity those who do not organize their social and material life in the same way. This

form is imposed upon the Balinese, which confers upon them the status of human while

erasing the possibility of an qualitatively different understanding of the concept of art,

and the alternate structures through which human practice might be linked to its inhabited

world, structures that may well be no less human and no less alive without necessarily

being incorporated into the Western forms of the artful or of the aesthetic. Hence the

concept of aesthetics is mobilized to erase exteriority of the Balinese lifeworld and to

subsume it into the European aesthetic organization of knowledge, despite the absence of

the Eurocentric understanding of art as a central organizing structure.

The central point here is not to simply fetishize the Balinese episteme as an

alterity which offers some solution to the domination of the Western European

articulation of the human, but to recognize the limits in epistemic formation conditioned

by late capitalism, along with its function in subsuming and erasing any possible alterity.

Ultimately, the Balinese are incorporated into the account set forth by Artforms in order

to structure a narrative of decline in which what the text identifies as “art” has been

progressively removed from everyday life and installed into museums. This supposed

decline of art in everyday experience is “unfortunate; people living in highly technical

 48

societies need art as much as members of the culturally rich, traditional societies need art.

Science and the arts serve humanity in complementary ways. Both involve creative

thinking and problem solving” (4). While the text attempts to veil the linear teleology

underlying its assumptions about the development of human societies by eschewing the

term ‘primitive societies’ in favor of creating a binary between ‘traditional’ and

‘technological’ societies, it nevertheless erases the possibilities of difference and rupture

by assuming that these alternate ways of interfacing with the world are included under the

concept of the aesthetic. Here the universalization of the aesthetic concept of art not only

obscures the alterities existing between cultural systems, but also erases its own

historicity. Art is posed as at once universal and ahistorical in such a way that it can only

be thought of as in decline. However, the aesthetic regime of the arts does have a history

that displays not only its decline, but its emergence from qualitatively different social and

political conditions that inhabit what is posited as the West’s own tradition. This history

allows us to see the limits that fence in the epistemic structure of Western thought and

that are obscured in the universalization of art as aesthetics.

While the Western concept of aesthetics, as one specific form of conceptualizing

the human activity encompassed by these ways of doing and making, is invented in the

mid-eighteenth century in Europe, the history of the concept of art is deeply imbricated

with a constellation of aligned and interwoven terms—including aesthetics, poiesis and

work. Historical shifts in this constellation reveal the social tensions that are negotiated

by the invention of aesthetics in the eighteenth century. Not only does aesthetics come to

form the ground for the new episteme, but it carries with it these historical sedimentations

that allow it to mediate the relation between knowledge and the sensuous existence of the
 49

human, and ultimately serve as the basis for social and political relations. There is much

to learn about this transformation from the contemporary interpretation of Hippocrates’

“Ars longa vita brevis” – art is long, life short. While Hippocrates is often misinterpreted

as referring to the enduring nature of a work of art, the art referred to here is not the fine

arts as understood in contemporary terms but the craft of medicine. “Art” as used here is

derived from the same base as the ancient Greek άραρίσκειν, meaning to fit together

(OED: art), referring to the whole range of professional, artistic, and technical means of

production—the entire scope of human praxis which takes raw material from the world

and fits it together to make something new. In the originary form of art, the “fine arts” are

not distinguished from other modes of doing and making; the art of the shoemaker in this

period is conceptually no different from the art of the poet or of the painter.

Art is separated from the realm of general human praxis only with the

development of social relations that alter how these ways of doing and making are

articulated with other spheres of human existence. Of particular importance are the social

and material conditions which illuminate the modes of experiencing art. In The Politics of

Aesthetics, Rancière divides the history of art into three primary regimes which are

determined by how they conceive of the “connection between ways of producing works

of art or developing practices, forms of visibility that disclose them, and ways of

conceptualizing the former and the latter” (21). However, while Rancière does not fully

discuss the historical and material conditions that lead to the development of different

regimes of art, perhaps in an effort to avoid the too rigid structuralism of his teacher,

Althusser, it would be useful here to further contextualize these regimes in order to trace

their relation to the web of social practices in which they are embedded. In general, one
 50

might say that the mutations in the structure of art—understood in Rancière’s sense as

relating to the structuring of the totality of human modes of doing and making—take

place within the context of large-scale changes in the historical and material conditions of

a particular society. In the context of the development of the Western tradition of the arts,

one might locate two central transitions: first the development of coinage and the money

form as central to the transition from the ethical regime of images to the representative

regime of the arts, and second the formal desacralization of the Western European

episteme brought about by the encounter with the continents of the Americas as central to

the movement from the representative regime of the arts to the aesthetic regime of the

arts.

In art’s earliest conception in the Western tradition, the ethical regime of images,

art is not distinguished from other forms of production. The primary problem of art is its

truth content and the question of the end which art – as the process and products of

human praxis – seeks to attain. Under this regime, “it is a matter of knowing in what way

images’ mode of being affects the ethos, the mode of being of individuals and

communities” (20). And because this question of how the images affect the ethos can in

principle be applied to any mode of making or doing, art under the ethical regime is not

distinguishable from other forms of production. The unity of art with the broad range of

ways of doing and making presents a fundamentally different understanding of human

praxis which is altered only through the development of historical and material

conditions. The unity of the ethical regime of images is replaced by the representative

regime of arts which distinguishes art by assigning it the function of producing

imitations. For Aristotle, “[i]t is the substance of the poem, the fabrication of a plot
 51

arranging actions that represent the activities of men, which is the foremost issue, to the

detriment of the essence of the image, a copy examined with regard to its model” (21).

The image comes to represent the substance of art, dividing poiesis from praxis. Giorgio

Agamben notes in The Man without Content, that central to poiesis “was not its aspect as

a practical and voluntary process but its being a mode of truth understood as unveiling. . .

it was precisely because of this essential proximity to truth that Aristotle, who repeatedly

theorizes this distinction within man’s ‘doing,’ tended to assign a higher position to

poiesis than to praxis” (69). Art was conceived as a means of producing truth through the

unveiling that occurs in the image, the “pro-duction into presence, the fact that something

passed from nonbeing to being, from concealment into the full light of the work” (68-69).

Thus, in the movement between the ethical regime of images and the representative

regime of art, art becomes aligned with poiesis as the production of truth and the

perfection of nature, as opposed to praxis and the practical arts which were linked to

humanity’s animal being.

What makes the shift between these regimes of art possible is the production of

new social technologies of abstraction that allow for the separation of a certain notion of

truth and a certain notion of the image from other forms of production. Alfred Sohn-

Rethel, in Intellectual and Manual Labor, locates the root of these new forms of

abstraction in the introduction of coinage, first mentioned by Xenophanes in the 6th

century BCE. Non-empirical abstractions are enabled by “none other than the real

abstraction of the commodity exchange, for it is of a non-empirical form-character and

does not spring from thought” (66). Money functions as a primary abstraction which is

rooted in the practice of everyday life and makes possible other forms of abstraction; it is
 52

an abstraction given material existence and made real through the course of exchange.

“The action of exchange stands in antithetic polarity to the sense-reality of things in the

private minds of the individuals in their social life. . . It is a reality carrying universal

social validity among all exchanging agents” (72). The forms of knowledge production

introduced with coinage are central to the articulation between the various ways of

making and doing that constitute the arts and the structure of society that they help to

produce insofar as these forms of knowledge produce a form of abstraction which is

embodied in practice and have real social effects.

Following Althusser’s analysis of ideology, one might say that money and the

exchange of commodities instantiate the material basis for the assertion of abstract

equality, which allowed for the manifestation of abstraction as a set of social and

epistemic practices. The epistemic structure based upon abstraction thus maintains its

validity through material practice, and it is through material practice that ideology

becomes inscribed in the consciousness of individuals. “Pascal says more or less: ‘Kneel

down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe’” (114). Much as the belief that is

generated not as the precondition of prayer but the product, ideology functions through

the performance of ritual. The ritual of commodity exchange for money institutes the

socially concrete existence of abstract value. Through this structure of practice, the belief

in abstract equality becomes held not merely as belief, but as truth; the social basis of

abstraction as the basis for the entire epistemic structure becomes hidden and naturalized

as an ontological phenomena. While the sensuous differences in commodities are evident,

they become formally equal in the act of money exchange, generating faith in abstract

equality as expressed through the medium of the money form. With the introduction of
 53

coinage the abstract character of exchange value is made concrete and all objects are, in

the truth of the money form, made equal.

Valuation through the money form renders concrete the abstract concept of

equality through the exchange of goods. The use of money as a universal equivalent

serves as a template which allows for the creation of other abstract universal qualities.

According to Seaford, this form of abstraction produced by the money form serves as a

basis for Ancient Greek philosophy and can be found at the root of “the counter-intuitive

idea of a single substance underlying the plurality of things manifest to the senses” (175)

which becomes prevalent with the spread of coinage. The monism which underlies

Ancient Greek philosophy and forms the basis of the material monism of modern science

can thus be found rooted in the money form where the originary universal substance is

nothing other than abstract value. Epistemology as a study of an abstract and universal

truth is made possible through the money form which allows for the cognitive process of

abstraction. “Heraclitus says that all things are an equal exchange (antamoibe) for fire

(his ‘first principle’), just as all goods are an equal exchange for gold” (218). The

abstraction necessary to establish a universal substance that serves as this first principle

becomes established only by analogy to the realm of monetary exchange which emerges

as the true first principle to scientific thinking.

The social practice of exchange through the money form remakes the knowable

world in its own image, shaping the consciousness of the individuals that inhabit it by

making the image visible as image, and enabling the shift from the ethical regime of

images to the representative regime of art. Aristotle’s notion of art as imitation focuses on

the production of an object of greater generality that functions as a medium of equivalent

 54

exchange in the multiplicity of human experience. In this way, art comes to conform to

the abstract equality that has saturated the social conditions of knowledge production.

Nimis notes in “Aristotle’s Analogic Metaphor,” that Aristotle describes both analogical

metaphors and similes by the word for exchange: “[T]he analogical metaphor should set

up a reciprocal exchange (antipodidonai) between each of the two things from the same

genus (homogenon)” (Nimis 216) and “Poets fail when they fail and succeed best when

they succeed: I mean when they set up an exchange (hotan apodidosin)” (216). The use

of apodidomi in both semantic fields is part of a network of language that bridges the

realm of the poetic and the realm of money: “hermeneus: meaning an interpreter and a

broker; logos: a meaning, an account, a ratio; nomizein: to ‘coin’ a phrase or to ‘strike’ a

coin; hypotheka: a counsel or a ‘down payment’” (216). These terms function

metaphorically, setting up a series of equivalences between the domains of language and

money, and exposing a deep connection between the abstraction from signified to

signifier and that from use value to exchange value central to Aristotle’s analysis of

poetic language.

The separation of knowledge production as a particular kind of knowing and

doing is thus a problem of art, and one that is deeply connected with the structure of

monetary exchange. For Aristotle, art is that abstraction from human experience that

allows it to be universally exchangeable, echoing the structure of abstract value instituted

by the money form. The difference between history and art, according to Aristotle’s

Poetics, is that art has a more generalized, universal form. “[D]rama and epic are more

scientific and intellectually rigorous than history, since their subjects are ‘universals’

[general truths] rather than ‘particulars’ [specific incidents]. By ‘universals’ I mean what
 55

people might do or say, necessarily or probably, because of who and what they are” (13-

14). The particularity of history is thus surpassed by drama and epic as general,

“scientific” forms. Just as exchange value subsumes use value in the general equivalence

of money, so does Aristotle’s notion of art subsume history through the creation of a

general equivalence for human experience. Aristotle’s art purifies the natural world,

bringing the particular under the rule of the general by ‘uncovering’ the universal formal

cause within it. Art thus produces abstract and universal knowledge from reality, bringing

into visibility its hidden truth. “We delight in seeing images because in doing so we

‘learn and reason about [sullogizesthai] what each thing is, i.e., that this man is that”

(1448b4-17). The essence of an object is not to be found within the object itself but in its

universal image made visible through art which allows us to learn the truth of the object.

The representative regime of the arts instituted new forms of knowledge production that

were closely linked to the invention of coinage and relied on relations between the

sensible and the knowable in which the essence of the object becomes intelligible through

abstraction.

The representative regime of the arts is enabled by an epistemic shift that results

from the invention of coinage and its associated technologies of abstraction which further

reinforce the newly structured episteme. However, both these regimes of art differ from

the aesthetic insofar as the underlying epistemology is not one centralized around human

sensory perception as the foundation of knowledge. Indeed, the concept of man under the

ethical regime of images and the representative regime of the arts both differed from the

Man that emerges in colonial modernity through the centralization of finitude and the

aesthetic. The anthropogenic function of art is established much later, through another
 56

fundamental shift in the structure of knowledge in the middle of the eighteenth century

that resulted from the removal of the divine basis of society and of knowledge. This shift

in the eighteenth century, in turn, was structured by the epochal shift instantiated by the

encounter with the peoples and continents of the Western hemisphere. Just as in the

mutation in the order of knowledge that saw the shift from the ethical regime of images to

the representative regime of the arts was deeply imbricated with the social and material

conditions that developed historically, so too is the one that leads to the development of

the aesthetic and the figuration of Man through his fundamentally untranscendable

finitude.

The formation of modern aesthetics in the mid-eighteenth century was not, as

some might claim, the continuation of the Greek tradition, nor was it the giving of a

proper name to an ahistorical appreciation of art and beauty; rather it marks a

fundamental mutation in the order of knowledge that continues to underlie our

contemporary episteme. It attests to an epochal shift that transforms the entire structure of

knowing and its articulation with the alterity of the external world. Instead of

distinguishing art by mimesis, the aesthetic regime of the arts defines a sensible mode of

being specific to the art works themselves. Under the aesthetic regime of the arts, art is

“extricated from its ordinary connections and is inhabited by a heterogeneous power, the

power of a form of thought that has become foreign to itself: a product identical with

something not produced, knowledge transformed into non-knowledge, logos identical

with pathos, the intention of the unintentional” (23). The sensible mode of being defined

by the aesthetic regime of the arts forms a new basis for intersubjective relations and the

epistemic order, both of which are ultimately intertwined with the formations of power
 57

that have come to define colonial modernity. The transformation enabled by Columbus’

premise of an order in which the organizing principles of the Creation become knowable

leads to the increased development of the abstract forms of knowledge that would come

to be organized under the concept of science. The new relations between sensation and

knowledge brings to the forefront the question of “how can reason, the most immaterial

of faculties, grasp the grossly sensuous” (15)? The withdrawal of the divine as the basis

of knowledge and the increased split between intellectual and manual production creates

a new crisis of legitimation that is mediated by the formation of aesthetics as a particular

system of relating the sensible and the knowable.

The aesthetic regime of art arises out of a crisis of perception between the

material body and the immaterial form of rationality that results when perception can no

longer depend upon the divine basis that was withdrawn through the development of the

state and Western Europe’s encounter with the continents of the Americas. The formation

of aesthetics should be understood as the result of a particular historical conjuncture that

emerges from the increasing abstraction of rational thought and its separation from the

sensuous physicality of the body. The crisis emerges when the divine can no longer be

relied upon to justify forms of knowledge that are increasingly distant from the sensible;

the opposition formulated between rational thought and the grossly sensuous thus

depends upon the social and historical development of both. Alexander Baumgarten, re-

coins the term aesthetics in its contemporary sense, defining it in his 1735 Meditationes

philosophicae as “the science of how things are the cognized by means of the senses”,

which becomes by his 1750 Æsthetica, “the theory of the liberal arts, the logic of the

lower faculty of cognition, the art of thinking beautifully, the art of the analogue of
 58

reason” (227). Aesthetics as the science of the sensible moves the senses into art as a

particular structuring of experience which can be comprehended in a scientific way. That

art becomes the analogue to reason means that the senses function in a reasonable and

therefore ultimately knowable way. Aesthetics had become so entrenched into the social

and political order that by 1797, the author of the “Earliest System Programme of

German Idealism,” alternately identified as Hölderlin, Schelling or Hegel, is capable of

making the claim that aesthetics is not only an analogue to reason but is itself “the highest

act of Reason, the one through which it encompasses all Ideas, is an aesthetic act . . . the

philosopher must possess just as much aesthetic power as the poet . . . The philosophy of

the spirit is an aesthetic philosophy” (29). Aesthetics becomes not just a proxy for reason,

but that upon which all reason is based, which fundamentally grounds the order of

knowledge that develops through it.

Art is thus tasked with presenting a purer form of the sensory which is at the same

time an analogue to reason. This form is ultimately to be unmarked by history or politics,

emphasizing an aesthetic of disinterestedness to the detriment of an aesthetics rooted in

the examination of the senses in relationship to the social and political. Aesthetics

functions as a “kind of prosthesis to reason, extending a rarefied Enlightenment

rationality into vital regions which are otherwise beyond its reach” (16). Aesthetics

begins as a science of the sensible that would serve to bring the otherwise ungraspable

realm of the particular under the rule of the intellect, regulating the epistemic relation

between sense and intellect, and the social relation between the manual and intellectual

laborer. In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously remarks that “Germans are the

only ones who now employ the word ‘aesthetics’ to designate that which others call the
 59

critique of taste. The ground for this is a failed hope … of bringing the critical estimation

of the beautiful under principles of reason … [b]ut such endeavors are fruitless” (156).

However, he later performs precisely such a critique of taste in The Critique of Judgment.

In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant separates sensibility from cognitive functions,

deriving space and time as fundamentally a priori to any possible sense experience. In

Kant’s analysis, space and time cannot be derived from sensory experience because they

are what underlie experience. “It is therefore indubitably certain … that space and time,

as the necessary conditions of all (outer and inner) experience, are merely subjective

conditions of all our intuition, in relation to which therefore all objects are mere

appearances and not things given for themselves in this way” (171). Space and time cease

to be empirical and objective, but become the product of subjective cognitive functions,

inverting the relationship that established space and time as the basis of objective

experience. Kant thus attempts to neutralize the negativity between thought and sensation

by moving the space and time as the bases of sensation into the realm of the subject.

Furthermore, the aesthetic serves to ground the social order concomitant with the

rise of the nation state and the decline of the monarchy that emerges through the

epistemic shift marked by the Western Europe encounter with the land masses of the

Western hemisphere. If The Critique of Pure Reason abolishes objective certainty by

moving it into the realm of the subject, The Critique of Judgment attempts to form the

basis for social order by installing objectivity into the heart of the subject itself. Kant re-

forms the idea of subjectivity so that the grounds of the subject need no longer be derived

from an external source but takes place in the subject’s constitution of objectivity. This

can be seen as the completion of the revolution begun by Descartes’ thinking subject,
 60

which ultimately still finds its grounds for experience in an external, theological source.

The problem for Kant is rather how the subject can serve as the ultimate grounds, without

external support, so that subjectivity can truly function as its own foundation. Kant thus

removes the possibility of knowing objects in themselves, leaving only the knowledge of

the subjective sensory apparatus so that “[e]ven if we bring our intuition to the highest

degree of clearness … we should still know only our mode of intuition, that is, our

sensibility” (185). This results in any possible knowledge being subjective, however, only

with the final result of restoring objectivity within the space of the subject itself. The

skeptical ego’s inability to reach any certainty of the objects in themselves results in a

form of objectivity that grounds human experience within the thinking subject, such that,

as David Richter explains, for Kant “because each mind has the same equipment and

performs the same operations, and because these creative operations occur prior to

consciousness, we are able . . . to experience the world of the senses as though it were

objectively present” (244). The attempt to make perception subjective grounds for

experience occurs through an objectification that necessitates that each individual share

the same mental equipment and operations.

The aesthetic shift in the location of sensory perception echoes the political shift

from the sovereign power of the monarch to the individualized power of bourgeois rule;

indeed, the political problem present in this change finds itself resolved in and through

the aesthetic. The decline of sovereign power and the removal of the divine right that

supported it lead to the problem of grounding the human social order. Whereas

previously the feudal Church epistemic order was grounded on a hierarchal order

grounded in the divine through the great chain of being, the strictness of this hierarchy
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could not be sustained in human society without its divine foundation. The problem of

ordering society is ultimately resolved by the instituting intersubjective relations

guaranteed by the aesthetic. Kant attempts to “repair the subjective damage wrought by

Hume’s skeptical empiricism by restoring the objective order of things, but by restoring

it—since there can now be no lapsing back into a subjectless rationalism—from within

the standpoint of the subject itself” (72). The mechanisms of power are no longer located

objectively outside the subject and must be made to function from within. The Kantian

solution to this decline of sovereign power is not only to shift to a subjective form of

power, but to cause the realm of the subjective to function objectively such that, to re-

phrase Richter, each mind has the same political equipment and performs the same

operations of power, and because these operations occur prior to political consciousness,

we are able to experience the world of the political as though it were objectively present.

The new aestheticization of power transforms the body so that power becomes “at one

with the body’s spontaneous impulses, entwined with sensibility and the affections, lived

out in unreflective custom. Power is now inscribed in the minutiae of subjective

experience, and the fissure between abstract duty and pleasurable inclination is

accordingly healed” (20). The aesthetic attempts to heal the rift in the social and

individual body opened up by new modes of production and the transference of power

from the sovereign to the individual subject. The resolution is found in altering the

relations between sensibility and knowledge in the realm of the aesthetic so that pleasure

and duty can be made to coincide.

The aesthetic in The Critique of Judgment thus serves to reinforce a form of

objective intersubjectivity against the pure subjectivity that manifests itself in Kant’s
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understanding of the sensible. While the experience of the art object is subjective in our

contemporary sense, sharing aesthetic experience asserts a shared community that

transcends particular concerns and gestures towards a universality that serves as an

objective basis for experience. “When, for Kant, we find ourselves concurring

spontaneously in an authentic judgment, able to agree that a certain phenomenon is

sublime or beautiful, we exercise a precious form of intersubjectivity establishing

ourselves as a community of feeling subjects” (75). The aesthetic properly experienced is

that form of experience that serves as the basis for the founding of a social group through

the affirmation of the group’s shared capacities. The aesthetic functions not only to give

access to a sense of shared capacities but to create them through the disinterestedness

upon which they are based. For Kant, “taste in the beautiful is alone a disinterested and

free satisfaction; for no interest, either of sense or reason, here forces an assent” (251). It

is thus an assent that occurs without coercion, an assent conceived as deriving from the

shared community of the human. The disinterestedness of Kantian beauty institutes

subjectivity as a form of objectivity, creating a subjective universal validity that allows

aesthetic agreement to function as a social cement against threats that arise with the

dissolution of centralized monarchical power and the relocation of power within the

individual subject.

At the very heart of the subjective is thus inscribed the rule of law. Even in the

freedom of the subject’s imagination we find that the experience of beauty becomes “the

imagination’s free conformity to law” (259) which mirrors the bourgeois ideal of a

political free conformity to law in a society where the monarchical power is undermined

by new rationalities of power based in Enlightenment reason and located in the subject.
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The imagination, like the imagining subject, must be considered in its freedom not as “it

is subject to the laws of association, but as productive and spontaneous (as the author of

arbitrary forms of possible intuition)” (259). The arbitrary forms of intuition the

imagination might author and the arbitrary forms of power the subject might exercise are

brought under the rule of law through the aesthetic object which provides “a form

containing a collection as manifold as the imagination itself, if it were free, would project

in accordance with the conformity to the law of the understanding in general” (259). This

law itself cannot itself exist without transforming taste from a judgment of beauty to a

judgment of the good, from a sense which is free in itself to a sense which is based on the

formal perfection of conformity to law. “Hence it is a conformity to law without a law;

and a subjective agreement of the imagination and understanding” (259). Thus the social

and political ordering of the human that once was supported by the monarch and the

divine order by which he was upheld becomes replaced by an order that in which the

objective functioning of the social order is inscribed into the subjective desires of the

individual.

The history of the arts makes it clear that aesthetic regime is only one method of

assigning a relation between the totality of human praxis and the world that it inhabits,

one that is both historically recent and developed under the conditions of Western

modernity. However, like the ethnoclass Man that overrepresents itself as though it were

the human, the imposition of the aesthetic relation to human existence structures a

politics of belonging that institutes universality through exclusion and erasure. The

regime of the aesthetic develops in the particular social and historical conditions of mid-

eighteenth century Europe to ground the transition from a regime of knowledge grounded
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in the divine to one grounded in the finitude of Man’s sensuous experiences. This

transition is grounded in Western Europe’s colonial encounter with the Americas.

Through its response to the challenges to the social and epistemic structure brought about

by the withdrawal of the divine basis of feudal Christian society, aesthetics becomes the

basis of the new episteme that Foucault identifies as the episteme of finitude. And this

new structure of knowledge is, of necessity, intricately related to the structures of power

that develop in and alongside it through the invention of the aesthetic. Aesthetics

institutes an alteration of the relations between cognition and sensation, framing the

understanding of individual human experience as at once fundamentally free, while

simultaneously bound to subjective laws of universal validity which proved necessary for

the continued functioning of Western European society. In this way, aesthetics is the

invention and the regulation of the subject through which biopolitics becomes operative.

The aesthetic mode of conceptualizing sense perception in relation to the field of

knowledge developed parallel with and as a supplement to the system of power described

by Foucault as biopower. Biopower emerges during the second half of the eighteenth

century as a technology of power “applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to

man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man as species” (242). In this move from

the disciplinary power focused on the body to biopower focused on the species, the

Kantian aesthetic elevates the individual to the level of the species, diminishing the

expenditures of power functioning on multiplicities, making the subjective individual the

space of the universal in such a way that operations of power become experienced as the

will of the individual. The invention of aesthetics is thus intricately linked to the “conduct

of conduct” that is central to Foucault’s understanding of biopower. “In the aesthetic, in

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contrast to the domains of pure and practical reason, the individual is not abstracted to the

universal but is somehow raised to the universal in its very particularity, manifesting

itself spontaneously on its surface” (94). The Kantian subject’s free conformity to law

becomes a form of mediation between disciplinary and biopolitical power which causes

the individual to function in terms of the universal while attempting to maintain the

semblance of individual freedom.

The Aesthetic Ordering of Things

The reordering of knowledge and of the social through the aesthetic occurs in

response to a prior encounter with the Americas and the resulting withdrawal of the

divine as the fundamental basis for the human. Focusing primarily on the limited scope of

Western Europe, Rancière emphasizes the liberatory aspects of this shift. The aesthetic

regime of arts stands in contrast to the representative regime which instituted a

fundamental distinction between those whose capacities were caught up in their

occupation as craftsmen and those who were capable of participating in politics.

According to Aristotle and the division of the totality of human ways of doing and

making instituted by the representative regime of the arts, “citizens must not lead the life

of mechanics or tradesmen, since leisure is necessary both for the development of virtue

and of political duties” (156). At the center of both The Poetics and The Politics is this

distinction between the citizen who becomes the generator of knowledge and the ignoble

mechanics, tradesmen and farmers who can be neither the proper citizens nor the proper

producers of knowledge. Against the distinction instituted under the representative

regime of the arts, Rancière emphasizes the way the aesthetic regime functions by
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“destroying the mimetic barrier that distinguished ways of doing and making affiliated

with art from other ways of doing and making, a barrier that separated its rules from the

social occupations” (23). However, it does so in order to consolidate a new form of

power that attempts to transverse the occupations to formulate a general and universal

subject that would function within the confines of the new formations of the Western

bourgeois political order. Furthermore, Rancière’s emphasis on the equality of the new

regime of the arts largely and rather problematically assumes that the faculties of

aesthetic experience were conceived of as equally available to all.

With a broader scope, it becomes evident that although the aesthetic regime of the

arts functions to institute a new kind of equality in terms of the dominant ethnoclass Man

in Western Europe, its limited constitution of the human was simultaneously used to

mediate a field of inequality throughout the rest of the inhabited world. Giorgio Agamben

notes in The Open: Man and Animal that the locus of Western politics is the biopolitical

zone of indistinction within the human: “the decisive political conflict, which governs

every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man. That is to

say, in its origin, Western politics is also biopolitics” (80). This zone of indistinction is

mediated by social, political, and scientific discourses that shift historically, altering the

terrain of the human and dividing the legitimate subject who can be included in the realm

of politics from the illegitimate subject whose very exclusion constitutes the basis of the

political. In the emergence of modernity, these discourses become centrally connected

with the formation of the aesthetic which serves to regulate them. Furthermore, the

political structures instituted by the aesthetic regime of the arts operates beyond the

context of a closed continental Europe, and are deployed throughout the colonial
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enterprise as a means of producing and reinforcing the systems of exclusion that justified

the subjection of Europe’s others throughout the globe. The formation of aesthetics in the

mid-eighteenth century is central to the biopolitical structures upon which the politics of

our current moment is built; thus aesthetics in its modern form is not merely a

displacement of the political into the realm of culture, but one of the primary arenas in

which the political is manifested. If, as Agamben argues, biopolitics and therefore politics

takes the form of anthropogenesis—the creation of the human through its division from

the animal—aesthetics as a mode of conceiving human experience marks a fundamental

alteration in the forms through which the animality and the humanity of man become

rearticulated. Thus every meditation on aesthetics is in its essence an intervention in the

fundamental biopolitical formation between the humanity and the animality of the

human.

The biopolitical mediation between the human and animal becomes rearticulated

in a fundamentally new way through the discourses on art. In Lascaux: or the Birth of

Art, Georges Bataille analyzes the cave paintings of Lascaux and locates in them the

basis of humanity. As some of the earliest artworks of modern humans, they contain a

reflection on humanity in its moment of emergence:

These Lascaux men forcefully transmitted to us the fact that, being men,
they resembled us, but as a means of telling us so they left innumerable
pictures of the animality they were shedding—as though they had felt
obliged to clothe a nascent marvel with the animal grace they had lost.
These non-human figures, wrought with youthful strength, declare not
only that they who painted them became full-grown men by painting them,
but that they chose animality rather than themselves to give the image that
suggests what is most fascinating in mankind. (115)
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Thus art is conceived as that mediating structure that regulates the division between the

animal and the human. The resemblance between the Lascaux men and contemporary

humans is conveyed through the central representation of the non-human figures of the

animal, and the process of becoming human is simultaneously that of shedding the animal

and recognizing animality as what is most fascinating in mankind. The lost otherness of

the animal resides both alongside and within the human, as Agamben’s phrase on

recognizing the “humanity and the animality of man” suggests, with art functioning to

mediate this relation. In this process of anthropogenesis as a biopolitical process, it is art

that performs the function of division, bringing the human into its maturity, or, to shift

from Bataille’s more ontological understanding of the relation between art and the

human, into what is now conceived of as modernity. The anthropogenic function of art in

constituting humanity becomes the center of a knot in which the question of

distinguishing the human from the animal is inextricably entangled.

Aesthetics has functioned to divide those who are capable of certain forms of

sensuous experience, and therefore capable of claiming membership into a fully mature

humanity from those who are incapable of having these experiences. Even as Bataille’s

Lascaux institutes the anthropogenic function of art in a seemingly universal moment in

the history of humanity, it nevertheless functions by dividing those humans who are fully

incorporated into mature humanity from those who are not. Bataille compares the

paintings of Lascaux to those of what he identifies as the “savage” people living in his

contemporary moment to claim that Lascaux art is “much nearer the art, rich in various

possibilities, that belonged to the Chinese or to the Middle Ages . . . however close he

was to the Polynesian of our day, Lascaux Man was something the Polynesian is
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apparently not: laden with the promise of the most uncertain and complex future” (25).

Thus the Polynesian is figured as belonging not even to the order of the prehistoric

Lascaux Men in terms of their aesthetic capacity, for they have not even the promise of a

future. Instead, they have fallen out of history and are locked into a timeless structure:

“The modern primitive, after untold ages of maturing, stands on a platform nearer the

first men’s level than ours; until some crucial change occurs, his lot is to stay where he is,

uncreating and bogged down in the same ‘dark backward and abysm of time’ that

immobilized his forebears” (26). And this abysm of time is precisely the lack of structure

that defines the Western concept of the aesthetic through which Western Man comes to

define his entire system of knowledge production. The Polynesians of Lascaux thus serve

as that non-anthropophorous humanity whose exclusion from the range of mature

humanity is premised upon the incapacity to produce what would be judged as fully

formed art works.

Thus Rancière’s focus on the development of aesthetics within the confines of the

dominant ethnoclass Man formed in Western Europe obscures the way that the

centralization of aesthetics was also a mode of excluding the greater portion of humanity.

The new divisions of power instituted under the aesthetic regime of the arts are no longer

between the political citizen and the craftsman as instituted under the representative

regime of images, nor between the monarch and his subjects as under the feudal-Christian

order, but they are now mapped across the lines of the inhabitable/uninhabitable zones,

and ultimately along the color line. Rational knowledge, with its seemingly eternal

nature, had become through the Enlightenment one of the defining characteristics of the

human, which nevertheless had to explain the fleeting temporality of the sensuous. The
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human is that being that is simultaneously both rational and sensuous, a distinction that

becomes mediated for human beings through the concept of beauty. In The Critique of

the Power of Judgment, Kant emphasizes that “beauty is valid only for human beings,

i.e., animal but also rational beings, but not merely the latter (e.g., spirits), rather as

beings who are at the same time animal” (210). However this emphasis on the mediation

between the sensuous and rational occurs through a revaluation of the previous order

established under the feudal Church and the rational state. Under the previous order,

sensual non-rationality became that which must be overcome, displaced or repressed in

order to achieve full humanity, a structure that was combined with the borders of rational

Western Man set out by the geography of the feudal Church’s episteme. These borders

mapped the lines of exclusion between the “savage” and the “civilized” which continued

to inhere in the aesthetic order by remapping those outside the order into not-yet-human,

animal being of the timeless “savage.” The aesthetic does not function beyond the

confines of Europe, precisely because it is not necessary to mediate the relationship

between rationality and sensuousness in the putatively non-rational, non-Western world.

The formulation of the distinction between the animal and the human that

disqualifies certain individuals from participating in the community of humanity is

embedded within the structure of the aesthetic. In order to formulate aesthetics as the

basis of an objective intersubjectivity, it is necessary to establish disinterestedness as a

necessary condition for the reception of beauty. However, this condition in itself expels a

portion of humanity that is conceived of as being primarily linked to their subjective,

bodily existence. In the delineating the proper reception of an aesthetic object, Kant

notes:
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If someone asks me whether I find the palace I see before me beautiful, I

may well say that I don’t like that sort of thing, which is made merely to
be gaped at, or, like the Iroquois sachem, that nothing in Paris pleased him
better than the cook-shops; in true Rousseauesque style I might even vilify
the vanity of the great who waste the sweat of the people on such
superfluous things. . . (90)

There is something revealing about the performance of this “I” that can perform a

functionalist interpretation that dislikes mere adornment, or taking on a Rousseauesque

interpretation that critiques vanity, but must nevertheless maintain a certain distance from

the Iroquois sachem. Even in imagining itself in the place of the Iroquois sachem, this I

curiously remains detached as the third person—“I may well say. . . like the Iroquois

sachem, that nothing in Paris pleased him better than the cook-shops.” The Iroquois

sachem is portrayed as one who cannot gain distance from his immediate sensuous being

to experience the beautiful. In the hierarchy of the senses established by Kant in his

Anthropology, eating is the most material, the most sensual, the most animal of the senses

and thus at the greatest distance from reason. While it becomes clear that the functionalist

and moral judgments of beauty are based on categorical misunderstandings of what

constitutes the beautiful, the error of Kant’s Iroquois sachem is represented as inhabiting

a qualitatively different order. It is not merely a misunderstanding, but more centrally, the

inability to gain understanding of such, which stems from his inability to overcome the

animality of the human and gain access to what would be portrayed as his own humanity.

It would seem that he does not even make a judgment about the palace, much less a

judgment in accordance to the proper criteria of the beautiful, but instead changes the

subject to speak of the cookhouses. Kant’s reference to the Iroquois sachem in the

establishment of disinterestedness as one of the primary criteria for aesthetic experience

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attests to the impossibility of disinterestedness; the necessary condition of

disinterestedness is not itself without interest.

The criterion of beauty disqualifies the Iroquois sachem from the realm of proper

discourse that is determined by the intersubjectivity grounded by aesthetics. In Dissensus,

Jacques Rancière notes that in Aristotle’s Politics, “the sign of the political nature of

humans is constituted by their possession of logos, which is alone able to demonstrate a

community in the aesthesis of the just and the unjust, in contrast to the phôné, appropriate

only for expressing feelings of pleasure and displeasure” (37). To belong to a political

community thus requires that one be an animal whose speech can be recognized as logos

as distinct from the animal cry of pleasure or pain. Kant’s Iroquois sachem, unable to

dissociate himself from the experience of pleasure and overcome the animality of his

being, is thus excluded from the community of the political. The Kantian emphasis on

disinterestedness disqualifies the animality of being human, of the animal cry linked to

pleasure or displeasure, from the realm of aesthetic experience in order to establish the

conditions of intersubjectivity. “The satisfaction that we combine with the representation

of the existence of an object is called interest. . . such a satisfaction always has at the

same time a relation to the faculty of desire” (90). The basis of experience of the

beautiful separates out the faculty of desire as part of the animal cry against the

appropriate sign of logos. Kant’s portrayal of the Iroquois sachem presents him as

incapable of expressing the speech that would demonstrate the proper experience of

beauty, the form of speech which would admit him into the community of the Man, thus

revealing the political function that underlies the aesthetic determination of beauty.
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The centralization of art, even as it continues to maintain the distinction between

the animal and the human, displaces rationality as the defining characteristic that divides

the human from the animal and is instead attributed to the abstract and eternal realm of

the spirits. What comes to replace rationality as the defining characteristic of the human

is the ability to have a certain experience of beauty. Kant goes on to conclude that it is

perfectly possible to admit “that all gratification, even if it is caused by concepts that

arouse aesthetic ideas, is animal, i.e., bodily sensation, without thereby doing the least

damage to the spiritual feeling of respect for moral ideas, which is not gratification but

self-esteem (of the humanity within us)” (334). Aesthetics thus becomes a means of

negotiating the zone of indistinction between the human and the animal, and the

experience of beauty takes on a new role in the creation of this distinction. Similarly,

Friedrich von Schiller, in Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man notes that “when we

find in man the signs of a pure and disinterested esteem, we can infer that this revolution

has taken place in his nature, and that humanity has really begun in him” (66). These

early formations of the aesthetic alter the indistinction between the human and the animal

by locating the “real beginning of humanity” in the ability to have a disinterested

experience of beauty, ultimately putting into operation another zone of indistinction, one

that traverses the space between the subjectivity and the objectivity of the human.

The inability to attain aesthetic experience thus becomes the marker of being

locked out of the intersubjective relations that operated between those who belonged to

the dominant ethnoclass. The invention of the subject—conceived as both the producer

and the proprietor of his own perceptions—as the grounds for human knowledge allows

for the institution of the division between the subject and the object, mapped along the
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lines of the dominant ethnoclass Man and his non-anthropophorous others. The

Copernican revolution that takes place in Kant and which ultimately helps to ground the

intersubjective order established under the aesthetic regime of the arts is a transformation

in the status of subject and object such that cognition can no longer be determined from

the object, but takes place in the subject’s constitution of objectivity. Simon Critchley, in

Ethics—Politics—Subjectivity, references Martin Heidegger in observing that during the

Middle Ages the meaning of the words subjectum and objectum was precisely the reverse

of their modern signification. “The modern philosophical use of the word subject as the

conscious or thinking subject, as self or ego, as that to which representations are

attributed or predicated (the subject as the subject of representation) first appears in the

English language as late as 1796” (51). Part of the becoming Man that Foucault locates at

the end of the eighteenth century is also Man’s becoming subject which is founded on the

establishment of a particular relation between the human and his lifeworld that can be

found in the aesthetic. However, the foundation of Man as subject is also premised on the

exclusion of the non-European as a representative of non-anthropophorous humanity,

squarely on the basis of a purported lack of full subjectivity, perhaps most fully

illustrated in the figure of the slave.

The sheer objectivity of the slave is founded upon their particular relation to

aesthetic activity. According to Simon Gikandi’s analysis in Slavery and the Culture of

Taste this problem is also caught up in the capacities of self-reflection that become

central through the concept of the aesthetic that was established in Western European

modernity. Just as Kant’s Iroquois Sachem was unable to dissociate himself from his

sensuous being to attain the proper experience of beauty and thus a full subjecthood,
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Africans, “[B]ecause they were beholden to the religion of fetishism, which by its very

nature precluded self-conscious reflection” was “[d]efined as nonsubjects in European

discourses on art, culture, and taste. African slaves were not capable of reflection, and

because they were incapable of reflection they fell short of subjecthood” (225). The

aesthetic episteme founded in the shift away from an order predominantly founded on a

divine ground thus also becomes central to ordering the political order of colonial

modernity through its formalization and justification of its system of divisions. The

aesthetic conceptualization of art becomes central in mediating two fissures that cut

across the human: one in the zone of indistinction between the animality and the

humanity of Man and the other in the indistinction between the objectivity and the

subjectivity of the human. These splits do not occur merely in the realm of aesthetic

discourse; this discourse is rooted in much deeper social, historical and material

conditions which center the dual problems of the animality and the humanity, and the

objectivity and the subjectivity of the human. The etymology of “art” gestures towards

this deeper connection. Particular forms of relating animality and humanity, objectivity

and subjectivity, come into being through the discourses surrounding “art” in this larger

context.

Kant’s earlier writings attempt to make these divisions within humanity based on

the capacity for feeling. In Observations on the Feeling of the Sublime and Beautiful, it is

the ability to feel that Kant uses to institute ethnic difference. Speaking of the European

world, Kant observes that “those who distinguish themselves among all others by the

feeling for the beautiful are the Italians and the French, but by the feeling for the sublime,

the Germans, English, and Spanish. Holland can be considered as that land where the
 76

finer taste becomes largely unnoticeable” (97). It is important to note that, at least within

the European context, these differences in the ability to feel are drawn along national

lines rather than what is thought in contemporary terms as racial lines. However, when

one moves toward non-European portions of the world, the unit of analysis shifts as Kant

notes that “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises about the trifling”

(111). David Bindman notes in Ape to Apollo that the term race in the eighteenth century

was often used confusedly with “varieties” and with “nations” to divide the range of

human difference so that the slipperiness between the national categories and the larger

category of “Negroes” is perhaps unsurprising. Nevertheless, the ability to feel the

beautiful and the sublime becomes indicative of other attributes. After noting the inability

to feel anything but “trifling” feelings, Kant goes on to cite Hume in asserting that despite

the thousands of “blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries. . . still not a

single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other

praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the

lowest rabble” (111). The ability to properly feel thus not only marks a difference in

capacities between peoples, but becomes indicative of much broader capacities that

determine the potential of individuals.

The ideological force of the aesthetic is not simply in instituting a particular

aesthetic form, but in the structure of the concept of the aesthetic itself which traces out

the internal limits between Man and animal and between subject and object. These

divisions serve as the basis of the systems of exclusion instituted under colonial

modernity. This political function of aesthetics is often found wanting in the

universalistic accounts of the aesthetic that attempts to emphasize the shared community
 77

formed by a particular aesthesis. However, the formation of this community is also the

formation of those who are to be excluded from this community and relegated to the

extreme positions of pure animality or pure objectivity, and thus the history of aesthetics

cannot be separated out from the history of colonialism and capitalism. This structure

endlessly produces and mediates the distinctions between the animality and humanity,

subjectivity and objectivity of man. In this context, the colonies become a privileged site

for the examination of the construction of the human for both aesthetics as well as other

forms of labor. As Achille Mbembe notes in “Necropolitics”, “[i]n the eyes of the

conqueror, savage life is just another form of animal life. . . The savages are, as it were,

‘natural’ human beings who lack the specifically human character, the specifically human

reality, ‘so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that

they had committed murder’” (42). Furthermore, the purest expression of the individual

excluded from the community of humanity due to the status of the objectivity of the

human can be seen in the slave who was held incapable of self-consciousness and

therefore subjectivity, and therefore relegated to the juridical status of object in its purest

form. Not only does the emergence of the aesthetic take place under the epistemic

conditions determined by the initial encounter with the Americas, but aesthetics as the

biopolitical mediation of the zones of indistinction between the animality and humanity,

and the objectivity and subjectivity of the human thus finds its strongest manifestations in

the colonies of the early Americas which served as the hidden basis for the development

of aesthetic theory.

In Rancière’s reading of the historical development of the regimes of art, the

representative regime functions by establishing a certain relation between the seeable and
 78

the sayable which is mapped onto the social body, dividing those capable of seeing from

those capable of saying. Aristotle thus divides the totality of arts between those which

enable an individual to become a proper citizen and those which exclude the individual

from citizenship: “citizens must not lead the life of mechanics or tradesmen, for such a

life is ignoble, and inimical to virtue. Neither must they be husbandmen, since leisure is

necessary both for the development of virtue and the performance of political duties”

(156). The arts then function to articulate a certain partition of the sensible within the

social body in which those capable of seeing are split from those capable of speaking.

Thus the division within the arts functions as a means of further distinguishing those

capable of producing mastery over others from those whose lives are limited to their

occupations. According to Rancière, the aesthetic regime of the arts functions to

disarticulate this separation so that, in principle, anyone capable of seeing is also capable

of speaking what they see. Widening the scope of analysis beyond the borders of Europe

to the colonies which were intricately imbricated with the development of the colonizing

nations illustrates the limits of this transition; in the colonial context, the prior modes of

division are in fact remapped along and entangled in the lines drawn between civilized

and uncivilized that would later become, through the redescription of Man in biological

and evolutionary terms, the color line. Rather than simply extending the internal divisions

organized under the feudal Christian order, this mapping of capacities becomes

globalized, starkly dividing the totality of the human while accommodating this division

to the new developments in knowledge production.

Under the aesthetic regime of the arts and the larger aesthetic episteme in which it

is instated, the non-European is excepted from the proper realm of citizenship, but not
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simply based on labor activities assumed inimical to virtue nor on the lack of leisure to

perform political duties. Instead, the new distributive order maps this exception onto the

non-European body through an aesthetic exclusion in which the very capacity for the

proper aesthetic experience which would allow entrance not only into the domain of

citizenship, but into the domain of the human itself, is denied. Savage life is animal life—

the life that is capable only of expressing the animal cry of pleasure or pain and not the

speech recognized as logos through which one is able to claim belonging into the

community of political beings. The zones of indistinction between the animality and the

humanity, the objectivity and the subjectivity of Man that constitute the internal

dialectical field of the human as it emerges in the late eighteenth century are thus

thoroughly regulated by the invention of an episteme that can be defined as the aesthetic.

This aesthetic episteme not only serves to uphold grounds of knowledge in European

Modernity after the withdrawal of the divine, but also produces new social orders within

the totality of the human that both contains residues of the feudal Christian order and

elaborates them in new ways. This new episteme, which continues to serve as the basis of

the Man that is conceived as the figuration of finitude, also produces, within its structures

of division, new possibilities of articulation and rearticulation.

The task that critical theory is confronted with is not merely one of pretending to

step outside its own epistemic framework, indeed there is perhaps nothing so internal to

the structure of capitalism as the assumption of this transcendental standpoint which is

ultimately reintegrated into capitalism itself; rather, it must worry and probe at the ends

of its own limited structure of knowing to discover ways that this structure might be

made to fold back upon itself, producing new conjunctures of and new resistances to the
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manifold violences of its own way of knowing. It is the constant attempt to elaborate

what is unknown and what cannot be known under the current structure of thought.

Perhaps only in this way, as endless elaboration of the limits of its own knowledge, may

the new be heralded before the moment of its full emergence. The historical development

of the division of the arts and its role in structuring human praxis—and increasingly the

concept of the human itself—can be seen as one such fold in the structure of knowledge.

Whereas the fine arts, as commonly understood, is generally placed in opposition to the

labor that constitutes the field of human practice, the genealogy of the arts demonstrates

how this structuring in the moment of modernity is immanently connected to the

development of aesthetics. There is a subterranean connection between the aesthetic and

other modes of praxis that pierces the center of the human as it is formulated in

modernity. The indistinction between the humanity and the animality, and the objectivity

and the subjectivity of the human turn upon this central axis, determining the geographies

by which the manifestations of the human are divided, and making legible this terrain of

differences to create certain forms of knowledge and to enact certain forms of power. The

question of art as a particular mode of making and doing distinct from the wider range of

human praxis and its role in the constitution of the modern subject must be understood in

its relationship to the other of art found in these other forms of labor, and in the other of

the subject found in those whose exclusion serve to delineate the map of the human.

The Breath of Aisthêsis

That aesthetics has become central to a formation which enforces the coloniality

of knowledge need not determine its future, for even as aesthetics becomes the basis of a
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hierarchy that structures knowledge and the political as modes of exclusion, it carries

within itself the residual and perhaps now newly emerging traces of another order. This

alternate order attests to the functions of the aesthetic that have been repressed in order to

utilize it as an order of repression. Aisthêsis, in its formation by the Ancient Greeks, was

not confined to the narrow field of objects understood to comprise art in our modern

sense; nor was it limited merely to the scope of human sensory perception as understood

by Baumgarten. The term aesthetics, from the Greek, αίσθητικόϛ, referred to things that

were perceptible by the senses, as distinguished from νοητά, things that were merely

thinkable. Against nous, which seeks distance in the rarified heights of thought, aisthêsis

is located in the sensuous interaction with the material world. But these sensuous

interactions are themselves understood within a particular relation; and this relation that

stood at the heart of aisthêsis, was that of breath. Etymologically, αίσθητικόϛ has its roots

in the word meaning “to breathe.” “Things, as it were, breathe themselves out, we, as it

were, breathe them in, and on this etymological view aisthêsis is of a piece with life

itself” (428). Thus in the ancient view, subjective being is constituted through reciprocity

with the object world. Aisthêsis is breath as the mutual interchange between a subject and

its world through the negativity of an absence that produces movement. It is the void

between the subject and the object which creates flow, circulation, interpenetration. And,

moreover, it is life-giving and life-affirming. Aisthêsis as perception is the mutual

breathing between the subject and the object; we would suffocate without the breath of

our objects.

The harmonious accord between subject and object is experienced in the form of a

beauty which becomes a central means of investigating human experience. Thus in

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Pythagoras’ discovery of the laws of harmony, “[t]hose sounds that pleased the ear could

be shown to possess a harmonia, that is, to be well made and fitted to one another in

ratios of whole integers. It is crucially important that aisthêsis, and therefore the human

soul itself, resonated with this harmony, like apprehending like” (428). As opposed to the

modern rationality that stands in isolated contemplation over and above its sensuous

experience of the object, the demand of aisthêsis is precisely to be moved, to vibrate and

to resonate with the object world. Harmony is not merely the quality of an object, but is

located simultaneously in the depths of the subject. These resonances affirm a belonging

to the world that allows for the pleasure of sensuous experience, in and of itself, to

become a means of attaining knowledge. The study of the beautiful is not merely the

isolated contemplation of a particular set of objects, but it is also the study of the human

essence which cannot take place but in its relation to the objective world that it inhabits

and with which it resonates. The pleasure of sensible experience thus provided a way of

exploring the human and developing knowledge of the senses.

Aisthêsis, once central to the aesthetic, thus marks an attempt to contend with the

recalcitrant otherness of bodily existence, which ultimately refuses any easy

incorporation into the increasingly abstracted logos. In this form, aesthetics attempts to

deal with the grossly sensuous body that escapes the abstractions of rationality, an

attempt that can never be fully successful, because the material alterity of the body can

never be fully encompassed. Instead, the question of aesthetics comes to maintain the

negativity marked by this impossibility. Matter resists the efforts to conceptualize it, and,

“[b]ecause the unmastered residue is at the heart of thinking, not safely outside its

boundaries, aesthetic theory, in its broadest sense, is reflection on the place of the
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unthinkable in thought” (94). This unmastered and unmasterable residue at the heart of

thought remains because thought is of a qualitatively different order than that of bare

material existence. In this way, aesthetics maintains the persistent nonidentity between

the concept and its object; while the rational mind may indeed emerge and be inseparable

from sensuous and bodily being, it cannot be reduced to that being, but neither can the

rational fully contain that bodily being. It is precisely this tension that lies at the heart of

aesthetics that allows it to express itself as the impossible science of the sensible.

Aesthetics maintains thought’s relation to the body, making central “the question of

whether thinking could remain oriented by what resists it, by what, in virtue of remaining

unredeemed in thought yet nevertheless never losing its claim to being properly thought’s

own, negates thought’s triumphal celebration of its autonomy” (94–5). In aesthetic

experience, thought is made to endlessly confront that which resists it; however this

confrontation and resistance are not characteristics inherent in thought and matter, but a

result of the social and historical development that conditions both.

However, when aisthêsis becomes contained in aesthetics in the eighteenth

century, the interchange between the subject and the object is increasingly repressed in

favor of creating a system of mastery in which the object must be dominated by the

knowing subject. This creates a transformation in the understanding of the senses that

attempts to subject the senses to the command of the rational. While aesthetics is often

conceived of as having been developed as a focus on sensuous experience that is

ostensibly available to all, the increasing emphasis on abstract knowledge as mastery

carries with it its own implicit political structures. Indeed, Kant explicitly draws an

analogy that equates the senses with the common people and knowledge with their
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masters: “The senses make no claim in the matter [of understanding]: they are like the

common people who—unless they are rabble (ignobile vulgus)—readily submit to their

superior, understanding, but still want to be heard” (25). In this political ordering of

sensation there is no room for those rebellious sensations, the sensations that overthrow

the intellect and move the individual, as in the resonance of harmony found in Pythagoras

would suggest. Instead, the senses themselves must be placed under the police order of a

particular division of human experience that makes the senses incapable of understanding

and makes knowledge a higher-order process that is capable of reigning over them. “This

requires that understanding rule, but without weakening sensibility (which in itself is

rabble, since it does not think); for without sensibility there would be no matter that could

be worked up for the use of legislative understanding” (24). In other words, that

unthinking rabble of the sensible is necessary and must be allotted their place in the

totality of experience, for without it there would be nothing for understanding to rule, but

this rabble must be kept in its place in the hierarchy of the human lifeworld.

It is thus in opposition to the originary Greek understanding of aisthêsis as a

system of reciprocity that Kant formulates the hierarchy of these senses in his

Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. In establishing knowledge in its rule over

the senses, Kant privileges vision because of its ability to establish the perceiving subject

over and against its objects. In contrast, those senses that are thought to function by

partaking in the world are located at the bottom of this hierarchy: “The three higher

senses depend on mechanical, the two lower senses on chemical action. – By touch,

hearing and sight we perceive objects (on the surface); by taste and smell we partake of

them (take them into ourselves)” (36). It is not simply that the senses of smell and of taste
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partake of the world, but, more centrally, in doing so they define a qualitatively different

relation to the world than those senses that can be portrayed as functioning through a

merely mechanical action. These senses make it impossible to conceive of the sensing

subject as one who stands over and against the world because the interaction that takes

place in the interchange between body and the world makes the senses unavoidably a

matter of being in the world. And for Kant, the inability of the subject constituted as

reason to stand firmly apart from the world causes it to be lost in the rabble of the senses.

To partake of the world, much less to resonate with and breathe in unison with the world,

as in the proper sense of aisthêsis, is already to lose the possibility of thought. One must

not, as it were, mingle with the rabble of the senses, lest one lose one’s power to rule

through knowledge.

The problem with the senses for Kant is that they dislodge knowledge from the

position of mastery, forcing the subject into a position where it is not the absolutely

active ruler over its own perceptions, but rather an interlocutor with the world. The

subject does not choose out and determine the objects of its sensuous world, but is

equally chosen out by them. However, for Kant, this attests to a defect within the sensing

subject. “The ineradicable passive element in sensibility is really the source of all the evil

things said about it. Man’s inner perfection consists in his having control over the

exercise of all his powers, so that he can use them as he freely chooses” (24). Thus,

within the depths of sensuous experience itself is the perpetual threat to the rational,

autonomous Enlightenment individual who acts in freedom through the free exercise of

his powers, for one does not determine one’s own sensuous experiences nor can one

simply apply them to a self-arrogated end, but one is beholden to them, limited by them,
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determined by them. Our sensuous experiences and the limits they place on the purely

rational and abstract being remind us that we are then not the self-possessed masters of

ourselves, but rather the result of mechanisms which we do not and perhaps cannot fully

grasp through our rational faculties. The senses thus point us towards the limits of

Enlightenment rationality, however, they do not do so by emphasizing the ontological

excesses which escape them. Rather, the senses are the space of the in-between, where it

is possible for the subject to, for a moment, encounter the emergence of itself through the

interplay between subject and object. This emergence is not a matter of the ontogenic, nor

is it one that purely relates to the subject itself, rather, to return to Sylvia Wynter, it is

sociogenic, which is to say that it takes place in the space between an assumed

ontological purity and the interiority of subjectivism, the space of the social.

The emergence of Man was the result of a mutation in the order of knowledge

brought about by the encounter with the Americas and the shift from a feudal Church

based episteme to one that focused on the limits of Man, an order based on the aesthetic.

Contrary to the prevalent assumption that aesthetics is a fundamental and universal

characteristic of the human—that indeed, it is what comes to define the human as such—

it becomes apparent that the aesthetic itself is part of a historical formation that has

determined the possibilities of knowledge in our contemporary moment. This order of

knowledge has served as the basis for instituting the colonial ordering of the world

through its imposition upon the alternate epistemic models it has encountered. All alterity

of knowing is thus reduced to the order of the same, ultimately erasing the alternate

relations to the human lifeworld that the West encountered through its colonial ventures.

The aesthetics formulated in the eighteenth century has thus resided at the heart of the
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coloniality of knowing that serves to ceaselessly reduce the other to the order of the same.

However, its history poses another possible aesthetics, and another possible form of

knowing, one that is not founded in the visual metaphor of the penetrating gaze of the

viewer standing over and against the work of art in distanced contemplation, but on the

metaphor of the breath which is shared by the subject and the object and thus insists on

the mutual interaction and limits between them.

Foucault’s Order of Things ends by noting that the epistemic regime of Man may

well come to an end with the arrangements of knowledge that led to its emergence. “If

those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared,” Foucault writes, “one can

certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the

sea” (387). This metaphor of the edge between land and sea is repeated when illustrating

the limits of certain structures within a particular epistemic formation. “Marxism exists in

nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere

else” (262). It is not a question of the truth value of Marxism, but a matter of the

underlying structures of knowledge which allow the articulation of differing discourses

and their valuation as true or false. To those living before the nineteenth century, who

stood in a relation to their world as similar to ours as that of a fish is to that of the

creatures of the land, the analytic structures and the theoretical moves that were

fundamental to Marx, including his particular understanding of the practice of labor,

would have had no purchase, they would have been unable to breathe. And one can

imagine with hope those creatures of the future who would inhabit the space we now

occupy but view our current structures of knowledge, along with the system of
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inequalities that it institutes, with the same astonishment and estrangement that we

encounter those that went before us.

Prior mutations in the epistemic formation occurred through epochal

transformations in the material conditions of a society that further transformed the

relations within art as the totality of human ways of doing and making. The invention of

the money form led to an episteme that functioned through increasing abstraction, which

enabled the representative regime of art that was capable of separating art as a particular

form that captured the universal essence of a thing. The colonial encounter at the end of

the fifteenth century served as the basis for the de-Godding of Western European

modernity, and a shift from an order in which the knowledge derived from the senses can

be guaranteed by the divine. The development of a system of knowledge and a system of

relating to the world is defined through the aesthetic. In our current moment, those

conditions of increasing technologization that marks late capitalism too, might be seen as

coming to institute a new epistemic structure, and a new relation between art, as the

totality of social ways of doing and making, and the social whole. While Foucault thus

illustrates the difficulty of recognizing, much less inhabiting, another epistemic order, it

seems possible to locate in our own historical moment the tension between the dominant

aesthetic ordering of knowledge and an emerging order centered on ontological being,

what might, perhaps, be termed an order of the affective which marks an attempt to

articulate human praxis while passing by the entire structure of cognition.

It is perhaps only in these moments of disjuncture and transition that the

functionings of the dominant episteme become visible. From its center, one can only see

what the structure sees, but never the structure of seeing itself. And it is for this reason
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that the older view of aisthêsis as breath and interchange might offer a means of viewing

these shifts from askew. And Marx, too, that fish that seems to some increasingly out of

water in the ever-more rarefied air of our own current moment, might provide the

vestigial structures from which we might discover another way of breathing, another way

of surviving in and relating to the world. Aisthêsis, with its insistence on the mediating

power of the breath; between the subject and the object, is the irrational kernel within the

thoroughly rationalized shell of late capitalism. But this irrationality should not be

understood as merely the lack of the rational, but is, at its heart, the very limit of the

structure that constitutes the rational itself. The concept is always, as it were, inadequate

to its object, and it is the space of this inadequacy that sensuous perception pries open,

showing the limit to the established structure of knowledge and, through this exceedance,

gesturing towards another possible structuring.

It is this fidelity of the object that exceeds its conception that the aisthêsis of

antiquity might return to us. In the current historical moment, aesthetics finds its truest

form not in art, but in art’s undoing. If art in its broadest sense, is that activity which

takes some material from the world and fits it together with some other material,

aesthetics might find its place not in the articulation of material, but in the disarticulation

of that being who takes up the material in the moment of beauty in which the subject is

displaced, beside itself. And have we not all felt this power in the experience of a beauty

that renders us breathless—a beauty, that for a fleeting moment, restores the breath of the

object by taking it away from us? What would it mean to take seriously our sensuous

interchange with the world, not just in the mode of vision that makes the world an object
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for our knowledge, but in terms of that much older formation of aisthêsis? Can we restore

the breath of aisthêsis to the thoroughly reified and dead objects of late capitalism?
 History and Class Aisthêsis: Studies in Marxist Affects

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class

struggles.”
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 473

“The forming of the five senses is the labour of the entire history of the
world down to the present.”
Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 87

Contemporary cultural studies is decidedly marked by what has been termed “the

affective turn,” which increasingly focuses on the micro-political structures that produce

knowledges, desires and affects in an attempt to go beyond a presumed overemphasis on

structure and discourse. The proponents of affect theory structure their discussions of

their own mode of theorizing as an attempt to deny structure at every turn. Gregory

Seigworth and Melissa Gregg’s “field-defining collection” on affect studies, The Affect

Theory Reader, emphasizes the rhizomatic structure of affect theory, noting that there is

“no single, generalizable theory of affect: not yet, and (thankfully) there never will be. …

[t]here can only ever be infinitely multiple iterations of affect and theories of affect:

theories as diverse and singularly delineated as their own highly particular encounters

with bodies, affects, worlds” (4). The nebulous structure of affect theory is explicitly

made to encompass such varied proponents as Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, Walter

Benjamin, Paul Gilroy, and Roland Barthes (5). However, this retroactive subsumption of

91
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a broad range of thinkers makes it appear that anyone who writes or has ever written

about these “highly particular encounters with bodies, affects, worlds” can be enlisted

into the ranks of affect theory. Indeed, it becomes rather difficult to think of any theorist

who would not meet such broad criteria, causing the unstructured category of affect

theory to become applicable to any kind of theory at all. Affect theory thus comes to

describe such an unspecific specificity as to obfuscate as much as clarify the category it

attempts to define.

Despite the extremely broad range of theories that have been subsumed into the

category of affect theory it is interesting to note the general neglect of the Marxist

tradition, with the exception of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. This oversight has

often served to decontextualize the foundations of this renewed attention to affect. As

Benjamin Noys stresses in The Persistence of the Negative, the post-structuralist

philosophers who serve as the base of the recent developments in affect theory, including

Deleuze, Lyotard and Baudrillard, were in fact in deep conversation with the Marxist

tradition, despite their unorthodox approaches. “Heretical as they no doubt are, and they

each make much of this”, writes Noys, “we should not forget that these are Marxist

heresies” (7). These three thinkers come together in what Noys terms ‘affirmationist

theory’, which affirms the tendencies within capitalism that work against the structures of

capital. They work from the basis of Marx’s contention that the limit to capital is capital

itself, and each attempts to push through this limit by mobilizing this immanent power of

deterritorialization. However, the structure of contemporary affect theory, which takes

much from Deleuze and his particular form of affirmationism, tends to disregard any

relationship to Marxism and political economy in an attempt to present a more

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ontologically primary relationship to material existence. Whereas in Marx the

deterritorialization immanent in the forces of living labor was against the prevailing

structure of capitalist production, in the work of many affect theorists this

deterritorialization occurs in the sheer excess of materiality and desire as such, over and

against the structurings of human discourse and consciousness. To mobilize this excess

against capital would be to give it a structure that does not inhere in the object itself, and

so a structure of resistance is avoided in the name of a fidelity to the object and its excess.

In this way, Marxism takes on the status of a disavowed history that helps to trace the

limits of much contemporary affect theory.

Not only are the thinkers who serve as the basis of affect theory deeply influenced

by the Marxist tradition, but in many cases the problems highlighted by affect theory are

also addressed by Marx himself, though often within the context of an older German

philosophical tradition. Reading across Marx’s early works makes evident a link between

class struggle and the perceptual and sensuous apparatuses of the human subject,

concerns which are also central to theories of affect. In this way, Marx highlights the

historical development of the senses and makes them a locus of social struggle. If “[t]he

history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (473), as Marx

famously claims in The Communist Manifesto, is read alongside instead of against his

earlier statement in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts that “[t]he forming of

the five senses is the labour of the entire history of the world down to the present” (87), it

becomes clear that the development of human perception is intimately linked to the

development of society through class struggle. While Hegel’s Phenomenology of the

Spirit begins with sense certainty as the starting point for the dialectical mediation
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leading to the realization of the spirit, Marx’s Capital, aptly referred to by Adorno as the

“phenomenology of the anti-spirit” (356), begins with an analysis of the commodity form

as the structure that disarticulates any possibility of a simple sense certainty. Whereas for

Hegel the social constitution of the subject occurs at the point of conflict between one

individual and another in the master-slave dialectic, in Marx this inherent sociality is

already an integral part of sense certainty, for there is no human sense before social

action and therefore the senses themselves are understood to be thoroughly and

inescapably social.

Furthermore, while particular strands of affect theory focus on affect as giving

access to an inherent vitalist power that exists in the exceedance of ontological being over

any mode of consciousness, Marx emphasizes the way that human vital power is always

in dialectical tension with the social structure into which it is integrated. In the movement

between the “history of all hitherto existing society” and “the entire history of the world”

we see the intersection between social and natural history which resides in the play

between the process of class struggle and the development of the senses. Marx explains

in the introduction to the first German edition of Capital that in his analysis, “the

evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history”

(10). This relationship is further developed in a footnote to Capital that draws a parallel

to Darwin’s work on evolution: “Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature‘s

Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve

as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive

organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve

equal attention?” (372). In this sense, the development of human modes of production,
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which is deeply integrated with human sensuous activity, is analogous to the evolution of

the animal in natural history, and the vitalist power of the human animal cannot be

separated from its immanent sociality and displaced into the realm of ontology.

While The Affect Theory Reader performatively attempts to anarrange and

problematize the entire process of categorization, I nevertheless, perhaps somewhat

obstinately, organize my discussion of contemporary theories of affect into two related

categories: the affect theory developed out of the Italian Autonomist and Marxist feminist

traditions specifically as exemplified in the early work of Hardt and Negri; and the affect

theory that is more deeply influenced by the work of Baruch Spinoza and Henri Bergson,

primarily through Gilles Deleuze, and developed by Brian Massumi. These are

undoubtedly ‘diverse and singularly delineated’ as Seigworth and Gregg describe, but

they also nonetheless belong to and have inspired distinct theoretical traditions which can

be usefully delineated from each other and the broader field of affect studies. While there

are some clear parallels between these two traditions, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

are much more focused on the Marxist analytic of labor, while Massumi mobilizes

ontology against consciousness as a means of problematizing the contemporary

conceptualization of both identity and the modern subject. I focus on these two branches

of affect theory in particular in order to examine how affect is being restructured under

the regime of late capitalist political economy and to propose a more primarily Marxist

understanding of affect that attends to the inherent sociality of the human, which might,

indeed, have taken that older name of the aesthetic.

While Hardt and Negri argue that the social formation of late capitalism has

shifted from being structured primarily around material industrial labor to becoming
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increasingly structured around immaterial labor—a structuring of labor that focuses on

the production of knowledge, information, affect and communication—I want to

problematize this formulation by considering the increased proliferation of exploitative

forms of material labor. While their emphasis on the form of immaterial or affective labor

is problematic, tending to obscure the manner in which the production of immaterial

labor is underscored by the continued proliferation of exploitative material labor, they

also argue for a renewed focus on the Marxist concept of labor and, more particularly, the

processes through which capitalism structures and valorizes particular forms of labor so

as to maximize the extraction of surplus value. Rather than focusing on immaterial labor,

one might instead examine how the conditions of late capitalism restructure the division

between immaterial and material labor according to the needs of flexible accumulation.

These new divisions function to incorporate the production of affect into the totality of

late capitalist production. Hardt and Negri thus serve as a basis for my consideration of

the historically shifting divisions of labor under late capitalism—divisions that are made

not just between intellectual and manual labor, but additionally between the capitalist

valorization of reified labor and the self-valorization of living labor.

Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual focuses on how the materiality contained by

structure, in Massumi’s case the affective body, simultaneously always exceeds that

structure. Massumi employs affect in order to posit the resistance of the sheer materiality

of the ontological body that is conceived of as escaping the structuring forces of

discourse, much as Hardt and Negri pose living labor against the structures of capitalist

production; however, I am rather wary of a resistance that can be located in an ontology

that evades the social. Perhaps paradoxically, since affect theory often portrays itself as
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thoroughly poststructuralist, what I take from both Massumi and Hardt and Negri is the

emphasis on the processes that create the differential structures of valorization through

which capital generates surplus. This structure emerges neither as the endless excess of

free flowing intensities, nor as the solidified form of what is simply given, but in the

mediation that occurs between these flows and their arrest. I want to consider capitalism

itself not as a given structure, but rather as a continual process of enstructuration that

attempts at every moment to displace its own internal contradictions. To consider

capitalism merely either as a structure or as an effect of structure would be to reify it, to

accept its own false presentation of itself as an immutable and timeless object. But so too

is the attempt to consider only the sheer materiality which seems to exceed or to escape

structure, as though this escape were not also conditioned by the historical and material

conditions produced in and through the structure of capitalism itself. In other words, it is

not enough to posit the efficacy of that which escapes structure, without understanding

how that escape is itself in many cases structured and produced by the totality of the

capitalist mode of production.

Indeed, one might say that all structures are always more than the simple

crystallization of a particular set of relationships; structures are also always the process of

maintaining and solidifying that structure against the entropic non-structure of the actual

material forces they shape and contain. Capitalism itself is a structure in process that

must continually contain the living labor through which it functions and yet which always

threatens to overtake it. As Marx argues in the Grundrisse, “in so far as capital. . . enters

into the process with not-objectified, but rather living labour. . . it is initially this

qualitative difference of the substance in which it exists from the form in which it now
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also exists as labour. It is the process of this differentiation and of its suspension, in

which capital itself becomes a process” (298). The process-oriented nature of capital

arises precisely because of its simultaneous need to make use of and to contain living

labor. This living labor serves as a foundation for capital, but it is a foundation that

always threatens to topple the capitalist structure built upon it. “Labour is the yeast

thrown into it [capital], which starts it fermenting. On the one side, the objectivity in

which it exists has to be worked on, i.e. consumed by labour; on the other side, the mere

subjectivity of labour as a mere form has to be suspended, and labour has to be

objectified in the material of capital” (298). It is the suspension of the subjectivity

involved in living labor that must be contained in order to produce capital as the

crystalized and dead labor contained in a material object. The central problem that

confronts critical theory in our current moment is one of how to conceptualize and

mobilize living labor against the structure of capital in the moment of capitalism’s ever-

increasing domination of the subject.

The recent turn to affect theory must be read in the context of late capitalism’s

historical and material development. One might conjecture that the emergence of affect

theory has rather less to do with a sudden flash of insight that illuminates the immanent

exceedance of the object over the structure of human sensory perception than with late

capitalism’s increasing domination over the human sensorium. The truth of the object is

itself always conditioned by the historical and material conditions in which this truth is

formulated. If in the regime of late capitalist knowledge production the truth of

materiality becomes defined by its ability to escape the structure of human knowledge,

one must not be tempted to assume that the inner truth of the object has been revealed.
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The mutation that has occurred is not on the side of the object but in the structure of truth

which seeks to encompass the object. Indeed, despite the emphasis on difference in

postmodernity, late capitalism is marked by the incredibly strict enforcement of certain

patterns of homogeneity that emerge from capitalism’s precise production and

management of difference which serves both to produce surplus value and to reproduce

the conditions of production. What makes affect visible as a particular field of inquiry is

the transformation of social and political relations under late capitalism that has made

affect increasingly prominent as a problem. In this chapter I attempt to perform a

dialectic political economic critique of affect and an affective critique of political

economy. In this sense, the emergence of these new discourses on affect is intricately

linked to political economy, and is a problem that, to refer to Marx’s Contribution to the

Critique of Political Economy, one might hope poses its own solution in the process of

formation: “mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at

the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the

material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of

formation” (5).

The Contradictions of Postmodernity

The Affect Theory Reader avoids periodizing affect theory in favor of naturalizing

it as an immanent understanding of human experience that could be developed at any

point, regardless of the conditions of possibility of its emergence. This conceptualization

of affect theory as a rhizomatic discourse on any of the diverse encounters of the material

body problematically effaces the historicity of affect theory itself, making it seem
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possible to integrate writings from nearly any period into its discursive regime. However,

there are historical, social and material conditions to the types of immanence posed by

affect theory which cannot simply be brushed aside by employing an ontologically

presumed immanence of human experience. I want to instead locate affect theory as a

development deeply embedded in the social and historical conditions of late capitalism,

which will then allow for a consideration of how this formation of theory both is

produced by and intervenes in these conditions. To locate a phenomenon historically is

not to claim that it is false, as though truth itself were ahistorical, rather it is to examine it

as it is produced within a structure of truth and falsehood that is always determined by

more than a pure and abstract form of knowing. One would hardly be remiss in situating

affect theory in the structure of late capitalism, especially given its relatively recent

formation as a particular regime of discourse, as the recently coined term the ‘affective

turn’ would imply. I insist on understanding affect theory as coextensive with the phase

of late capitalism to examine it as a problem that is set forth by the historical and material

conditions of late capitalism, with its solution still being formed in the development of

these conditions. In this section I examine how the transition into postmodernity

restructures political economy so that affect becomes legible as a particular site of

production.

The close of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s marks a fundamental mutation

in the capitalist mode of production which is described by David Harvey in The

Condition of Postmodernity as the shift from a Fordist-Keynesian model of capitalist

production to a regime of flexible accumulation. In Harvey’s analysis, the Fordist-

Keynesian model of capitalist production with its centralized system of top-down

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integration becomes less and less capable of containing the inherent contradictions it

produces. Flexible accumulation functions as a means of displacing these contradictions

through the restructuring of production to exploit increasingly fluid labor and production

processes: “It has entrained rapid shifts in the patterning of uneven development, both

between sectors and between geographical regions. . . It has also entailed a new round of

what I shall call ‘time—space compression’ in the capitalist world – the time horizons of

both private and public decision-making have shrunk” (147). Furthermore, these

transformations in the mode of production lead to a concomitant shift in the social

perception of time and space which transforms cultural production. The Fordist

structuring of the factory “fragmented tasks and distributed them in space so as to

maximize efficiency and minimize the friction of flow in production. In effect, he used a

certain form of spatial organization to accelerate the turnover time of capital in

production” (266). This fragmentation of space and time in the production process leads

to a crisis of representation that is expressed in the formal play of modernist cultural

production that deliberately denaturalizes structures of space and time. While modernism

was the cultural accompaniment to the Fordist-Keynesian structuring of capitalist

production, postmodernity in Harvey’s view similarly represents cultural production

organized under the conditions of accelerated fragmentation imposed by the regime of

flexible accumulation.

Like Harvey, Fredric Jameson links the cultural level of postmodernism with the

transformation of the modes of capitalist production. Jameson expands upon Ernest

Mandel’s periodization of capitalism by examining how these separate phases are also

linked to the forms of cultural production. According to Mandel, primary phases of

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capitalism are determined by the apparatuses employed in the processes of production.

These three primary stages are: the “machine production of steam-driven motors since

1950; machine production of electric and combustion motors since the 90s of the 19th

century; machine production of electronic and nuclear-powered apparatuses since the 40s

of the 20th century” (18). Each of these technological developments allows for a

reorganization of social and economic structure that displaces the systemic contradictions

inherent to the capitalist mode of production. “These technologies are both productive of

new types of commodities and instrumental in opening up new world spaces, thus

‘shrinking’ the globe and reorganizing capitalism according to a new scale” (166). The

spatial expansion and reorganization of capitalism can be seen historically as one of the

primary means of displacing capitalism’s internal contradiction. Thus we have the

development of “steam technology for the moment of national capitalism; electricity and

the combustion engine for the moment of imperialism; atomic energy and the cybernetic

for our own moment of multinational capitalism and globalization, which has come to be

labeled by postmodernity” (165-66). Additionally, each of these given technologies and

organizations of capitalism correspond to a particular cultural dominant, respectively, the

stages of realism, modernism and postmodernism. The modes of production, the spatial

organization of capitalism and the production of culture all exist in a tense relationship,

though this relationship is more complex than the necessarily brief and schematic

presentation provided here.

It becomes evident that the mode of production produces far more than merely the

material object that is to be consumed; it also produces the entire ways of life and

structures of perception of those living in the society supported by this mode of

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production. It is precisely this character of production that makes it central in any social

analysis, especially those analyses that attempt to examine the interiority of affect in the

moment of postmodernity. As Marx notes in the Grundrisse, “the result of the process of

production and realization is, above all, the reproduction and new production of the

relation of capital and labour itself, of capitalist and worker. This social relation,

production relation, appears in fact as an even more important result of the process than

its material results” (458). The dialectically expanding geographical scale and the

changes in cultural production that result from the production of new commodities can be

thought of as means through which the relationship between capital and labor is

constantly reproduced and reinforced. In other words, the central contradiction within the

capitalist mode of production between labor and capital is re-elaborated under new

conditions that temporarily displace the resolution of this contradiction—a resolution that

can ultimately only be found in the dissolution of capitalism itself. The extraordinary

dynamism of capitalism can be traced to the constant need to contain and displace this

inherent contradiction, for if capitalism ever ceased to be mobile it would be overrun by

the crises it produces. The expanding spatial scale and shifting forms of cultural

production under each stage of capital, and multiple structural mutations in the capitalist

mode of production further transform capital’s ability to encapsulate this contradiction.

Late capitalism’s global scope introduces new contradictions that must further be

displaced in order to ensure the continued production of surplus value. Historically,

capitalism required expansion as a means of displacing its own internal contradictions: in

order to “preserve itself, to remain the same, to ‘be,’ that society too must constantly

expand, progress, advance its frontiers, not respect any limit, not remain the same. . .
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bourgeois society. . . would no sooner reach a ceiling, would no sooner cease to have

noncapitalist areas available outside itself, than its own concept would force its self-

liquidation” (26). While it is important to note that capitalism has always functioned as a

world system that differentially incorporated non-capitalist regions by making their

alternate modes of production operative to capitalism’s production of surplus, there is a

qualitative difference under late capitalism where these external processes are fully

subsumed. Hardt and Negri view late capitalism as the real subsumption of society as a

whole, leading to the generalization of the factory production. They describe this process

with reference to Marx’s conception of the difference between formal and real

subsumption, noting that late capitalism marks the real subsumption of formerly

noncapitalist spaces. “In the previous phase . . . capital operated a hegemony over social

production, but there still remained numerous production processes that originated

outside of capital as leftovers from the precapitalist era,” however in the current phase,

“[c]apital subsumes these foreign processes formally, bringing them under the reign of

capitalist relations” (15). In the late capitalist phase of the real subsumption, capital no

longer has an outside and the foreign processes of production have been transformed and

integrated into capitalist production. Late capitalism marks the fullest integration of

formerly noncapitalist spaces into the structure of the capitalist system, effectively

eliminating the outsides of capital and heightening capitalism’s existing contradictions.

This does not mean that the whole world is integrated into a simple homogeneity,

particularly when we consider capital itself is an engine that produces systems of

difference; rather the differences are integrated into the complex homogeneity of the

capitalist totality.
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The imperialist phase of capitalism employed the colonies to solve the problem of

the overproduction of capital by being making them productive through investment of

surplus capital and the extraction of labor and raw materials. This relation between

capitalism proper and its outsides resulted in what David Harvey has termed the “spatial

fix” which allowed for a displacement of the problem of overproduction to the colonies

as areas only formally subsumed under capitalism. Under the imperialist phase of

capitalism, the spatial fix functioned as a means of ensuring the valorization of surplus in

the center, effectively underwriting the continued smooth functioning of capitalism.

Harvey’s spatial fix focuses on the way that “[s]patial displacement entails the absorption

of excess capital and labour in geographical expansion” (183). The disappearance of the

spatial outsides of capitalism through the real subsumption of formerly noncapitalist

regions results in the attempt to create new spatial fixes through the fragmentation of

space within capitalism itself. The global expansion of late capitalism leads to the

heightening of crisis and the transformation of capital’s modes of displacing that crisis.

Marx argues in the Communist Manifesto that the bourgeoisie has two primary means of

overcoming the crises of capital: “On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of

productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more

thorough exploitation of the old ones. This is to say, by paving the way for more

extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are

prevented” (478). Short of the destruction of the productive forces of capital itself and

without new markets to conquer, late capitalism becomes increasingly reliant upon the

ever more thorough exploitation of previous markets, which occurs under late capitalism
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through the increased production of differences that allows for increases in the

differential valuation of human life.

Hardt and Negri problematically emphasize the homogeneity of the factory

production as one means of establishing a more thorough exploitation of previous

markets, which allows them to posit the concept of immaterial labor. They initially seem

cognizant of the new systems of differentiation, noting that “[w]ith the expansion of its

productive bases in the Third World, the shift of certain types of production from North

to South, the greater compatibility and permeability of markets, and the facilitated

networks of monetary flows, capital has achieved a truly global position” (16); however,

this recognition of the different types of production and the geographical distinction

between the global North and South are effaced in favor of the globally homogenizing

force of the factory form. They expand the generalization of the factory regime

throughout the globe, assuming that the factory regime operates on a mode of

homogenization and that resistance would likewise be universalized: “As the specifically

capitalist form of exploitation moves outside the factory and invests all forms of social

production, the refusal of this exploitation is equally generalized across the social terrain”

(16). However, the generalization posed in Labor of Dionysus seems to miss some rather

important distinctions in the different forms through which factory production comes to

structure the totality of social life. Hardt and Negri note that “[t]he generalization of the

factory regime has been accompanied by a change in the nature and quality of the

laboring processes. To an ever-greater extent, labor in our societies is tending toward

immaterial labor—intellectual, affective, and techno-scientific labor, the labor of the

cyborg” (10), but they problematically employ their analysis to the global structure of
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capital, stretching their analysis of immaterial labor and the community implied by “our

societies” to encompass those incorporated into the regime of late capitalism in the most

material way.

This homogenization of the global structure of real subsumption leads to the

effacement of the very real differences in the late capitalist production process. I want to

emphasize, contra Hardt and Negri, that late capitalism functions not only as a system of

abstract homogenization, but also as a homogenization that produces and functions

through the organization and structuring of difference in a total system. The problem with

the generalized factory regime and the positing of immaterial labor is precisely the

continuation of actual factory labor that has not been abstractly generalized and the very

material labor that takes place in these spaces. To refer to a concrete example, while

Apple’s programmers in Silicon Valley and Apple’s workers at Foxconn factories in

China are integrated into the same economic system, even producing the very same

product, there is no small difficulty in reconciling the differences between the two under

the banner of immaterial labor. Material labor is not simply being reduced under the

conditions of late capitalist production, but it is also continually being displaced and

hidden. Hardt and Negri argue that “[t]he increasingly complex networks of laboring

cooperation, the integration of caring labor across the spectrum of production, and the

computerization of a wide range of laboring processes create the contemporary passage in

the nature of labor” (9), which may indeed be true in certain sectors of the economy and

certain regions of the globe, however, one must not forget the increasingly hidden

continuation of material labor. What resists the computerization of laboring processes is

capital’s ability to reduce the value of human labor to below the value of the fixed capital
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necessary for production. The case of Foxconn in China illustrates capital’s ability to

reduce the exchange value of human life to an absolute minimum, a level approaching

sheer disposability through the organization of spatial difference, exploiting the

differences in the regulations between states. And capital produces these conditions not

merely through the generalization of the factory regime of production, but also through

the production and dissemination of differences. In this sense, one might repurpose the

concept of immaterial labor and employ it to describe precisely that which is made

immaterial in Hardt and Negri’s theory of immaterial labor: material labor itself. This

grossly material labor is made immaterial under late capitalism through its valuation as

next to nothing, and through its spectralization in the structure of Western society.

The factory regime integrates the production of differences as a means of

producing differentially valued human labor which allows for the continued production

of surplus. Harvey usefully gestures not only to the homogenization produced by the

factory regime but also to capitalism’s production of new differential spaces. “This

‘spatial fix’ . . . to the overaccumulation problem entails the production of new spaces

within which capitalist production can proceed” (183). One might say generally that the

moment of imperialist capitalism involved the formal subsumption of noncapitalist areas

of the world so that they were integrated into the totality of capitalist production without

their own modes of production being fully capitalist; however, the moment of late

capitalism can be seen to produce spaces within capital that function differentially with

respect to the generalized capitalist production, and it is precisely in these spaces of

excess exploitation, both included in and excluded from the overall structure of capitalist

relations, that the apparent immateriality of material labour is produced. These spaces of
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excess exploitation are the exception which allow for the rule of generalized capitalism to

function. It becomes evident that postmodernism is involved in not only the development

of an immaterial form of labor, but also and more centrally in the necessity of containing

the gross materiality of labor under the structure of late capitalism. The global expansion

of capitalism has greatly reduced the spaces external to the capitalist mode of production,

leading to the necessity of new methods of displacing the contradiction of surplus

production which comes, at least in part, through the increased production of difference

within capitalism itself.

The production of differential spaces results in the acceleration of uneven

development not only between nations, but within individual nations as multinational

capitalism reorganizes national space as a means of extracting surplus value. While, on

the one hand, capitalism becomes global, its structure breaks down the national focus of

capitalist production, allowing for the production of differential spaces within capitalist

nations to become productive to the structure of capitalism. Armand Mattelart notes in

“Real Politik and Utopias of Universal Bonds” that this transformation of national space

and increased uneven development within the nation often leads to the formations of

consumption communities that differ more significantly within a nation than across

nations: “There are more similarities between groups living in certain neighborhoods of

Milan, Paris, Stockholm, Sao Paulo and New York than between a Manhattan and a

Bronx inhabitant. . . Thus segmentation and globalization appear to bet the two facets of

the same process” (551). The spatial fix under late capitalism functions differently than in

the conditions of imperial capitalism, with the increased production of spaces of

differential accumulation and exploitation within rather than across national boundaries.
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Nevertheless, the fragmentation of late capitalism should be thought of as a continuation

of the larger economic logics of capitalism, with the necessity of containing the central

contradiction between living and abstract labor. Capital itself increasingly exploits and

produces the fragmentation of time and space as a means of producing surplus value. In

this sense, capital becomes ever more deeply invested with the production and the

structuration of difference.

This apparent emphasis on difference and fragmentation under the late capitalist

mode of production cannot simply be read as resistance, but must take into account the

increased totalization of society as a whole. Even as affect theory focuses on the process

of the fragmentation and dissolution of the subject, this process should be understood

within the totality of capitalist relations. Harvey emphasizes that “what is most

interesting about the current situation is the way in which capitalism is becoming ever

more tightly organized through dispersal, geographic mobility, and flexible responses to

labour markets, labour processes, and consumer markets, all accompanied by hefty doses

of institutional, product, and technological innovation” (159). Capital itself is a mobile

process of organizing similarities and differences so as to produce the conditions

necessary for the extraction of surplus value. The increase in difference is not necessarily

counter to the structure of capitalism but may well be produced by capital as a means of

ensuring the continued functioning of the capitalist mode of production. The apparent gap

between homogeneity and difference under the capitalist ordering of things is, in the final

analysis, not so great after all, for capital functions through processes that entail both.

The differences produced by capital are differences without alterity, already contained by

the logics of capitalism that produces them. Thus theory itself, in its attempts to conceive
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a system that is truly an alterity to capitalism is caught between the increasingly

fragmented nature of cultural activity, and the necessity of considering the political and

economic totality.

Objectified and Living Labour

While both dominant strands of affect theory are heavily influenced by Deleuze,

Hardt and Negri also attempt to maintain a firmer connection to the Marxist tradition, and

despite the various problems that occur in their writing, I want to examine their return to

Marx’s concept of labor as a means of disrupting a reified understanding of labor that ties

it too simply into the processes of political economy. If the various expansions and

mutations in the specifically capitalist form of production occur in order to displace its

internal contradictions, living labor and its role in the problem of producing surplus out

of the exchange of ostensible equivalents is the originary contradiction which generates

the entire system of displacements. In Labor of Dionysus, Hardt and Negri take up

Marx’s concept of living labor from The Grundrisse, opposing it to reified, dead labor.

“The living labor of this [social] subject is its joy, the affirmation of its own power.

‘Labour is the living, form-giving fire,’ Marx wrote, ‘it is the transitoriness of things,

their temporality, as their formation by living time.’ The affirmation of labor in this sense

is the affirmation of life itself” (xii). Living labor thus functions as the affirmation of

human life, and it is only the alienation of labor under the conditions of capitalist

production that turns it into an antagonistic power that stands over and against the human

subject. Living labor exceeds and resists the processes of abstraction which are inherent

to the production of capital. For Hardt and Negri, “living labor not only refuses its
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abstraction in the process of capitalist valorization and the production of surplus value,

but also poses an alternative schema of valorization, the self-valorization of labor” (6).

The living labor that valorizes itself outside of the circuit of capitalist production is one

source of resistance that disrupts the reified structures of capitalist valorization and

production, opening the possibility of producing new articulations within the social, for

this valorization of living labor is neither an individual activity nor an inherent

ontological property. It offers instead an alternative social schema.

What is central is the sociality of living labor, which cannot be linked merely to

the vitalist understanding of life itself. This is rather contrary to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s

Provincializing Europe, where he structures his discussion of the relationship between

capitalist abstraction and life in much the same way as Hardt and Negri, but ultimately

claims that Marx founds his concept of resistance on the inherent power of life itself.

Chakrabarty argues that in the distinction between objectified labor and living labor the

“critical point is that the labor that is abstracted in the capitalist’s search for a common

measure of human activity is living. Marx would ground resistance to capital in this

apparently mysterious factor called ‘life’” (60). Chakrabarty’s reading centers on life as a

ground which resists the structuring of capital through an ontological existence that

exceeds the structuring inherent in the capitalist extraction of labor. “In this vitalist

understanding, life, in all its biological/conscious capacity for willful activity. . . is the

excess that capital, for all its disciplinary procedures, always needs but can never quite

control or domesticate” (60). In this reading, the undifferentiated and abstract realm of

life itself is made to stand as the point of resistance, which ultimately displaces the

central role of the social. In the course of this argument, Chakrabarty overemphasizes the
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vitalist reading of Marx while largely disregarding the inherent sociality of Marx’s

concept of human life. Chakrabarty notes that “Marx’s language and his biological

metaphors often reveal a deep influence of nineteenth century vitalism . . . These vital

forces are the ground of resistance to capital. They are the abstract living labor—a sum of

muscles, nerves, and consciousness/will—which, according to Marx, capital posits as its

contradictory starting point” (60). But, despite the presence of these biological

metaphors, the starting point for Marx is not in these abstract vital forces, but in the

structure of human labor. The attempt to localize resistance in life itself effaces the actual

social contradiction between the capitalist and the laborer.

While Chakrabarty recognizes the problems of displacing resistance into the

vagaries of an undifferentiated understanding of life, he attempts to address them by

turning life itself into an inherent struggle. Chakrabarty employs Hegel’s expression of

life as “‘a standing fight’ against the possibility of dismemberment with which death

threatens the unity of the living body. Life, in Marx’s analysis of capital, is similarly a

‘standing fight’ against the process of abstraction that is constitutive of the category

‘labor’” (61). Chakrabarty poses life against labor; but for Marx it is not simply life and

labor that are arrayed in a system of contradiction. Against the dead labor embodied in

the commodity, Marx poses not simply living labor, but living labor. And this living

labor is always arrayed in an ensemble of social relations, and thus always exceeds a

simple conception of life itself. Chakrabarty further emphasizes Marx’s employment of

Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in an attempt to distinguish human life in Marx. If the

master-servant relation represents the appropriation of an alien will, “[t]his will could not

belong to animals, for animals could not be part of the politics of recognition that the
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Hegelian master-slave relation assumed . . . [t]his embodied and peculiarly human

‘will’—reflected in ‘the many-sided play of muscles’—refuses to bend to the ‘technical

subordination’ under which capital constantly seeks to place the worker” (61). However,

in The Phenomenology of the Spirit, this moment of the master-slave dialectic is the

originary moment of the social. It is, even for Hegel, not a “peculiarly human will” that

distinguishes the human from the animal, but its inherent sociality. As Marx notes in his

theses on Feuerbach, “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single

individual.”—it is, one might add, also not in an abstract conception of life itself—“In its

reality it is the ensemble of the social relations” (145). Living labor should then not be

read as an ontological phenomenon, but as always already a social fact, and it is

ultimately in the human essence, which is to say in the realm of the social that Marx

posits resistance. Human life, the life capable of engaging in living labor is always

already a social life. The life of resistance is not more fundamental, not more given, not

more ontologically real, and it does not gain its power from any of these supposed

characteristics. Rather, the life of resistance is caught up in a social structure that posits a

mutual antagonism between living and dead labor, the worker and capital.

For Marx, living labor and not simply life embodies the central contradiction

which capitalism can neither fully contain nor dispel, but can only resist by creating a

dynamic assemblage of displacements. And it is ultimately living labor that holds the key

to the dissolution of the capitalist mode of production. In the Grundrisse, Marx argues

that the contradiction in capital is not one that is simply between exchange values and use

values—not between a system of abstraction and concretion—because the commodity

form already contains in itself both of these elements. Any commodity, in order to be a
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commodity, must have both the elements of exchange value and use value. Instead,

against the commodity, Marx poses living labor as that which it absolutely cannot be

commodified:

The only thing distinct from objectified labour is non-objectified labour,

labour which is still objectifying itself, labour as subjectivity. Or,
objectified labour, i.e. labour which is present in space, can be opposed, as
past labour, to labour which is present in time. If it is to be present in
time, alive, then it can be present only as the living subject, in which it
exists as capacity, as possibility; hence as worker. The only use value
therefore, which can form the opposite pole to capital is labour. (272).

The worker’s capacity to resist capitalism is then located not simply in the fact of being

exploited by the system of capitalist production, but in a socially constituted relationship

in which the living labor of the worker exceeds and resists the objectified labor that

constitutes capital. The labor itself is active in time and therefore alive, allowing it to take

up and animate the labor that is dead. Living labor thus exists outside of the structure of

capital while being absolutely integral to its continued functioning, producing the

dynamism of capitalism as it seeks to contain and make productive living labor.

Marx argues that the exchange between the worker and the capitalist, contrary to

bourgeois political economy, operates on the basis of an absolute nonequivalence, and it

is precisely the containment of this nonequivalence in a system of ostensible equality

which allows for the production of surplus capital. “[B]y virtue of having acquired labour

capacity in exchange as an equivalent, capital has acquired labour time—to the extent

that it exceeds the labour time contained in labour capacity–in exchange without

equivalent; it has appropriated alien labour time without exchange by means of the form

of exchange” (674). Labor capacity here is the reified form of living labor which can be

exchanged with capital, but capital gains in exchange living labor time. The moment of
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exchange between labor capacity and capital is the moment whereby the system of

equivalence that underwrites capital breaks down, but in order to create surplus this

breakdown is absolutely essential, for it is the moment where the excess of living labor is

incorporated into the system and turned into capital. At the heart of the exchange of

equivalences under which capital is supposed to operate is the containment of an absolute

nonequivalence, which can be understood as the moment of exploitation. “The living

labour time he [the capitalist] gets in exchange is not the exchange value, but the use

value of labour capacity. Just as a machine is not exchanged, paid for as cause of effects,

but as itself an effect; not according to its use value in the production process, but rather

as product—definite amount of objectified labour” (673). Capital and labor are thus not

exchanged as identical values, for capital offers what is dead in exchange for that which

is living, a produced effect for an active cause.

The success of capital is based on this abstract equivalence of what fundamentally

cannot be equated: living and dead labor. The central contradiction of capital thus lies in

this moment of nonequivalence between capital and labor, which is expressed as an

exchange without equivalence, exposing the exceedance of living labor. The very process

of turning labor into value under the capitalist system indeed “presupposes in principle

that living labour is not equal to its product, or, what is the same, that it is sold not as an

acting cause, but as itself a produced effect” (575). But while labor is not sold as an

acting cause, it nevertheless must function as an in the processes of production in order

for the system of capitalist production to function. The capacity of living labor always

threatens and exceeds capital, yet capital cannot do without it, for it is precisely the
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exploitation of this exceedance at the heart of living labor that enables capital’s process

of producing surplus value.

However, Marx goes on to argue that what characterizes the capitalist system in

particular is more than this exchange of objectified for living labor, but also the inversion

which subjects living labor to the dead labor of capital. What is central is “the exchange

of objectified labour as value, as self-sufficient value, for living labour as its use value, a

use value not for a specific, particular use or consumption, but as use value for value”

(469). This inversion between the dead labor embodied in the commodity and living labor

animates Marx’s use of the metaphor of the vampire throughout Capital. “Capital is dead

labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more

labor it sucks” (341). But if under the system of capitalist production, dead labor lives off

the life force of living labor, in the Grundrisse, Marx makes it clear that what animates

dead labor, what brings the vampire to life is none other than living labor itself:

This appropriation, by means of which living labour makes instrument and

material in the production process into the body of its soul and thereby
resurrects them from the dead, does indeed stand in antithesis to the fact
that labour itself is objectless, is a reality only in the immediate vitality of
the worker—and that the instrument and material, in capital, exist as
beings-for-themselves. (364)

In the processes of production, the dead labor embodied in objects is made to live again,

indeed, through acting upon the object living labor preserves the previous labor invested

in it that would otherwise have been lost to decay. Marx here examines more specifically

the commodity of cotton as it is turned into yarn and then woven into a commodity for

direct consumption. In each stage of the process, the objects upon which labor works is

reanimated, so that the dead labor embodied in the cotton is made operative and brought
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into a relation with the living labor that is working upon it as it is turned into yarn.

“Objectified labour ceases to exist in a dead state as an external, indifferent form on the

substance, because it is itself again posited as a moment of living labour; as a relation of

living labour to itself in an objective material, as the objectivity of living labour” (360). In

the moments of concrete labor, the division between the laborer and the objects upon

which labor works is suspended, becoming the conditions for living labor.

While the expropriation of the materials and the means of production from the

worker is one of the primary moments of capitalism, the moment of labor at the center of

capitalist production brings the dead labor embodied in capital back into relation with the

living labor of the worker. Thus living labor conceived as the absolute contradiction to

capital entails two possible moments, one negative and one positive. Living labor as the

contradiction to capital negatively valued implies that labor is the absence of the

materials of capital. “Conceived negatively. . . it is not-raw-material, not-instrument of

labor, not-raw-product . . . existing as an abstraction from these moments of its actual

reality . . . this complete denudation, purely subjective existence of labour, stripped of all

objectivity. Labour as absolute poverty: poverty not as shortage, but as total exclusion of

objective wealth” (296). Conceived positively, living labor as the negation of capital is its

pure non-objectified existence. “Not-objectified labour, not-value, conceived positively,

or as a negativity in relation to itself, is the not-objectified, hence non-objective, i.e.

subjective existence of labour itself. Labour not as an object, but as activity; not as itself

value, but as the living source of value” (296). Under the conditions of capitalist

production, both of these moments of living labor are made productive; on the one hand it

is the negative poverty of the object that suspends the laborer’s ability to labor without
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capital, and on the other hand it is the capacity of living labor as potential and as the

living source of value that is appropriated by capital. These two sides of labor as absolute

poverty and as the living source of value “are reciprocally determined and follow from

the essence of labour, such as it is presupposed by capital as its contradiction and as its

contradictory being, and such as it, in turn, presupposes capital” (296)

If living labor is the broad form of human intercourse with the material world

through which human sociality might valorize itself, the dead and reified labor of capital

is the labor that is structured to maximize the extraction of surplus value. The central

problem then becomes far more than merely minimizing the amount of human labor

necessary for the production of society; indeed, such a minimization would make little

sense when considering the broad range of human life activity that constitutes the form of

living labor. It is also a qualitatively different problem than of equitably dividing the

labor necessary to reproduce society. What becomes central instead is precisely

capitalism’s structuration of labor so as to contain the human possibilities of living labor

and to produce surplus in the reified conditions of capitalism. It is, in the words of Hardt

and Negri, the problem of how “capital succeeds in corralling and domesticating the

savage energies of living labor in order to put it to work” (xiii). For Hardt and Negri in

Labor of Dionysus, this process of structuring labor so as to make it productive for capital

becomes central. “The definition of what practices comprise labor is not given or fixed,

but rather historically and socially determined, and thus the definition itself constitutes a

mobile site of social contestation” (9). Making labor a central analytic also requires a

close examination of the structure that allows particular practices to be made productive

of capital and other forms of social production to escape such structure.

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Such an analysis requires acknowledging the historicity of what becomes

incorporated into the capitalist system as value-producing labor. As Hardt and Negri note,

“[w]hat counts as labor, or value-creating practice, always depends on the existing values

of a given social and historical context; in other words, labor should not simply be

defined as activity, any activity, but specifically activity that is socially recognized as

productive of value” (9). Thus what constitutes living labor outside the circuit of

capitalist valorization can also shift, producing subjectivities that are, at least in Labor of

Dionysus, necessarily capable of producing resistance to the reifying structures of capital.

As opposed to the subjects created under the labor of capitalism, “[t]he subjectivities

produced in the process of the self-valorization of living labor are the agents that create

an alternative sociality” (6). While such a move neatly avoids any Nietzschean charges of

ressentiment by founding resistance in the superior positivity of life itself, it also does

away with any dialectical movement so that the whole range of properly social conflict is

effaced in favor of an ontological resistance to be founded in the forms of valorization

that are not fully incorporated into capitalism. The notion of a value-creating activity that

exists simply outside of the capitalist valorization of labor can indeed become rather

complicated when we consider the different modes through which capital comes to

structure social production.

This understanding of the historicity of the forms of labor that are incorporated

under the regime of capitalism make it clear that under late capitalism it has become

increasingly difficult to separate self-valorizing labor from labor that is integrated with

capitalist production, so that even our pleasures and desires and needs become integrated

into the value-producing labor of capital. Dionysus’ labors too, are under the constant
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peril of being brought under the spell of capital. Maria Mies’ Patriarchy and

Accumulation on a World Scale problematizes the structural division of labor under

capitalism so that even what might be categorized as self-valorizing affective labor

becomes integrated into the system of capitalist production. For Mies, this division of

labor between the labor valorized by capital and the labor that goes unrecognized is

inherently one of oppression: “The predatory patriarchal division of labour is based, from

the outset, on a structural separation and subordination of human beings” (74). Mies

traces the history of what she calls ‘housewifization’, the process by which the biological

reproduction of labor under the regime of capitalism is naturalized and made invisible.

The process of producing this division of labor was far more violent than a mere

domestication of a certain segment of the population. Rather, Mies argues, that the

women under industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century comprised the most

exploited segment of the proletariat and had no material interests in the reproduction of

the labor force, but “the production of children could not be left to the ‘instincts’ of the

proletariat. . . the propertyless proletariat had no material interest in the production of

children, as children were no insurance in old age, unlike the sons of the bourgeoisie”

(106). In short, the proletarian woman “had to be made to breed more workers” (105).

There was then no small urgency and force in the structuring of the experience of women

so that they desire to reproduce the proletarian labor force, so that they can function as

the proletariat.

The enforcement of the reproduction of the proletarian class takes place on a

bourgeois model of the family which initially had to be imposed on the proletariat

through force. The naturalization of the family in our contemporary period can be viewed
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as nothing less than capitalism’s stunning success in shaping affective relations in accord

to the requirements of the capitalist mode of production. According to Mies, “the ‘family’

had to be forced upon the proletariat by police measures, because otherwise the

propertyless proletarians would not have produced enough children for the next

generation of workers” (105). In Britain, these police measures included the outlawing of

infanticide and the removal of the ban against the marriage of propertyless people. This

juridical shift, in addition to the earlier witch hunts that effectively eliminated

autochthonous knowledge of natural contraceptives, helped to force women into the

structure of the bourgeois family. Furthermore, in terms of the economic processes,

housewifization confines the labor women perform in the reproduction of the proletarian

worker to the private sphere of the home, making it effectively invisible to the circuit of

capitalist valorization, even as that valorization depends upon women’s labor. The very

material labor that contributes to the continuation of the male workforce is invisibilized

as natural affective care, conceptualized as non-labor. In a critique of Marx’s view of

women’s labor, Mies notes that “housewifization means the externalization, or the ex-

territorialization of costs which otherwise would have to be covered by the capitalists.

This means that women’s labour is considered a natural resource, freely available like air

and water” (110). It becomes necessary to consider living labor not simply in the context

of what appears self-valorizing, but in the light of the totality of capitalist production

which can simultaneously incorporate what appears to valorize itself outside of its

circuits. The distinction between living labor and the labor of capitalist production

becomes far more subtle than a simple one between waged and non-waged labor.
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Mies’ account of housewifization complicates any notion of living labor that does

not recognize how the self-valorization of living labor can also become integrated into

the structure of capitalism and made productive, even if it is not formally valorized

through the wage. While Hardt and Negri argue that “[l]abor is too often defined

narrowly in the realm of a capitalist work ethic that denies pleasures and desires” and

attempt to “open up the concept of labor across the spectrum of social production to

include even the productive sphere that Marx called the horizon of nonwork” (7), the

emphasis on pleasures and desires too easily evades the way that these pleasures and

desires have been historically shaped through juridical and economic violence. As Mies

shows, what Marx considered the horizon of nonwork should indeed be integrated into an

analysis of the capitalist system, but cannot be reduced to a sphere of an innate or

ontological resistance, for even if we were to accept the possibility of a pristine self-

valorization of living labor, it has become structured and contaminated by the reified

production of capitalism. The labor of the housewife then is valorized by capital, if

indirectly, and it is precisely the structure which allows housework to be externalized as a

realm of nonlabor that allows even greater extraction of surplus from the laborer in the

formal economy.

While Mies’ example of housewifization problematizes the division between

living labor and reified labor by examining how the ostensibly self-valorizing labor of the

care for the family is made productive to capital, Theodor Adorno’s discussion of free

time demonstrates how free time, often conceived in opposition to labor time, is

integrated into the structure of capitalist production. Where once there existed the

concept of leisure, which was qualitatively different from free time, “indicat[ing] a
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specific difference, that of time which is neither free nor spare, which is occupied by

work, and which moreover one could designate as heteronomous” (187), with the

conditions of advanced capitalism, free time is produced as a prosthesis to labor time.

Whereas once it seemed that the development of the productive forces would produce the

conditions for the liberation of the human subject from oppressive forms of labor, Adorno

shows the extension of capital into the realm of free time, creating oppressive forms of

nonlabor. The realm of free time is integrated into the totality of capitalist production,

functioning as the “continuation of the forms of profit-oriented social life” through the

ethos that “time free from work should be utilized for the recreation of expended labour

powers” (189). Thus what appears to escape the reified labor of capitalist valorization

nevertheless, when viewed in terms of the structure of the totality, can be seen as fully

integrated. While Mies examines the earlier phases of capital, Adorno can be seen to

examine capitalist production in the moment of transition between the imperialist form

and the late capitalist form, which transforms the relation between living and objectified

labor through the dissemination of technological apparatuses that allow for increasing

control over the subjective potential of living labor.

Postmodernity and the generalization of the factory form to the whole of society

restructures the horizon between objectified and living labor, a distinction which cannot

simply be made on the basis of what forms of human activity are compensated by capital

with a wage. Mies’ analysis of the construction of the modern family and the circuits of

care that underlie the reproduction of the worker reveals the creativity of capital in

producing structures of power that are productive of surplus value without being

reciprocally recognized and compensated. Adorno’s analysis of the reformation of leisure

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time as free time that is integrated into and determined by a larger system of unfreedom

further troubles the originary contradiction between capital as dead labor and living labor

as the not-objectified labor of the living subject precisely because the subject is becoming

increasingly structured as a means of displacing the contradictions of capital. Indeed, the

concept of the subject itself has undergone a mutation in the moment of late capitalism.

As Hardt and Negri argue, “in the factory-society the traditional conceptual distinction

between productive and unproductive labor and between production and reproduction,

which even in other periods had dubious validity, should today be considered defunct”

(10). What is necessary is a thorough revaluation of the sociality of labor and those

mechanisms whereby the antagonism of living labor becomes incorporated into the

functioning of capital itself. Central to this restructuring in the moment of postmodernism

is the transformation of affect and the subject as they become reshaped by the

commodities produced under the technological processes of late capitalism.

Affective Displacements of the Capitalist Contradiction

Late capitalism’s saturation of global space results in a restructuring of the

mechanisms that serve to displace the contradiction between capital and living labor. This

restructuring entails both the invention of new methods of displacement made possible by

advancing technology and the deployment of older forms of displacement that are

repurposed for new social and material conditions. The transformation that occurs with

the late capitalist mode of production makes affect an increasingly prominent object of

critique. The new electronic and communications technologies developed under late

capitalism have not only extended capitalism across the globe and eliminated the friction
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of finance capital, but it has additionally greatly increased capital’s capacity to structure

the subject of living labor. Under the social conditions of postmodernity the

technologically mediated but no less invisible hand of the capitalist market is capable of

reaching ever-deeper into the subject, shaping and animating it in new ways. It is in this

sense that these technologies mark relatively recent advancements in the modes of

subjection, which allow for the displacement of the central capitalist contradiction into

the subject by restructuring the contested zone of indistinction between living labor and

capital.

The relatively recent historical shift in the functioning of experience under the late

capitalist mode of production is recognized by Massumi, even as he emphasizes affect as

an experience that escapes history and conscious structuring. He notes the “growing

feeling within media, literary, and art theory that affect is central to an understanding of

our information- and image-based late capitalist culture, in which so-called master

narratives are perceived to have foundered” (27). The historical development of the

postmodern culture of information and images, based on the electronic technologies

produced under the late capitalist mode of production, displaces the centrality of

consciousness that operated under previous capitalist regimes, which were reliant on

ideology, by reaching into the level of affect to form the structures of subjection that

precede consciousness. Thus Massumi argues that “[a]ffect holds a key to rethinking

postmodern power after ideology. For although ideology is still very much with us, often

in the most virulent of forms, it is no longer encompassing. It no longer defines the global

mode of functioning of power. It is now one mode of power in a larger field that is not

defined, overall, by ideology” (42). The apparent timelessness of an ontologically

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primary affect must be considered within the limits of material production that are time-

bound, even as affect theory attempts to efface the assumptions of a linear temporality.

Affect as an attempt to move beyond history must be located historically, a location that

at the same time must be wary of reducing affect to the linear and teleological model of

history that it attempts to surpass. For this reason, the emergence of affect must be

understood within the ensemble of social relations that make it visible.

While Massumi is keen to emphasize the distinction between his analysis of affect

as a model for understanding postmodernity and Jameson’s work that notes the relative

waning of affect under late capitalism, one might without difficulty examine how they

ultimately rely on the same principle analyses and are not as distinct as Massumi implies.

Massumi attempts to position affect theory in direct opposition to Jameson’s studies on

postmodernity: “Fredric Jameson notwithstanding, belief has waned for many, but not

affect. If anything, our condition is characterized by a surfeit of it” (27). However, rather

than speaking of a linear waning or waxing of affect, it may be more accurate to speak of

a mutation in the structures of affect that is brought about by the increased capacity to

control the processes of its structuration. While there is certainly no love lost between

Massumi and Jameson, Massumi’s analysis of the increase of affect can be without

difficulty reconciled with Jameson’s assertion of affect’s waning as soon as it is made

evident that Jameson relies upon a rather different conception of affect than the

Deleuzian one proposed by Massumi. The affect that Jameson analyzes has more to do

with a certain psychic experience associated with modernity: “The waning of affect. . . as

the waning of the great high-modernist thematics of time and temporality, the elegiac

mysteries of durée and of memory” (200). And these shifting structures of temporality
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are correlated with Massumi’s emphasis on the untimeliness affect that is always in

process that somehow escapes the structuring of temporality.

Massumi’s central concept of the virtual can be seen as precisely an effect of and

engagement with the late capitalism that Jameson analyzes under the name of

postmodernity. Massumi’s description of the virtual exemplifies the temporal

transformation of subjective experience. The virtual is explained as “having a different

temporal structure, in which past and future brush shoulders with no mediating present,

and as having a different recursive causality; the virtual as cresting in a liminal realm of

emergence, where half-actualized actions and expressions arise like waves on a sea to

which most no sooner return” (31). The waning of affect as a certain experience of time

and temporality in Jameson parallels the waxing of a detemporalized affect that exceeds

the structures of causality and mediation in Massumi. When Jameson conjectures that “it

is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural

languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time,

as in the preceding period of high modernism proper” (200), it is, in the final analysis, not

so distant from Massumi’s own attempts to reconsider the temporality of the subject by

emphasizing the concept of the virtual. The primary difference between the two is not in

the transformation of the structures of affect so much as it is in the possibilities of

resistance—even the very concept of resistance itself—a point that I will return to in the

following chapter. Rather than focus on the different terminologies employed to discuss

the transformation of affect, it might be more productive to consider them to be in

agreement on the transformed structures of time and space under the conditions of late

capitalism.
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The moment of postmodernity is marked by the late capitalist mode of production

in which new electronic technologies are employed to produce new commodities that

further shape the relations of production. These technologies can be seen to transform

society on the affective level, altering the content of the subject itself. In The Micro-

Politics of Capital, Jason Read examines this transformation in capitalist production that

focuses increasingly on the interiority of the subject. According to Read, the spatial

transformation of late capitalism includes an element that is not only extensive in space

but also intensive in the subject: “It is thus possible to talk about an endo-colonization

(the colonization of the remainders of noncommodified or nonexploited dimensions of

existence internal to capitalist societies) alongside exo-colonization (the extension of

capital to other spaces)” (27). This endo-colonization entails not only the fragmentation

and increased exploitation of space within the capitalist societies, but these

noncommodified and nonexploited dimensions include the subject which is increasingly

structured to produce profit: “subjectivity is not reproduced but is made directly

productive, not in the form of an abstract potentiality but in the form of knowledge,

desires and affects” (10). Capital thus becomes capable of restructuring the subject on the

most basic level, further problematizing Marx’s assertion of the primary contradiction

between capital as dead labor and the subject of living labor. Dead labor comes to invade

the space of the living so that the distinction between objectified labor and non-

objectified labor can no longer be considered a merely ontological one between a labor

present in space and a labor present in time, but must be considered on the level of the

social. Affect becomes central to theory in the moment of late modernity precisely

because of the increased ability of capital to alter the affective level and produce
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subjectivities that are profitable to capital, shifting the line between dead labor and living

labor.

Postmodernity marks the moment when the chain of displacements that obfuscate

the contradiction between objectified and non-objectified labor is further modified by the

ability to structure living labor itself. As capitalism has become more enmeshed into the

social structures that underlie the subject, the possibilities of subjectivity that once stood

counter to capital are increasingly incorporated into the productive process of capital.

Thus as Read notes, “it is no longer possible to separate capital, as the producer of goods

and commodities, from what used to be called the superstructure. . . Capitalist production

today has either directly appropriated the production of culture, beliefs, and desires or it

has indirectly linked them to the production and circulation of commodities” (2). The

encroachment of capitalist production into the superstructure further leads to a “mutation

of the relationship between ‘subjectivity and ‘production’—one that affects the

fundamental human activities of perception, thinking, and acting—it extends. . . to a

fundamental transformation of the very structure, or basis, of human existence itself” (2).

The deployment of technologies that shape affect in new ways lead to a general

transformation of the living subject and a mutation of the relationship between capital

and living labor. This transformation of the basis of human existence can be thought of as

more than simply a change in the conditions of subjectivity, but a more fundamental

change in the subject. The alleged postmodern dissolution of the subject can thus be

located within the historical and material conditions which transform the relations

between capital and the living subject.

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Martin Heidegger in “The Age of the World Picture” charts one such

transformation of the subject that occurred at the beginning of modernity. The central

change that occurred with the shift into the modern, Heidegger argues contra Kant’s

“What is Enlightenment?”, is not merely the casting off of chains or the achievement of

maturity, but “[w]hat is decisive is . . . that the essence of humanity altogether transforms

itself in that man becomes the subject” (66). It is this becoming subject of the human that

restructures the human relationship to the world so that it can be viewed as a process of

representation, as a world picture. It is in this sense that the world becomes a picture:

“[t]hat beings acquire being in and through representedness makes the age in which this

occurs a new age, distinct from its predecessors” (68). Furthermore, this becoming

picture of the world is enabled by an inversion in the relation between the subject and

object in the modern period whereby the human subject becomes the ground for

knowledge. The subject becomes the subject in the modern sense. Heidegger traces the

concept of the subject back to its roots in the Ancient Greek, noting that “this word

‘subject’ must be understood as the translation of the Greek ύποκείμενον. The word

names that-which-lies-before, that which, as ground, gathers everything into itself” (66).

However, what occurs in the moment of modernity’s dawning is the production of a

system of representation that places the human subject at the center as the producer and

proprietor of representations, which is precisely Kant’s Copernican revolution in

philosophy. There is a qualitatively new relation between the human that has become

subject and the world that it inhabits whereby the human subject becomes the central

force of existence. Heidegger notes that representation means “to bring the present-at-

hand before one as something standing over-and-against, to relate it to oneself, the

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representer, and, in this relation, to force it back to oneself as the norm-giving domain.

Where this happens man ‘puts himself in the picture’ concerning beings” (69). Modernity

is the moment in which the fundamental structure of being is transformed into

representation and the human subject who represents becomes the center of being itself.

The anti-representational emphasis in the work of Deleuze and Guattari which is

taken up by contemporary affect theory should be understood in terms of this

Heideggerian critique of the modern subject. Affect theory attempts to extend the critique

of the representational mode of being by focusing on those aspects of human life that

escape representation but nevertheless impact human society. Massumi references the

virtual as “[s]omething that happens too quickly to have happened. . . The virtual, the

pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies, is a realm of potential. . . where futurity

combines, unmediated, with pastness, where outsides are unfolded and sadness is happy”

(30). In this sense, the virtual is thought to be immediate, unmediated by the senses and

the representational system which makes the world legible. The virtual is thus that which

exceeds the system of representation whereby the subject comprehends the world and

gestures towards the ontological exteriority of being. It points toward that which

impinges upon the body but is nevertheless above or below the threshold of experience,

and so occurs without the possibility of being experienced by the subject. It is, to refer to

a concrete example, that moment in David Fincher’s Fight Club, which plays so

beautifully and intentionally with the structure of affect, where the protagonist (Edward

Norton) explains Tyler Durden’s (Brad Pitt), nighttime work as a projectionist, “splicing

of single frames of pornography into family films. . . So that when the snooty cat and the

courageous dog with celebrity voices meet for the first time in reel three that’s when
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you’ll catch a flash of Tyler’s contribution to the film. . . Nobody knows that they saw it,

but they did.” The virtual is this moment of seeing without knowledge of seeing, or

perhaps more properly, the seeing that goes unrepresented in the conscious subject. The

truth of being is no longer that which passes through the subject and is represented by it,

rather truth, at least for Massumi, becomes founded on the virtual that exceeds the subject

in the realm of ontology. These affects serve as a stratum which precedes the moment of

politics proper, yet nevertheless is not without its effects upon the political.

The transformation of the subject under late capitalism can be considered in

relation to the ethological reconsideration of the concept of the ground in both Brian

Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual and Tim Ingold’s Being Alive, both inspired by

Deleuze. If, in Heidegger, the human subject functions as the ground that gathers

everything into itself and gives it being through representation, the very concept of the

ground is disarticulated as an abstraction that obscures what is figured as a more

ontologically primary relationship. Massumi examines the abstraction inherent in the

concept of space by attempting to gesture toward the more primary form of ground and

the relationship between ground and sky: “Before measurement, there was air and

ground, but not space as we know it. Ground is not a static support any more than air is

an empty container. The ground is full of movement, as full as the air is with weather,

just at different rhythm from most perceptible movements occurring with it” (10). The

emphasis on the moment before measurement is the attempt to attain the purity of the

object that exists prior to the abstraction performed by the human subject; it is the attempt

to gesture towards the things as they are in themselves. Similarly, Ingold notes that “what

we call ground is not really a coherent surface at all—just like the skin—a zone in which
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the air and moisture of the sky bind with substances whose source lies in the earth in the

germination and growth of living organisms” (87). The ground ceases to be to be fixed or

solid, but moves on a level that influences us while existing beyond our perception. But

what affect theory offers is the dissolution of the subject as the center of representation in

order to expose, on the one hand, the movement within the subject which can be thought

of as the zone of indetermination that separates the subject from the object, and on the

other hand, the interpenetration of air and ground, which is to say of the unrepresentable

flows and the subject.

Yet, one might disavow the possibility of ontological primacy as such, even

against a more detailed understanding of air and ground as opposed to the inherent

abstraction of space, and instead examine the way that any possible understanding of

either space or “ground” are both historically and socially constituted. This focuses our

attention on the social and historical conditions that produce the appearance of

ontological primacy so that it becomes clear that the metaphorical attempt to return to an

ontologically primary understanding of ground that exists prior to human experience and

measurement gestures toward a qualitatively different problem: Under the conditions of

late capitalism the subject undergoes a transformation in which it becomes ever more

deeply penetrated by the flows of capital itself, so that it ceases to be a solid ground upon

which being can stand. In affect theory, the conception of the subject, like that of the

ground which is its analogue, undergoes a parallel transformation where it is no longer

conceived of as representable, much less as fixed or solid.

The transformation in being occasioned by the endocolonization of the subject

under late capitalism is not the simple return of the subiectum as the grounds of
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knowledge to a more ontologically primary state. Indeed, the increasing priority of the

ontic is not a simple positivistic progression in the realm of knowledge; the appearance of

primacy is always determined by social and historical conditions in which it is

formulated. It is thus not a matter of the grounds of being gaining a new foundation in the

non-solidity of ontological truth through a redefinition in which “[a]ny geologist will tell

you that the ground is anything but stable. It is a dynamic unity of continual unfolding,

uplift and subsidence” (10). Rather, the appearance of the ground as foundation instead of

space emerges from the capitalist fragmentation of space itself, which lends the ground

the appearance of ontological priority. The ground that ceases to be solid is produced by

the capitalist saturation of the globe and the fragmentation of its subjects and its

structures. And this transformation of the ground is concomitant with a larger

transformation of the subiectum; what occurs in the moment of postmodernity is a much

larger shift in the understanding of being where the human subject as the being that

represents ceases to be central to being as such. And, as Heidegger notes, when “man

becomes the primary and genuine subiectum, this means that he becomes that being upon

which every being, in this way of being and its truth, is founded. Man becomes the

referential center of beings as such. But this is only possible when there is a

transformation in the understanding of beings as a whole” (67). Similarly, when the

human subject ceases to be the primary and genuine subiectum, this also can only be

possible with a transformation in the understanding of beings as a whole. And this

transformation of beings in the moment of postmodernity is not only the melting of what

was solid into air, but is also the becoming solid—the becoming subiectum—of what is

least solid of all: capital.

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Under the conditions of late capitalism, the human as subject ceases to be the

solid ground which gathers all beings into itself and gives it the reality of its existence,

for the human subject is now permeated not only by the exteriority of its own

experiences, as affect theory might emphasize, but by the power of capital. Heidegger

contrasts the representative regime that develops in the modern with the understanding of

ancient Greece where the being of the human was in its determination by other beings:

“man is the one who is looked upon by beings, the one who is gathered by self-opening

beings into presencing with them. To be looked at by beings, to be included and

maintained and so supported by their openness, to be driven about by their conflict and

marked by their dividedness” (68). However, in the moment of postmodernity, being is

located not on the side of that which looks upon the human subject, nor is it any longer in

the human subject itself. In the capitalist imaginary, the human is no longer the subject,

no longer what gathers the horizon of things into itself and represents it, giving it form

and existence; rather the system of capital has become the genuine subiectum, which,

gazing upon its human subjects, gathers them into itself and presences with them, driving

them with its conflict and marking them with its own dividedness. The human as ground

loses its solidity, because what gathers the representations is no longer the human subject,

the human subiectum; it is the power of capital itself which both gathers and disperses

these images of the human. If the subject is dissolved under the conditions of

postmodernity, it is not because the discovery or emphasis on the individual that escapes

all determination through its particularity; on the contrary, it is through the excess of

totalization that integrates it into the capitalist system which displaces its own

dividedness—its own internal contradiction—into the human subject as a part of the

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process of endocolonization that serves to displace its own central contradiction between

living and dead labor.

The Fixed Capital of Human Subjectivity

I have argued that the emergence of contemporary affect theory can be read both

as a result of and as a response to the continued development of late capitalism.

Capitalism itself functions as a system that constantly displaces its own internal and

irreconcilable contradiction between living and dead labor so as to continue and

maximize the extraction of surplus value. The historical development of capitalism is also

the development of new technologies to contain and restructure this central contradiction.

The development of new electronic and communication technologies under the regime of

late capitalism has allowed for this contradiction to be displaced ever deeper into the

subject, ultimately transforming the terrain of struggle from one marked by the human

subiectum to one founded on the terms and the grounds of capital itself. In History and

Class Consciousness, Georg Lukács develops the Marxist concept of class consciousness

through its relationship to the processes of production: the “division of society into

classes is determined by position within the process of production” (46). Class then is not

simply a matter of exploitation by the system, but also one of the multiple types of

exploitation through which individuals are differentially integrated into the system. It is

in and through the structure of production from which the consciousness of the classes

emerges, which in the current moment structures a more complex relationship than a

simple binary between the bourgeois and the proletariat. And it is precisely because of

the multiplication of positions within the productive process that it becomes necessary to
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rethink the concept of class to institute one that is founded not merely on a positive

concept of identity, but is sensitive to both its own exclusion with respect to the economic

structure and to the multiplicity of subject positions formulated by the structure of capital.

Because subject positions are never merely the result of the ontological primacy

of the subject but are instead always interrelated with determinate social formations, it

becomes necessary to consider subjectivity in relation to the field of production. Read

argues that, indeed, the micropolitical structuring of individual subjectivity has, from the

very beginning been part of capitalism’s regime of power. “There is a production of

subjectivity necessary to the constitution of the capitalist mode of production. For a new

mode of production such as capital to be instituted . . . it must institute itself in the

quotidian dimensions of existence—it must become habit” (36). The production of capital

as habit is instated through micropolitical processes that normalize the structure of daily

life under the new political economic regime. Central to the continued functioning of any

mode of production is the normalization of its relations and forces of production, which

furthermore “involves the generation and normalization of beliefs, appearances, and

desires, and thus the creation and generalization of particular quotidian practices, habits,

or subjective comportments” (41). In this way, a mode of production, and late capitalism

in particular, becomes deeply invested with the structuring of subjectivity, which is

further inflected by the technologies developed under that mode of production. Much like

Lukács, Read notes that the ground of subjectivity is never open, but rather is conditioned

through a series of constraints so that there can never be the simple possibility of a self-

arrogated, pure subject. Instead, “[w]hat is placed in the space of reproduction is not the

natural individual ‘man’ but a series of different possibilities and constraints of

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subjectivity . . . Reproduction does not simply conform to some natural pregiven

community or subjectivity. Rather, it includes within its general schema different

possible relations of power” (47). These general schema, like Lukács’ positions in the

structure of production allow for the multiplication of positions with relation to the mode

of production in and through which the subject is formulated. Thus the dialectic between

the proletariat and the bourgeoisie becomes more complicated than the struggle between

two competing totalities.

It is not simply that subjectivity is constrained, but that subjectivity itself arises

out of a system of constraints which determine its possibilities on a primary level. The

individual comes into being within this system of constraints determined by the structure

of society, and ultimately by the structure of capital necessary for reproduction. In this

way, by structuring the grounds of being, capital becomes the true subiectum for the

human subject. The containment of the contradiction between living and dead labor has

advanced under late capitalism to the stage whereby only the greatest repression of the

human subject is possible for life to reproduce itself. Adorno argues, “[o]nly when the

process that begins with the metamorphosis of labour-power into a commodity has

permeated men through and through and objectified each of their impulses as formally

commensurable variations of the exchange relationship, is it possible for life to reproduce

itself under the prevailing relations of production” (244). What allows for the

continuation of the reproduction of life under the conditions of late capitalism is precisely

what makes life unlivable—the increased reification and deeper exploitation of the

subject. In this sense, the process of reification in which the social becomes objectified is

not in contradiction to the development of the subject in late capitalism. Adorno’s

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lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason explicitly draw the parallel between the

advancement of subjectivization and the advancement of reification: “the categories of

subjectivism and reification are not incompatible opposites, but corollaries. That is to say,

the more subjectivism there is, the more reification, and vice versa” (176). For Adorno,

the process of subjectivization inherently involves the reification of phenomena: there “is

a reifying quality in the very attempt to relate all phenomena, everything we encounter, to

a unified reference point and to subsume it under a self-identical, rigid unity, thus

removing it from its dynamic context” (174). The knowledge that passes through the

subject, with its emphasis on identity, is thus always ultimately nonidentical with its

objects which do not conform to this imposed unity. And the imposition of the epistemic

stance of capitalism itself assures that this nonidentity is always mobilized for the

processes of exploitation through which surplus value is extracted. In this sense there is

nothing more subjective and nothing more objective than capital itself. The grasp of the

subject necessarily misses its object. Thus, the more necessary the centrality of the

subject, the more that knowledge must pass through the subject’s understanding, the more

reification advances.

What becomes central in understanding the contemporary functioning of

capitalism is precisely its structuring of the subject, and any possible form of resistance

must also recognize capital’s capacity to structure the grounds upon which any such

resistance stands. As Read notes, “It is a matter of understanding the predominance of

immaterial labor, for what could be called the ‘production of subjectivity by subjectivity.’

Ultimately it is a matter of rethinking the place of subjectivity in the mode of production”

(18). The forms of immaterial production integrated into the circuits of capital thus
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attempt to produce particular forms of subjectivity that are amenable to the larger modes

of production. And this subjectivity is simultaneously a form of objectivity. In Adorno’s

lectures on Kant, the integration of subjectivity into the mode of production functioned

primarily on the level of thought:

in Kantian philosophy the world, reality as a whole, is turned into a

product, in fact, the product of labour, of effort. Thinking as a spontaneous
activity—that is what we do; but it is actually nothing other than labour.
The distinction between thinking and receptivity, sense impressions, is
precisely that we do something, we activate ourselves. Because analysis
shifts the entire weight of the dynamic, the dynamic character of reality,
onto the side of the subject, our world becomes increasingly the product of
labour; we might say, it becomes congealed labour (115)

The Kantian shift that transforms sensuous receptivity of the world into the representation

within oneself of the objects of perception, which allows one to become the proprietor of

one’s own perceptions thus also serves to impose perception as a kind of labor which has

become structured by the capitalist system.

Late capitalism is precisely that form of capitalism in which the subject is

structured in through the new technologies of social reproduction. Jonathan Beller in

“Kino-I, Kino-World” argues that contemporary capitalism can be understood as the

cinematic mode of production, in which “cinema and its succeeding, if still simultaneous,

formations, particularly television, video, computers and the internet, are deterritorialized

factories in which spectators work, that is, in which they perform value-productive labor”

(79). Ultimately, Beller’s assertion is perhaps not so distant from Marx’s Grundrisse,

where Marx asserts the immediate unity of production with consumption. Part of this

threefold unity is precisely how:

the object is not an object in general, but a specific object which must be
consumed in a specific manner, to be mediated in its turn by production
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itself. Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten
with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw
meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth. Production thus produces not
only the object but also the manner of consumption, not only objectively
but also subjectively. . . Production thus not only creates an object for the
subject, but a subject for the object (97)

However, the cinematic mode of production, understood also to encompass the new

media technologies of late capitalism, allows for this production of a subject for the

object not just in relation to the particular object of cinema, but to the entire field of

commodities in general. Thus recreation, the activities one enters into in one’s free time,

is not merely for the re-creation of the subject’s labor power, as noted by Adorno, but it

furthermore serves a value-productive function that creates the proper subject for late

capitalism. The value that is produced lies not just in the external, material world, but in

the structures of the subject itself, which becomes ever more deeply embedded in the

structure of capitalism. “Cinema is an orchestration of the unconscious and the

unconscious is a scene of production. Dream-work turns out to be real work” (79). The

value produced within the subject by the cinematic mode of production relates directly to

the perceptions, desires and affects which shape the individual’s interactions with the

general commodity world of capitalism. It thus creates the generalized commoditization

and reification of the world by instilling the process of commoditization into the subject.

Cinema as a site of cultural consumption simultaneously functions as a site of the

production of an increasingly fixed subject. “Cinema is a deterritorialized factory which

extends the working day in space and time while introjecting the systems of language of

capital into the sensorium. Cinema means a fully-mediated mise-e-scène which provides

humans with the contexts and options for response” (80). The human sensorium under the
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regime of late capitalism is increasingly conditioned by the modes of production, both in

the structuring of its labor and in the disposition of its free time. Thus, in Beller’s

reading, “as it enlists viewers to build the pathways for its infrastructure, both as fixed

capital and in themselves, Corporate America consciously recognizes that ramifying the

sensual pathways to the body can produce value” (62). The infrastructure of capitalism is

erected not just as fixed capital, but also within the subject itself; or, perhaps more

accurately, the cinematic apparatus of late capitalism functions to transform the subject

itself into a kind of fixed capital. However, with the increasing animation of the human

subject by the structures and flows of capital, Read poses extending the concept of fixed

capital to include not only the concrete machinery of capital, but the increasingly

structured and automated subject: “Here this process of self-transformation and

experimentation is presented . . . as constitutive of a new form of fixed capital:

subjectivity as fixed capital. Knowledge and social relations are incorporated not only

into fixed capital as machinery but also as human subjectivity” (123). Ultimately, this

analysis of the subject as fixed capital produced in and through capitalism can be located

in Marx’s Grundrisse where he notes that the increase of free time, or “time for the full

development of the individual . . . in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labor

as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production

process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man

himself” (712). The human subject, insofar as it becomes developed under the conditions

of free time, is reified into fixed capital, at least from the standpoint of production.

This transformation of the subject into fixed capital thus troubles the relation

between living and objectified labor. Living labor cannot be simply located as a power
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that inheres in the subject, for the relation between objectified and living labor is

thoroughly mediated by technologies of production and not ontologically fixed. Living

labor does not dwell as an inherent property of in the subject, but exists only through the

relationship between the subject and the totality of the processes of production. To return

to Marx’s description of living labor, previously discussed above, “[t]he only thing

distinct from objectified labour is non-objectified labour, labour which is still objectifying

itself, labour as subjectivity” (272). The subject as fixed capital developed under the

conditions of late capitalism is rather different from this labor as subjectivity which

would stand in contradiction to the dead labor of the commodity. The subject is split

between a subject which partakes in living labor, and a subject which is fixed as capital.

“[O]bjectified labour, i.e. labour which is present in space, can be opposed, as past

labour, to labour which is present in time. If it is to be present in time, alive, then it can

be present only as the living subject, in which it exists as capacity, as possibility; hence as

worker” (272). Insofar as it is preformed and preconditioned by the mode of production,

living labor ceases to be present in time, ceases to be living; as the subject’s experiences

and perceptions become automated through the cinematic machinery of late capitalism,

the subject becomes increasingly fixed as capital. Under late capitalism, subjectivity, too,

can be reified and made into a fixed capital that so that it becomes a labor present in

space rather than time. The reified subject, the subject which operates as fixed capital and

thus represents labor present in space, can be placed in contradiction with a subjectivity

that labors in time, and the task, to which I turn in the next chapter, is to locate where

subjectivity labors, even under the conditions of late capitalism.

 Resisting the Subject of Capital: Negativity and the Politics of Non-Identity

[W]hat we think of as individuality in the West, and what seems to us

somehow to trace the outlines of an essential human nature, is little more
than the marks and scars, the violent compressions, resulting from the
interiorization by so-called civilized human beings of that instinct for self-
preservation without which, in this fallen society or history, we would all
be destroyed as surely as those unfortunates who are born without a tactile
warning sense of hot and cold, or pain and pleasure, in their secondary
nervous systems.
Fredric Jameson, Seeds of Time, 99

If the capitalist mode of production is indeed deeply invested in the micropolitical

structuring of subjectivity as a means of containing and exploiting living labor, any

politics that seeks to maintain its fidelity to a social order beyond the endless self-

elaboration of the logic of capital must contend with this primary structuring. Identity is

not an unproblematic basis for politics under the contemporary crisis of representation in

which capital itself has become the Heideggerian subiectum that gathers beings into itself

and marks them with its own internal conflict and dividedness, granting them the

substance of their existence. One must confront the way that the formation of identity and

of the subject has itself become increasingly prominent in the circuits of late capitalism as

a means of displacing its internal contradictions. What we call consciousness and the

subject that arises therefrom is perhaps nothing other than the series of systemic

structurings that produce a certain legibility, but this legibility and the violences done

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both to the subject and the world it inhabits is not simply a matter of a self-arrogated,

individual choice, but one of survival under conditions that always restrict and determine

that which survives. Legibility and its objects therefore cannot be strictly separated, for

they are intricately imbricated within the limits of the subject’s consciousness; this is not

to say that everything simply devolves solipsistically into the internal workings of the

subject, nor that everything can be located solely in objective determining factors, but

rather that the tensions within this dialectical space of structuring might better be

understood as the social itself.

In order to live in a capitalist society, one must develop into a particular kind of

subject, just as, to refer to Frederic Jameson’s gloss of Theodor Adorno in Seeds of Time,

we have evolved specific tactile senses to respond to and survive in our environment. But

that we have developed these senses is only obliquely an expression of the truth of the

human, as is the subject that comes into being under the systems of repression necessary

for capitalist exploitation. It maintains this obliqueness because to take the subject

ahistorically, as it exists in the present, is to ignore that which structures it and thereby

the social and fluid nature of the human; it erases the fact that things could and indeed

ought to be otherwise. The truth is perhaps better to be discovered in that dialectical

relation between the subject and its world, in which the consciousness of the individual is

formed; however, even this holds true only so long as this particular system of

domination prevails. “[D]ialectics,” as Adorno notes in Negative Dialectics, “is the

wrong state of things. The right state of things would be free of it: neither system nor

contradiction” (11). The consciousness that emerges from within this wrong state of

things, the consciousness capable of declaring its own self-identity, emerges neither as
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triumphant nor as victorious, but as immeasurably damaged by the necessities imposed

by the conditions of its always contingent survival. In this way consciousness is a

problem rather than a solution for the development a society liberated from capitalist

exploitation.

The solution to this problem does not lie on the level of consciousness, but must

be located in the social and material conditions which are inseparably interwoven with

this consciousness. Part of the damage wrought by this wrong state of things is in the

institution of the dialectic itself, which situates consciousness in absolute separation from

its object. “Reconcilement would release the nonidentical, would rid it of coercion,

including spiritualized coercion; it would open the road to the multiplicity of different

things and strip dialectics of its power over them” (6). The Utopia produced by this

reconcilement of the nonidentical and freed from the reality principle instituted to survive

in a repressive society would be, according to Jameson, a “Utopia of misfits and

oddballs” where individuals, “no longer fettered by the constraints of a now oppressive

sociality, blossom into the neurotics, compulsives, obsessives, paranoids and

schizophrenics, whom our society considers sick but who, in a world of true freedom,

may make up the flora and fauna of ‘human nature’ itself” (99). Beyond the

normalization and regulation of differences organized by the prevailing social order lies

the multiplication of different orders, each of which can only be read as aberrant and

pathological from within the singular logics of survival determined by the totalizing order

of capitalism. This dis-order of the nonidentical both underlies and is repressed by the

dominant social order, and offers a Utopian critique of the repressions necessitated by the

capitalist totalization of society. However, one cannot simply ignore the prevailing
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conditions and leap fully formed into an unmediated utopian consciousness unrepressed

by the dominant reality principle without first abolishing the objective dominance of this

wrong state of things that goes by the name of capitalism. This subjective damage

wrought by the institution of the capitalist social order cannot be repaired without the

material transformation of that social order itself.

While the Utopia freed from repression allows for the multiplication of non-

repressive non-identity, under the late capitalist regime identity and difference, the

repression necessitated by the reality principle is unequally distributed through the

processes of subjectivization that both produces and conceals its production of these

central determining differences. Herbert Marcuse notes in Eros and Civilization, that

Freudian psychoanalysis contains both a normative, clinical aspect that attempts to adjust

the psyche to the dominant order of repression, and exists as a possible critique of the

structures that make this system of repression necessary. This latter aspect that allows for

a critique of capitalism becomes available only with an understanding of the historical

nature of this social repression. Marcuse grasps this historicity through his concept of the

performance principle, which he defines as the historically variable form of the reality

principle’s socially necessary repression. The forms of repression necessitated by the

reality principle are historically inflected through the technological means of production

and the social relations of production that develop through them, which allow for the

possibility of greater or lesser repression as well as different forms of repression.

Furthermore, the performance principle is not only historically variable, but it is also

determined by the different positions in the relations of production that necessitate this

particular unequal distribution of labor, instituting differential systems of valuation of life

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and of labor, and producing systems of human expendability as a means of ensuring the

valorization of capital. And the production and organization of these differences is one of

the means through which the subiectum of capital marks out and brings into

representation its human objects as a form of fixed capital. Thus the surplus repression,

the repression over and beyond what is necessary for the continued survival of a society

with its historically specific forces of production, is differentially distributed. As Franz

Fanon well knew, the reality principle is more real for some than for others.

In the hands of Fanon, psychoanalysis becomes not merely the attempt to adjust

the black psyche to the prevailing order of repression, but is formed into a critical edge

against the system of differential repression organized under colonial capitalism. The

normalization of a system that unevenly distributes socially necessary labor under

capitalist modernity is instituted, in part, through the production of racialized and

gendered differences, which is to say through the production of the structures of identity

and nonidentity. This production of identity and the normalization of virulent forms of

difference also manifest themselves in the production of psychic differences so that the

psychoanalysis formed by Freud with the assumption of bourgeois European experience

is not necessarily and not directly applicable to those identities that are differentially

produced under the prevailing system of repression. Fanon notes that in opposition to the

normalcy produced by a white European in growing up in a normal family, “[a] normal

Negro child, having grown up within a normal family, will become abnormal on the

slightest contact with the white world” (143). It is this contact with the white world and

its externalization and production of the black subject through a system of violent

identifications and disidentifications that generates the particular forms of neurosis found
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in the racialized subject. One can thus comprehend neither the specifics of racialized

identity nor the overarching structure of late capitalist production in isolation.

Fanon articulates the necessity of comprehending the totality of these relations as

they are instituted by capitalist production. Against the possibility of projecting the

structures of European psychoanalysis on the colonized and racialized black subject,

Fanon notes that “it would be relatively easy for me to show that in the French Antilles

97 percent of the families cannot produce one Oedipal neurosis. This incapacity is one on

which we heartily congratulate ourselves” (158). The structure of repression imposed

upon the colonized black subject and the forms of neurosis that it produces are thus

radically different from those that occur within the white bourgeois family, with the

primary psychic conflict structured not around an ostensibly primordial urge toward

incest and patricide as in the Oedipus complex, but around the white other with whom

one is made to identify through cultural and economic domination, but also with whom

such identification is expressly prohibited. Such identification is always wounded, even

as it is in itself the response to a wound. “There is identification—that is, the young

Negro subjectively adopts a white man’s attitude. He invests the hero, who is white, with

all his own aggression—at that age closely linked to sacrificial dedication. A sacrificial

dedication permeated with sadism” (147). Under the differential capitalist structuring of

the subject, racialized differences manifest as psychological differences which further

shape the pathologies of those living under the capitalist system and illuminate the

subjective damage wrought in the attempt to maximize the exploitation of living labor.

In opposition to a clinical Freudian reading of the white bourgeois subject that

tends to internalize psychopathology in the individual, the psychoanalysis developed by

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Fanon in relation to the black subject is inherently social, with the primary neuroses

occurring at the point of encounter of the black subject with the white social world. The

sadistic identification with whiteness leads to a simultaneous rejection of the self, but one

that is not conditioned on any ahistorical development of the subject, as in certain

readings of Freud, but rather by the historical and social conditions of colonial capitalism.

“It is normal for the Antillean to be anti-Negro. Through the collective unconscious the

Antillean has taken over all the archetypes belonging to the European. . . There is no help

for it: I am a white man. For unconsciously I distrust what is black in me, that is, the

whole of my being” (191). These racial neuroses spring from the entire economic, social

and political construct that subordinates one group to another. The internal contradiction

that Fanon emphasizes in identifying with the European against the whole of his own

being arises from the cultural condition of domination that shapes the individual subject

and its worldview. “With the exception of a few misfits within the closed environment,

we can say that every neurosis, every abnormal manifestation, every affective erethism in

an Antillean is the product of his cultural situation” (152). And this cultural situation

turns the problem of racialization immediately into one of the broader conditions in

political economy that produce the racist society, for its truth is that it is the situation of a

culture organized under capital. “The Negro problem does not resolve itself into the

problem of Negroes living among white men but rather of Negroes exploited, enslaved,

despised by a colonialist capitalist society that is only accidentally white” (202). What

emerges from Fanon’s analysis of psychoanalysis and racism is not the demand for

equality under the ordering of capitalism; it is not the demand for the black subject to be

able to equally produce its own bourgeois Oedipal complex; and it is not the demand to
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be normalized within and adjusted to the all-encompassing system of capitalist

exploitation. Instead, the demand is articulated against the entire system that makes these

forms of repression necessary.

And it is in this play between incorporation under the name of abstract equality

and exclusion through a system of differential valuation that we might locate those

systems such as racism and sexism that produce the differential identities propagated

under late capitalism. While some argue that racism and sexism produce frictions to the

flow of capital and therefore would be erased under the universalizing power of the

commodity form, Immanuel Wallerstein notes in “The Ideological Tensions of

Capitalism” that their persistence and even their increasing virulence under the conditions

of late capitalism, which he attributes to the need to produce surplus value. Both racism

and sexism serve to produce differential valuations of human life and labor which are

then incorporated into the larger mode of production to maximize capitalist exploitation.

This final incorporation of the labor of the individual allows Wallerstein to strictly

distinguish modern racism from prior forms of xenophobia. While xenophobia ejects the

other from the community, allowing it to “gain the ‘purity’ of environment that we are

presumably seeking, but we inevitably lose something at the same time. We lose the

labour-power of the person ejected and therefore that person’s contribution to the creation

of a surplus that we might be able to appropriate on a recurring basis” (33). In order for

capitalism to extract surplus, however, it is no longer merely a matter of either ejecting

the other from or including the other within the dominant community, but rather one of

managing their differential inclusion, thereby naturalizing the unequal positions in the

relations of production. “Ejection out of the system is pointless. But if one wants to
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maximize the accumulation of capital, it is necessary simultaneously to minimize the

costs of production. . . and minimize the costs of political disruption. . . Racism is the

magic formula that reconciles these objectives” (33). Racism and sexism are two forms

that serve to restructure and repurpose the subject itself, and adjust it to the system of

production in such a way as to produce an oppressive system of identity that makes

possible the realization of surplus value. In addition to David Harvey’s spatial fix to the

crisis of capitalist accumulation, one might add that the social formation of late

capitalism employs a racial fix that differentially devalues human life so as to maximize

the exploitative extraction of surplussed—made socially to appear as a surplus—life,

labor and value. The racist society is not only one where race operates on the level of

organizing social production, but it is also one that produces the subjective experience of

race and the generalized acceptance of its differential valuation of human life.

In this sense, modernity manages social relations as a simultaneous movement of

inclusion and exclusion. Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid Modernity uses Claude Levi-

Strauss’ distinction between anthropoemic and anthropophagic societies as a means of

discussing the structures of modernity. The emic and the phagic function as two modes

for a society confronting a dangerous alterity: the emic is a mode of “‘vomiting’, spitting

out the others seen as incurably strange and alien: barring physical contact, dialogue,

social intercourse and all varieties of commercium, commensality or connubium” (101);

and the phagic is the “‘disalienation’ of alien substances: ‘ingesting’, ‘devouring’ foreign

bodies and spirits so that they may be made, through metabolism, identical with, and no

longer distinguishable from, the ‘ingesting’ body” (101). While Levi-Strauss in Tristes

Tropiques links each of these methods of neutralizing alterity with a historically distinct
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type of society—the anthropophagic is linked to “primitive” societies through the

metaphor of cannibalism and the anthropoemic linked to more “modern” societies

(388)—Bauman emphasizes how they both function within a singular society through the

production of emic and phagic spaces. However, as in both Fanon’s and Wallerstein’s

analyses of racism, we might say that the emic and phagic containments of alterity

function not only coevally within a single society, but within a singular social form. The

late capitalist structuring of identity cannot be a simple ejection of the individual and

their labor power from dominant society, nor can it be a complete incorporation into an

undifferentiated system of valuation, but rather it must effect an incorporation that is

simultaneously exclusion, and, conversely, an exclusion that is at the same time an

inclusion, a formula that echoes the integration of living labor at the heart of capital itself.

Capitalism, as a process of abstraction that functions through a vampiric, anthropophagic

consumption of living labor, must simultaneously eject the unassimilable material core of

that which cannot be integrated into its order of abstraction. Thus racism, sexism and

other forms of virulent exclusion and inclusion function to produce differential valuations

of life and labor, allowing for the production of increased surplus value premised on the

greater exploitability of certain populations.

Politics in the present must thus recognize that the capitalist nation state functions

by erasing alterity and restructuring it into a system of difference without difference that

is productive for the valorization of capital. The various forms of the politics of identity

that seek formal recognition from the nation state thus run the risk of an incorporation

that restructures the demands being made against the capitalist system so as to support the

very structures that they on another level attempt to resist. The politics of identity
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organized by the discourse of capitalist equality serve to coopt alterity through its

inclusion into the realm of the identical, a move that predetermines the possibilities of

that which was once outside the purview of the larger system of capitalist

governmentality. It makes the other an object of management through the

predetermination of what is recognized that allows for the erasure of the other’s alterity.

Wallerstein notes that in the case when the racism inherent under the capitalist nation

state becomes xenophobic, demanding the ejection of racial others, it is “resisted, of

course, by the victims, but they are also resisted by powerful economic forces who object

not to the racism but to the fact that its primary objective – an ethnicized but productive

work force – has been forgotten” (35). In this way the demand for racial tolerance and

equality on the terms of the system becomes repressive and it is insufficient for politics to

appeal to an abstract equality determined centrally by the abstraction of capital. What this

means then is that the social processes that produce subjectivity must be central to the

understanding of the political project, and, to refer back to Hardt and Negri’s Labor of

Dionysus, “[s]ubjectivity must be grasped in terms of the social processes that animate

the production of subjectivity” (12). The problem with a too easy politics of identity is

that it obscures these social processes by which identity is formed and takes identity itself

to be a given.

The task that remains is to discover the moment between the escape from and the

capture by the capitalist structuring of the subject, in order to give voice to the negativity

inherent in the capitalist mode of production and allow it to become politically fruitful.

To do so, one must consider both the totality of capital, and the fracturings and

fragmentations caused by the internal dialectical tensions necessitated by the production

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of surplus value. Capitalism is a totality in its real subsumption of the globe, but this

subsumption does not extend to every aspect of the integrated subject; it is an incomplete

totality, and it this necessary condition of its incompleteness allows for the production of

surplus value. The perpetually recurring dynamic process of capitalism must continually

work to encapsulate its own traumatic center of living labor, which is and must remain

external to it. Even as the human subject becomes ever more an object of the subiectum

of capital, the capacity present in the worker must nevertheless remain for surplus value

to be extracted. It is the perpetual process of encapsulation that gives capital both its

dynamism and form. “[O]bjectified labour, i.e. labour which is present in space, can be

opposed, as past labour, to labour which is present in time . . . as the living subject, in

which it exists as capacity, as possibility; hence as worker. The only use value therefore,

which can form the opposite pole to capital is labour. (272). The totality of capital is a

perpetually incomplete totality, a totality in the process of becoming totality whose

completion must be perpetually deferred.

However, this is not to simply valorize those elements that are not incorporated

into capital and posit them as the source of an undifferentiated pleasure. That which

escapes the dominant structurings of capital is not experienced as pleasure; for it is,

because of this escape, traumatically erased, repressed and remaindered, and will remain

so, as long as the prevailing system of capital itself determines the possible structuring of

the social world and the individuals that inhabit it. If there is any salvation from the

prevailing order of repression organized by the late capitalist mode of production, it will

not be found in our happiness or in our joys—both of which represent little more than the

successful adjustment of our psyches to the dominant repressive apparatuses—neither

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will it be located simply in the deterritorializing demands of a free-floating Deleuzian

desire; it can only be discovered in those neuroses which represent all that has been

erased and cannot be captured by the system, in those ineluctable yet ineffable feelings

that things had ought to be otherwise, in those unnamable sufferings that must remain

traumatically unspeakable so long as the possibilities of speech are determined by capital.

The heralds of the social order to come can only appear as pathologically neurotic under

the smooth operation of a repressive system organized by the extraction of surplus value.

Yet one must be wary of valorizing such neurosis, for even though such liberation can

only appear as diseased under our current mode of production, their present form is

produced by the dominant system and so “the sickness of the normal does not necessarily

imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a

different way, the same disastrous pattern” (64).

The Limits of Politics

It is thus necessary to move beyond the positivist problem of identity, which

serves as that moment when difference is captured by the prevailing order, in order to

discover that which eludes the structure of the identical. Adorno writes of Benjamin’s

“Theses on the Philosophy of History”:

If Benjamin said that history had hitherto been written from the standpoint
of the victor. . . we might add that knowledge must indeed present the
fatally rectilinear succession of victory and defeat, but should address
itself to those things which were not embraced by this dynamic, which fell
by the wayside—what might be called the waste products and blind spots
that have escaped the dialectic. It is in the nature of the defeated to appear,
in their impotence, irrelevant, eccentric, derisory. What transcends the
ruling society is not only the potentiality it develops but also all that which
did not fit properly into the laws of historical movement. Theory must
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needs deal with cross-grained, opaque, unassimilated material, which as

such admittedly has from the start an anachronistic quality, but is not
wholly obsolete since it has outwitted the historical dynamic. (161)

There are thus two possible moments of transcendence of the prevailing society which

are themselves dialectically related: the positive moment in the potentiality developed in

the forward movement of history, which, for Adorno after Auschwitz can only be

represented by the movement from the slingshot and the atom bomb; and the negative

which is contained by all that falls outside the forward movement of this instrumental

rationality, but which for that very reason must be rendered inoperative by the ruling

society. And we must turn toward this second pole, toward this life that does not live, in

order to discover some resistance; as capital functions increasingly to structure and

contain the living labor of human subjectivity for its own needs, it can only function

through increased violence, producing greater pain but also greater resistance.

However, before turning towards this negative, I want to examine the

parapolitical drama of the unflaggingly positivity of contemporary political theory,

including both the politics of universality and the politics of difference. The forms of

politics that centralize identity function by erasing the nonidentical, and integrating

everything into its own normative structures that ultimately serve the dominant system of

capital. Despite the apparent conflict between a politics of universal human identity and

one of multicultural difference, both rely upon a shared conception of identity that erases

any possible alterity to the larger capitalist system; their apparently agonistic relationship

conceals their mutual accord in terms of their containment of nonidentity and difference.

The predominant form of contemporary political theory based on a presumed universality

is no more than the attempt to incorporate and organize difference under the dominant
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sign of capital, rather than in opposition of capital’s logics. Similarly, the multicultural

politics of difference are caught up in the same logics of identity that determine which

differences become available to the processes of identification in order to differentially

incorporate alterity into the capitalist totality. Both the Hegelian politics of universality

and the multicultural politics of difference are thus politics of containment, and despite

the often vitriolic dispute between them, in the final analysis, the point of contention it is

little more than one of how to best assure everyone an appropriate place in which to be

exploited by the prevailing system of capital.

Political theory takes for granted that the system of politics formulated under late

capitalism is the teleological endpoint of human development, an assumption which

allows for the continuation of capitalist exploitation on the level of political economy.

This political theory approach to the problem of identity is steeped in a positivist

understanding of Hegel that erases the social constitution of identity and emphasizes the

forward-moving achievements made by the dialectic of history. The prevailing form of

this politics is conceived as the success of the universal identity form posited under

liberal democracy which is supposed to have triumphed over and against the

contradictions of history. Indeed, despite the controversy surrounding the work of Francis

Fukuyama, the structure of his positivist reading of Hegel, which focuses on the

achievement of universality through liberal democratic consensus, has nevertheless come

to underlie much political theory in our current moment. This positivist and universalist

understanding of history marks an acceptance of the order of liberal democracy that

prevents a more fundamental critique of not only politics, but of political economy in its

original sense that foregrounded the dialectical relationship between the political and the
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economic. The acceptance of liberal democracy prevents the attempt to think beyond the

current political structure which is an integral part of the ideology of late capitalism.

Fukuyama’s reading of the end of history exemplifies the underlying assumptions

of contemporary politics and its foreclosure of any ordering of social life that goes

beyond liberal democracy. For Fukuyama, the decline of the Soviet Union at the end of

the 1980s marked “the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s

ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final

form of human government” (190). This assumption removes the possibility of

conceptualizing the complex and dynamic stasis organized around late capitalist

production and replaces it with the simple stasis of an assumed timelessness. Bourgeois

society, despite being caught up in the movement between the perpetual dissolution and

reproduction of the capitalist system, presents itself as eternal through this inability to

comprehend its own historicity. With this end of history achieved, every social struggle

can only be a struggle for inclusion into the liberal democratic system, and any demand

beyond the imposed regime of political discourse can only appear: “Our task is not to

answer exhaustively the challenges to liberalism promoted by every crackpot messiah . . .

it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso,

for we are interested in what one could in some sense call the common ideological

heritage of mankind” (190). This exclusion of the non-Western portion of humanity from

the “common ideological heritage of mankind” is little more than a mode of disqualifying

and expelling from consideration any form of thought that does not conform to the

normative order of liberal democratic truth procedures. Any demand that goes beyond the

procedural order of liberal democracy can only appear inane under the capitalist
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organization of political possibility. Yet these crackpot messiahs, those who recognize

the poverty of capitalist liberal democracy and yearn for another form of human sociality,

may well prove a greater portion of humanity than Fukuyama is capable of recognizing.

The liberal democratic shaping of the subject and its demands limits the

possibilities of politics, making illegible any demand against the liberal democratic

regime itself. Even as recognition under the system nominally allows formerly excluded

groups to function under the imposed regime of differential valuation, it prevents

demands against the system organized by the apparatuses of capital. In this way,

multiculturalism organized under the regime of liberal democracy is pre-established to

determine the form and structure of those differences that can be incorporated into the

dominant political system. In order for social groups to be recognized under the politics

of liberal democracy, they must shape themselves into proper liberal democratic subjects

and phrase their demands in language sanctioned by the liberal democratic order. To

borrow a phrase from Slavoj Žižek, the assumption of liberal democracy as the universal

which assimilates all others creates the problem of the “decaffeinated other”: “we have

products deprived of their poisonous substance; decaf coffee, beer without alcohol, fat-

free chocolate and so on – and it seems to me that people also want a 'decaffeinated

other'; this mythic, holistic 'good other'” (Žižek, “Are we living in the end times?”). This

decaffeinated other, this Other deprived of its venomous alterity is produced through the

play of the emic and the phagic structures of liberal democracy in the movement that

incorporates the other into itself while simultaneously determining the limits and

conditions of that incorporation. As a condition of incorporation into the liberal

democratic society, the poisons contained by the Other are purged, and what remains of
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any alterity is represented in little more than the particularities of ethnic cuisine:

thoroughly exoticized yet also palatable to the market from which one is allowed to

choose freely amongst them. Yet this freedom of choice is ultimately only the freedom to

choose what is always the same, insofar as its structure has been predetermined and

preselected by the system of liberal democracy that neutralizes the venom of these

alternate identities before they are presented to the market.

Liberal democracy reinforces its hegemony by subsuming the demands made

against capitalism into the language of liberal democracy itself, thereby containing and

deflecting the essence of these demands. Jodi Melamed’s Represent and Destroy provides

one example of such integration, tracing the subsumption of African American subject

into the U.S. nation state through the construction of a system of official antiracisms.

These official antiracisms marked the integration of antiracism into the system of

capitalist production, functioning as “unifying discourses for U.S. state, society, and

global ascendancy and as material forces for postwar global capitalist expansion. . . the

incorporation of antiracism into postwar U.S. governmentality as decisive” (1). They

institute a governmental mode of power that, while enabling subjects to critique the racial

nature of capitalism, also limits and structures the content of these critiques. Official

antiracism is the Foucauldian conduct of antiracist conduct that has enabled the

expansion of the capitalist mode production by containing the material and economic

demands of antiracism. These “official antiracisms—the freedoms they have guaranteed,

the state capacities they have invented, the subjects they have recognized, and even the

rights they have secured—have enabled the normalizing violences of political and

economic modernity to advance and expand” (4-5). The subsumption of antiracism into
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the ideological structure of the capitalist nation state does not mark the advancement of

some neutral and abstract notion of justice and equality; rather, official antiracisms

function by moving the critique of racism away from “material conditions, even as they

have detrimentally limited the horizon for overcoming racism to U.S. global capitalism”

(2). Official antiracism does not definitively resolve the problem of racism itself, but

rather displaces antiracism’s material demands to the level of an abstract recognition.

Under these conditions the differential valuation of life and labor that enables racialized

economic exploitation continues unabated.

The analysis required for a historical materialist antiracism is in contradiction to

the forms of critique developed in political theory which focuses on the problems of

recognition under a putatively universal system. In reading Hegel, Fukuyama is situates

the problem of recognition on the level of ideology rather than on that of the material. In

a reaction against the Marxist emphasis on materiality, Fukuyama returns to Hegel’s

original focus on consciousness: “For Hegel, the contradictions that drive history exist

first of all in the realm of human consciousness, i.e. on the level of ideas . . . ideas in the

sense of large unifying world views that might best be understood under the rubric of

ideology” (195). In the light of this reading, the end of the Cold War represents the

dialectical working out of political ideologies, with fascism and Marxism being overcome

by the liberal democracy that provides a triumphal synthesis and allows for the resolution

of all ideological contradictions. There are thus no longer “any fundamental

‘contradictions’ in human life that cannot be resolved in the context of modern liberalism,

that would be resolvable by an alternative political-economic structure” (194). This,

would then mark the exhaustion of any possible alternatives to Western liberalism.
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Indeed, this emphasis on consciousness allows Fukuyama to remark without irony that

“the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in the West . . . the egalitarianism

of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society

envisioned by Marx” (194). This universalist reading of the politics of recognition orients

itself within the liberal democracy to prevent any forms of thought that attempt to operate

outside or against the system.

In order to ensure the smooth functioning of capitalist society, liberal democracy

attempts to erase the contradictions that exist in and are produced by the liberal

democratic order, externalizing them and presenting them as lingering remnants of a

historical past that will be overcome through the universalization of the liberal

democratic order. Fukuyama thus attempts to argue that “the root causes of economic

inequality do not have to do with the underlying legal and social structure of our society .

. . so much as with the cultural and social characteristics of the groups that make it up,

which are in turn the historical legacy of premodern conditions” (189). The exploitation

that occurs on the level of political economy in order to ensure the production of surplus

value production are explained away as a mere historical artifacts rather than as a process

internal to the system itself. “Thus black poverty in the United States is not the inherent

product of liberalism, but is rather the ‘legacy of slavery and racism’ which persisted

long after the formal abolition of slavery” (189). That these contradictions are in fact

produced by and integral to the political economic structure of capitalism that underlies

the liberal democratic regime of power is erased in an attempt to discredit any attempt to

think beyond its limits. And the insistence on this universalization that ignores the

contradictions produced by the system of liberal democracy itself drives much of political
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theory today. Fukuyama’s focus on ideology thus allows for the simplification of the

material and historical problems inherent in late capitalist liberal democracy, so that the

contradictions within the dominant system are presented as always already fully resolved

by the liberal democratic order. For Fukuyama, the working out of history is the working

out these ideologies, and liberal democracy is the triumphal synthesis which resolves all

possible contradictions through its increasing universalization. In order for a political

wrong to be addressed, it need only translate itself into the language of the liberal

democracy, which will then through the consensus of the people allow for its resolution.

The system of liberal democracy obscures its own production of structural

inequality through its presumed embodiment of the teleological end of history. The

inequalities produced within its system are portrayed merely as remnants of some prior

social organization which has now been overcome through liberal democracy. Liberal

democratic political theorists are thus unable to grasp the totality of the system of capital

and the role that liberal democracy has played in the project of justifying the exploitative

extraction of labor. The violence of this recognition is to be found in being recognized

under a system that determines the possibilities of that recognition and integrates what is

recognized into a normative regime of exclusion. As Melamed notes, “Tropes such as

race reform, racial progress, racial integration, ending racism, bringing in excluded

voices, and living in a postracial society have become touchstones for racial projects that

recalibrate state apparatuses, expand the reach of normative power, and implant norms

during the performative constitution of human subjectivities” (11). The official

antiracisms organized under the name of liberal democracy ultimately serve to subsume

resistance into the totality of the capital-oriented political structure and make these
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differences productive for capital. “[F]orms of humanity win their rights, enter into

representation or achieve a voice at the same moment that the normative model captures

and incorporates them as Negro American (racial liberalism), Asian American (liberal

multiculturalism), diversity (neoliberal multiculturalism)” (14). The moment in which the

racial other enters into the universality of liberal democratic humanity is the moment in

which they are made legible to the dominant systems that determine the very possibilities

of humanity, and these systems of universalization are always also systems of differential

valuation.

Given the manner in which official antiracisms subsume the originary intentions

of the demand against the racist system of capitalism, it is perhaps unsurprising that those

who adhere to the dominant understanding of liberal democratic politics, whether

universalist or identitarian, grievously misread Fanon. Charles Taylor’s emphasis on a

universal politics of equal dignity against a politics of identity ignores the fundamental

differences organized by capital in order to focus on what is putatively universal in the

human which is to be recognized by the state. This form of universality which is derived

from something ontologically inherent can only be discovered in a humanity transformed

into an abstract equivalent, with the social and political processes that goes into the

determination of this abstract universal hidden from view. Thus his reading of Fanon

restructures the critique against the system into one that conforms to the empty form of

recognition: “Frantz Fanon, whose influential Les Damnés de la Terre argued that the

major weapon of the colonizers was the imposition of their image of the colonized on the

subjugated people. These latter, in order to be free, must first of all purge themselves of

these depreciating self-images” (65). The critique of the totality of colonial capitalism
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and its production of race becomes little more than the problem of poor self-esteem and

body image, and the entire anti-colonial struggle becomes “a struggle for a changed self-

image which takes place both within the subjugated and against the dominator” (65).

Here, what one recognizes in the Other is merely that the Other is the same as the I, a

violent recognition that erases all possibility of alterity while imposing an identity that

prevents recognizing the totality of the system. The problem with this politics of

recognition is that it misreads Hegel in the attempt to pose the prevailing system as the

end of history; for it is not simply the expansion of a singular form of recognition that

provides the movement of politics. Central to the recognition of the Other is also the

recognition of the limits of recognition itself. One recognizes not only that the Other is

the same as the I, but also that the Other is simultaneously and most emphatically not I,

which is the moment that necessitates the movement of the dialectic that restructures the

system of recognition itself.

Despite this attempt to reduce Fanon to the discursive rules and procedures of

liberal democracy, Fanon himself is clearly not speaking within the framework imposed

by Taylor. For Fanon, it is not merely a matter of being granted the development and

recognition of an improved self-image as Taylor claims. In fact, the problem that Fanon

recognizes is precisely in the too easy recognition and incorporation of the black subject:

“One day the White Master, without conflict, recognized the Negro slave. . . But the

former slave wants to make himself recognized” (Fanon: 217). This difference between

being recognized and making oneself recognized is central, for in being recognized one is

recognized under the conditions of the dominant system of recognition, whereas in

making oneself recognized one alters the totality of the system itself. “The black man was
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acted upon. Values that had not been created by his actions, values that had not been born

of the systolic tide of his blood, danced in a hued whirl around him. The upheaval did not

make a difference in the Negro” (Fanon: 220). The primary concern here is thus not

simply about integration into the dominant system of values, but the transformation of

those values in and of themselves. Thus Fanon notes that “[f]rom time to time he [the

slave] has fought for Liberty and Justice, but these were always white liberty and white

justice; that is, values secreted by his masters” (Fanon: 221). It is not merely that the

slaves had fought for the liberty of white people and justice for white people, but that the

very values of liberty and justice are structured in the terms of the white masters. And

these values of white liberty and white justice are the foundation for the liberty and

justice of liberal democracy. The integration into this system of putative equality prevents

the revaluation of the entire structure of political economy that underlies the continued, if

transformed, exploitation organized by capitalism. What is at stake is not a matter of

becoming recognizable to the prevailing logics of capital, but one of fundamentally

transforming this logic itself.

Ultimately, liberal democracy and the insipid multicultural organization of

difference that results might both be understood as the political face of late capitalism.

Liberal democracy is organized to incorporate and contain the alterity that would

otherwise make a demand against the totality of the system. The unapologetic assumption

of Western liberal democracy as the fullest and final form of human political

achievement—an assumption that erases the violence at the foundation of liberal

democracy itself—is thoroughly coextensive with the assumption of capitalism as the

fullest and final form of human economic production, and is one of the ideological tools
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employed by the prevailing social order in its attempt to arrest its own decline by positing

itself as the insurmountable end to historical development. Yet it is not difficult to see

how the ever-intensifying exploitation under the late capitalist mode of production and

the virulent forms of difference produced in order to maximize and naturalize this

exploitation serve as the expression of an as yet unresolved contradiction between the

productive forces and the needs of the human subject; and this central contradiction

defines the capitalist mode of production and fundamentally cannot be resolved under it.

Any politics of recognition that assumes the granting of admission to the excluded into a

putatively universal political order displaces and ignores the primary structuring that

occurs in this predetermination of what properly constitutes recognition through

determining what can and cannot be recognized and what the consequences of this

recognition can be. The struggle for recognition is always already orchestrated by a

system that determines the rules under which the struggle is to take place.

Difference and Negativity

My critique of liberal democracy is not so distant from that of many on the New

Left who also focus on the limits of the contemporary multicultural politics and its links

to capitalist exploitation. However, while many of these theorists focus on formulating a

new universality against the false universality of capitalism and its organization of

difference, I want to revive the related but also qualitatively different problems of totality

and negativity. While the universality employed by dominant strains of political theory is

centered on determining a universally shared human capacity, the problems of totality

and negativity focus instead on the social and political structures that have become
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universal through the domination and subsumption of the nonidentical. If one of the

central problems of contemporary political theory can be located in its emphasis of a

positivist reading of the Hegelian dialectic which ultimately subsumes any possible

resistance, a response might take two forms, both of which were elucidated toward the

end of the 1960s by two radically different yet astonishingly convergent philosophers: the

complete rejection of dialectics as exemplified by Gilles Deleuze’s Différence et

Répétition published originally in French in 1968, or the radicalization of dialectics as in

Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialektik published in the German in 1966. While Deleuze’s

work has given rise to the contemporary movement towards affect theory, the breadth of

Adorno’s oeuvre tends to languish relatively untouched except by Germanists and critical

theorists. Here I want to draw out a parallel to affect theory using the concept of the

negative in order to bring the two dialectically together against the structures of identity

that have been increasingly reified by capital.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze describes the anti-Hegelian atmosphere of

the late sixties, faulting the Hegelian tradition for being centered on a concept of

contradiction that subordinated difference to an order of identity. “The primacy of

identity, however, conceived, defines the world of representation. But modern thought is

born out of the failure of representation, of the loss of identity, and of the discovery of all

the forces that act under the representation of the identical” (1994: xix). Thus Deleuze

attempts to elucidate all the forces of difference in order to undo the logic of identity by

attending to the sheer positivity of the multitude that it subsumes. Beyond the conception

of identity exists the object which, in its sheer material difference, always exceeds the

limits of the knowing subject. This difference exists in itself, without a stance that would
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necessarily incorporate it into the Hegelian structure of contradiction. In the actually

existing world of things, everything is difference, and it is only the human modes of

perception and conceptualization that impose the structure of identity. Deleuze notes that

his focus is on “a concept of difference without negation, precisely because unless it is

subordinated to the identical, difference would not extend or ‘would not have to extend’

as far as opposition and contradiction” (1994: 6); thus, even the organization of that

which falls out of identity critically against the dominant structure of identity is itself a

totalization that falsifies things in their sheer material existence.

One might read the Deleuzian approach to affect as the attempt to apply the

reality of sheer difference to the limits of the modern subject and against the increasingly

totalizing nature of late capitalism. Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages notes that the

affective turn indicates “that no matter how intersectional our modes of subjectivity, no

matter how attuned to locational politics of space, place, and scale, these formations may

still limit us if they presume the automatic primacy and singularity of the disciplinary

subject and its identitarian interpellation” (206). Affect theorists attempt to move beyond

the intersectionally conceived conceived as limited to a discursively produced grid.

Similarly, Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual attempts to disarticulate the reified

forms of identity at the base of multicultural politics through a critique of intersectional

models. For Massumi, the intersectional account of multicultural identity overemphasizes

systemic structurings while neglecting the ontological exceedance of the body beyond the

framework of discourse: “The grid was conceived as an oppositional framework of the

culturally constructed significations: male verses female, black versus white, gay versus

straight, and so on. A body corresponded to a ‘site’ on the grid defined by an overlapping
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of one term from each pair. The body came to be defined by its pinning to the grid” (2).

This grid is overdetermined by socially produced discourses, limiting the possibilities of

understanding that which escapes discourse. It is important to note here that Massumi is

not interested in restoring the subject; instead, he wants to focus on what precedes the

formation of the subject in the sheer materiality of the body, thus emphasizing the

Deleuzian differences that reject any possible identity because of the difference inherent

in materiality.

Affect theory attends to the materiality of a body conceived as both external and

prior to the structuring of discourse in order to adhere to its ontological primacy. “To say

that passage and indeterminacy ‘come first’ or ‘are primary’ is more a statement of

ontological priority than the assertion of a time sequence” (8). The move towards the

primacy of the material body is seen as the rejection of the Foucauldian emphasis on the

discursive production of the body as the site of inscription for multiple discursive

regimes. While Foucault emphasizes the discursive nature of the body as “the inscribed

surface of events . . . Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the

articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by

history and the process of history's destruction of the body” (Foucault 1991: 83). For

Massumi, the emphasis on the discursive encoding is an aftereffect which is always

simply a capture of the body which in reality exceeds the structuring of this discourse.

The model of intersectional identities and these discourses are then read as the attempt to

capture and reduce the threatening nature of the bodily exceedance of discourse.

Massumi places the emphasis “on process before signification or coding” because in his

analysis, “[s]ocial and cultural determinations on the model of positionality are also
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secondary and derived . . . Gender, race, and sexual orientation also emerge and back-

form their reality. Grids happen. So social and cultural determinations feed back into the

process from which they arose” (8). It is therefore not that these intersectional identities

have no effect upon the level of the body, but rather that the body is primary and all of

these discourses secondary; however, the forms of analysis that Massumi produces

adhere so closely to the specificities of the particular body as to make any conception of

larger structurings impossible. Ultimately, the adherence to the micro-ontological level

that Massumi employs seem like a poor answer the issues raised by Fanon.

Massumi begins by framing his book as an argument against the forms of identity

structured by discourse and the apparatuses of capitalism; however, the political nature of

the problem is neglected in favor of emphasizing a thoroughly differential materiality that

is unorganized in and of itself. The discursive Foucauldian emphasis on the body as

imprinted by history and therefore by larger economic and political structures is replaced

by that which escapes this imprinting which can therefore have no history and ultimately

no integration into the political. Politics presupposes structure, and to move onto what is

presumed ontologically primary misses the political, while ignoring the politics of

determining what constitutes this primacy. Thus, while Massumi’s critique is originally

formulated against intersectional identity’s inability to conceptualize movement and

change, and therefore resistance, the question of politics completely drops out in favor of

an emphasis on the ontologies of the body. In fact, Massumi ultimately institutes a

prohibition against the philosophical consideration of the political: “It is precisely when

nature philosophy becomes politically useful that it ceases to be itself. Just as science

crosses a threshold when it feeds into technological ‘progress,’ so, too, does philosophy
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when it lends itself to radical politics” (244). Philosophy that is politically useful, even to

a radical politics, is according to Massumi, a realm of untruth because it is merely

instrumental. However, the freedom from use emphasized here seems largely an illusion,

for if it is not useful to a radical politics, it has no doubt become useful to capital.

Theodor Adorno, writing in the same historical moment as Deleuze, similarly

critiques the Hegelian dialectic, however, with the emphasis on negativity rather than

difference. In Adorno’s analysis, the Hegelian dialectic succumbs to its own positivity,

emphasizing a closed synthesis over the negative—negative here understood not in the

moral sense, but as that constitutive absence that provides movement in the dialectic.

Theodor Adorno in Negative Dialectics, that “dialectics meant to achieve something

positive by means of negation; the thought figure of a ‘negation of negation’ later became

the succinct term. This book seeks to free dialectics from such affirmative traits without

reducing its determinacy” (xix). However, Adorno notes, the emphasis on the affirmative

and positive traits within the dialectic conceal that which has been left behind in the

forward movement of progress. While Deleuze rejects the Hegelian dialectic in favor of

the positivity of what exists and exceeds the structure of contradiction, Adorno attempts

to recuperate it by asserting its moment of negativity that is both inherent in and

uncontained by the dialectic. “The name of dialectics,” Adorno asserts, “says no more, to

begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder,

that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy. … It indicates the untruth

of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived” (1973: 5).

Adorno’s negative dialectic holds open a conception of difference as non-identity, an

excess that can only be thought of as a remainder. Faced with the order of a capitalist
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modernity that one cannot step outside to achieve a transcendental viewpoint, one is left

only with remainders, the broken ruins of what might have been, that offer a critique of

what exists through their own failed realization.

These wounded remainders are perpetually produced precisely because of the

untruth of identity, but this untruth cannot be surpassed by simply posing the truth of

sheer difference. If the concept of non-identity structures difference in an opposition to

identity, it is not because of some inherent nature of the subject and object, but because

the social and historical conditions of capitalism and the commodity form. Capitalism is

that system that functions through the continual production of an ensemble of relations

that serve to both produce and contain difference as a means of annihilating the aleatory.

While the Deleuzian emphasis on the positivity of difference tends towards

ontologization, Adornian negativity is deliberately formulated out of and against the

historical and social conditions of capitalism. “What we differentiate will appear

divergent, dissonant, negative for just as long as the structure of our consciousness

obliges it to strive for unity: as long as its demand for totality will be its measure for

whatever is not identical with it” (Adorno 1973: 5). The nonidentical is thus a condition

of our own systems of knowing that function under the tyranny of a knowledge that

centers and emphasizes the identical. This structure of our consciousness is not

something that can be freely chosen, but is produced under the social conditions of

capitalism, and cannot be dismissed on the level of consciousness without a change in the

social and material conditions that produces that consciousness. The dialectical method,

like the subject that employs it, is also a social product, but it holds out the promise of its

own annihilation. “Dialectical reason’s own essence has come to be and will pass, like
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antagonistic society” (Adorno 1973: 141). The promise held out by dialectical reason is

its own eventual obsolescence, which only becomes possible through the subsumption of

capitalist modernity.

Dialectics, and the negativity that it employs, is a form that corresponds to social

reality, but because of this correspondence also always threatens to reproduce the same

violence it attempts to escape. To array the sheer excess of ontological existence as

contradiction is already to give it an order which reduces sheer difference. “This law [of

the dialectic] is not a cognitive law, however. It is real. Unquestionably, one who submits

to the dialectical discipline has to pay dearly in the qualitative variety of experience”

(Adorno 1973: 6). However, the antagonistic structure of dialectics is deliberately

produced out of the structure of antagonistic society as a means of opposing that society.

The principle of dominion, which antagonistically rends human society, is

the same principle which, spiritualized, causes the difference between the
concept and its subject matter; and that difference assumes the logical
form of contradiction because, measured by the principle of dominion,
whatever does not bow to its unity will not appear as something different
from and indifferent to the principle, but as a violation of logic. (1973: 48)

What is external to the system of domination is made negative by that system, and serves

as a point of resistance. Adorno’s centralization of dialectics as an aspect of capitalist

reality is in contrast to Deleuze who situates dialectics as a merely epistemological

enterprise. As Alberto R. Bonnet notes in “Antagonism and Difference,” “it was

dialectics rather than reality that Deleuze held responsible for ‘substituting the labour of

the negative for the play of difference and the differential’” (Bonnet 47). While the

organization of difference into a system of contradiction certainly serves to organize and

structure difference, as Deleuze argues, nevertheless, this organization and structure need
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not follow the same logic of identity as that imposed by capital. “Still, in the administered

world the impoverishment of experience by dialectics, which outrages healthy opinion,

proves appropriate to the abstract monotony of that world. Its agony is the world’s agony

raised to a concept” (6). The attempt to salve this agony is more than just the assertion of

the sheer difference inherent in the distance between the concept and the object, but

because both concept and object are socially constituted, involves the transformation of

the social structure. It is not just that the positive difference of what exists becomes

negative with respect to the dominant structure of knowledge, but that the concept of the

negative structures what is critical against the dominant system, without itself becoming

systematic.

The affirmative character of affect theory similarly corresponds the same

capitalist social reality, with its ever-accelerating forms of deterritorialization, but it does

so without becoming conscious of itself. What thus becomes necessary is an

understanding of the movement within and between the micro-political structures of

affect and the totality of capitalist modernity, and it is perhaps here that we might locate

the space of the negative and all that which has failed to achieve a positive existence

under the prevailing order of domination. “What dissolves the fetish is the insight that

things are not simply so and not otherwise, that they have come to be under certain

conditions. Their becoming fades and dwells within the things; it can no more be

stabilized in their concepts than it can be split off from its own results and forgotten”

(Adorno 1973: 52). Thus, while affect theory has produced ever more sophisticated

analyses of the microstructures that underlie the subject, it is also necessary to tarry with
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the negative of what has been erased and subsumed by the dominant structures of capital,

in order to posit the complex totality within which they arise.

Our task here is to make politically fruitful this space of the negative and the non-

identical, for it is also the space of possibility, but only those possibilities that have been

thwarted and that we have failed to realized. “The means employed in negative dialectics

for the penetration of its hardened objects is possibility—the possibility of which their

reality has cheated the objects and which is nonetheless visible in each one” (52-3). And

what we see in the politics of the subject shaped under late capitalism is the perpetual loss

of possibility through the dual structuring forces of the phagic that consumes the alterity

of the subject and subsumes it to the order of the same, and the emic that disgorges what

is unassimilable to the capitalist totality. Rather than formulating a politics that takes

identity as its basis, one must hold fast to a politics that maintains its fidelity to what has

been lost, erased, rendered inoperable under the prevailing order of social and political

life, a politics not of identity—nor, what often amounts to the same, one of difference or

multiculturalism—but a politics of the nonidentical. Negativity is not an abstract

category, nor is it merely a form of dialectical mysticism; rather it is central to the

functioning of capital itself. The negative is produced through capital’s necessary

condition of making visible certain modes of being while making others inconceivable,

and thus negativity is not ontologically given but always relative to the prevailing system

of domination. It recognizes both the imposed totality, and the erasures and elisions that

had to be enacted to maintain it. The critical categories of totality and negativity thus

emphasize the violence committed against the particular, which allows it to be mobilized
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in opposition to the totality which attempts to but also always fails to fully organize the

whole of social existence.

The category of totality must be employed against what has come to impose its

own structures as total. Adorno notes in his introduction to The Positivist Dispute in

German Sociology that “[t]otality is not an affirmative but rather a critical category.

Dialectical critique seeks to salvage or help to establish what does not obey totality, what

opposes it or what first forms itself as the potential of a not yet existent individualization”

(12). While the latent affirmationism within universality always seeks out the same, and

in this process finds what it seeks by constantly reducing the other to the same, the

totality employed by Adorno is about seeking out what does not obey the law of the

totality. It seeks out these extraneous elements not in order to better integrate them into

the existing totality, which is in the final analysis the task of capital’s subsumption of the

world, but in order to rescue the negative potential of these elements. Negativity is not an

abstract category but is the concrete determination of what does not obey the logic of the

system, of what, indeed, must be erased by the totality in order for the totality to continue

into being. These elements are integrated only by way of their erasure. The potential for

these not yet present individualizations opposes the dominant form of totality and points

towards alternate possibilities of ordering society which in themselves need not form a

new totality that would dominate all other elements. “A liberated mankind would by no

means be a totality” (12). The critical conception of totality highlights the violence

committed against the particular that can never be fully integrated into the structure of

identity. As opposed to the naturalized universality employed by the prevailing political

theory, and the celebration of sheer difference of affect theory, the problem of totality
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recognizes the socially constituted nature of the totality and attempts to go beyond its

limits to form the particular against the dominant order.

Thus while Deleuzian affect emphasizes the existence of what escapes on the

level of ontology, Adorno focuses on the structure from which this escape takes place,

which is deeply social. As Jameson argues in “Cognitive Mapping,” it is certainly true

that “[t]he conception of capital is admittedly a totalizing or systemic concept: no one has

ever seen or met the thing itself; it is either the result of scientific reduction . . . or the

mark of an imaginary and ideological vision” (Jameson 284); yet that does not mean that

such a system does not exist, and the adherence to the micrological makes it impossible

to conceive of this larger system. The denial of the larger system, despite its

fundamentally abstract nature can only result in integration; “anyone who believes that

the profit motive and the logic of capital accumulation are not the fundamental laws of

this world . . . is doomed to social democracy, with its now abundantly documented

treadmill of failures and capitulations” (Jameson 284). One might say that capitalism,

despite being a kind of abstraction, despite no one having ever seen or met it, despite it

being the an abstract conceptualization, nevertheless functions as though it were

ontologically real, and it is absolutely necessary to comprehend the totality that

capitalism posits. And it is the work of Adorno that allows us to maintain that totality

while examining its limits. Against Hegel’s emphasis on the absolute self-becoming of

universality through the claim that “the truth is the whole” (PS), Adorno maintains also

that “The whole is the false” (MM 54) as a means of attempting to rescue all those

elements that cannot be incorporated into the totality of capitalism. Capital is total in the

sense that the process of real subsumption has incorporated the entirety of the globe; but
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not total in the sense that each element can only be incorporated only differentially, for

some part of the ontological existence of each element always escapes the abstractive

logic of capital. This indelible alterity is the space of the negative, which maintains a

melancholy rejection of what is in order to hold fast to the possibility of what is better.

One must attempt to think the totality of capitalism while also reckoning with the

limits of that totality, in order to examine the specificity of how the elements are

integrated into the whole. As capitalism has moved from the formal subsumption to the

real subsumption of alternate modes of production, the whole has become ever more

dominated by the total system, making it ever more imperative to consider the totality;

yet even as it subsumes the globe, this capitalist totality also produces its own internal

limits and differences to produce surplus value. The concept of totality must not be

avoided; while Bataille in Inner Experience that “Like a flock chased by an infinite

shepherd, we, the bleating wave, would flee, endlessly flee from the horror of reducing

being to totality” (36), even as we flee the epistemological act of reducing the plenitude

of being to a singular totality, we must be wary of running straight into the jaws of the

wolf that relentlessly seeks to consume and phagically integrate us into its totality. For it

is not simply us that are reducing being to totality through our epistemic practices; it is

the being of capital that has had no trouble in integrating being into its own social

totality. Thus as Terry Eagleton notes in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, “We may forget

about totality, but totality, for good or ill, will not forget about us, even in our most

microscopic mediations” (346). However, the analysis of totality must consider the

microscopic even as it attempts to intervene on the larger systemic level. Only in this way

can we discover the ways in which “the principle of identity is always self-contradictory,
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perpetuating non-identity in damaged, suppressed form as a condition of its being”

(Adorno 1973: 346). What is made identical under the dominant system of totality is

never able to fully overcome the persistent nonidentity that is its actual existence. Even as

contemporary forms of critique attempt to examine the increasingly micropolitical

structuring of the subject, one must not lose sight of the totality of the system which

attempts orders these differences, for finally the goal is not simply in the micropolitical

interpretation of society but in the transformation of the political economic system as a

whole.

Towards a Marxist Aesthetic

While many discussions of affect emphasize the ontological primacy of the

affective body that necessarily escapes the social, ontological primacy itself is a

thoroughly ideological concept, and I instead want to focus on the space between the

affective body and its capture. Indeed, ontological primacy has a parallel structure to the

search for origins critiqued by Michel Foucault in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”

Thus, even as Deleuzian affect theory attempts to emphasize the material lack of identity,

“because it is an attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities,

and their carefully protected identities; because this search assumes the existence of

immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession” (78). The

ontological emphasis of affect theory thus mobilizes one notion of truth, even though it is

articulated as the attempt to mobilizes that which necessarily escapes against the

dominant conception of truth. In the end, it evades the inherently social nature of human

reality, for even in the most particular and material of affects we still discover the social
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that enables one particular encounter with the world, through the world which itself has

been thoroughly overwritten by human sociality, through the division and multiplication

of affective experiences between those who have the privilege of experience their world

as their own and those who are alienated to the utmost degree from their own existence.

And in the end, Fanon notes, “[t]he alienation of the black man is not an individual

question. Alongside phylogeny and ontogeny, there is also sociogeny” (xv). Thus

Foucault cautions against origin, even an origin constituted by the primacy of a pristine

human body: “This search is directed to ‘that which was already there,’ the image of a

primordial truth fully adequate to its nature, and it necessitates the removal of every mask

to ultimately disclose an original identity” (78). Affect thus still attends an imagined

originality of what is there, erasing its historicity and eliminating the traces of the social

within it as opposed to “the genealogist . . . [who] finds that there is ‘something

altogether different’ behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that

they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from

alien forms” (78). Much might be learned by a genealogy of the affective body, precisely

to rearticulate it with the social.

While affect theory places the primacy material body at the center, even though it

glancingly recognizes the backformation of discursive identity, one might just as easily

place the affective experiences of the body not at the beginning of experience, but as its

end. Paulo Virno performs precisely this act in “Two Masks of Materialism,” where he

centralizes the social understanding of even the most micrological experience: “every

living experience presupposes a lot of materialized theory. Innumerable conceptual

constructions, embodied in as many techniques, procedures, and regulations, orient the

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gaze and serve as the premises of any operation whatsoever. Direct perception and the

most spontaneous action come last” (Virno 171). This inversion of the emphasis on the

ontological primacy of affect draws attention towards the capture of these affective

experiences in the larger social structure that delimits their applicability to politics. And,

according to Virno, this shift of the sensible from the most immediate to the most

mediated allows for a critique of society that offers some hope for developing an

understanding that would at the same time be able to intervene into politics. “[I]t is

precisely the terminal placement of sensible experience. . . which offers a glimmer of

hope” . . . when direct perception is understood as the furthest edge, or the last link, in an

entirely deployed knowledge process, it can at last aspire to unconditioned integrity . . .

there is nothing after sensation, everything else came before’ (172). Ultimately then, it

becomes necessary to understand how the most immediate sensual and affective

experiences are at the same time political experiences, and how politics is caught up in

the affective level which seems to mark the escape from discourse and politics. In order

to do this, I want to emphasize that the human is that being which is social on the level of

ontological primacy, so that ontogeny and sociogeny are geared toward the same task.

Perhaps somewhat contrary to a standpoint that emphasizes the ontological

primacy of the experiences that exceed human perception, one might instead focus on the

processes whereby the capture and exceedance are structured, which is to say, the

immanent sociality of human perception. Indeed, in Adorno, the thing is not an essence,

but rather the ensemble of the social through which it connects with the totality of human

experience. “To comprehend a thing in itself, not just to fit and register it in its system of

reference, is nothing but to perceive the individual moment in its immanent connection
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with others. Such anti-subjectivism lies under the crackling shell of absolute idealism; it

stirs in the tendency to unseal current issues by resorting to the way they came to be”

(Adorno 1973: 25-6). In this view, the human is thoroughly social, and this sociality is

not limited to the aspects of cognition or of discourse, but rather thoroughly saturates the

being and the affect of the human. The ontology of the human is constituted by an

ensemble of social relations, so that the ontogeny of the human is simultaneously its

sociogeny. There is no point where things simply exceed the perceptual capacity of the

humans, but what is captured and what escapes is always a condition of human sociality.

Recent studies in the relationship between perception and language have demonstrated

that both are in fact deeply interlaced, even in the most primary moments of perception.

In the study of color, “a recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study by

Tan et al. (2008) suggested that language processing areas in the brain are directly

involved even in the simplest discriminations of easy-to-name colors” (220) (Goldstein at

al. 2009: 220). What this means is that the visual cortex of the brain is deeply connected

with those areas of the brain responsible for language so that the linguistic structure of

human experience becomes inseparable from the experience itself.

The human is thus an ontologically social being that is caught up in the living

labor that shapes these experiences and the social world that determines their affective

affinities. In the phenomenon of categorical perception, the learning of language for

particular phenomenon fundamentally changes the experience of the color spectrum.

Looking at the development of color and naming in children, Marc Bornstein notes that

children are capable of discriminating between various spectral wavelengthns, but are

unable to accurately name them. Thus “color naming presupposes mature perception,
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discrimination, and categorization of color” (73). Even as children learn the proper words

for the various colors, they are unable to make the connection between the visual

perception of the color and its name until further development, indicating the

development of the visual cortex and its integration with the linguistic structure of the

brain necessary for this color naming. “[C]orrect and consistent naming follows a tardy

and untidy course in semantic development” (Bornstein 73). Bornstein notes that the

phenomena of unequal development between color perception and color naming was

recognized as far back as Darwin who notes in his Biographical Sketch of a Young Infant

that “soon after they had reached the age in which they knew the names of all the

ordinary things that they appeared to be entirely incapable of giving the right names to

the colors of a color etching” (Bornstein 74).Language is not something that is secondary

to human experience, not something that is only imposed or forced onto the subject, but

is deeply a part of human experience. Both evolutionarily and biologically we are social

beings whose sociality is integrated into our ontological structures: “Visual-verbal

associative abilities rest on the integration of specific cortical structures, and a heretofore

unexamined developmental hypothesis of color naming is that neurological maturation

may act as a rate-limiting factor in ontogeny” (Bornstein 83).

Furthermore, this inherent sociality of human experience structures the very

experiences themselves. Robert L. Goldstone’s “Perceptual Learning” in the Annual

Review of Psychology, traces how language alters the perceptual space within the human

itself. One of the primary examples of this is categorical perception in the color space.

Rather than colors being experienced as a smooth continuum with an infinite gradation

between different wavelengths of light, the color space experienced by the human is
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warped by language so that certain categories become more perceptible. “Korean (but not

English) speakers show Categorical perception (CP) on a visual search task for

aboundary between two Korean colour categories that is not marked in English. These

effects were observed regardless of whether target items were presented in the left or

right visual field” (Roberson 752).1 Julie Goldstein, Jules Davidoff, and Debi Roberson

provide a more concrete example in their article, “Knowing color terms enhances

recognition: Further evidence from English and Himba” from the Journal of

Experimental Child Psychology. They find that categorical perception allows for

distinctions to be made between linguistically determined color groups in one language

that are much more difficult to make in cultures that lack these linguistic distinctions. For

example, the Himba language lacks the distinction between green and blue, and Himba

speakers have a single word for between green and blue, consequently they have a much

more difficult time distinguishing between what is designated as “blue” and “green” in

English. Conversely, the Himba language makes a distinction within the category English

speakers categorize as “green” between Dumbu and Burou, which then causes English

speakers to have much more difficulty making the distinction between two colors which

are readily apparent to Himba speakers.

1
See also “Categorical perception of color in the left and right visual field is verbally mediated: Evidence
form Korean.” Debi Roberson, Hyensou Pak, J. Richard Hanley Cognition 107 (2008): 752-762; “The
Structure of the Color Naming Space.” Steve Guest, Darren Van Laar. Vision Research 40 (2000): 723-734.
“Colour Categories in a stone-age tribe.” Jules Davidoff, Ian Davies, Debi Roberson. Nature 398: 203-204.
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Figure 2: Organization of the color space in English.

Figure 3: Organization of the color space in Himba.

They thus conclude that “our perception is warped so that an otherwise smooth

continuum of change becomes ‘stretched’ at category boundaries and ‘compressed’ in

category center” (482), and furthermore, their research shows that this mutation in

perceptual space is not innately a part of human vision but infinitely cross-referenced

with language.

While affect theorists like Massumi may well attend to the structure of the

undifferentiated color space before its integration with the linguistic cortices of the brain,

I want to instead locate the space of politics precisely in this structuring of perception by
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language which determines what makes itself available to political struggle. The source

of political struggle might thus be seen to arise in those moments that are constantly

being incorporated into the dominant logics of capital, but which also, simultaneously

escape. The persistent tension of this escape and capture thus becomes the focus of my

analysis in the second part of this dissertation. As Ernst Bloch notes in The Principle of

Hope, there are some affective levels which cannot be fully captured:

Hunger cannot stop continually renewing itself, but if it increases

uninterrupted, satisfied by no certain bread, then it suddenly changes. The
body becomes rebellious, does not go in search of food merely within the
old framework. It seeks to change the situation which has caused its empty
stomach. . . hunger transforms itself, having been taught, into an explosive
force against the prison of deprivation (75).

Between this escape and capture we discover that there are, indeed, affects that escape the

linguistic structure formed by capital, affects that must be continually produced by the

capitalist system precisely because of its perpetual need to create surplus value. The place

of language and the place of social are the place of politics, because it determines what

becomes available to political perception and how those perceptions can be mobilized

against the dominant system. And the goal is not to simply allow these affects to exist in

their ontologically pure state, to allow difference to maintain its difference, but to gather

them together against the dominant system which makes them necessary in order to open

a space of liberation where deprivation itself will be subsumed. And so long as capital

functions through oppression, which is to say, so long as capitalism exists, the space and

desire of liberation will always be open.

This leads us to the consideration of what might be called a properly Marxist

aesthetic, which might be defined as the proper political economic mode of dealing with
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the affective and social nature of perception in order to make it operative against the

dominant system of repression and its apparatuses of liberal inclusion. Rather than

attempting to derive a Marxist aesthetic by imposing a reified notion of art onto Marx’s

writings, as often seems to be the case in the broad tradition of Marxist aesthetics, one

might instead work to recuperate the qualitatively different idea of art that Marx develops

throughout his own works. Marx is generally considered to have written very little

directly on the question of aesthetics, with the discussion often confined to his analysis of

the continued appeal of Ancient Greek arts In this case, it would be impossible to fully

comprehend the works of Marx without also comprehending the aesthetic tradition out of

which he writes, a tradition that traverses Kant, Schiller and Hegel, but does not end with

them. Marx works within this tradition of the aesthetic but also goes beyond it by offering

the possibility of not only putting idealist German philosophy back upon its feet, but also

turning idealist aesthetics right side up. At stake in this volatile space between the

recuperation and the reinvention of Marx’s own aesthetics is the attempt to come to a

new understanding of art and what it produces, both in terms of the material products, but

also in terms of these divisions within the human upon which the political is based.

However, philosophical aesthetics, while not explicitly discussed by Marx, nevertheless

forms a fundamental background against which his early thought emerges. The prevailing

understanding of aesthetics is – historically – relatively recent, and a much broader

conception existed in Marx’s own time.

In Marx’s time, the scope of aesthetics itself was never fully settled – referring

either to a broad notion of a science of the sensible or a more limited understanding of art

– the problem of aesthetics inherits a legacy of the negative which it shares with the
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dialectic as formulated by Hegel. While Marx never specifically utilizes the specialized

discourses of the aesthetics, they nevertheless serve as the background of own

developments in thinking of human sensuous activity. In Marx’s critique of Hegel’s

idealism, he argues that ‘because thought imagines itself to be the direct opposite of itself

– i.e., sensuous reality – and therefore regards its own activity as sensuous, real activity,

this supersession in thought, which leaves its object in existence in reality, thinks it has

actually overcome it’ (2010: 155). For Marx it is the sensuous reality of beauty as a

sensuous activity of the human that is primary. If the aesthetic did not refer merely to the

realm of high art, but still maintained Baumgarten’s formulation as referring to the entire

range of sensible and bodily perception, Marx’s intervention here must be understood as

deeply aesthetic insofar as it engages this particular lineage of philosophical thought.

It is notable that while Marx himself does not use the term ‘aesthetics’, he does

engage in a type of critique that must have been understood as following broadly in the

aesthetic tradition. One might read Marx’s general tendency to eschew the name of

aesthetics as an attempt to insert a fundamentally different principle at the heart of the

human sensuous activity: the social. In ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, Marx notes that ‘[t]he

chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the

thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of

contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively’ (1972b:

143). And the human being that participates in this human sensuous activity is always

already a social being so that the senses are themselves always already social.

Commenting on the narrative structure of Robinson Crusoe in The Grundrisse, Marx

notes that the appearance of a human being producing in nature alone is itself a product
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of a particular historical epoch. Even the appearance of an isolated individual is a

historical and social phenomenon. Instead, the human being ‘is in the most literal sense a

ζωον πολιτιχόν [political animal], not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which

can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual

outside society . . . is as much an absurdity as is the development of language without

individuals living together and talking to each other’ (1972a: 223). Human sensuous

activity is already a social activity, and cannot be considered outside of its social context.

In this way Marx follows in the line of Hegel, so that even the immanent

experience of the body does not offer a socially transcendent position. Adorno briefly

gestures towards a reading of spirit as society, noting in Phenomenology that ‘society is

manifested in phenomena the way, for Hegel, essence is manifested in them’ (Adorno

1993: 19–20). The phenomena themselves are thus a manifestation of the social. Whereas

contemporary affect theory tends to focus on the immanence of the body as something

that exceeds the structuring constraints of the social through sheer difference, Marx,

following Hegel, finds the essence neither in the individual body nor in larger structures,

but in the social itself which functions as a mediation between the two.

In Hegel’s conception, the complete separation between the sensuous

world of appearance and the supersensible world of essence is gradually
transcended in favour of a second supersensible world, in which its reality
encompasses the sensuous world and contains within itself, while
maintaining their difference, both the sensuous and the first supersensible
world. (Reichelt 2005: 32)

Thus, the negativity of the dialectic is itself preserved, canceled and raised up into this

second supersensible world of the social.

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In commenting on the relations between production and consumption in The

Grundrisse, Marx notes that objects that are produced also produce the proper mode of

consumption. The immediate identity of production and consumption thus points to the

centrality of the production of subjectivity, and the negativity that was once located in the

space between the subject and the object becomes a social phenomenon. In Marx the

perception of space and time become forms of practice that are essentially social. ‘The

object of art – like every other product – creates a public which is sensitive to art and

enjoys beauty. Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a

subject for the object’ (Marx 1972a: 230). Even basic human sensuous activity cannot be

grounded in the contemplation of an individual subject, but must be located in the social.

‘The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is

the ensemble of social relations’ (1972b: 145). In Marx, what must underlie aesthetics as

a science of the sensible is thus a science of the social, and it is through a consideration of

the commodity form that this science is practiced.

While Marx generally avoids imagining the liberated communist society in order

to avoid an easy utopianism, in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts he

nevertheless examines the effects of abolishing private property on the human sensorium.

This seems to locate the problem of private property in the sphere of human sensuous

activity, making it an aesthetic, or perhaps, affective problem. Under private property, the

problem is that ‘all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple

estrangement of all these senses – the sense of having’ (2010: 114). Abolishing private

property will lead to ‘the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes; but it

is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become human,
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subjectively as well as objectively. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object

has become a social, human object, made by man for man’ (2010: 115). If in the act of

production the human produces not only the objects of his means of subsistence, but also

the human itself, under the production of private property there is a reification of the

social that prevents human sensory activity from attaining its fullest expression. What is

produced with the reified object is the reified subject. It is only through the abolition of

private property that the human eye becomes human and the object becomes a human

object, freeing the connections reified by the production of objects divorced from human

connections and allowing for the production of both the human object and the human

human.

Elimination of private property induces a change in the human’s aesthetic

sensibilities, altering the sensory relation to the world. ‘The senses have therefore become

theoreticians in their immediate praxis. They relate to the thing for its own sake, but the

thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and vice versa’ (2010:

115). The assertion that sensual activity can become immediately theoretical could stand

some elaboration; it is counterintuitive that the senses in their immediacy can become

theorists, particularly when theory is understood of as a function of abstract cognition.

However, the function of theory in Marx is to make visible the social. Thus making the

senses, theorists in their immediate practice institute a mode of looking that allows the

object to be seen in terms of its objective human relations. While commodity production

under the mode of private property imposes a particular form of seeing, the overturning

of private property leads to material conditions that makes social ties visible and enables

theory as the natural mode of perception. The senses liberated from private property
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perceive objects always in terms of the social relations they embody. Once objects are

understood in terms of their human connections, as Marx claims, the senses can become

directly in their practice theoreticians. If the purpose of theory is to disentangle the

complex relationship of the things from the mystifications created by private property,

the abolition of private property makes objects visible in their human relations, making

theory the natural mode of perception.

Marx’s famous discussion on commodity fetishism in the first volume of Capital

is perhaps best understood in terms of sensuous bodily potential. His discussion here

echoes The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, employing an analogy between

vision and the commodity form. Marx begins by explaining the commodity as a form that

transforms the social character of labor into objective characteristics of the products of

labor, which account for the mysterious character of the commodity:

the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at

the same time supra-sensible. In the same way, the impression made by a
thing on the optic nerve is perceived not as a subjective excitation of that
nerve but as the objective form of a thing outside the eye. In the act of
seeing, of course, light is really transmitted from one thing, the external
object, to another thing, the eye. It is a physical relation between physical
things. (1976: 165)

Marx’s description operates through a parallel between the physiology of vision and the

production of commodities, where both vision and commodities are split into objective

and subjective processes. In the realm of vision the objective movement of light

transmitted between objects is described as a physical relation between physical things,

while the excitation of the optic nerve produces a subjective excitation that is

nevertheless perceived as the objective form of a thing outside the eye.

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The question that presents itself is how do we explain this ‘in the same way’ that

operates between the discussion of commodities and the discussion of seeing. In other

words, in what way does vision produce sensuous things, which are at the same time

supra-sensible? It would seem that the supra-sensible is sensation itself. The subjective

mode of looking is, while based on objective sensuous things, simultaneously supra-

sensible, which is to say social. In this process of seeing, the social character of the

excitation of the nerve is understood as the objective form of that outside the eye, just as

‘[t]he commodity reflects the social characteristic of men’s labour as objective

characteristics of the product of labour themselves’ (1976: 165). Seeing and what is seen

then is not merely a characteristic of the object, but is constituted in the subjective eye.

Marx goes on to note that in the form of the commodity, ‘[i]t is nothing but the definite

social relations between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form

of a relation between things’ (1976: 165). In the realm of vision the physical relation

between physical things becomes incorporated into the realm of subjective experience; in

the processes of production under private property, the social relation between social

beings becomes the reified in the form of the commodity object. Ideology is not merely a

matter that can be isolated in false consciousness, but also instills itself in the perceptual

and sensuous apparatus of the human body.

While this section of Capital creates a homology between commodity fetishism

and vision, it continues to further elaborate the relationship through the articulation of

another analogy, one between commodity fetishism and religion. This second analogy

functions to create a distinction within the first, separating commodity fetishism from the

physiology of vision. “As against this [process of vision], the commodity form, and the
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value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no

connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising

out of this” (165). Unlike the skeptic, Marx assumes the correspondence between sensory

experience and the object of perception, which serves to distinguish perception from the

commodity. In the realm of vision then, the physical relation between physical objects

has some connection with the form manifested by the subjective excitation of the optic

nerve, joining subjective perception with the objective world. However the form of the

commodity bears no inherent connection to the social relation between men that it

embodies. Instead, “to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of

religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed

with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and the human

race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands” (165).

What is necessary for the sociogeny called for by Fanon is thus an understanding

of the integration between the ontological level of sheer being and the sociological level

of human interaction, which, in the final analysis, can never be strictly distinguished but

must rather be considered a continuum where phenomena emerge as being available for

political discourse. Sensuous experience, and even the affect that escapes it, are both

deeply social and political, and the goal of a Marxist aesthetic is not only to adhere to the

truth of the object in themselves, but to make the exceedance of the object and of bodily

sensation beyond discourse productive to a politics that escapes the dominant structuring

order of capital. Because capital is an order that operates through abstraction, some

portion of the concrete particularity of the human subject and its objects must escape, no

matter how micrological the processes of capital becomes. The proper task of the theorist
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today is not simply to acknowledge these escapes, but to gather them together against the

system of domination which is central to their production, and against which they stand.

We must thus reckon with the mediated immediacy of affect in order to examine the

structure of escape and think through the possibilities of the negative, the task of which is

the central goal of the second part of this dissertation.

 The Polyphonics of Space and Time: Yamashita’s A Tropic of Orange

. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the
map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of
the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable
Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild struck a Map of the
Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for
point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the
Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map
was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it that they delivered it
up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still
today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and
Beggars, in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Discipline of
Geography.
Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”

There is always a necessary gap between the map constructed by human

knowledge and the reality of things as they exist in the bare materiality being. This gap is

both an ontological limit wherein the knowledge of the subject is always other than the

taciturn object, and also a limit that manifests itself in the social form of knowledge itself.

Knowledge is a particular social practice that mediates and navigates the irreducible

space between the subject and the object, for if knowledge ever succeeded in forming a

perfect correspondence to its object, it would be as mute and intransigent as the object

itself; it would cease to be knowledge. Thus, in Jorge Luis Borges’ “On Exactitude in

Science,” the pinnacle of the empire’s cartographic project is at the same time the

dissolution of the science of cartography, for what is revealed by this simultaneous

achievement and dissolution of science is not the uninflected truth, but rather the naiveté

199
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of the assertion that the goal of science is to be found in mere exactitude. Were the map

and the world to coincide exactly, point-for-point both in scale and in detail, we would

lose ourselves in the map as easily as we lose ourselves in the world. Such a map would

thus be useless, for the purpose of a map is, in the final analysis, not to blankly present

the space of existence but to organize it into a comprehensible world capable of being

navigated; however, this navigation is never purely open, for possibilities of movement

are restricted precisely in the act of making space navigable. In order to enable a

comprehensible movement through space, presentation becomes representation so that

what appears in the map is something other than ontologically bare space, something

filled with human intention and capable of being made use of. Thus a map does not fulfill

its purpose in pure resemblance to the landscape but also in its difference, and it is the

play between resemblance and difference that allows for meaning to be made and for the

space to be navigable.

The erasure of this fundamental difference occurs not only with the imaginary

achievement of an assumed asymptotic limit where the map comes to perfectly

correspond to the space it represents, as in Borges’ story, but also through the imposition

of an epistemic regime that asserts itself as the only possible articulation between

knowledge and its objects. The multiple possibilities of experiencing and moving through

space can thus be constrained by the assumption of a singular form of truth that functions

to ensure the continuation of a system of power. The erasure of the fundamental play

between resemblance and difference in this case does not merely render the map useless,

but transforms its primary use from enabling human movement through the material

world to enforcing a fundamental stasis in human social relations. This form of power
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functions on the level of epistemology, constituting the limits between knowledge and

non-knowledge, and determining the possibilities of knowledge and its integration with

social movement. The erasure of this open contingency between human consciousness

and material reality allows for the abstraction to be taken as real while concealing the

processes that shape this contingency. The appeal to the exteriority of the object, an

exteriority that emphasizes that the real is always other than the object at the center of

discourse, is the attempt to reassert the limits of this relation, and thus also the attempt to

examine the way that politics is ingrained in the possibilities of knowledge. The social

power in a representation that is able to portray itself as pure presentation is one of the

reasons that knowledge-making has often been so crucial to the project of the Empire,

precisely because it imposes a singular and instrumental relation to the landscape which

is naturalized by a certain resemblance, but nevertheless functions to lay the territory and

its inhabitants bare to the processes of colonial exploitation.

Those animals and beggars in the deserts of the West in Borges’ story, who still

inhabit the tattered ruins of that map, can be none other than those who cling so

insistently to the possibility of absolute knowledge that they are content to, as it were,

dwell on paper, as though such dwelling were equivalent to dwelling in the world. In

contrast to the era portrayed in Borges’ story in which the science of geography has been

surpassed, our current historical moment marks the ascendance of a practice of

knowledge-making that encompasses the world and not only asserts itself as equivalent to

the real but attempts to entirely usurp the real with its own system of representation. In

our era, this instrumental rationality seems to pile success upon success, even as it is this

very rationality that determines for itself the bounds of what constitutes success and
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failure. In this way, Borges’ story, despite the seemingly archaic language and style,

might well be read as a work of speculative fiction, a fragment of the future rather than

one of the past. In this future, the poverty of our own instrumental and rationalistic

epistemology—which is completely caught up in and limited by its own internal and, for

this reason, hidden structures—is revealed and finally abandoned by all except by the

animals and the beggars that dwell in the deserts of abstraction. The form of the story and

the sparse economy with which it maps out the historical situation gives a glimpse of the

knowledge of the future where the goal is not to overdetermine and finalize the objects of

the world, but to aesthetically evoke a meaning which remains always open to the act of

human interpretation that moves in the space between bare materiality and human

sociality.

In the example of these lingering inhabitants of the Map where animality and

poverty intertwine, we can discover traces of Borges’ engagement with the theses of

Martin Heidegger’s The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: “the stone is worldless,

the animal is poor in world, man is world-forming” (176). In Heidegger, the animal’s

poverty in world is precisely due to its captivity in a singular relation between the world

and its being, a relation that is determined entirely by the structure of its perceptual

apparatuses. “The possibility of behaving in the manner of animal being is grounded in

this essential structure of the animal, a structure we will now elucidate as captivation”

(239). Yet, there is also a human form of this captivation which is discovered in the

acceptance of a singular structure of knowledge that serves to close the human off from

the open contingency of its relation to the real. Borges’ animals and beggars are thus held

captive to that instrumental rationality that purports to be the whole of the world. For
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Heidegger, as for Borges, the human form of this captivation can be found precisely in

the human’s enclosure within a singular form of knowing that does not recognize its own

limits and thereby closes off the multiple possible articulations between world and

knowledge. Heidegger thus moves against the predominant form of knowledge and

towards the pre-logical because “λόγος, ratio, reason, is what has dominated the entire

problematic of metaphysics precisely with respect to the problem of world which failed

to come to light” (352). However, despite recognizing the exteriority of knowledge,

Heidegger, too, is caught up in what might be considered a different form of captivation

in his attempt to formulate a more authentic relation of being through the concept of

Dasein. This assumed authentic relation between being as such, or as Heidegger

sometimes put it, the “being of beings,” and the human ultimately eludes the sociality of

the human, and makes it captive to an assumed of pre-logical purity. One can be captured

by authenticity just as easily as one can by logos, and it is here that Theodor Adorno

makes his critique of Heidegger in Jargon of Authenticity.

Adorno does not object to the emphasis on the limits of rationality and the

exteriority of the object; on the contrary, his critique is quite the opposite. For Adorno,

there is a way in which the jargon of authenticity thus employed annihilates exteriority in

order to form a privileged and originary relation to the object. This assumed authenticity

erases the fundamental sociality of this relation: “the categories of the jargon are gladly

brought forward, as though they were not abstracted from generated and transitory

situations, but rather belonged to the essence of man, as inalienable possibility” (59). The

jargon of authenticity thus assumes an un-reified and creative subject that is capable of

gaining direct access to the essence of Dasein, a move which itself is thoroughly reifying
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insofar as it conceals the social and historical nature of the human. “The pride in

controlling phenomena in their undisfigured state bases itself inexplicitly on a certain

judgmental claim: that the world is divided up into thingly pieces through an unraveling

thought-process, not through the structure of society” (144). For both Heidegger and

Adorno, thought has indeed become ever more distant from its object and we have come

to inhabit the abstraction of the map more than the concreteness of the world through the

imposition of a particular logos; however, for Heidegger the predominance of logos

occurs in the realm of thought and he discovers his solution in a move away from logos

to an assumed authentic and ultimately asocial existence; for Adorno this process reflects

the structure of capitalist society as a whole and the only possible solution must be sought

in the sociality of every human interaction with the world. Even if we were to dispose of

the map and forget the science of geography, as seems to be the persistent postmodern

temptation, we would still nevertheless have to forge our way through the world, and thus

movement would be no more authentic and no less social than the movement enabled by

the map. Instead, we might discover our authentic being precisely in our sociality, and the

goal is not to return to some natural state but to take up that sociality and make it critical,

in that Kantian sense of examining its conditions of possibility, in order to rearticulate it

and produce new possibilities within the social.

And it is the social that helps establish and solidify the articulation between the

existing reality and the human being, filling the inadequacy between the world and the

map. The material relations of production under late capitalism are reinforced through a

deeply epistemic structuring of its subjects that functions by determining the limits

between knowledge and non-knowledge, and the political possibilities that knowing can
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entail. However, the inadequation between the order of discourse and the order of being

can never be fully contained, and this inadequation is therefore also always the space of

possibility where every encounter between discursively limited consciousness and the

sheer materiality of being has a disjunctive potential that can radically anarrange the

forms of knowledge that are taken as given. The excess of the material world over human

sensuous experience means that there is always a moment of encoding that makes any

perception legible to consciousness, and, further, that this encoding is never fully

adequate to the experience. As Foucault argues in The Order of Things, between the bare

existence of the world and the structure of human consciousness is always a relationship

of inadequation in which one can never fully capture the other. Thus Foucault writes in

his ekphrasis of Las Meninas that “the relation of language to painting is an infinite

relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they

prove insuperably inadequate” (9). This inadequation exists because the materiality of the

painting and the form of language constitute and dwell in qualitatively different orders.

The discursive can shape our relation to these other orders, can help orient us towards

alterity, but in the end can never fully encompass it, can never become the whole of

reality. It is in the infinity of this relation between discourse and a qualitatively different

order that the political asserts itself. This articulation between the intransigent world of

objects and the human consciousness can never be made univocal because of the

fundamental nonequivalence between the two orders, thus what links the two is always a

relationship of infinity which sociality must endlessly mediate in order for the shared,

human world to emerge, but which can also become reified into a structure that reinforces

exploitative systems of differentiation.

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Thus, despite the relatively common reading of The Order of Things as one of

Foucault’s least political books, an emphasis on the epistemic circuits of capitalism

allows it to be seen as profoundly political. Foucault’s joyful description of the Chinese

encyclopedia from Borges’ “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” and his

recounting of the impossible ordering performed by aphasics are precisely the attempt to

open the space for a different cognitive ordering of things, a different knowledge and

therefore a different political order. Beneath, behind and beyond the order of the given

and the taken-for-granted is a multitude of different orders that can finally not be

contained. And the greatest moment of disorder is precisely that moment in which the

contingency of any possible order becomes visible: “[T]here is a worse kind of disorder

than that of the incongruous, the linking together of things that are inappropriate; I mean

the disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in

the dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite” (xvii). In order for things to

appear incongruous, there must be an assumed order of congruity; the potential of these

different orders is precisely in the way that they disarticulate the very relation between

incongruity and congruity as they have been determined by the dominant order. And this

possibility of another order has a political urgency, particularly when our current systems

of knowledge and the singular relation between knowledge and objects it enforces are

increasingly produced by late capitalism and serve in the production and reinforcement of

an exploitative social order. Indeed, as I will argue later in this chapter, capitalism

ensures its continuation through the production of self-evident orders of knowledge and

perception, including the homogeneous, empty time of history and the homogeneous,

empty space of the nation. However, any living experience is also an experience of
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something other than the thoroughly Cartesian and instrumentalized space and time that

predominates under our particular mode of production; every living experience is an

experience of the alterity that dwells in the material world. But this alterity makes itself

known not simply through a Heideggerian meditation on the purity of Being, but through

the motion of contradictions within a repressive social order that must naturalize its own

forms of oppression, and between the socially constituted knowledge and the intransigent

materiality of the object.

The order of power that determines the legibility of the world and its system of

contradictions which always gesture towards illegibility, is not merely a matter of

consciousness, but instills itself in the human sensorium. The senses are not passive

apparatuses that give a direct access to the world, as in that image of the eye that simply

admits the light of the world into the consciousness of the human, rather it actively

constructs the image that the individual experiences. At every moment, sensation is an

interpretation that also occurs on levels that precede the conscious subject which is

nevertheless woven through with the social, just as the human visual cortex is interwoven

with the language centers of the brain and is thus biologically and physiologically social.

Sensation then can be thought of less as a passive activity that allows the world to

impinge on the consciousness of the subject than it is an always active process of

mediation between the structured consciousness and the structured and unstructured

exteriority of the world. The senses are thus simultaneously subjective and objective and

never merely one or the other. While I have previously argued that the processes of

perception that take place in the senses are deeply social, in this chapter I argue that both

the exteriority of the world and inherent social contradictions interrupt the smooth
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functioning of a determined order of knowing, allowing for the emergence of the

heteroclite. If part of the functioning of late capitalism is to multiply the orders of

differentiation as a means of ensuring the possibility of ever-greater exploitation and the

continued valorization of capital, it also multiplies the possibilities of experiencing the

produced world in other ways, necessitating the attempt to recapture the sensuous

capacities of the human. And these attempts to recapture human sensuousness can only

take place through greater exploitation.

In order to examine the dynamics by which capital endlessly attempts to capture

human sensuousness, one need only to turn to the mass production of affect by Disney. In

Simulation and Simulacra, Jean Baudrillard argues that the patent unreality of Disneyland

is a second-order simulacra that functions to conceal the unreality of all that surrounds it:

“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real,

whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but

belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation” (12). Yet what Disneyland

conceals is not just the fact that the rest of the world has become a fantastical simulation,

but that the real and rather unfantastical labor that goes into the constant production of

this fantasy is occluded. What allows the bourgeois family to experience an imagined

utopia in the juxtaposition of Fantasyland, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, and so on, is

precisely the dystopia of the laborer, whether confined to the sweltering costumes of the

various trademarked characters roaming the park or to those factories dedicated to mass

producing the various trinkets that serve to reinforce the fantasy. Rather than the colorful

cartoon experience mapped out on the theme park brochure, one would imagine that these

laborers confront a rather different experience of moving through the space of the park.
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Indeed, Disney World is built upon an underground system of utility corridors that spans

392,000 square feet and serves to facilitate and conceal the movement of labor and

products throughout the park, helping to maintain the manufactured illusion.

In exchange, the laborers, too, must be convinced that they are due their own

modicum of happiness, some little pleasures that would help maintain their lives, but

which is also integrated into the circuit of late capitalist fantasy production. However, the

greater the demands placed upon the worker, the greater the manufactured pleasures

necessary to maintain the given order, creating a circuit of ever-greater exploitation and

repression which finally cannot hold. The persistent, coercive demand toward happiness

constantly made by late capitalism serves to conceal the insidious and underlying

unhappiness that is its real product. As Adorno says of pleasure: “To be pleased means to

say Yes. . . . Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even

where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not as asserted, flight from a

wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance” (155). If Baudrillard

is correct in his analysis that Disneyland is that point of unreality that gives the lie to the

apparent real that surrounds it, one might take it a step further to note that this unreality

functions within a totality of social relations, that it is a product of human laborers. And

we might hope to one day witness the maligned Minnie Mouses and the disgruntled

Donald Ducks wielding bayonets and throwing up barricades across Main Street, U.S.A.

in the fantastic spectacle of the overthrow of the Magic Kingdom in order to make

happiness possible.

While Baudrillard similarly begins Simulation and Simulacra with a reference to

Borges’ “On Exactitude in Science,” he loses the aspect of human laboring that goes into
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the production of knowledge and the fact that these simulacra are ultimately tied back to

human social relations produced by and through the laboring of human bodies. Thus, he

ultimately rejects “On Exactitude in Science” as an appropriate metaphor for the

postmodern, precisely because he supposes that the abstraction functions independently,

both without reference to a real and seemingly absent of any human sociality: “Today

abstraction is no longer that of a map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation

is no longer that of the territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by

models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1). All of the vast array of social

apparatuses and all of the material conditions of production that emerge and reinforce the

structures of late capitalism are thus dissipated in favor of posing a critique that is as

simulacral as that which it claims to elucidate. One might say instead that all models, as

products of human thought, necessarily have their origin, perhaps not in the real as such,

but in the endless mediation that takes place in the realm of the social. If, as Baudrillard

claims, the current structure of knowledge comes to increasingly be “a question of

substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring

every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly

descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short circuits all its

vicissitudes” (2), this occurs not merely as an abstract advancement in knowledge, but

through the transformation of the social and material conditions that determine the

prevailing epistemic structures in any given society.

It is less that there is no longer any relation between knowledge and its object

than that there is the persistent attempt to erase and conceal the way that this relation is

always mediated. This relation is contingent, open to interpretation and intervention, and
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at every moment inflected politically and economically. In this way, the two apparently

opposed positions between a blank empiricism in which knowledge can give a pure

relation to its object and a postmodernism that erases any possible foundation of

knowledge both ultimately serve to conceal the sociality of the processes by which

human knowledge is constituted. This apparent contradiction might well be resolved in

the social, and the difficulty of discovering that solution is to be found in the material

conditions of late capitalism which is invested in both the multiplication of identity as a

means of ensuring the valorization of capital and the integration of each identity into the

structure of its totality. Late capitalism’s multiplication and differentiation of positions

within the mode of production—including, but not limited to, that familiar triptych race,

class and gender—opens up multiple modes of experience that stand in contradiction to

and cannot be fully captured by the homogeneous and empty structure produced by

capitalism. What is required to make this multiplicity productive to a resistant knowledge

is not just a postmodern move into sheer difference, but its simultaneous integration into

an understanding of social totality which focuses the question of the real neither in

ontological being nor in the vagaries of epistemology but in the realm of the social that

manifests the various contradictions in the capitalist nation state that must be mediated in

order for the social to cohere in our current moment. To this end I want to examine the

system of relations mediated by the capitalist nation state with its enforcement of a

particular spatiality and temporality, and ultimately turn to Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic

of Orange which shifts the stakes from a contestation of a particular space or a particular

time, to a contestation of the very conceptions of spatiality and temporality that serve as

the basis for dividing and making productive both space and time.
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Space, Time and the Capitalist Nation State

Contemporary capitalism functions through the linearization of space and time

that enforces the shared experience of its subjects. The historical development of the

current form of capitalism involves, according to Kojin Karatani’s Transcritique,

capitalism’s integration with other social structures, including the nation and the state

which then allows this assemblage to function as a mutually-reinforcing ring so that

pressure against one element is dispersed and absorbed by other elements in the structure.

“When economic liberty becomes excessive and class conflict is sharpened, the state

intervenes to redistribute wealth and regulate the economy, and at the same time, the

emotion of national unity (mutual aid) fills up the cracks” (15). Even if the state

intervenes and redistributes wealth, as in the welfare state, this attempt to alleviate the

symptoms of capital occurs only as a secondary effect of the primary goal of ensuring the

continuation of capitalism itself, as occurred under the Keynesian state. The enforcement

of the conditions of capital by the state is further inflected through the structure of the

nation and its production of a shared experience that contains the critique against

capitalism by evoking the shared sense of community. While Karatani’s analysis of the

mutually reinforcing structure of the capitalist nation-state in Transcritique was published

in 2005, it clarifies the situation of the U.S. financial crisis of 2007; even as the crisis is

caused by capitalism, the state steps in to preserve capital by funneling public resources

into private corporations, while the nation continues to deflect any critique of capitalism

and to uphold itself as fundamentally a nation whose freedom and prosperity is founded

in capitalism. Indeed, the primary critique of the state funded economic stimulus package
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was not that it helped to preserve an exploitative capitalist system of production, but

rather that it unnecessarily interfered with the free markets.

In this way, rather than speaking of the withering away of the state and the decline

of national sentiment under neoliberalism, it may well be more accurate to consider the

material and social conditions of neoliberalism as constituting a deliberate and strategic

shift in state power and nationalist affiliations that reinforces the conditions of possibility

of late capitalism. Thus, even as capital functions to the detriment of the state, the state

nevertheless comes to capital’s rescue when it is in a moment of crisis; and even as

capitalism is premised on the exploitation of its people, the nation nevertheless is deeply

invested in its continuation. A too-stark conceptual separation between the nation, the

state, and capitalism risks concealing the way in which they are deeply intertwined.

However, even as the capitalist nation state articulates these three separate domains of the

social, neither can they be completely integrated into a singular whole so that the singular

structure of capital is conceived as dominating the entirety of human sociality. The nation

cannot be fully integrated into capital because it functions not only within the structure of

economic rationality but also to integrate “the family and agrarian community; in this

sense capital is essentially dependent upon the precapitalist mode of production. Herein

exists the ground of the nation” (15). Similarly, the state also cannot be completely

subsumed or dissipated, for “the state, no matter what kind, always exists as the bare

sovereign vis-à-vis other states (if not always to its nation)” (15). It is thus the integration

of these three levels of sociality that also serves to organize human experience, in ways

that are also productive to capital, moving constantly between systems of homogenization

and systems of differentiation. Even as postmodernity seems to dominate on the cultural

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level of the nation, any such analysis that does not also integrate its understanding of

postmodernity with the political and economic relations constituted by the circuit of the

capitalist nation state will ultimately miss its mark precisely because it fails to account for

the social totality.

In our current moment, even as capital is constantly engaged in the production of

differential forms of inclusion, both the nation and the state produce forces that attempt to

contain sheer differentiation and impose the myth of the uniform application of law and

the uniform shared community. These are both premised on the monologization of a

fundamentally dialogic human experience, at least in part through the creation of

particular a priori senses of time and space. The formation of the nation-state is brought

about by a conjuncture of what Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities calls an

imagined community with a geopolitical territory. The sense of community enforced by

the nation, with its sense of shared belonging is imagined because it is never simply

given, particularly when it spreads beyond the limits of small-scale, face-to-face

interactions. Instead, it must be at every moment produced and constructed. This

imagined community provides the basis for national belonging, determining the scope

and the limits of the national subject’s sympathies, its relationship to the power exerted

upon it, and the possibilities of resistance to that power. Furthermore, it serves to

integrate a diverse group of people into what they imagine as a coherent whole, despite

the actual forms of “inequality and exploitation that may prevail. . . [T]he nation is

always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship . . . it is this fraternity that makes it

possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill,

as willingly to die for such limited imaginings” (7). The shared community of the nation
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serves as a powerful determinant of the possibilities of politics which also comes into a

mutually-reinforcing relationship with the state. The state, most famously defined by

Max Weber in “Politics as Vocation” as “a human community that (successfully claims

the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (78),

projects sovereign power over a geographical space by determining the rules that govern

the exercise of coercive violence. In the nation-state, this geographical territory over

which the human community has the sovereign power over legitimate force coincides

with and reinforces the imagined community of the nation.

According to Anderson, at the basis of this imagined community is the aesthetic

production of a singular sensibility, so that each member that constitutes the nation

imagines themselves as a belonging to a coherent entity and moving forward with other

members of this community through linear, homogeneous time. As Anderson notes, “all

communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even

these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their

falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (6); it is the

homogeneity of the nation as a form of imagined community that allows state power to

be enacted across broader geographical spaces, and the monopoly over violence and its

administrative organization exercised by the state that allows it to reinforce the nation. Of

course, there are also real material bonds that bind different people within an area

together, perhaps most notably the bonds created by the interchange of material goods

and products. However, these material bonds must be supplemented with the imaginary

that allows different people to inhabit the shared space of a community such that

individuals living in San Diego can imagine themselves as having more in common with
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someone living in New York than they do with someone in Tijuana, despite geographical

proximity, racial solidarities, class affiliations, and/or gender similarities. Furthermore,

these national boundaries are not necessarily mapped along state lines, as the violent

rejection of any shared community with “illegal immigrants” demonstrates, despite both

physical proximity and material circulation. This community, as the term “illegal” here

when speaking of those who are not formally incorporated into the auspices of the U.S.

nation state implies, is also reinforced by the state through its structuring of legality and

illegality. The imagined community is faced with the threat of the imagined other that

lives down the street, or even in the same apartment complex; and yet the threat is real

insofar as it opens the possibility of disrupting the dominant imaginary of the nation, thus

necessitating the intervention of the state. It is a particular conjuncture of nation and state,

of cultural imaginings and administrative practices, of the formation of consent and the

exercise of coercion, that organizes the nation-state as an entity whose elements mutually

reinforce each other and capitalism against opposition.

Central to Anderson’s argument in Imagined Communities is the production of a

linearized, monological sense of time and space, which allows for an assumed shared

form of experience across a wide geographical expanse. Anderson relies on the critique

of homogeneous, empty time that Walter Benjamin makes in his “Theses on the

Philosophy of History” in order to further examine the homogeneous, empty space of the

nation. The temporality filled with the multiplicity and complexity of lived experience is

reduced to a teleological narrative focused on the forward temporal advancement of the

nation; as a member of the nation, one is actively engaged with this forward progress,

alongside other members of this imagined community to whom one is bound through this
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shared movement. The pre-national time appropriated by the empty homogenous time of

the nation is filled with what Anderson describes as the “simultaneity of past and future

in an instantaneous present” (24), echoing Benjamin’s “time filled with the presence of

the now” (261). The nation is formed through the imposition of this homogeneous, empty

time onto the national subject, making secondary the time of lived experience that might

rupture its forward movement. The nation thus occurs through a transposition of

simultaneity from a vertical axis to a horizontal axis; whereas the temporality described

by Benjamin was a simultaneity in which every moment is implicated in every other, the

simultaneity of the nation is spatially dispersed so that every space experiences every

moment in the same way; and the time of the nation is no longer filled with the presence

of the now, but is linearized and oriented in its movement toward a yet unrealized future.

Ultimately, for Anderson, this kind of national belonging is reinforced by what he terms

print capitalism, and the ability of national newspapers to create a shared sense of

temporality across the national space. The simultaneity embedded in print publication,

along with its ability to articulate a coherent past and future, creates a linear timeframe

which spans the multiple spatial differences of the nation so that each individual subject

experiences themselves as moving forward through the same temporality in the same

way.

From the standpoint of those enclosed within the nation state, it is thus as though

those cohabiting the territorial bounds of its state without belonging to the community of

its nation were inhabiting a different space and a different time. According to Anderson,

the nations which first deployed these print technologies also invented modular forms

through which imagined communities were disseminated on a global scale. The

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“developing nations”—here understood as particular geographical regions which were

transitioning from a prior spatial organization to the organizational model of the nation

state—were relegated to choosing among the various pre-fabricated modules of imagined

communities in building their own nations. This account of modular nation building is

problematized by Partha Chatterjee in his work, The Nation and its Fragments.

According to Chatterjee, relegating these other national formations to imitating the forms

of imagined community developed by European nations obscures the agency of

postcolonial nations, particularly when postcolonial nationhood is often developed in

opposition to the colonizing nations. For Chatterjee, this opposition allowed for the

development of different forms of nationhood that went beyond simply mimicking the

national formations of the colonizers. Chatterjee’s analysis of the limits of such a

modular structure of national dissemination also allows us to consider the disjuncture

between the nation and the state, those spaces in which the imagined community that

constitutes the predominant nation within a territory fails to incorporate all of the

individuals that inhabit it. Indeed, those inhabiting a colonized nation may well see the

presumed forward-progress of the colonizers in a more Benjaminian light, as an endless

series of disasters piled one upon another rather than as teleological progress through

empty, homogenized time. But this failure to fully incorporate each individual within the

territory is also a necessary failure of the nation state under late capitalism, as the

exploitation employed by the flexible accumulation that underlies it is premised precisely

on the labor of those who are excluded from the affinities of the nation and the protection

of the state. If part of the function of the nation is to form a sense of deep comradeship

across structures of actually existing inequality and exploitation, those who do inhabit the
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territory but are excluded from the nation serve as points where the contradictions of the

dominant nation-state are manifested, points where the rifts and crevices of the

monolithic national project becomes apparent, and thus spaces where the new may well

emerge.

If the nation functions to create a shared sense of camaraderie through the

production of a shared sense of space and time, the state functions by imposing a system

of abstraction across the territory in order to make it legible as an object of management

and administration. In the course of this process, the state furthermore embeds these

forms of abstraction into the sensual apparatuses of its subjects. James Scott’s Seeing

Like a State examines the way the perceptions of the populace is formed to cohere with

the abstract measurements of the state in order to make the people a more pliable object

of management. Weber notes that the state and its monopolization over the legitimate use

of physical force over a territory comes through the historical expropriation of this power

from those who inhabited the territory prior to its formation as a state who, at one point in

time, possessed their own means of “administration, warfare, and financial organization,

as well as politically usable goods of all sorts” (82). Scott further emphasizes that this

expropriation also occurs on the level of perception that renders space and its contents

legible to the operations of state power. If every space is comprised of a complex

multiplicity of possible experience, the state functions through the reduction of the

richness of reality, “standardizing what was a social hieroglyph into a legible and

administratively more convenient format” (3). For Scott, the actual, complex human

structuring of space functions as a hieroglyph that must be interpreted by the

administrative structure in order to regulate and administer human society. This

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translation and standardization always involves a simplification, for “no administrative

system is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic

and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification” (22). The complex

formations of localized societies must thus be made legible to the state apparatuses. This

process of making legible functions not only to render the activities of localized

populations comprehensible to a distant state apparatus, but it also allows the state to

intervene and structure local societies so that they become more pliable and more visible

to this power.

However, there is also a limit to the visibility produced by the state so that the

attempt to produce the world in accordance to its limited vision can never be fully

realized. Scott begins with the example of state forestry as a parallel to the management

of the human population. The state’s relation to the forest reduces it from a complex

habitat to an economic resource to be managed, and in the process, produces a certain

system of legibility: “the utilitarian state could not see the real, existing forest for the

(commercial) trees” (13). Furthermore, this purely economic view of the forest erased the

social relations that were mediated by it, as the state “typically ignored vast, complex,

and negotiated social uses of the forest for hunting and gathering, pasturage, fishing,

charcoal making, trapping, and collecting food and valuable minerals as well as the

forest’s significance for magic, worship, refugee, and soon” (13). More centrally, it is not

only that the state has an economically determined view of what is occurring within the

forest, but that the state is also capable of structuring the forest around its limited view so

that the actually existent diversity within the forest is reduced to what was imagined to be

the most economically profitable form. “The fact is that forest science and geometry
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backed by state power, had the capacity to transform the real, diverse, and chaotic old-

growth forest into a new, more uniform forest that closely resembled the administrative

grid of its techniques” (15). However, contrary to the expectations of the state, the

reduction in forest diversity to the resultant monocultures often led to ecological

disasters, precisely because the economically determined logics of the state is incapable

of accounting for the full complexity of what actually occurs within the forest. The very

necessity of administration itself requires an abstraction that makes any full

comprehension impossible: “The administrators’ forest cannot be the naturalists’ forest.

Even if the ecological interactions at play in the forest were known, they would constitute

a reality so complex and variegated as to defy easy short-hand description” (22). And like

the forests, human societies, too, are made into objects of administration by a distant state

apparatus that is ultimately incapable of comprehending the complex totality of human

society, yet nevertheless attempts to structure society into transparent and abstract

structures that can be easily managed.

The perpetually limited nature of the state’s vision thus opens up a possible space

where the population can operate independently of the predominant system of state

power. According to Scott, from the standpoint of the state, the social totality functions as

a “social hieroglyph” that must be deciphered and translated in order to enable

administration. In the processes by which complex forms are made legible by the state,

“state simplifications, the basic givens of modern statecraft, were . . . rather like abridged

maps. They did not successfully represent the actual activity of the society they depicted,

nor were they intended to; they represented only that slice of it that interested official

observer” (Scott 3). Between state power and its subjects operates a zone of illegibility
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which must be navigated through the reduction of difference and locality, in order to

enforce the systems of homogenization that enable legibility. And this reduction takes

place not only on the level of conceptualization, but also in the lived reality of those

under state power: “They were, moreover, not just maps. Rather, they were maps that,

when allied with state power, would enable much of the reality they depicted to be

remade” (Scott 3). These abstractions on the level of knowledge imposed by the state

functioned to alter the real interactions of individuals with the world, and with each other.

Among the examples Scott discusses is the standardization of the system of measures,

which moved away from more localized and contextual units like a “cartload,”

basketful,” or “handful,” and helped to simplify state taxation and administration.

Additionally, however, it also produced the belief in the abstract standard. Whereas once

the very impreciseness and flexibility of these localized units of measure allowed for the

expression of social relations, where the basketful of grain shared with one’s neighbor

may indeed be different from the basketful rendered to the state. And with time, these

abstract standards become the norm, reshaping of these societies so that they are

simplified and therefore capable of being read, and causing the individuals to also see

like the state so that the system of reductions that the state performs to render society

legible is embedded in society itself. However, these attempts to structure society can

never be fully successful, and, as in the case of those monoculture forests produced by

the state, often result in precarious situations, precisely because those real needs of the

populace made invisible by the map are incapable of being addressed.

The capitalist nation state has formed a particular social formation that functions

centrally through the power of abstraction, and through the ability to make these
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abstractions experienced as though they were real, whether through the abstract equality

embodied in the commodity form, the abstract spatiality and temporality of the nation, or

the abstraction from social reality performed by the state apparatus. These technologies

of abstraction and homogenization are necessary to produce the homogeneous, empty

time of history critiqued by Walter Benjamin and the homogeneous empty space of the

nation as explicated by Benedict Anderson. This homogenization renders experience

itself an object of administration and control, ordering the imaginative possibilities of

space and time. Yet, these rationalized, Cartesian understandings of the world are always

already human artifacts, shaped by history and culture, and manufactured in the dialectic

of a human being in the world that always exceeds and resists the imposed abstraction.

There is thus a constant tension between the attempt to homogenize experience and the

proliferation of different positions of exploitation necessary for the continuation of the

capitalist mode of production. While part of the tension generated in this process is

displaced onto other social structures, allowing for the continued smooth operation of

capital despite its own internal contradictions, this containment is ultimately always

unstable, threatening to overturn the structures of power that enforce it. If it is the

privilege of power to determine the scope and scale of analysis, the axes by which

comparisons and contrasts can be made, the line of distinction between the legible and

the illegible, and senses of space and time through which individuals come to experience

the social, historical and material conditions in which they exist, the attempt to move

beyond the capitalist nation state must also attempt to disrupt the given sensual

abstractions that it produces.

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The Exteriority of Perception

There is an intricate relationship between the sensible and the political; what

becomes available for politics is determined through the limitation and the production of

the sensuous. However, the ontological limit that prevents epistemology from fully

encompassing the real also means that every act of sensation is a mediation between the

exteriority of the world and the structures of perception that are socially produced and

reinforced so that there is also always the possibility of disrupting the smooth functioning

of an imposed sensuousness. Even the assumption of a rationalized, Cartesian space and

time is also mediated by the actual human experiences of space and time which are never

merely homogeneous and empty, but filled with the alterity of the real. And it is this very

exteriority of the real that offers the possibility for moving beyond the reified structures

enforced by the predominant mode of production. Thus Adorno argues in Negative

Dialectics, that “[i]n sharp contrast to the usual ideal of science, the objectivity of

dialectical cognition needs not less subjectivity, but more. Philosophical experience

withers otherwise” (40). Yet what is meant by the objective and the subjective here is

anything but transparent; elsewhere, in Minima Moralia, Adorno remarks upon the

inversion of subjectivity and objectivity, though in a rather different light than

Heidegger’s consideration of this inversion at the beginning of modernity. For Adorno,

under the administered society:

Objective means the non-controversial aspect of things, their unquestioned

impression, the façade made up of classified data, that is, the subjective;
and they call subjective anything which breaches that façade, engages the
specific experience of a matter, casts off all ready-made judgments and
substitutes relatedness to their object for the majority consensus of those
who do not even look at it, let alone thing about it – that is objective. (74-
75)
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What prevails under the capitalist nation state and the culture industry it employs is

precisely this form of objectivity which actually expresses the subjectivity produced by

the dominant social structures, while any attempt to adhere closely to the objects in

themselves is pronounced as merely subjective. Yet, what this also means is that,

precisely because the relations to the object are deeply influenced by the subject’s

position within the apparatuses of production, there may well not be a single objectivity,

but instead every such relation to the object must be understood as open and polyphonic,

which one of the primary conditions of the political.

There is not a single and simply given spatiality or temporality free from the

position of the subject, but only a multitude of differential relations to space and time that

have been socially shaped. Heidegger examines the multiple spatialities and temporalities

of possible existence ontologically, by disarticulating the differences within the

physiological perceptual apparatuses of different animals. For this, he turns to the

biologist and ethologist Jakob von Uexküll who attempted to examine the environment

beyond the strictly human perspective by trying to inhabit the perceptual world of

animals radically different from the human—including sea urchins, jelly fish, sea

anemone, and, most famously, the tick—and the sheer difference that each of these

systems of perceptual apparatuses produce. In this view, the environment [Umwelt] of the

animal is not merely a world constituted by the homogeneous empty space and

homogeneous empty time that surrounds it, but it is constituted by the structure and the

limits of its perceptual interaction with that world. In Uexküll’s example of the tick, the

tick does not experience the same space and the same time as the human, but is limited by
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its own perceptual interactions with the world. As Brett Buchanan notes in Onto-

Ethologies, there are a limited set of perceptual cues that are available to the tick so that

“moon, weather, birds, noises, leaves, shadows, and so forth do not matter to the tick.

They may belong to the Umwelt of other organisms that live in the midst of the tick, but

they do not carry any meaning for the tick itself” (24). In The Open, Giorgio Agamben

notes that in Uexküll, the Umwelt of the tick is comprised of three carriers of

significance: “(1) the odor of the butyric acid contained in the sweat of all mammals; (2)

the temperature of thirty-seven degrees corresponding to that of the blood of mammals;

(3) the typology of skin characteristic of mammals, generally having hair and being

supplied with blood vessels” (46). And these three sensations mark the entirety of the

Umwelt of the tick; it knows that it has discovered a victim only through the scent of

butyric acid; it knows that it is sucking blood not through taste, but only by the

temperature of the fluid; its sense of touch functions only to discover a surface bereft of

hair.

The world taken for granted by the human thus does not exist for the tick, but at

the same time the human has no privileged access to the objective space of the

environment. As Agamben notes, “[i]n reality, the Umgebung [objective space which we

take for granted] is our own Umwelt, to which Uexküll does not attribute any particular

privilege and which, as such, can also vary according to the point of view from which we

observe it” (40-41). There are thus an infinity of possible articulations of the different

environments experienced by the multitude of creatures that inhabit it, without any single

creature being able to completely totalize the world through a fundamental understanding

of objective space. Yet, even as the Umwelt of the human does not occupy a privileged
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position within the possible inhabited environments, the human is still marked out by its

possible disengagement from the environment. “[T]he tick is immediately united to these

three elements in an intense and passionate relation the likes of which we might never

find in the relations that bind man to his apparently much richer world. The tick is this

relationship; she lives only in and for it” (46-47). What marks out the human is precisely

the ability to recognize the limits and the untruth of its own Umwelt, to disarticulate itself

from its own inhabited world. While Nietzsche likewise focuses on the limits of

anthropocentric human knowledge, noting in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”

that “[i]f we could communicate with a mosquito, we would learn that it, too, flies

through the air with the same pathos, feeling itself to be the moving center of the entire

world. There is nothing in nature so abject and lowly that it would not instantly swell up

like a balloon at the faintest breath of that cognitive faculty” (18); however, from the

Heideggerian standpoint, whereas the mosquito would be completely encompassed in the

knowledge developed from its relation with the world, the human is precisely the animal

that is able to come to a realization of the limits of its own knowledge. The human then is

marked out not by a direct knowledge of its environment, but by its knowledge of the

limits of its knowledge; and that mosquito might become human only by becoming

Nietzsche and recognizing its own limited relation to the world.

For Heidegger, as noted in the introduction to this chapter, this human ability to

disarticulate itself from the limits of its Umwelt is assumed to give the human access to a

more primordial Being, to the very being of Being. “Every person in history knows Being

immediately, though without acknowledging it as such . . . All that is needed is simple

wakefulness in the proximity of any random unobtrusive being, an awakening that all of a
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sudden sees that the being ‘is’” (1998: 149). However, building on Adorno’s critique of

this jargon of authenticity, one might instead claim that this capacity to distance oneself

from the capture of sheer sensuous being does not give one access to immediate being,

but rather to an understanding of the social mediation of being. In Agamben’s

explanation of the limit of our understanding of Umgebung as merely our own Umwelt,

he also notes that this is not, for the human, a biologically determined environment;

“There does not exist a forest as an objectively fixed environment: there exists a forest-

for-the-park-ranger, a forest-for-the-hunter, a forest-for-the-botanist, a forest-for-the-

wayfarer, a forest-for-the-nature-lover, a forest-for-the-carpenter, and finally a fable

forest in which Little Red Riding Hood loses her way” (41). And, of course, one might

add, to refer back to Scott’s Seeing Like a State, there is also a forest-for-the-state which

is a particular Umwelt of the state that sees the forest only in terms of the commodities it

can produce, and simultaneously has the ability to alter the actual existence, the

Umgebung, of the forest. In the process of shaping the forest, the state also attempts to

alter the relations between each individual and the forest; when the forests are

administered by the state and become monocultures of trees planted neatly in rows, the

forest-for-the-park-ranger is transformed precisely by the ranger’s employment by the

state, the forest-for-the-hunter is inflected by the state’s administration of the forest, and

the fable forest is so technically administered that there can be no more Little Red Riding

Hoods to lose their way. Instead of the disjointing of perception from its captivity to

sensation producing direct knowledge of being, what becomes visible in the human

environment is the socially mediated nature of our relation to the world.

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Yet, the capitalist nation state must also always fail in its attempts to impose a

perceptual structure on its subjects, precisely because the order of being is different from

the order of discursive power. If perception is that movement of mediation between the

imposed structure and the alterity of the object, the externality of the object always

contains a disruptive potential because of the multiple possibilities of experiencing the

object. To return to a previous example, the Disneyland-for-the-tourist must always be

experienced as something other than the Disneyland-for-the-worker, opening up a

necessary multiplicity of experiences that can never be fully contained. This does not

mean, as in Heidegger, that all one requires is attention to an unobtrusive being to see

what being is, but rather that what one comes to see is precisely the impossibility of

seeing being and so instead catches a glimpse of what structures and limits one’s own

vision and capacity to see. In other words, what becomes visible is the very sociality and

politics of the human perceptual apparatus itself, and rather than the stark clarity of

homogeneous empty space and homogeneous empty time that lies at the base of the

capitalist nation state, one sees a space and time that is always socially mediated. And the

multiple possible articulations between experience and the object means that this

experience can never be univocal, but is always open to multiplicity, always polyphonic

in the Bakhtinian sense. While Bakhtin employs the concept of polyphony directly in his

reading of Dostoyevsky, he also notes that “dialogic relationships are a much broader

phenomenon than mere rejoinders in a dialogue . . . they are an almost universal

phenomenon, permeating all human speech and all relationships and manifestations of

human life—in general, everything that has meaning and significance” (40). That things

are always in a dialogic relationship in human meaning does not mean that everything is
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entirely encompassed in a singular logos or discourse; indeed, it means precisely the

opposite. In order for the dialogue to take place, there must be a space that exceeds the

singular discourse. Without this exteriority there can only be the monological, and it is

that which exceeds one’s own limited structure that makes the dialogic possible.

The dialogic emphasized by Bakhtin thus describes an open relationship to a

series of alterities which can never become fully reduced to a single monological

structure. According to Bakhtin, Dostoyevsky’s novels, which served as the basis for

developing the concept of polyphony, are “not a multitude of characters and fates in a

single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality

of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not

merged in the unity of the event” (6). The multiplicity of possible worlds, the multitude

of Umwelt that can never be reduced to Umgebung, means that the reality of social

interaction must always be constituted dialogically, not from any one position but in the

constant movement between and among different positions. Social reality for Bakhtin is

thoroughly dialogic, and presented in the way that “the utterly incompatible elements

comprising Dostoevsky’s material are distributed among several worlds and several

autonomous consciousnesses; they are presented not within a single field of vision but

within several fields of vision, each full and of equal worth” (26). Of course, this does not

mean that there is no material reality, or even that material reality is secondary, rather the

relationship to material reality is always something that is mediated by and open to the

dialogic. The impossible yet necessary task of grasping the social totality then occurs not

through a direct access to that totality, but by grasping the multiplicity of the dialogic

relations to reality constituted by a social formation; it is a matter of grasping how “These

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worlds, their consciousnesses with their individual fields of vision . . . combine in a

higher unity, a unity, so to speak, of the second order, the unity of a polyphonic novel”

(26), or rather the unity of a polyphonic reality. Thus the sensuousness of an individual’s

Umwelt must always be considered as practical, human-sensuous activity.

To study any single object is more than just to study it from one’s own given

point of view, but rather to examine the polyphonic nature of that object and how it

organizes the multiplicity of social reality. Adorno notes in Negative Dialectics that

against the reification of knowledge, the dialectic requires a close attention to the object:

“If the thought really yielded to the object, if its attention were on the object, not on its

category, the very objects would start talking under the lingering eye” (27-8). But

because of the multiplicity of social positions which interact with any given object, the

speech of such an object can never be merely univocal: doing away with Disneyland’s

concept of the utopia of puerile pleasure may well allow it to say something different to

the bourgeois tourist than to the proletarian laborer. Disneyland is thus a material set of

relations embodied relations, and also what Vološinov calls a sign: “Signs are particular,

material things; and as we have seen, any item of nature, technology, or consumption can

become a sign, acquiring in the process a meaning that goes beyond its given

particularity. A sign does not simply exist as a part of a reality-it reflects and refracts

another reality” (10). This dual nature of the sign as both a part of reality and the

refraction of another social reality enables its mediating function between the real and the

social. “Signs emerge, after all, only in the process of interaction between one individual

consciousness and another . . . Consciousness becomes consciousness only once it has

been filled with ideological (semiotic) content, consequently only in the process of social
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interaction” (12). This allows for the signs to be bearers of multiple forms of

contradiction, both the contradiction that occurs between bare materiality and social

structure, and the contradictions within that social structure itself, allowing for a

disarticulation of the individual consciousness from the regimes of perception imposed

by the dominant social formation.

Perception is that articulation between the externality of the object and the order

of discourse, allowing it to be a central arena of the political. In The Political Life of

Sensation, Davide Panagia attempts to move beyond the discursive structuring of politics

in order to examine the basis upon which the political is formed, which gestures towards

the dialogic moment in which the material is captured in the structure of discourse.

“Politics happens when a relation of attachment or detachment is formed between

heterological elements: it is a part-taking in the activities of representation that renders

perceptible what had previously been insensible . . . before such political relations may be

forged, before things are rendered perceptible, an interruption of previous forms of

relating occurs” (3). The structure of perception by the capitalist nation state is the

attempt to determine what attachments can be made within the realm of sense making, an

attempt that cannot finally be realized because of the contradictions within the larger

system which becomes manifested in the disjunctive sensation of the exteriority of the

object that interrupts any smoothly determined sense. Building on Rancière’s

understanding of partitions of the sensible, Panagia notes that “our modes of perceiving

the world, of sensing the presence of others, are parsed; that as subjects of perception,

human beings are partial creatures variously divided. A partition of the sensible thus

refers to perceptual forms of knowledge that parse what is and is not sensible, what
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counts as sense making, and what is available to be sensed” (6). One might say, following

Bakhtin, that this parsing is dialogically mediated, and that the polyphonic attempt to

comprehend reality focuses precisely on these dialogic mediations.

Here I want to turn to Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel, Tropic of Orange as an

exemplar of a polyphonic novel that not only presents multiple possible interlocking

worlds, but makes visible the structures of perception that formulate the multiplicity of

the world and therefore makes it available for political critique. While the nation state

attempts to create a hegemonic regime of space and time, the univocal nature of this

regime is increasingly fragmented through the aesthetic of postmodernism and the modes

of production from which it arises. The necessity of creating ever-more differential forms

of inclusion in order to ensure the continued valorization of capital multiplies the

polyphony of space and time, ultimately helping to disrupt the naturalized forms of

perception that underlie the predominant regimes of sensibility and partitions of the

sensible. Space and time come to be experienced as always underdetermined, opening the

possibility for new articulations in the field of the perceptual which are always open to

contestation, always the result of a social and political struggle which determines how

space and time are themselves made legible. Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange

might be read as one such work which attempts to unsettle established perceptual regimes

by making the struggles over spatiality and temporality visible. In this way, it functions

as a theoretical text which theorizes and deconstructs itself, providing a primer for a new

regime of legibility that reimagines postmodern politics.

Disarticulating Perception in the Tropic of Orange

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Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange is a novel that functions by rendering

legible the processes that establish legibility, so that the primary form of the novel might

be considered less the interweaving of multiple worlds into a second-order unity, as in

Bakhtin’s polyphonic novel, than the making visible of the material and political

structures that produce these worlds. It is a polyphonic novel whose subject is polyphony

itself. To this end, the novel plays with the scales of spatiality, from national to the

metropolitan to the personal, using the tensions between each of them to examine the

imbrication of aesthetics and politics. While the nation-state constructs an imagined

community on a large scale and a broad series of abstractions, the novel examines how its

individual characters always experience the world in ways that resist the structuring of

the nation-state. Similarly, the central city of the text, Los Angeles, functions as a

microcosm that creates a sense of community and negotiates various specificities often

omitted by, and sometimes in contradiction with, the more sweeping framework of the

nation state. The emptying of space and time occurs on both the level of the nation state

and the level of the city which equally attempt to render the complexity of human

experience legible to administrative control; however the city as a smaller unit of analysis

reveals different forms of interaction and complexity which also increase the possibilities

of reading otherwise against the empty space and time of the nation. Similarly, the level

of the individual character maps more localized movements through space and time and

reveals the contradictions that arise in attempting to impose perceptual regimes on the

micro level. Tropic of Orange maps the contradictions in the struggle over and

appropriation of space which allows, at any moment, a messianic eruption in which a

freeway might be taken over by those who have always lacked access to its flows, in
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which abandoned automobiles might become homes for the homeless and the span of the

freeway’s lanes might become the space of a utopian community that, for a fleeting

moment, resists the dominant rationalities of city and nation to holds fast to the

possibility of what is better.

The very form of Tropic of Orange ruptures the assumption of linear

homogeneous space and linear homogeneous time by anarranging the scales it assumes.

The novel begins by presenting a table of contents separated into seven sections by each

of the seven days that take place in the novel. However, this linear chronology is

followed by another, second table of contents listed as a table of “Hypercontexts” which

appears to be organized in the structure of a Cartesian grid. Across the x-axis is mapped

each of the seven days of the week, and down the y-axis are the seven main characters of

the novel. Initially, it would seem that this table serves to spatialize the linear form of the

table of contents in order to provide a clear map of the novel, with each square of the grid

containing the title of the chapter and the location where it takes place. Each square of the

grid becomes like a city block where the spatial logic of the city becomes visible in its

division into a rationalized space. However, the implied vertical distance of gazing down

on the city so that its blocks become legible, is in contradiction with the experience of

walking along the streets and being encompassed by the city. Wandering among the

elements of Yamashita’s grid, reveals how they rupture the framework of the grid,

pointing to the impossibility of forming a purely rationalized and empty space through

which to comprehend the novel. The columns of the grid are organized temporally,

proceeding from Monday to Sunday much like the section headings. However, the

chapter titles of the first row disrupt the linear temporality produced by the column
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headings, proceeding from “Midday,” to “Morning,” to “Daylight,” to “Dusk,” to

“Dawn,” to “Nightfall,” and finally to“Midnight.” While the headings of the columns

organize temporality according to a linear logic, the first row disrupts the expected flow

of time, producing a temporality in which morning is proceeded by midday, and dawn is

proceeded by dusk, challenging the temporal organization of the grid and gesturing

toward breaking down the assumed linear temporality.

Similarly, while each cell of the grid includes the location in which the chapter

takes place, the scales and specificity of the different spaces involved disrupt the

possibility of forming a simple map. Each space in the grid, apparently representing a

Cartesian structure of containment, nevertheless are made to contain an organization that

ruptures its system of containment. The space that the chapters take place in are described

as diversely as “Hiro’s Sushi,” “El A,” “World Wide Web,” “Virtually Everywhere,” and

“Dirt Shoulder,” creating a mix of specificity and vagueness, a map which frets at the

edges of the very possibility of mapping. The diagram goes further in deconstructing the

empty, homogeneous, space of the nation through its presentation of the various

characters as the organizing principle of the rows. If as Benedict Anderson notes, the

novel form has been central to the development of the nation through the creation of a

sense that every individual moves forward together in a homogeneous, empty time, the

table’s organization separates out the narratives of individual characters, inviting them, to

be read individually by proceeding from left to right along the columns, thus breaking the

synchronicity of the novel. Reading the novel by disarticulating its individual characters

is further encouraged by the distinct style of writing used for each character, including

the magical realism used for Arcangel’s narrative, the film noir style of Gabriel’s, the hip
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hop style for Buzzworm’s and the chicanismo of Bobby Ngu’s narrative. The stylistic

variations of each narrative create different senses of temporality, and different modes of

being in the world which go beyond mere style, and in which it becomes evident that the

characters are not simply progressing together and experiencing a universally constructed

homogeneous and empty time. Arcangel frequently reminisces of a far distant past,

creating the sense that his narrative stretches out over centuries whereas the quick,

staccato rhythm of the prose for Bobby Ngu’s narrative creates a sense of fragmentation

and acceleration, a sense of time that seems incompatible with that of Arcangel even as

they rush together, sharing moments that are alternatively narrated from both

perspectives.

The table of hypercontexts located at the very beginning of the novel thus

functions as a supplement to the table of contents that ultimately undermines it,

problematizing the simplistic organization of the contents in an empty temporal linearity.

Even as it breaks that linearity down into the two dimensions of the Cartesian grid, it

does so in order to show the impossibility of containment and organization, even with the

added dimension by breaking the rupturing the framework of Cartesian mapping and

producing senses of space and time which do not adhere to the logics of the grid, and thus

ultimately become aware of their own contingency. This table of hypercontexts serves as

a kind of cognitive map of the novel that at every point emphasizes its own inadequacy

and the epistemic violence inherent in the construction of a map, that lie in the act of

determining which differences can be mappable and which differences are to be omitted,

highlighting the necessity of reading against any imposed Cartesian structure, and thus of

being constantly open to the construction of new links and connections. The
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hypercontexts then serve not simply as a cognitive map, but as an illustration of how

cognitive mapping itself is to be carried out. The table might be read as an attempt to

transform the aesthetic of homogeneous, empty space to a sense of a space which is

always contradictory and contingent and which challenges the rationalized grid as the

basis for any possible map.

The spatial tensions negotiated by the novel might be schematized in the form of a

Greimas semantic rectangle to examine how the novel appropriates the spatialities of

postmodernism in order to propose new forms of community and politics.

Globalized space

Homogenous, Multi-national
empty space space
Postmodern Postcolonial
Los Angeles Los Angeles

Postmodern Multiply-mapped
hyperspace Space
Strategic, multiple
space

Figure 4: Greimas Semitoic diagram of Postmodern Space

The novel negotiates between multiple senses of Los Angeles, one largely marked by its

creation of homogeneous, empty space that is simultaneously experienced as a

postmodern space. In the postmodern understanding of Los Angeles, the hyperspace

Jameson describes as “transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate

itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, to map cognitively its position

in a mappable external world” (15-16) becomes ubiquitous, creating a homogenous space

experienced as empty difference, filled with an excess that empties it of content. This sort
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of intersection between the homogeneous, empty space and the space of postmodernity is

evident in the image of the picture-in-picture television showing simultaneously a fire

raging through the I-5 freeway, and the movie for disaster week, Canyon Fires—both

interspliced with advertising, making it impossible to determine the difference. “‘No

difference,’ observed the sushimaker. ‘Fire here. Fire here.’ He pointed to the screen and

subscreen” (125). “Fire here. Fire here.” The redundancy is only clarified when it is made

clear that he points to the screen and the subscreen, emphasizing the indistinguishability

between the two in the postmodern space of hyperreality. The ‘Fire here’ then might be

seen to emphasize the ubiquitous and empty experience of the fire as it is broadcast over

national television which obscures the fact that the fire, as a moment of exception from

which new forms of community might explode, is indeed here.

In contradiction with Los Angeles as a postmodern and homogeneous, empty

space is the reading of Los Angeles as a postcolonial space with much more attention

paid to the material conditions that lead to the particular formation of the city. Rather

than the homogenous and empty national space, one is presented with characters who

themselves embody a multinational space which cannot simply be viewed as empty. This

multinational space is mapped on and through specific bodies and specific cultural

practices, onto figures like Bobby Ngu, “Chinese from Singapore with a Vietnam name

speaking like a Mexican living in Koreatown” (15). And much is made by the

indecipherability of Bobby’s identity, which is ultimately an identity that is not

formulated internally, but by the social and material conditions produced by capitalism.

Bobby is displaced by the spread of U.S. capitalism through Asia where his father once

produced bicycles, but was unable to compete with American factories. “One day,
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American bicycle company put up a factory. Workers all went over there. New machines.

Paid fifty cents more. Pretty soon, American company’s selling all over. Bicycles go to

Hong King. Go to Thailand. To India. To Japan. To Taiwan. Bobby’s dad losing

business. Can’t compete. That’s it” (17-18). This listing of places with its quick, staccato

rhythm echoes all the places that Bobby himself is associated with, creating the sense that

the national container is no longer sufficient to house such a subject. However, this is not

a blank cosmopolitan subject belonging to nowhere and everywhere, but one rooted in the

material conditions of his existence which has been greatly impacted by the global spread

of capitalism.

This blank globalized space poses itself as a mythic resolution to the

contradictions of the homogeneous, empty space that must be imposed by the nation and

the increasingly multinational space experienced by individual subjects. In the terms of

Levi-Strauss, “[t]he purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming

a contradiction (an impossible task, if it so happens, that contradiction is real).” The myth

of a globalized space then functions to smooth over the inherent contradictions between

the national and multinational experiences of space, between a space that must be made

homogeneous and empty and a space that is ostensibly oversaturated by multinational

difference. In the novel, Hiro’s Sushi Bar functions as one locus of this globalized space

where national specificity and multinational differences are both negated. It is the space

of an empty multiculturalism, a sort of cultural diversity that Emi defines as “a white guy

wearing a Nirvana T-shirt and dreds. That’s cultural diversity” (128). This creates a space

which seems to echo Žižek’s critique, that “the problematic of multiculturalism—the

hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds—which imposes itself today is the form
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of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as universal world

system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of the contemporary

world” (46). As Emi notes, “You’re invisible. I’m invisible. We’re all invisible. It’s just

tea, ginger, raw fish, and a credit card” (128). Thus this apparent diversification of culture

is in reality the homogenization of capital as it extends itself over the globe, allowing the

trace of difference to remain only in empty symbols.

If globalized space appears initially as a mythic resolution to the contradictions of

differing national spatialities, this myth is disarticulated and critiqued by the novel. More

than a trace of irony lingers behind the defense of multicultural Los Angeles provided by

one of the other patrons at the sushi bar who overhears Emi’s critique: “I happen to adore

the Japanese culture. . . I adore living in L.A. because I can find anything in the world to

eat, right here. It’s such a meeting place for all sorts of people. A true celebration of an

international world. It just makes me sick to hear people speak so cynically about

something so positive” (129). Rather than the cynicism of speaking badly about

something positive, we are thus presented with the cynicism of reducing everything in the

world to an object for capitalist consumption. This adoration of multiculturalism is

revealed to be an empty adoration of consumption in which cultural capital is gained

through the consumption of other cultures emptied of their contents, precisely the sort

Žižek critiques: “[l]iberal ‘tolerance’ condones the folklorist Other deprived of its

substance—like the multitude of ‘ethnic cuisines’ in a contemporary megalopolis” (46).

If, in the center, globalization is experienced through the extraction of cultures from their

particular contexts, in the periphery there is an enforced emphasis on the culture of the

center. The very next chapter of the novel takes place in Mexico, in La Cantina de
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Miseria y Hambre. “Arcangel looked around at all the hungry and miserable people in the

cantina—all eating hamburgers, Fritos, catsup, and drinking American beers. Only he,

who asked the cook the favor of cooking his raw cactus leaves, ate nopales” (131).

Access to the multicultural benefits of globalization is then revealed to be an extremely

unequal affair, where the consumption of imposed American goods leads, as in the name

of the restaurant, to the hunger and misery of the people and the erasure of the existing

culture. “All American beers. But we are in México, are we not?” (131). Just as in the

case of Bobby’s father, whose production of bicycles was overtaken by the American

factories, so too, does the production of food become a matter of a kind of economic

imperialism.

The novel then disarticulates the mythic formation of a globalized space and

instead examines the tensions between the postmodern hyperspace and an understanding

of space that is situated and grounded in the relations of power in which it is based. The

novel might initially be read as staging the very sort of postmodernism that Jameson

critiques in which “densities [are] navigated in an unmappable way with space

assembling and disassembling itself oneirically around you” (112). The sheer

impossibility of any possible mapping becomes central when the character Buzzworm

examines a map given to him by Gabriel that was torn out of Mike Davis’ “Quartz City

or some such title” (80). It shows the mapping of the gang territory of Crips and Bloods,

but Buzzworm is skeptical of the efficacy of such a map: “Even if it were true, whose

territory is it anyway? Might as well show which police departments covered which

beats; which local, state, and federal politicians claimed which constituents; which kind

of colored people (brown, black, yellow) lived where. . . If someone could put down all
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the layers of the real map, maybe he could get the real picture” (81). And this is precisely

the critique of mapping made by Scott, that the reality contains a complexity that is

incapable of being mapped, but that must be reduced in order for administrative power to

function. There is an excess of maps and complexity so that moving according to the

logics of any single map becomes limiting. One gets a sense then of the impossibility of

creating a map adequate to the full complexity of Los Angeles, and finds instead multiple

forms of reduction that enact different forms of power, rendering the city legible in

different ways. It is not that these spaces assemble and disassemble oneirically, but rather

according to complex rules of power, structuring the forms of resistance that can be

enacted. It would seem, that these maps can never be fully grasped by the individual so

that the ‘real’ map is always out of reach, and instead what becomes visible is the

different forms of power that the different maps enact.

Between these two forms of mapping, the novel poses a new one, one which is

always aware of the possibility of mapping otherwise, of the infinity of possible maps

and the forms of power they enact. It is a mapping that is perpetually mobile and open,

always keenly aware of the epistemic violence it commits and the omissions it must make

to derive legibility from a complex reality. This awareness of mapping otherwise allows

the radical alterity of the ‘real’ map to, at times, erupt into established rationalities of

space, opening possibilities for change. While all the characters have some access to

mapping the spatialities they inhabit, it is the homeless and apparently insane former-

surgeon Manzanar who seems to have the greatest access to the spaces around him.

“There are maps and there are maps and there are maps. The uncanny thing was that he

could see all of them at once, filter some, pick them out like transparent windows and
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place them even delicately and consecutively in a complex grid of pattern, spatial

discernment, body politic” (56). While it appears Manzanar thus has access to the infinite

complexity of the real map, his access comes only in the form of music, through the least

spatial of the traditional art forms. “As far as Manzanar was concerned, it was all there. A

great theory of maps, musical maps, spread in visible and audible layers—each selected

sometimes purposefully, sometimes at a whim, to create the great mind of music” (57).

Thus Manzanar stands on an overpass and conducts, with a silver-tipped baton, the

symphony of the city. The cost of this apparently transparent, if non-spatial knowledge of

the map of the city is the ability to take part in the action; of all the primary characters he

is at the furthest remove from the actual events, conducting only from a distance.

Manzanar thus stands in as the practitioner of an impossible art, standing on an

overpass and conducting traffic, the movement through space, as one might otherwise

conduct a symphony. Yet there is also some ambiguity in the extent to which he is

actually conducting the movement through space around him and the extent to which he

is simply channeling the movements around him into a form of music. Initially Manzanar

sees himself as one of the few capable of the project of conducting space, with the

majority of people unable to grasp its complexity: “On the surface, the complexity of

layers should drown an ordinary person, but ordinary persons never bother to notice,

never bother to notice the prehistoric grid of plant and fauna and human behavior, nor the

historic grid of land usage and property. . .” (57). Space, then is what is imposed upon the

majority of individuals without their own conscious acknowledgement of its power.

However, by the end of the novel, Manzanar recognizes that space is not simply imposed

but is structured by the lived social relations of the individuals that inhabit it. “Little by
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little, Manzanar began to sense a new kind of grid, this one defined not by inanimate

structures or other living things but by himself and others like him. He found himself at

the heart of an expanding symphony of which he was not the only conductor” (238).

Space ceases to be structured according to any single individual principle, but offers

multiple points of resistance through which others might gain some control over the

symphony of social spatialities and establish new, more equitable rationalities of space.

The symphony thus becomes polyphonic, not overdetermined by a single conductor, but

the work of multiple individuals each moving through and defining the music according

to their own lived worlds.

Such a cooptation of dominant spatialities takes place in the occupation of the I-5

freeway by the homeless in the novel. A fire rages throughout the freeway, and the space

of the flow of commercial goods becomes a space of stasis as drivers abandon their

automobiles and seek safety. And here a new vision of space flashes up in this moment of

danger where “great walls of fire raged at both ends” (121) of the freeway. The homeless

who once lived in the bush and detritus on the side of the freeway take possession of

these abandoned vehicles and attempt to form their own utopian community in this newly

formed and transitory space of exception, appropriating the space of the freeway, which

is absolutely vital for the flows of capitalism, into a space of their own. On the freeway,

the various vehicles are formed into streets: “There’s already names to the lanes, like

streets! South Fast Lane and North Fast Lane. Limousine Way—that’s the off-ramp at

Fifth. There’s dealing down here! There’s a truck could be a Seven eleven. . .” (156). The

street of the freeway is thus broken down into even more localized communities with the

vehicles now functioning as buildings. And this impossible community, located in the
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middle of a freeway, disrupts the flows of capital which allowed it to orchestrate multiple

spatialities under its hegemonic regime; it is a move not from the periphery to the center,

but to a heterotopic space that disrupts the regulation of center and periphery, attempting

to establish new spatial rationalities.

It is not surprising then that one might find echoes of Benjamin’s “Theses on the

Philosophy of History” in this section of the novel. This moment “was one of those happy

riots. Manzanar wondered if the storming of the Bastille could not be compared to the

storming of this mile-long abandoned car lot” (122). When contemplating the rupture of

linear, homogenized time, Benjamin’s example is also the July Revolution, noting that

“On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired

on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris” (262). While

Benjamin focuses on the firing upon the clocks and breaking free from established senses

of time, the novel attempts to also imagine the breaking free from spatial rationalities

through the appropriation of that space which organizes and distributes that other spaces,

the space of the flows and transfers between other spaces. While the novel ends on an

ambiguous note, with what Benjamin might call the real state of exception brought about

by this occupation of space ended by reinstitution of the system of control as the state

apparatus forcefully and violently descends upon the community to end it, what the novel

portrays is not the final reinstitution of the state, but only the moment of descent of the

police and National Guard into the freeway canyon and the death of Emi. One is left with

the sense that the aftermath has not yet been fully written, that these spaces of hope have

not and cannot be fully contained even through the exercise of the state monopoly over

violence.
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Against an empty sense of globalized space, the novel then asserts a space that is

underdetermined and overflowing with meaning, a space that can at any moment become

the strait gate through which a new spatial rationality might be established. The project of

Tropic of Orange would seem to be to make such an understanding of space possible, to

place both the author and the readers of the novel in the position of Manzanar and the

multitude of other conductors he identifies, with the understanding that “each of the maps

was a layer of music, a clef, an instrument, a musical instruction, a change of measure, a

coda” (57). This alternate understanding of space allows it to become the object of

appropriation, and rather than an un-navigable hyperspace one might instead find a sense

of space that is equally fluid, but always as a result of social conflict, and so always open

to appropriation and reappropriation through social and material interactions within that

space. Tropic of Orange, as a postmodern cultural artifact, might then be seen to function

not by closing off and containing alterity so that it can only be seen as an empty form, but

as a means of exposing the dominant spatial and temporal forms of legibility that

postmodernism relies upon, opening up the possibility of radically new forms of spatial

and temporal experience. The role of the artist or theorist like Manzanar is then not to

conduct the organization of space, but rather to make this organization and the processes

by which it takes place visible to those who experience it, allowing them to become the

conductors of their own spaces and allowing for new forms to emerge from within their

own material practices.

The Aesthetics of Cognitive Mapping

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In the project of cognitive mapping, of allowing one to locate oneself the

vicissitudes of space and time, Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange does not simply make

legible a single cognitive map, but the entire processes of cognition and of mapping. In

its making legible the processes through which legibility is produced, the novel

formulates a new means of connecting the practice of art with the ways in which art is

itself formalized and conceptualized, going beyond the disclosure of its own status as a

privileged object and deconstructing the spatial and temporal figurations through which

traditional works of art function. If the aesthetic, as formulated by Baumgarten and Kant

in mid-eighteenth century Europe, functioned as a particular method of relating sense

perception to knowledge through disinterestedness and a subjective universal validity,

Yamashita’s novel reconceptualizes these relations, exposing the modes through which

sense perceptions upon which knowledge is founded are formulated and undermining the

possibility of any disinterested or universal validity. The art work performed by the novel

then refuses to set the aesthetic apart from other practices, but shows how the sensual

experiences of space and time in various activities serve to create the spatialities and

temporalities which make these practices possible, regulating the play between

perception and knowledge, and providing not a single cognitive map, but rather an

aesthetic of cognitive mapping itself.

It is thus necessary to examine the social foundations of that knowledge which

seems to us now the most objective. In “The Image of Objectivity,” Lorraine J. Daston

and Peter Galison examine the historical formation of our current understanding of

objectivity, and rather than taking the more philosophical and etymological approach of

Heidegger, they provide an accounting of the concept’s development from the standpoint
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of the history of science. In the foundation of science, the proper portrayal of the sensed

phenomena was central, so much so that the early production of books that represented

objects in nature was a felt as a deeply moral affair. “They enlisted polygraphs,

photographs, and a host of other devices in a near-fanatical effort to create atlases—the

bibles of the observational sciences—documenting birds, fossils, human bodies,

elementary particles, and flowers in images that were certified free of human

interference” (81). But, the problem was not in coming to an agreement on the necessity

of properly portraying a nature free of human interference; the bigger issue was in the

question of what exactly it meant to properly portray nature, and this was unavoidably a

subjective determination: “in order to decide whether an atlas picture is an accurate

rendering of nature, the atlas maker must first decide what nature is. All atlas makers

must solve the problem of choice: Which objects should be presented as the standard

phenomena of the discipline, and from which viewpoint?” (86). What is interesting here

are the multiple understandings of what it meant to properly represent nature so that at

every moment it becomes clear that objectivity is also always an interpretation of what it

means to be objective. These early “atlas makers. . . did not all interpret the notion of

‘truth to nature ‘in the same way. The words typical, ideal, characteristic, and average

are not precisely synonymous, even though they all fulfilled the same standardizing

purpose” (87). These notions of the typical, the idea, the characteristic, and the average

were each slightly different forms of what it means to be objective; with the typical

seeking to represent the underlying Typus or ‘archetype’, the idea seeking to represent the

perfect form of the object, the characteristic seeking to portray a combination of what
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was found across a variety of objects, and the average attempting to portray what was

deemed normal.

And even in our own moment, when we have largely ceded the role of

determining the objective to the various mechanical apparatuses of the camera that allow

us to establish the fiction of an apersonal objectivity, we have not escaped from the social

determination of objectivity. This is obvious in the usual assumption in medicine of the

white male anatomy and physiology as the objective type, leading to, for example, a lack

of understanding until very recently of the different symptoms that manifest in women

undergoing a heart attack, or the different effects that various pharmaceuticals can have

on people of different racial backgrounds. What this means is that the assumption of a

particular objectivity is always a social and political question that cannot be simply

dismissed. Thus, it may be wise to supplement these mechanically produced images of

objectivity with paintings of Cézanne, the painter who more than any other makes vision

itself the subject of his paintings. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in “Cézanne’s

Doubt”, Cézanne attempts to focus his painting so that perspectival distortions “are no

longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to an

impression of an emerging order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself

before our eyes” (14). And this attempt to capture the functioning of the eyes leads to a

presentation that focuses on the mediation between the object and its visibility:

In the same way, the contour of an object conceived as a line encircling

the object belongs not to the visible world but to geometry. If one outlines
the shape of an apple with a continuous line, one makes an object of the
shape, whereas the contour is rather the ideal limit toward which the sides
of the apple recede in depth. Not to indicate any shape would be to deprive
the objects of their identity. To trace just a single outline sacrifices
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depth—that is, the dimension in which the thing is presented not as spread
out before us but as an inexhaustible reality full of reserves. (14-15)

In contrast to that reified map of the Empire described by Borges and those scientific

atlases constituted by a mechanical objectivity, what is central for Cézanne is the

perpetual emergence of the object into human perception. Instead of focusing on the line

that would constitute the object as something comprehensible, the emphasis is on the

multiplicity of the contour which gestures towards the excess of reality beyond the object

constituted by human vision and knowledge. In this way, Cézanne’s paintings make the

process of vision itself visible.

In a similar way, Tropic of Orange functions as a kind of second-order art. The

disruption of these reified structures of perception was once thought to be the domain of

art. Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique,” argues that perception can become

automatized so that life ceases to be experienced by the individual; such a life “is

reckoned as nothing. Habitualisation devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the

fear of war. . . . such lives are as if they had never been” (779). For Shklovsky, this

process of habitualization whereby perception becomes automatized is merely a fact of

human existence. “After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The

object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it” (779). However, it is

clear that at the very least these processes become employed by the capitalist nation state

as means of normalizing those experiences that disrupt the system of control. Indeed,

from Adorno’s standpoint, it is precisely the role of the culture industry to produce this

obfuscation between the objective and the subjective so that the ready-made perceptions

enforced by consensus become taken as the objective under the historical conditions
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when “objectivity is calculated by the subjects managing it” (75). Thus capital must

traffic in the habitualisation of its subjects to the domination and exploitation it produces

through the automatization of perception by the culture industry. Shklovsky locates the

function of art in its distancing of and estrangement of perception from its object which

allows one to “recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the

stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived

and not as they are known” (779). But Yamashita’s novel makes clear that things as they

are perceived as opposed to how they are known also have no claim to a higher level of

truth, because these perceptions, too, are produced through social processes. What

becomes central then is not the things in themselves, but those social processes of

perception.

This understanding of art and its function in disrupting the naturalized forms of

perception was taken up variously by a broad array of Marxist theorists. Bertolt Brecht

took up Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization in order to apply it to capitalist society

in the alienation effect, so that the purpose of art was to alienate one’s own alienated

understanding of the world. Lukács focused on realism as the form that best illustrated

the social relations that constitute human society and therefore the best suited to

producing a Marxist art. Adorno rejects both Brecht’s political emphasis for art and

Lukács realism, claiming that modernity was so utterly alienated that the only appropriate

representation is itself one of utter alienation, as in the works of Samuel Beckett. In the

conclusion to Aesthetics and Politics, which includes a series of conversations between

Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Brecht and Lukács, Fredric Jameson writes that although

Adorno may have been correct in his argument for the alienating aesthetics of modernism
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against Lukács’ realism, our own current moment calls for a rather different aesthetic.

Under the conditions of postmodernism when the radical alienation of perception has

become the standard, “there is some question whether the ultimate renewal of

modernism, the final dialectical subversion of the now automatized conventions of an

aesthetics of perceptual revolution, might not simply be . . . realism itself!” (211). For

Jameson, the goal of this new realism would be to “resist the power of reification in

consumer society and to invent that category of totality which, systematically undermined

by existential fragmentation on all levels of life and social organization today, can alone

project structural relations between classes as well as class struggles in other countries in

what has increasingly become a world system” (212-13). Yet, Tropic of Orange, too,

might be thought to pose a kind of aesthetic realism that does not return to historically

previous forms; or perhaps more accurately, Tropic of Orange might be read as posing a

Marxist aesthetic of the real. And this aesthetic of the real makes visible the radical

alienation of perception that constitutes postmodernity as a means of showing how the

perceptual apparatuses are shaped, and it is precisely through the exposure of these

processes that the social totality itself becomes visible.

 Traumas of Production: Representing the Chinese Coolie

The unconscious is the chapter of my history that is marked by a blank or

occupied by a lie: it is the censored chapter. But the truth can be refound;
most often it is already written elsewhere. Namely. . . in its traces that are
inevitably preserved in the distortions necessitated by the insertion of the
adulterated chapter into the chapters surrounding it.
– Jacques Lacan, Ecrits

We are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.

Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has
contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. So
as a corollary to writing about what we know, maybe we should add
getting familiar with our ignorance.
–Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner

I gestured in the previous chapter toward the development of not only a realist

aesthetic, but what might be termed a Marxist aesthetic of the real that would recognize

the absolute alterity of the object world and find its primary object in making visible the

social mediation of that alterity. What necessitates such an aesthetic is precisely the

current form of the capitalist mode of production that produces what might be called

trauma in the proper Lacanian sense. The traumatic is that event which cannot be

integrated into the proper structure of experience, and because of this recurs endlessly in

a structure of neurosis. It thus always escapes knowing proper, existing beyond the

bounds of a consciously constituted knowledge, because it cannot enter into the realm of

symbolization that would make it knowable. There are thus those traumatic presences

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within the structure of the capitalist nation state that are necessary to ensure the

valorization of capital, but which cannot be brought into the structure of knowledge of

capital. To render them visible and fully acknowledge them would require the radical

transformation of the entire system of legibility itself, which is to say, the transformation

of the modes of production that determine the system of legibility. The bounds of

knowledge under late capitalism are thus socially determined, but an aesthetic of the real

would not only seek to represent the object at the center of its representation—which is

impossible when dealing with an object made traumatic produced as trauma under late

capitalism—but in the process, it would illuminate the silhouette of what is absented, not

to make the object knowable, but to make known its fundamental absence.

In this chapter, I examine the Chinese coolie in Latin America as one such figure

that is fundamental to the structure of capitalism and which must nevertheless be

absented from it; it is that trauma which must be produced in order for capitalism to

continue its own production. In The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and

African Slaves in Cuba, Lisa Yun examines how the figure of the coolie is used to

construct a narrative that bridges the movement between slave and wage labor, creating a

teleology from more primitive forms of accumulation to the modern capitalist free

market. It has functioned as “a narrative of transition [that] has provided currency for

explaining their [the coolie’s] emergence and function as subjects in slave and free

economies as mediums for ‘progress’ and modernization” (1). The figure of the coolie is

encapsulated in positivistic, teleological histories which serve to contain the historical

and social fissures inherent in the transition between dominant forms of labor and modes

of production. These “modern interpretations of Chinese migration speak directly to its

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ideological significance in liberal teleologies and theories of race and emancipation” (4).

Attempting to recuperate the figure of the coolie and to perform the impossible task of

allowing them to speak of their own experiences opens up the possibility of disrupting

these dominant modern interpretations of teleological transition, altering both the

temporal and spatial senses developed under the regimes of multinational capitalism.

What is at stake in recuperating the figure of the Chinese coolie in Cuba is the

attempt to examine the networks of transnationality established in the mid-nineteenth

century and their continued echoes in the transition from the imperial phase of capitalism

to late capitalism. Such counter narratives problematize the dominant reading of the

Chinese coolie as a transitional figure and expose the failure of this transition. Yun’s

work focuses on how the image of the coolie was produced in the mid-nineteenth

century, showing this history to be the unmentionable underside of contract labor in the

contemporary moment and making visible the inseparable links between contemporary

transnational labor and the slavery coolies actually endured. Instead of a teleological

advancement from slave to contract labor we are presented with a cessation of this

movement; the role of the coolie contract functioned as “a state of explicit, implied, or

even ‘involuntary agreement’ in which wage and debt can be wielded by empowered

parties against the contracted as mechanisms for new slavery” (231). The narrative of

transition and progress serves as a means of obscuring the continued existence of slavery

in its mutation into a form of the contract which allows surplus to be forcibly extracted

from the bodies of the contracted. In this way, the figure of the coolie and the forms of

exploitation it endured is not simply a clear image from a time prior to our own, but it
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lingers and continues to exist in new forms within the currently dominant modes of

production in late capitalism.

Yun’s work is careful not to collapse all forms of contract labor into a singular

form, as there are obvious differences between a relatively wealthy wage laborer

recognized by the nation state and the forms of indentured labor produced through late

capitalism’s new regimes of flexible accumulation. Rather, she focuses on the new

coolie, “the new global indentured laborer. . . [that] transgresses a highly bordered world

of (il)legalities, (non)citizenry, and contracts, now refashioned as a highly efficient

panopticon of labor control, exploitation, and public surveillance wedded to corporate

exigencies” (231). Yun’s example of the persistence of this new coolie is the incident of

seventy-two Thai women working in a California sweatshop until 1995. The sweatshop

was surrounded by razor-wire fences and employed armed guards.

Similar to age-old plantation systems of control and bondage, laborers

attested to being literally imprisoned in the workplace and forced to
purchase necessities from their captors. This was after being paid only
sixty cents per hour, thereby further indebting and bonding themselves.
When discovered, the women were then penalized for being ‘illegal’ labor
and imprisoned again, this time by the American Immigration and
Naturalization Service. (231)

In the moment of their discovery, the capitalist nation state’s penalization of the women

for being illegal labor rather than victims of a new form of slavery indicates the

assumption that the women were working in such conditions by consent, accepting the

validity of the “involuntary agreement” implied by the contracts they were under. In these

new spaces created by transnational labor what is discovered is the mutation of previous

spaces of exploitation, a ghostly continuation that refuses to be erased, indicating that the
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existence of these conditions of labor is not the other of modernity, but one of its

constitutive conditions.

However, shortly after recognizing the women as victims, the capitalist nation

state moved quickly to reincorporate the story of these women into its own teleological

narrative of progress in order to contain the rift introduced by this new trauma. In

“Sweatshop Exhibit Revives Painful Memories”, a January 24th, 2000 article of the LA

Times, Edward Boyer writes of the visit of these same women to an exhibit called

“Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A History of American Sweatshops 1820-Present,” at

the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance. Tellingly, the article makes no

mention of the women’s imprisonment at the hands of the INS, noting only that

“[a]uthorities raided the sweatshop on Aug. 2, 1995, freeing 72 Thai workers. Eight

others had escaped earlier” (Boyer). The authority of the capitalist nation state is thus

imagined as sweeping in to liberate these oppressed workers, making invisible how these

laborers were integrated into the economy of this very same nation state. Instead, the

article attempts to reincorporate the traumatic presence of the sweatshop into a narrative

of progress and assimilation into US society:

Since their ordeal in El Monte, the Thai workers have moved on with their
lives. They now are legal residents, most have studied English, many still
work in the garment industry, at least 15 have married, 13 have had
children and more are on the way. . . “They had no idea that they had been
victimized,” Martorell said. “They had no idea what their rights were.
They've made a remarkable adjustment. They are a remarkable
demonstration of human resilience.” (Boyer)

There is thus both a curious movement and a curious lack of movement in the lives

portrayed; they have gone from the conditions of the sweatshop, which can only be

imagined as primitive and pre-capitalist, to entering properly into modernity by endowing

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them with certain ostensibly unalienable rights; yet, many of them are still employed in

the garment industry. While the article portrays these women as having moved on with

their lives, there is also an evident feeling that the nation should also move on with its

progress through history, but the simultaneous moment of cessation throws into question

the possibility of such progress. The question of whether “[t]hey had no idea what their

rights were” or whether it is that without the protection of the state they were effectively

without rights is never raised, eliding the possibility of comprehending the spaces of

these refugees within the larger context of the nation state. Such narratives of progress

obscure the manner in which the contradictions of the past persist and seek to suture the

traumatic continuation of the past in the present. This “remarkable adjustment” and

“remarkable demonstration of human resilience” is no less a remarkable example of the

capitalist nation state’s ability to conceal the conditions of its own possibility which

creates and makes necessary such spaces of hyper-exploitation.

In Trauma and the Memory of Politics, Jenny Edkins examines the national

state’s incorporation of similar traumatic experiences into a national narrative in terms of

the differential relations between what she terms “the linear time of the standard political

processes” and “trauma time” (xiv). The linear time of standard politics is a temporality

that suits the sovereign power of the nation state, allowing events to be used to reproduce

the teleology of national subjectivity. Trauma time, on the other hand, “doesn’t fit the

story we have, but demands that we invent a new account, one that will produce a place

for what happened and make it meaningful. Until this new story is produced we quite

literally do not know what has happened . . . we only know that ‘something happened’”

(xiv). The state’s reincorporation of this traumatic event thus rewrites the narrative of
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these new indentured laborers into a linear narrative of liberal progress, inserting them

into a fictional teleology from the purportedly primitive condition prior to the formation

of rights to the conditions of the modern subject, not only foreclosing other

understandings of what occurred but also using this foreclosure to underpin the power of

the nation state. This narration of the trauma inserts the subjects into the logic of politics

proper and makes legible the “something [that] happened” in such a way as to foreclose

other understandings of the event, including the attempt to mobilize the event against the

larger capitalist mode of production. Yet the erasure of this traumatic temporality always

leaves a trace which offers the possibility of understanding it in a different framework—a

framework which would make the narrative of the trauma legible, which would then

necessarily expose the ultimate illegibility of the system of capital.

It is then no surprise that the state attempts to normalize the survivors, and

incorporate them into the national body as a means of controlling the historical narrative

produced. “The aim is recovery, or the reinsertion of survivors into structures of power.

Survivors are helped to verbalise and narrate what has happened to them; they receive

counseling to help them accommodate once more to the social order and re-form relations

of trust” (9). The process of verbalization and making the events known, of turning the

lived experience of memory into the verbalized discourse of history through the act of

bearing witness, becomes a means through which state power reincorporates individuals,

particularly when the state determines the conditions under which this verbalization can

take place. Even as the nation state under the current modes and relations of production

necessarily functions to propagate these traumas, it must also continually reincorporate

the victims into the national body through the constant production and reproduction of
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linear teleologies and narratives of history proper. While these women were not initially

subjects of the United States, the very process of incorporating them into the national

body furthers the narrative of the nation and prevents them from bearing witness against

the structures of the capitalist nation state that led to their victimization. Incorporating

these women into the national body not only alters the narrative that is produced, but

allows the nation state to regulate the production of that narrative.

This process of reincorporating the trauma through the encouraged production of

narrative further serves to turn the memory of the individuals into history. In Edkins’

theory, history and memory are two terms that exist in a tense dialectical relationship.

“Memory is sacred, history profane. Memory is alive, evolving, negotiated and belongs to

the present and to particular groups; history is a reconstruction of the past that has to be

analytical and detached” (31). Thus in Edkins’ model, history takes on a reified form,

reduced to an analytical construct formed by experts, while memory is fluid and dynamic.

However, Edkins troubles this binary between history and memory through the work of

Pierre Nora, noting that “[o]ur practices of memory have changed. Or as Nora argues,

‘memory’ has been replaced by ‘history’” (31). The transformation of memory into

history posed by Nora involves a psychological and social transformation in which

previous modes of remembering which take the form “memory,” are altered to conform

to the mode of remembering embodied in “history.” For memory to become history

requires the remembering individual to organize their memory in a particular way so that

it ceases to be alive and evolving, and instead takes the reified form of history. To refer

back to James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, it requires those ordering and abstracting

qualities of the state that enables legibility by making its subjects to see as it does. Thus
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any attempt to remember a trauma must be wary of reifying the events presented and

foreclosing them through the construct of history. The nation state’s role in aiding the

women’s verbalization of their experience serves to transform that memory into history,

yet there is still a traumatic core that cannot be completely encompassed. Trauma, as that

which absolutely resists being made meaningful, serves to disrupt both the teleological

narratives of history proper and the fluid and evolving narratives of memory itself.

“Caruth describes post-traumatic stress disorder as ‘a symptom of history’. She notes ‘the

traumatised carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the

symptom of a history they cannot entirely possess” (39). The continued existence of the

coolie in this new form—the persistent production of the traumas of production—might

then be viewed as a symptom of the contemporary moment in the development of late

capitalism.

This is not to claim for the aesthetics of the real some privileged ability to reclaim

the ultimate truth of the events from the experience of the survivors who have themselves

been reinserted into the very structures of power which led to the traumatic experience.

Rather it might trace the contours and the coherence of these absences in order to

examine the cultural conditions which make necessary the production of certain forms of

knowledge. In “The Empty Wheelbarrow,” Žižek playfully quotes Donald Rumsfeld on

the problem of these contours of knowledge and nonknowledge: “There are known

knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to

say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns.

There are things we don't know we don't know" (Žižek). To this, Zizek adds the category

of ‘“unknown knowns’, the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we

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pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.

To unearth these ‘unknown knowns’ is the task of an intellectual” (Žižek). But also

central to these categorizations of knowledge is the way knowledges shift between the

different categories, the way in which the largely unknown unknown of the coolie

becomes a known known, the epistemic violence that occurs in this process of making the

situation comprehensible as an object of knowledge, and the way in which this shift

invariably modifies the structures of the realm of the ideological unknown knowns. The

acts of knowing and of making known are never neutral processes in some impartial

project of transparent knowledge accumulation; knowledge is produced under certain

conditions which shape that knowledge and how it is received. In this sense, it is

necessary to perform an archaeology of ignorance alongside an archaeology of

knowledge, to discern the outlines of the absences and examine the political surpluses

and subtractions produced in the process of filling these epistemic lacunae.

It is thus necessary to be sensitive to the possibilities and impossibilities of

history, and the politics behind the production of knowledge and non-knowledge. The

Coolie Speaks conducts a close reading of various coolie testimonies and commission

investigations, which are carefully problematized, even as Yun makes clear her own role

in the process of knowledge production. She notes that the purpose of her study is not to

recover or convey “a pure, transparent, or essentialized record of experience. Rather, it is

an effort to read testimonies with attention to what apparently were previously obscured

radical and dissonant views. The messiness of these perspectives becomes subsumed in

global enterprises specifically formulated to locate, represent, and archive ‘truth’” (49).

Rather than offering a simple alternative to the dominant historical narrative, it is thus
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necessary to attend to the messiness of history that always exceeds any attempt to form it

into a simple meaning. This messiness serves to expose the construction of history as a

particular object of knowledge which functions through operations of erasure in addition

to operations of the production of knowledge. Furthermore, Yun’s project recognizes the

coolie testimonies as highly problematic historical objects in themselves, created in

particular social and material circumstances. “The acts of managing and creating forums

for testimony, the historicizing of speaking and witnessing, the public enactment of

processional and the archives produced by these acts, all provide highly charged

enterprises of knowledge and collectivity in the tensions of social consciousness and the

politics of memory (50). The Coolie Speaks is also about the impossibility of gaining any

unproblematic testimonial speech from the figure of the coolie, recognizing how such

speech has often been incorporated into the temporalities of politics proper and closed off

from trauma time. The emphasis on the closure endured by such speech exposes the

temporalities established by the dominant historical narrative while refusing to

completely foreclose the possibilities of this traumatic and impossible history.

The Coolie Speaks performs a necessary excavation of the figure of the coolie in

the past which is sensitive to the problematic nature of testimony and questions the neat

positioning of these forms of exploitation as temporally prior to the current moment. It

might further serve as a basis for the examination of the production into presence of the

figure of the coolie in the current image circulation of the United States. The coolie has

been largely forgotten in contemporary Cuban histories, often eclipsed by the “images of

the Chinese freedom fighter and the Chinese merchant that are generally known among

the Cuban people, with the coolie being a more distant historical figure in the national
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memory of labor and independence” (35). These representations of the Chinese as

national hero or productive citizen seek to close off the traumatic presence of the history

of the coolie, effacing this longer history of struggle and enslavement. While there

narratives were often produced by the Chinese themselves in order to emphasize their

own contributions and aid in their own continued existence in the conditions of the

nation, “the history of the coolies and the context of their bondage have been dimmed by

the more recent narrative of the Chinese immigrant struggles and contributions.

Consequently, the coolie story has been called ‘la historia de la gente sin historia’ (a

history of a people without history)” (35).

This “history of a people without history” has recently been made the subject of a

series of recent cultural productions. Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s God of Luck (2007),

Daina Chaviano’s The Island of Eternal Love (2008), Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting

(2003), and Angie Cruz’s Let it Rain Coffee (2005) all deal with the repressed history of

the coolie either directly by exploring its foreclosed history or indirectly by representing

the Asian from Latin America. Each of these portrayals brings the image into light in the

tensions between mourning and melancholia, and in the play between forgetting and

remembering that makes it visible. This new visibility places the figure in relation to

contemporary social and historical conditions; however, rhe recovery of such knowledge

is never neutral, and it becomes necessary to examine the emergence of this image in

terms of the political and cultural work that it performs in the current moment. This

emergence occurs within conditions that make necessary the attempt to fill in this blank

of history, this adulterated chapter. This play between knowledge and non-knowledge

participates in the political productions of race, class and gender and allows us to trace
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the changing contours of history. The insertion of this censored and distorted chapter into

the current cultural dominant leaves traces through which one might, to paraphrase

Lacan, refound some fragmented truth of our own contemporary conditions.

We might consider the coolie a fragment of a prior mode of production that

simultaneously continues into our present. According to Marx, every actually existing

social formation is the combination of different historical modes of production, thus

understanding the structure of capitalism “thereby also allows insights into the structure

and the relations of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it

built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along within it, whose

mere nuances have developed explicit significance within it” (105). Fredric Jameson’s

“On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act,” similarly takes into account

remnants of prior modes of production such as the new coolie as it incorporated into the

structural configuration of late capitalism. According to Jameson, each dominant mode of

production, with its concomitant cultural formations, is necessarily crisscrossed with the

remnants and prefigurations of both prior and future modes of production. “[E]very social

formation or historically existing society has in fact consisted in the overlay and

structural coexistence of several modes of production all at once, including vestiges and

survivals of older modes of production, now relegated to structurally dependent positions

within the new, as well as anticipatory tendencies” (50). Every existing society then

functions as a heterogeneous mix of different modes of production, and therefore a

heterogeneous mix of different forms of exploitation and oppression. The flexible

accumulation of late capitalism functions as one particular social formation which

structures these relations in new ways while attempting to obscure the continued
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existence of multiply determined forms of exploitation. According to Jameson, “it

becomes clear that sexism and the patriarchal are to be grasped as the sedimentation and

the virulent survival of forms of alienation specific to the oldest mode of production of

human history” (54). This allows one to avoid the problem of determining which form of

alienation is most fundamental by focusing on the structural relations they each occupy in

different social formations.

The repressed and now reemerging image of the coolie offers a means of

examining the complexities of this history as they are sedimented in the contemporary

structures of capital accumulation. The purpose is not to excise these prior forms of

exploitation, as though they could be cut out to achieve some purer form of the currently

dominant mode of production, or as though they could all be simply removed in order to

achieve utopia as an inverse reflection of currently existing conditions. Indeed, the

current forms become inextricably imbricated in a system that orchestrates multiply

determined structures of domination. Rather, such an examination might open the space

for the prefiguration of a new mode of production to become visible in a negative light

where, Theodor Adorno notes, “consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates

the mirror image of its opposite” (256). It may allow us to imagine a situation that is

radically otherwise and conceive the possibility of a “cultural revolution, that moment in

which the coexistence of various modes of production becomes visibly antagonistic, their

contradictions moving to the very center of political, social, and historical life” (Jameson

51). The novels might then be examined in terms of how they heighten or contain these

contradictions, serving to either invoke or erase the traumas of history and historical

modes of production contained and reproduced in the current moment.

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To Trace the Ambiguity of Melancholy

So, when we are hoping for rescue, a voice tells us that hope is in vain, yet
it is powerless hope alone that allows us to draw a single breath. All
contemplation can do no more than patiently trace the ambiguity of
melancholy in ever new configurations. Truth is inseparable from the
illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all,
real deliverance will come.
–Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

If the new coolie represents a form of trauma that is necessarily reproduced by the

late capitalist mode of production, the emergence of the image of the “historical” coolie

in contemporary cultural texts performs the work of forgetting or coming to terms with a

figure which is in both the present in our own moment and is consigned to the historical

past. Part of the work of ideology in late capitalism is then to obscure this figure, to

banish it to the realm of history and disavow its presence in the current moment in order

to portray itself as a form of advancement. This posing of the coolie as a lost figure of the

past that must be overcome allows one to pose Freud’s notions of mourning and

melancholia as hermeneutic tools to examine how these recent cultural productions that

evoke the coolie function within the larger trans-American image economy. We might

thus use these novels to, in the words of Adorno, trace the ambiguity of melancholy as

they are configured within each of these novels and attempt to draw out, from the

contours of their absences, some possible form of transformation of the late capitalist

modes of production, which is precisely the work of an aesthetic of the real.

The play between remembering and forgetting necessary to produce history from

a traumatic past can be further elucidated with Sigmund Freud’s conceptualizations of

mourning and melancholia. In the essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud notes that
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both mourning and melancholia originate in a loss; however, while in mourning the loss

is expected to be easily overcome, there is a lingering on the “unknown loss in the case of

melancholia” (312). The work of mourning, as Tammy Clewell notes in her analysis,

“Mourning and Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss”, is “a kind of

hyperremembering, a process of obsessive recollection during which the survivor

resuscitates the existence of the lost other in the space of the psyche, replacing the actual

absence with an imaginary presence” (44). In the case of a proper mourning, invoking

this imaginary presence allows the mourner to comprehend what was lost and to

ultimately sever the relationship with the lost object, freeing the libido to be invested

elsewhere. In this clinically acceptable case of mourning, “the prolonging of the existence

of the lost object at the center of the grief work does not persist indefinitely. . . the

mourner, by comparing the memories of the other with actual reality, comes to the

objective determination that the lost object no longer exists” (44). The purpose of

mourning then is to come to a decisive end to the relationship of the lost object, so that

the “the survivor has detached his or her emotional tie to the lost object and reattached

the free libido to a new object, thus accepting consolation in the form of a substitute for

what has been lost” (44). This mode of conceptualizing mourning, with its severance to

the object of the past might be seen to perform work parallel to the work of a violent

historicism, which seeks to turn the past itself into an object that can be left behind. As

Clewell notes, compensatory mourning “depends on a denial of otherness, a denial that

occurs exactly at the moment the other is represented and memorialized” (52). This form

of dealing with the lost object is therefore always a kind of containment in which the

totality of what is lost is able to be imaginatively fully known and contained within the
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individual. The knowledge of history likewise erases the alterity of the event in order to

present it as fully comprehended and therefore something that can be discarded as past.

In opposition to mourning, melancholia is portrayed by Freud as the pathological

method of dealing with a loss which manifests as the inability to dismiss the lost object

and reinvest the libido elsewhere. However, if the clinical aspect of Freudian

psychoanalysis functions to adjust the ego to the conditions of bourgeois society, the

pathological thus opens up the possibility of disrupting the smooth functioning of that

society. In this sense, the pathology of melancholy interrupts sterilized formation of

mourning with its too-ready knowledge of its object. In melancholia the object lost is also

invested with the ego, becoming an object of love; however, that which is lost cannot be

simply dismissed, in part because the true loss is often times unknown, for it is not simply

a loved object that is lost, but also the ego with which it is invested. This loss cannot be

teleologically overcome and so loss persists as the inability to reinvest the ego in a new

object. The “melancholic refuses to break the attachment to the lost object when in reality

it is gone. Instead, the melancholic consolidates the connection with the lost other

through ‘an identification of the ego with the abandoned object’” (Clewell 59-60). This

investment of ego prevents the object from ever being truly lost without the erasure or

transformation of that ego, but the individual comes into a profoundly ambivalent

relationship to this ego which simultaneously lingers and is lost.

Thus melancholia inhibits the normal functioning of the ego. “The complex of

melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing investment energies to itself from all

sides . . . and draining the ego to the point of complete impoverishment” (Freud 319-

320). The melancholy of a mode of production might then be located where there is the
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investment or overinvestment of social energies which attempt to suture the traumatic

wound by incorporating it into history. These narratives of the historical existence of the

coolie might be read as such investments of energy which attempt to close off the past. In

psychology, these wounds can only be sutured through the aggressive separation of the

melancholic identification which has been internalized into the ego which allows

melancholia to become mourning through a form of self-aggression on the part of the

melancholic. “Just as a mourning impels the ego to give up the object by declaring the

object to be dead and offering the ego the inducement to love, so does each single

struggle of ambivalence loosen the fixation of the libido to the object by disparaging it,

denigrating it and even as it were killing it off” (324). The play of mourning and

melancholia can then function as two models for structuring relations to the past, one of

mourning in which the past is simply overcome in a progressive model of history, and

one of melancholia where the past never ceases to linger into the present except by

turning it into mourning. The mourning of history attempts to suture the wound of

melancholia, turning it into an object that can be simply overcome, whereas the

melancholia of history implies the always-lingering presence of the past in the present

and the necessity of working through that past as a means of working through the present.

However, it would be a mistake to reify mourning and melancholia as two

completely distinct categories, as more recent work on the psychoanalysis of loss has

indicated. Instead, we might trace the new configurations of melancholy by proposing a

more dialectical understanding of the two. The dyad between mourning and melancholia

can be complicated by examining the dialectical interactions between the two. Thus the

initial dyad of mourning and melancholia opens up into four related categories: mournful
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mourning, mournful melancholy, melancholic mourning, and melancholic melancholy.

Mournful mourning might be seen as the repressing and forgetting the very act of

mourning itself, a sort of forgetting of the forgetting which standard historicism makes

operative. Melancholic melancholy might be seen as the investment of the libido in the

loss itself rather than simply the object that is lost. The open wound of melancholia is

thus reopened doubly in the refusal to relinquish the originary wound. In its absolute

refusal to relinquish the past, and in the recognition of this refusal, melancholic

melancholy refuses the linear time of history, insisting on the coexistence of past and

present within a singular moment. It is a form of dealing with the past that insists upon

the trauma and maintaining the trauma as a means of comprehending the present.

Melancholic mourning, on the other hand, can be seen as a kind of mourning that

contains and continues the unresolved grief and refuses to break the emotional bonds.

Citing Jahan Ramazani, Clewell notes that melancholic mourning is a modern

phenomenon that “names a work of grieving less idealistic and more ambivalent, enraged

and aggressive” (55) than Freud’s original formation. Whereas in Freud aggressivity was

reserved for the work of melancholia and served as a means for the melancholic

individual to sever their ties with the internalized lost object, in melancholic mourning,

this aggression aids in the process of mourning. In the modern age, the prohibition of the

expression of bereavement forces inhibits the hyperremembering of Freudian mourning

that allows the individual to call fourth that which was lost, comprehend its relationship

to the ego, and ultimately sever the ties between the two. Instead, examining the modern

elegiac tradition, Clewell notes that while “[r]edeeming the dead in transcendent or

consoling fictions necessarily sustains the terms of the attachment, modern poets attack
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those they mourn in order to weaken the ties and create new discursive spaces

unencumbered by the demands of the other and the past” (55). Whereas in traditional

mourning, this aggressivity is directed at the lost object internalized within the self, in

melancholic mourning, the aggressivity is aimed at the hyperremembered object and

serves as an attempt to move beyond that past, even as it nevertheless “demonstrates how

a residue of unresolved grief signals that emotional bonds have not broken” (55). In

melancholic mourning, the ambiguity between mourning and melancholia is resolved in a

form of relinquishing the past which nevertheless contains the undissolved and

undissolvable traces of these unresolved bonds which affirms the past’s hidden

continuation into the present. Mournful melancholy, in distinction from melancholic

mourning, might be seen as a kind of melancholy that relies precisely on this

hyperremembrance, as a form of memorialization that seeks to retain the image of the

past and with it the traces of another temporality even as it attempts to gain distance and

close itself off from that past. It refuses to fit the past into a linear narrative in which the

past simply produces the present.

From the original binary between mourning and melancholia we then have four

related terms which stake out different means of relation to the past and the possibility of

its traumatic return and continuation in the present. These serve not only as means of

grasping an individual’s psychic relations, but also illustrate different means that

narratives can function socially and politically in relation to the past, and open up

different forms of understanding how the figure of the coolie has been brought into the

realm of representation in the present moment, with many of the narrative representations

taking place within this play between mourning and melancholy that trace out different
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relations to the past. In the following section I will seek to examine four such cultural

productions in order to explicate the proposed hermeneutics of mourning and

melancholia in relation to history and further examine how the image of the coolie

functions within the larger economy of images in the current stage of late capitalism.

Representations of the Chinese Coolie

Memories cannot be conserved in drawers and pigeon-holes; in them the

past is indissolubly woven into the present. . . Precisely where they
become controllable and objectified, where the subject believes himself
entirely sure of them, memories fade like delicate wallpapers in bright
sunlight. But where, protected by oblivion, they keep their strength, they
are endangered like all that is alive. . . No other hope is left to the past than
that exposed defencelessly to disaster, it shall emerge from it as something
different.
–Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s The God of Luck narrates the tale of Ah Lung, a

Chinese silk farmer who is kidnapped from a market town near Canton in China by

coolie traders. Ah Lung is subsequently brought to Peru where he is forced to work in the

guano mining trade on one of the Chincha Islands. Ah Lung eventually manages to

escape from his servitude with the help of three indigenous boatmen who help him get

away from the island on which he is imprisoned and return to his family in China. His

return trip is funded by his wife, Bo See, who has saved the money for his passage by

raising silkworms.

McCunn’s novel presents itself through a realist aesthetic which tends to valorize

the truth of the history it portrays. The novel consciously frames itself in terms of

historical accuracy, beginning with a note to the reader that serves to authenticate the

narrative; in the ostensibly dispassionate and objective voice of official history, it notes:
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“From 1840 to 1875, multinational commercial interests operated a traffic in Asian labor

to Latin America and the Caribbean. Of the estimated one million men decoyed or stolen

from southern China, close to 100,000 landed in Peru.” Similarly, the novel ends with an

acknowledgements section of approximately two and a half pages. The first two pages of

this acknowledgements section lists the various historical materials researched for the

novel, including such sources as “depositions from captives, their kidnappers, the

captains of devil-ships, and members of their crews; the memorials and correspondence

of Chinese, British, and American officials . . . Arnold J. Meagher’s 1975 doctoral

dissertation” (237). The final half a page lists the others who have supported the project

in various other ways. It quickly becomes evident that these acknowledgements serve to

authenticate the historical veracity of the fictional account given by the novel as much as

it does to recognize any of the people who may have aided in the production of the novel

itself. The novel exhibits a particular obsession with historical truth and accuracy, that is

tacitly portrayed as being transparently accessible through historical research into the

cultural artifacts produced during the period—the various depositions, memorials and

correspondences—and through dialogue with the academic community.

Indeed, it is in terms of historical accuracy and truth that the novel has most often

been praised. The Library Journal notes that the novel is “[h]ighly recommended for

general readers as well as those studying Chinese history” (cited in McCunn, 2008),

eliding the differences in representational regimes between history and the novel, and

presenting the novel as an unproblematic representation of historical events. Historical

Novels Review notes that "[i]n God of Luck, McCunn creates a world, distant from us in

both space and time, which seems absolutely authentic, and characters who are
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heartbreakingly real in their universal humanity" (cited in McCunn, 2008). What occurs

in these reviews is a slippage between historical reality, and an attempt to construct a

reality based on universal humanity. While McCunn attempts to emphasize the veracity

of her account by framing it with the trappings of an objective and thoroughly researched

history, the Historical Novels Review constructs truth not on a sense of what objectively

occurred, but on a sense of abstract universal humanity which serves as a guarantor of its

authenticity. Such an analysis of the novel becomes problematic, particularly because the

novel portrays an era in which “humanity” is less universal than one might expect and

reflects an attempt to construct the human in the contemporary period. This tension

between different geographies of inclusion and exclusion into the universal of humanity

is what is centrally at stake in the novel. The very lack of historicity of “universal

humanity” itself within the novel serves to deconstruct the attempt to base historical

truthfulness upon the abstract and universal notion of humanity.

What becomes apparent in both the framing of the novel and the various reviews

of the novel is the attempt to negotiate the tensions between an apparently objective sense

of history and the aesthetic representation of past events—a tension which is located

within the genre’s designation as “historical fiction.” This tension is resolved, perhaps too

readily, in the reviews either by reformulating the standards by which historical truth is

judged, or by tacitly collapsing history into fiction. Such a tension might, instead of being

resolved, be usefully heightened through the use of Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s distinction

between truth and truthfulness elaborated in The Past Within Us: Media, Memory,

History. According to Morris-Suzuki, rather than focusing on the question of historical

truth one might focus on the question of historical truthfulness as the “open-ended and
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evolving relationship with past events and people” which will help “shift the debate away

from the sometimes arid arguments about the existence of nonexistence of historical

facts, and towards the processes by which people in the present try to make sense of the

past” (27). Truthfulness then focuses less on the attempt to formulate or verify truth in

terms of the objective framework in which McCunn frames her novel, and looks more

towards the processes by which certain narratives come to represent the truth. And it is in

the space of this truthfulness rather than in a reified truth that the importance of history as

subject establishes itself, as a gaze that looks out on the current moment and causes

individuals to present themselves in particular ways so as to attempt to disarm that gaze.

The transformations in the processes through which historical truth are established

are particularly visible in the Historical Novels Review, where truth becomes a matter of

establishing an empathetic connection with the past through the “universal humanity” of

its characters. This is precisely Morris-Suzuki’s analysis of the historical novel, which

“created a new form of empathetic identification with the events of the past. The novel

presented the past as a social phenomenon – a process of change – in which the living

experience of all individuals was bound up” (40). The alleged “universal humanity” of

the characters of God of Luck emphasized by The Historical Novels Review is precisely

what allows for the historical novel to create these forms of empathetic identification,

which creates new forms of historical and spatial consciousness. As Morris-Suzuki notes,

“[T]he historical novel created a new form of empathetic identification with the events of

the past. The novel presented the past as a social phenomenon – a process of change – in

which the living experience of all individuals was bound up” (39). The assertion of a

universal humanity as the basis for representations of historical truth can then be viewed
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as a particular notion of how the past should be viewed, an affective relationship caught

up in the Historical Novels Review’s own historical and social conditions, and the generic

history of the current form of the historical novel.

The problem of truthfulness of the novel rather than truth of history bears upon

the question of the political work the narrative performs in reproducing the largely-

obscured figure of the Chinese coolie in the moment of late capitalism. The God of Luck

serves to conceal the traumatic persistence of these forms of exploitation by locating

them squarely in a prior moment of history through the anachronistic projection of

universal humanism into the past. Our ability to affectively relate to the narrative of the

coolie in the current moment then seems to guarantee the closure of these forms of

exploitation in the present. Even as the novel represents the passage from China to Peru

and the brutality and hardships endured by the coolies on the ship in a realistic fashion

from the first-person perspective of Ah Lung, this representation serves to encapsulate

the traumatic narrative, inserting it into the teleological history of the nation. What the

narrative forecloses then is precisely the understanding of the ways in which the coolie

persists in to the current moment; indeed, Ah Lung’s return to China at the resolution of

the novel would seem to also mark the end of the narrative of the coolie in general,

ignoring the plight of the numerous other Chinese who were unable to return home

through the focus on this single exceptional individual.

While Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities, focuses his discussion on

the way in which novels formed a sense of empty, homogenous time which led to the

linear homogeneous space of the nation, Tessa Morris-Suzuki in The Past Within Us

usefully examines the transnational movements of culture which point to the possibility
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of new forms of spatialization which might help to disrupt the dominant narrative of the

nation state. The simultaneity embedded in print publication paradoxically creates a

linear timeframe which encompasses the multiple spatial differences of the nation so that

each individual subject experiences themselves as moving forward through the same

temporal space as other subjects. Thus the creation of the nation relies upon the

spatialization of a particular sense of time across the national space. Similarly, Morris-

Suzuki notes that “The historical novel, then, creates a new form of empathetic link

between past and present, between the lives of readers and an imagined image of the

society of the past. But at the same time it also frames that society spatially, most often in

terms of the nation state” (49). Indeed, God of Luck, with its two spatial frames, one

located on Ah Lung as he is moved from China to Peru and the other centered on Bo See

as she raises the silkworms necessary to ransom him, creates precisely the national

simultaneity critiqued by Anderson. The narrative typically cuts between the two

characters between every chapter, creating a sense that the two are moving forward

together through homogeneous, empty time, despite the wide spatial differences between

the two.

The realist historical novel seems particularly unsuitable for the project of

breaking from the national historical narrative and creating new forms of spatial and

temporal consciousness. As Morris Suzuki notes, “Historical fiction elaborates our

mental map of national history, and links this to a wider map of the histories of

surrounding countries. But in doing so it also creates an uneven landscape, riven by

invisible fissures” (62). Thus, while God of Luck attempts to bring to light a narrative

episode that would otherwise be largely ignored, it presents it in a manner that reinforces
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both national borders and national histories. It is insufficient to simply re-present an

episode of the past, though of course any such re-presentation is always already a

reinterpretation, no matter how revolutionary that narrative may initially seem. The

representation of the past in the simple realist mode seems to only make it available for

further containment by dominant discourses of teleological history through the

reassurance that our contemporary moment is qualitatively different than the one

portrayed. Although the novel seems to question narratives of national containment by

representing a history that transcends national borders, it ultimately seems to only further

strengthen those borders. The only characters who are portrayed with any psychological

or emotional depth are the Chinese, while the Ah Lung’s captors are only referred to as

“white devils”, and the indigenous Peruvians who help Ah Lung to escape are similarly

flat. Furthermore, the novel focuses entirely on what occurs to Ah Lung; the plight of the

other Chinese captives is almost completely marginalized except where it intersects Ah

Lung’s narrative. Ah Lung represents the “good” Chinese subject whose only longing is

to return to Bo See and to China, distracted neither by opium nor gambling as are many

of the other Chinese. Thus it is through the faith in his own nation and the love of and for

Bo See as representative of that nation that Ah Lung is delivered homeward.

The God of Luck might be seen to perform a sort of mournful mourning, where on

the one hand the hyperremembering of the past occurs precisely to close off that pass as

something that has occurred prior to our own historical moment, and on the other hand

performs a hyperremembering of the hyperremembering which presents its own

historicity as something completely transparent and clear, as though there were some

direct means of accessing the traumatic past. The God of Luck then attempts to mediate
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the relationship with this traumatic moment of the past by closing it off, eliminating the

space from which the Other of history gazes out at the present and determining precisely

how that history should be used. Yet this sort of closure fails to capture and entirely close

off the trauma and instead attempts to hide it by bringing it into the narrative of a

dominant discourse. But the traumatic point, the point from which history views the

present, cannot be so easily closed off. This history continues as a ghostly remainder in

the form of the Chinese who were not able to return to China in the novel, and in the

continued remnants of the Chinese in contemporary Peru. These remnants might be seen

to function not unlike the anamorphic skull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors. The skull

lingers in the image, and cannot quite be made sense of, appearing as a strange phallic

object that mars the rest of the realistically painted picture. It is only when the painting is

viewed from askew, from an angle so great that the rest of the picture becomes

incomprehensible that the death’s head comes into view, radically transforming the

reading of the portrait, as not the celebration of the vanitas represented in the picture, but

precisely its opposite. Similarly, the trauma functions in language as a sort of asymptotic

point that cannot be represented, but can only be encircled at a distance, because to touch

that point would require the radical transformation of the coordinate system being used

that would make that which was once legible illegible. Thus focusing on the human

remnants both within and without the novel gives the lie to the narrative of closure and

return; forcing the narrative to be glanced at askew so that the realistic teleological

narrative becomes incomprehensible in the coordinate system imposed by this new angle.

What becomes visible in this reading askew, in brushing against the historical grain of the
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novel, is the openness and continuation of these systems of exploitation, moving them

from the historical to trauma time.

If The God of Luck forecloses the trauma of the coolie and the continuation of

these forms of labor extraction by incorporating them in the teleological narrative of

history, The Island of Eternal Love erases the trauma by ignoring it completely, as though

neither the trauma nor its traces remained. Indeed, the novel seems to create a romance of

the conditions of both slavery and the coolie in Cuba, ultimately erasing the conditions of

labor extraction in favor of a cultural relativist, liberal humanist critique. According to

the novel it would seem that the real repressive conditions of the African and Chinese

Cubans were located in the lack of recognition experienced by them in society after their

liberation from the conditions as slaves and as coolies. When two of the enslaved

characters in the novel, Florencio and Caridad, have saved up enough money to buy

themselves out of the conditions of slavery, they go to their master only to find that it is

“‘Too late to buy anyone’s freedom. . . from this day on, you are all free,’ the man

replied, throwing the newspaper in the corner. ‘Slavery has just been abolished’” (48).

The relation of the master to the slave is then represented as one of unbelievable

benevolence, where even in this moment of vulnerability where the master could easily

have taken the money from Florencio and Caridad he opts instead to release them.

Indeed, the conditions of the two slaves is represented in the pastoral; they both never

labored on a plantation but instead worked in a “country house. . . surrounded by all sorts

of fruit trees. Orange and lemon trees perfumed the air. Ripe guavas burst as they fell,

tired of waiting for someone to pick them from the branches” (41). This expression of
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plenty seems to echo the country house poems that exhibit a utopian excess, a strange

locale indeed for those who are enslaved.

The conditions of the coolie are expressed in similarly utopian terms; the Chinese

characters in the novel move in Cuba to escape the revolution in China, arriving after the

formal end of the coolie trade. The traumatic experience of the coolies are only expressed

as an event locked in the past, even within the narrative of the novel, Siu Mend is assured

that “They don’t hire the Chinese as coolies anymore” (19). The traumatic plight of the

coolie in Cuba is only expressed through its foreclosure in the past, “the venerable Pag

Chiong, had for seven years worked twelve hours a day, bound by a contract he signed,

unaware of its weight. Until one afternoon he dropped dead on a pile of sugarcane he was

trying to carry” (19). Yet these conditions of the coolie are never experienced by the

characters in the novel, who instead experience the move to Cuba as a kind of

homecoming. Upon Siu Mend and his wife, Kui-Fa’s arrival in Cuba, “none of Siu

Mend’s tales could have prepared her for the vision that appeared at mid-morning,

glittering on the horizon. A narrow white barricade, like the Great Wall in miniature,

protected the city from the pounding waves. The sun tinged the buildings with all the

hues of the rainbow” (119). The move to Cuba is then experienced as a kind of

homecoming where the traumas of the coolie have long since been overcome and they are

able to begin a new life free from both the longer history of the coolie and their

experiences of the revolution in China. “‘I feel like I’ve come home,’ sighed Kui-fa, who

hadn’t opened her mouth during the entire walk” (120).

The longer history of labor and exploitation only maintain a ghostly existence

within the novel; existing only within momentary glimpses into the traumatic past. The
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traumatic passage from Africa to Cuba is explored through Caridad’s mother who is dead

by the time the novel begins. “Her mother had serviced three of the men during the

crossing to Cuba. Then she was sold to a plantation owner on the island, where she gave

birth to a strange creature with milky skin” (41). This terse description is the only

mention of the traumatic passage from Africa to Cuba, just as the brief tale of Pag Chiong

is the only mention of the conditions of the coolie, leaving these longer histories

unexplored. If these two ghostly remnants are the only remains of the longer and more

traumatic history of labor in Cuba, the novel itself functions precisely by rendering the

ghostly unghostly, domesticating and romanticizing it. The narrative of these African and

Chinese families in Cuba is told within the larger framework of the contemporary

character Cecilia investigating the occurrences of a haunted house. Yet this haunting

ultimately turns out to be not one of the terrors and traumas of history, but a soothing one

that domesticates the ghostly and renders it benevolent. “That’s why she [Cecilia] carried

within her a house inhabited by the souls of her loved ones” (313). The ghostly remnants

are then disavowed through a move that erases the trauma of history and inserts in its

place a benevolent history.

Much as The God of Luck, The Island of Eternal Love includes an

acknowledgments section to authenticate its own veracity, despite the explicit use of

spiritual and ghostly figures. Chaviano similarly cites books that offered “valuable

information about the different eras and social customs recreated here. . . La colonia

china de Cuba (1930-1960) by Napoleόn Seuc; Los Chinos de Cuba: Apuntes

etnográficos by Jos Baltar Rodríguez; and Los chinos en la historia de Cuba (1847-

1930) by Juan Jiménez Pastrana” (317), and living sources without which she “would not
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have been able to reproduce the family atmosphere that appears in these pages” (317).

Yet, even while she cites these historical and scholarly sources, it is clear that her use of

them is different from McCunn’s in how they inform the narrative, focusing on the

attempt to produce a sense of the cultural and social conditions of the individuals in this

historical development from Cuba in the past to the contemporary character of Cecilia as

she investigates this history. Yet this focus on the cultural aspects serve to ultimately

occlude the conditions of the slave and the coolie in Cuba’s history, projecting instead a

sense of liberal multiculturalism that serves to erase the very real conditions of

exploitation that was endured by these two groups. According to Chaviano, “one essential

factor served as impetus for the plot: the desire to tell a story that would re-create the

symbolic union of the three ethnicities that make up the Cuban nation, especially the

Chinese, whose sociological impact on the island is greater than what many people

suppose” (317). Yet this mythological emphasis on symbolic union obscures the real

fissures and contradictions in the historical modes of production in Cuba, occluding both

the real traumas that existed in the island’s history and the manner in which they persist

into the current historical moment. The novel then can be seen to stage a remembering

that functions precisely through the forgetting of the traumas of the past, closing off the

recognition of how they continue into the present.

Indeed, the focus on the symbolic union which is provided in the teleological

history of liberal multicultural tolerance can be seen in the beginning of each section that

emphasizes how the Chinese language have become integrated into the language of Cuba.

These beginning portions are labeled as being notes “From Miguel’s Notebook”, a

character who only appears in the final pages of the novel and whose project echoes that
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of Chaviano. Miguel himself notes that “[h]ardly anyone ever mentions the Chinese. . .

although according to the history and sociology texts, they’re the third link in our

culture” (311), aligning him with Chaviano and her project of attempting to re-create this

symbolic union. From Miguel’s notes, we learn that “Mi Chino . . . mi China,” has come

to be:

A term of endearment used by Cubans among themselves without any

implication of Asiatic blood on the part of the person so addressed. The
same can be said of the expression mi negro or mi negra, which is not
necessarily applied only to those with black skin. These are simple
expressions of friendship or love, whose origin dates back to when the
three principle ethnicities that make up the Cuban nation—Spanish,
African, and Chinese—began to blend (3).

This resolution of ethnic conflict in the realm of the symbolic serves to contain the real

conflicts between ethnicities, particularly those which emerged with the modes of

production under which the different ethnicities were brought together. Within the

structure of the novel, Miguel’s notes serve explicitly to turn the ghostly remnants of the

past into something comprehensible within the coordinates of national history, closing off

the trauma that threatens to emerge and ultimately sentimentalizing the trauma that

remains. The Island of Eternal Love might then be seen to stage a form of melancholic

mourning which examines the continuing traces of the past despite the attempt to

overcome such a past. The affective bonds cannot be simply broken without also

dissolving the self because the traumatic past is also inherently a part of the self, as seen

through the mixing of blood and culture within the novel. These traces linger on in the

realm of language and in the very necessity of making this past known, in the residue of

unresolved grief that lingers despite the oversimplified representation of the conditions of

the coolie in the novel.

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The production into presence of the figure of the coolie through these two

novelistic representations then attempt the impossible act of enclosing the past, either

through a realistic representation, a kind of mournful mourning that makes visible its own

form of hyperrepresentation as a form of claiming truth and locating the trauma in a

distant point in history as in the case of The God of Luck, or through a kind of

melancholic mourning which attempst to sentimentalize and erase the traumas of

production of the past which nevertheless maintains a lingering sense of presence, as in

the case of The Island of Eternal Love. The re-emergence of the coolie in these works of

literature then serves to conceal the continuation of these forms of exploitation in the

present, and enclosing our understanding of the conflict in the contemporary moment in

terms of universal humanism and liberal tolerance rather than the very modes of

production that continue to propagate such traumas in the multiply constituted social

formation of late capitalism, attempting to forestall the moment of cultural revolution by

obscuring the contradictory nature of the existing modes of production.

In contrast to The God of Luck and the Island of Eternal Love, we might read

Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting and Angie Cruz’s Let it Rain Coffee as two novels

which play primarily upon the melancholic mode of dealing with the lost and traumatic

history. Monkey Hunting presents a multigenerational narrative which spans the time

from the coolie trade to the time of the Vietnam war, focusing primarily on three

characters: Chen Pan, one of the coolies who is lured to Cuba; Cheng Fang, Chen Pan’s

granddaughter who lives in China through the cultural revolution; and Domingo Chen,

Cheng Fang’s great grandson who moves to the United States and then joins the US

Army in fighting the Vietnam War. Monkey Hunting thus maps out a complex
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geographical and temporal matrix that spans four continents and multiple generations,

attempting to trace the echoes of the earlier colonial moment with its modes of

production focused on the enslavement of Africans and the indenture of Chinese coolies

to the neocolonialism of the Vietnam War, tracing out a kind of mournful melancholy

where the past is situated through the three interwoven and interconnected narratives as

temporally simultaneous, filling it with a different sense of temporality, one in which the

traumas of the past cannot be simply located in the past but continue perpetually into the

present through these new and mutated forms.

The blatant exploitation of the coolie in the past comes to be echoed in the new

war in Vietnam where even Domingo, a descendent of one of the Chinese coolies, comes

to exert the same colonial powers of the United States. He visits a Vietnamese prostitute,

Tham Thanh Lan where the traumas of war are visited upon the female body. Tham Than

Lan’s thigh is tattooed with numbers, an identity code of a jealous Republican general,

marking her out as property so that the enslaved and coolie laborers of the past take on

this new form in the present, with renewed violence upon the body. She shows Domingo

the scars between her legs, “from this same general, who had once tied her to the bed and

penetrated her with his dagger. Tham Thanh Lan had been told two things in her hospital

bed: that she could no longer bear children and that the general had shown up at Army

headquarters and shot himself in the head. (160-161). Thus these forms of trauma and

power cannot be simply forgotten or located in the past precisely because they mark

themselves out upon the body which cannot be reincorporated into the linear temporality

of the state with as much ease as other narratives. “The body, he [Domingo] suspected,

stored everything in its flesh. The sunwarmed spots of his childhood bed. The palms
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along Parque Martí postponing dusk. His Tío Eutemio had told him once that every

person carried the scars of each year in his body like a thick-trunked tree” (163). But

these scars upon the body inscribed by history also predate the formation of the

individual body; the scars upon Tham Thanh Lan are also that of being racialized and

gendered within particular social formations which make her vulnerable to these

particular forms of violence, and are so inextricably related to the larger formation of

historical traumas.

The silence of Tham Than Lan’s house reminds Domingo of his father’s tales of

the plantations where “sugar mill owners hadn't wanted their ‘property’ getting overly

excited and sending messages to slaves on other plantations. In those times, to own a

drum, to play a drum, were acts of rebellion punishable by death. And so the drums and

the drummers learned to whisper instead” (206). There is a connection then between the

silence of the prostitute and the silence of the coolie, enforced by relations of domination

and power where language and communication becomes figured as an act of rebellion.

Yet, there is also a connection between language and memory, as Chen Fang notes, “No

doubt there was a secret language that would restore all my loss. But how was I to learn

it? Again, I found the shaman and begged him to make me forget. And for a time, I did. I

lived as an insect in amber, protected from memory” (147-8). This inability to find a

language to restore the loss might also be seen as the inability to find a language that

would appropriately express the loss, as an expression of the trauma where language

itself is a form of normalization that cannot represent the trauma without incorporating it

into a discourse that forecloses it. The inability to encapsulate the trauma thus leads to the

reversal, encapsulating the self “as an insect in amber, protected from memory”. Chen
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Fang thus maps out a kind of mournful melancholy which attempts to protect the self

from the memory of a loss, but can only do so by encapsulating oneself in a form which

is itself encapsulated and surrounded by the larger trauma of the loss which always

threatens to break in and expose the individual to that which has been closed off. Indeed,

history itself can be seen as the attempt to encapsulate and crystallize a particular portion

of the past, closing it off from the larger trauma that surrounds it. But, one might hope, as

occurs with Chen Feng, “Little by little, though, everything returned. . . in vivid wisps”

(148). There is then the hope that this crystallized portion of history locked in amber

might, when defencelessly exposed to the past, emerge as a present that is qualitatively

different.

In Let it Rain Coffee, Angie Cruz stages a form of melancholic melancholy where

it is the act of remembering itself that is investigated as a form of refusing to relinquish

the past as that which is past. In the front matter of the novel, Cruz notes that “[w]hen it’s

truly alive, memory doesn’t contemplate history, it invites us to make it” (Angie Cruz).

History, then, cannot be closed off as a reified object which can be simply grasped, but is

that which is made. Yet this going out and making history disavows the Western

masculinist tradition where the making of history occurs ostensibly through going forth

and performing heroic deeds worthy of being recorded in the history book, but rather as

the literal imaginative production of narratives that attempt to explain the present through

the act of producing history. The novel centers on the life of Don Chan, a Chinese man

who is inexplicably washed up in the Dominican Republic as a young boy who “couldn’t

remember anything but his name” (96). With Don Chan unable to recollect some
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ostensibly true image of the past, much of the novel is about the act of remembering itself

and how this remembering takes place always within a moment of the present.

For Don Chan, the absence of a past necessitates its creation of history based on

the information and objects available. Don Chan was “left with no choice but to study the

journeys of Chinese families who sailed to the Americas for a better life and a bit more

freedom” (287). It is Don Chan himself, a character in the novel, who seems to be

engaged in the process of writing historical fiction, a form of estrangement which makes

visible both the process of writing history and the process of writing fiction which both

rely on the presence of artifacts and narratives lingering from the past. Yet, rather than

coming to a completely fixed and closed concept of history, for Don Chan, everything is

left open, there is always the perpetual “perhaps” which makes visible the work that goes

into the construction of history and makes it impossible to present history as simply

transparent:

With each fact he dug up from history books and campesinos’ lips, he
couldn’t help but think that his poor old father was one of the unfortunate
ones who had found himself indentured, trapped in a credit system where
he worked forever to pay the landowners back. Perhaps his father died in
the fields, like so many Chinese immigrants who worked the cane. Or
maybe his father did the impossible and fled. That was Don Chan’s
favorite interpretation. That his father looked at his future, working in the
fields of Cuba, and all he saw was misery. (287)

History is, the novel makes clear, interpretation. But it is also clear that this does not

simply disavow the fact that events have occurred in the past, but rather refuses to claim

some absolute knowledge of these events, and makes clear the disjuncture between

cognition and representation that takes place in the production of any narrative. “Don

Chan told his father’s story often. He sometimes forgot which stories came from people’s
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lips, books, or his own imagination. To him, all his stories were true” (288). The truth of

the narrative then cannot be simply assumed, but must always be constructed out of these

diverse materials, out of a multiplicity of narratives, none of which can guarantee its own

legitimacy.

Yet even the multiplicity of truths confronts a historical lacunae, a trace left over

from the erasures of history. “[I]t occurred to Don Chan that not one single passage in the

books he read contained a Chinese woman” (288). The official histories represented in

the history books thus reveal this impossible gap which would make it impossible to

comprehend Don Chan’s own existence in the Dominican Republic. Instead, “he was left

with no other option but to imagine his mother dying from a fever that made her float

right up to the heavens, like the Chinese woman he heard about who once lived on the

other side of his town. Who was so thin, she had pebbles sewn in the hem of her skirt so

the wind wouldn’t blow her away” (288). The impossible history of the history books is

thus supplemented with the impossible history of local hearsay and Don Chan’s mother

becomes figured through an imaginative representation which functions to mythically

resolve this impasse.

In Let it Rain Coffee, the coolie becomes a historical figure, yet it is of a history

which is always in the making, always being imagined and reimagined strategically

within the context of the present. Thus melancholia in the melancholic mode refuses to

relinquish the method through which the original wound is maintained, attempting to

hold open the wound of history because it is only through the radical reconceputalization

of that history that the wound can be healed and the wounded can be made whole. Past

and present coexist in the sense that it is always the present that is producing any form of
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knowledge about the past, and always in the present that such understanding has social

and political efficacy. Don Chan’s mother, this Chinese woman with a fever that causes

her to float right up into the heavens, is the image of past which always eludes our grasp,

threatening to escape the present moment. And it is only by weighing down the past with

these pebbles, the narratives and artifacts about the past, that we can hope to keep it

present, yet these pebbles sewn into the dress is not the past itself, but only that which

can allow us some minor glimpse into that impossible history.

In the contemporary phase of late capitalism, previous modes of production are

structured in new ways under a qualitatively new social formation. Central to this social

formation and the formation of global capitalism in general is the racialized exploitation

of labor represented by the figure of the historical coolie which continues into the present

in the mutated form of the new coolie, forms of international laborers who lack formal

recognition of the state and therefore formal rights and citizenship. While the existences

of these flexible and disposable laborers are central to the functioning of late capitalism,

they are also in many ways contradictory to universal humanism which functions as the

dominant ideology of the late capitalist moment. The production of new narratives that

seek to mourn the historical coolie therefore banishes the coolie to history, suturing the

wound opened up by its traumatic continuation into the present and allowing the nation to

continue in its forward movement through history. However, even in this simple

foreclosure of history lie the traces of the erasure it performs, which exist not only within

the texts themselves, but also within the current global system of production. Yet, even

with this new production of narratives that enclose the history of the coolie are narratives

of melancholia which seek to disrupt the easy closure of history, to refuse the settling of
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history as that which is past and to hold fast to how it continues, is enclosed and is

structured in the present moment.

The Appropriation of Historicity in Trauma Time

[A]esthetics is not simply the privileged dimension that progress in the

sensibility of Western man has reserved for the work of art as his most
proper place; it is, rather, the very destiny of art in the era in which, with
tradition now severed, man is no longer able to find, between past and
future, the space of the present, and gets lost in the linear time of history.
The angel of history, whose wings became caught in the storm of progress,
and the angel of aesthetics, who stares in an atemporal dimension at the
ruins of the past, are inseparable. And so long as man has not found
another way to settle individually and collectively the conflict between old
and new, thus appropriating his historicity, a surpassing of aesthetics that
would not be limited to exaggerating the split that traverses it appears
unlikely.
–Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content

“History”, notes Adorno in a quotation inscribed on the floor in the postmodern

hyperspace of UCSD’s new Price Center East, “does not merely touch on language, but

takes place in it.” The past, in order to become known, must persist into the present, as

memory or as text, as monument or as artifact, as narration or as absence. The historicist

relation to the past which is defined through what is known problematically privileges the

narratives which have served to suture the traumatic possibilities in the past and obscures

the epistemological status of that which is present as absence. These present absences

exist as distortions or aberrations in the dominant narrative which the historical fails to

fully incorporate; they are residual, anachronistic structures that linger long enough to

make visible the act of erasure upon which history is dependent. However, blank

historicism assumes a transparent window on the past, attempting to deny its own status

as representation by posing its own standpoint as one of pure presentation of the past. It is
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a form of knowledge that conceals its own conditionality, whereas we well know from

Adorno that “[t]he more thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the

unconditional, the more unconsciously and so calamitously it is offered up to the world.

Even its own impossibility thought must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible”

(247). The calamity offered up by a history which denies the conditions of its own

production is the continuation of the traumas of the past. It is at last the impossibility of

any transparent window into history that we must confront in order to salvage the

shattered fragments of the possible. It becomes necessary, as Jameson notes, to recognize

the possibility that “our contact with the past will always pass through the imaginary and

through its ideologies, will always in one way or another be mediated by the codes and

motifs of some deeper historical classification system or pensée sauvage of the historical

imagination, some properly political unconscious” (455). It is precisely this recognition

that historicism disavows, repressing its own representativeness and posing itself as a

form of unmediated access to truth.

In The Man Without Content, Agamben examines the relationship between art and

history through a comparative examination of Dürer’s engraving, Melancholia I, and

Benjamin’s reading of Klee’s Angelus Novus. If Benjamin’s angel of history is blown

endlessly backwards by the storm arising from paradise, the “angel of art appears

immersed in an atemporal dimension, as though something, interrupting the continuum of

history, had frozen the surrounding reality in a kind of messianic arrest” (110). In the

melancholy of the angel of art, we see the cessation of time in the art object that removes

its subject from the continuum of history, alienating it from what is and gesturing towards

what might be. “The past that the angel of history is no longer able to comprehend
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reconstitutes its form in front of the angel of art; but this form is the alienated image in

which the past finds its truth again only on condition of negating it, and knowledge of the

new is possible only in the nontruth of the old” (110). Art’s cessation of time in this

moment of melancholia enables the contemplation of the very history Benjamin’s angel

could not grasp, but only in so far as it becomes unreal, delimiting and representing the

ungraspable totality of events. This representation is always other than the reality of what

was, and therefore always an altered and limited history. Official history comes no closer

to the event, but functions as representation that denies its own representativeness,

positioning itself in a privileged relation to what was through a play of power. The

problem then becomes to develop a concept of history open to its ultimate

unfinalizability—unfinalizable not only because history continues into and merges with

the present, but also because of the impossibility of grasping this incomprehensible

totality.

Keeping open the possibilities of the past while still making it representable is

precisely the problem Sadiya Hartman attempts to navigate in Lose Your Mother,

particularly in the chapter, “The Dead Book.” The whole narrative of Hartman’s journey

to Ghana is one of the failed attempt to discover some portion of the past that could be

recuperated to redeem the present. The impossibility of a simple return to her ‘home

country,’ which she realizes is located not in Africa but in the past, plays out in “The

Dead Book,” the most self-consciously literary chapter of the book. In this chapter, she

writes about the life of a girl which she recognizes as impossible to reconstruct, noting

that this girl “will never have any existence outside the precarious domicile of words”

(137). This domicile, while offering some continuance of existence, is also nevertheless
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threatening, not only allowing for her continued existence, but also always running the

danger of continuing the violence perpetrated against her. “These words are the only

defense of her existence, the only barrier against her disappearance; and these words

killed her a second time and consigned her to the bottom of the Atlantic” (138).

Hartman’s own use of language to recover the existence and trauma of the girl also

always runs the same risk of this violence, yet it is a risk that she takes pains to highlight

and trouble. “I too am trying to save the girl, not from death or sickness or a tyrant but

from oblivion. Yet I am unsure if it is possible to salvage an existence from a handful of

words: the supposed murder of a Negro girl” (137). The multiple tellings of the events

surrounding the murder of the girl through the multiple witnesses at once points to the

impossibility of a simple witnessing and leaves open this domicile of words that might

otherwise threaten to become less of a home and more of a cage. “No one saw the same

girl; she was outfitted in a different guise for each who dared look” (136). And despite

the multiple viewpoints of the event, the book stylistically refuses to emphasize any

single one; indeed, the feeling that one gets upon reading it is not only that each point of

view is insufficient but that even all of the views put together, even the serialization of

every possible vantage point, would somehow still have this absent center to the event.

The Coolie Speaks, rather than presenting a teleological transition from slave

labor to contract labor via the figure of the coolie instead presents a continuation.

According to Yun, the forced indenture of the coolie was the perpetuation of slavery. The

contract form through which indenture purportedly functioned was undermined by this

indistinguishability between coolie labor, underwritten by the contract, and slave labor,

underwritten by force. Thus, central to the continuation of late capitalism is not the end of
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slavery, but its continuation under a different guise, as evidenced by transnational

migrant sweatshop laborers. These four novels similarly attempt the representation of this

traumatic past which is always in danger of being incorporated into the dominant

narrative, tracing out the ambiguities of melancholy while simultaneously attempting to

stake out a representation within it. The God of Luck seems to function as a mournful

mourning that represents history as ultimately transparent and knowable, serving to

problematically foreclose the continued ghostly presence of the past through its

incorporation into a teleological framework where Ah Lung is simply a historical figure.

The Island of Eternal Love presents a more melancholic mourning where the traumatic

past, while closed off in a presentation of an essentially romantic vision of slavery and

indentured servitude, nevertheless leaves traces of its presence that have not been

completely closed off, and relations that have not been completely severed. Monkey

Hunting presents us with a relation to the past that might be described as a mournful

melancholy which strives to close off the individual from the past, encasing it within a

protective shell of amber, yet it can only do so by making the traumatic past some vaster

framework which forms the outside of the shell which is always in danger of being

ruptured, allowing the trauma of the past to permeate the present once more and

fundamentally alter the crystallized monad of the present. Let it Rain Coffee presents a

narrative which is fundamentally about the construction of history, one of melancholic

melancholy that serves to reopen the traumatic wound of history by focusing on how it is

constructed.

The problematic of the trauma of the coolie is that it represents, as all history

does, a past which cannot be comprehended transparently, but is always mediated

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through different forms of artifacts and narratives. There is then an absent center in all

history. What do we have in this absent center that can only be encircled yet never quite

grasped but the Lacanian problem of the subject and the eye? The traumatic center is the

pupil that looks out at the spectator, making the spectator aware of this look and the

impossibility of apprehending it in its totality. This encircling of the pupil’s outer edges is

the iris that acts as screen and regulates the light that enters into and is emitted by the

traumatic center, regulating how it sees and is seen. And it is the trauma, the ungraspable

black hole in the center of any possible representation of history, that functions as the

center of the gaze, making it irreducible to a simple object and asserting that history, too,

had ought to be viewed as a subject, and only through this recognition of history as not

simply subjective, but as subject can the epistemic violence of the will to know be

mediated into an ethical stance. Here we understand the ethical not only in reference to

morality, but in its original sense of ethos, referring, in the original Greek, foremost to an

abode, and secondly to a proper method of being within this abode. History might, then,

become a sort of home; as Hartman often notes, her home is not in Africa, nor in the

United States, but in the past: “the past was the only country left, the only horizon visible,

the only world inhabitable” (95). Approaching the past as subject then opens the

possibility of making it homely, of understanding that the present moment too lives

within the past and it is only through an engagement of this home that does not seek to

simply make it an object of rational knowledge that can open new possibilities for the

present. And the ethics of history is the problem of one’s continued being in the abode of

history and the proper manner of that being.

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What is at stake in this play between imagining History as subject and object

staged is the epistemological violence inherent in positing the grounding of cognition in

this form of subjectivity brought about in the action of “seeing oneself seeing oneself.”

For Lacan, this mode of cognition ultimately establishes subjectivity as the ground of the

property relationship. Lacan draws on the distinction between feeling and seeing, which

can be reciprocated in ways that other modes of the encounter cannot. In the act of

touching the other, one is necessarily touched oneself; in looking at the eye of the other

one is also looked at. However, in opposition to feeling, what is seen is fundamentally

different about the gaze is that it is focused on that which is outside oneself and its mode

of perception is on the external objects that sight apprehends. However, in the

formulation of Valéry’s seeing oneself seeing oneself, a short circuit occurs which

disavows the gaze of the other and centers cognition solely in the subject. “I apprehend

the world in a perception that seems to concern the immanence of the I see myself seeing

myself. The privilege of the subject seems to be established from that bipolar reflexive

relation by which, as soon as I perceive, my representations belong to me” (81). This

sense of ownership over one’s perceptions, then is not only reminiscent of the property

relation, but also “[w]hen carried to the limit, the process of this meditation, of this

reflecting reflection, goes so far as to reduce the subject apprehended by the Cartesian

meditation to a power of annihilation” (81). This power of annihilation which comes

from this ontological grounding in the subject ultimately comes to manifest a sort of

property relation in which not only do objects become available for appropriation, but so

do other individuals who become the objects of one’s look.

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The Western philosophical tradition from Kant is based on a form of subjectivity

centered around the individual as the grounds for cognition which serve to radically

annihilate the gaze of the other, making it an object that can be possessed. The

formulation of seeing oneself seeing oneself erases the space of the other and the space of

any possible history. Indeed, the Kantian revolution served to recenter the problem of

philosophy on the problem of the subject. As Simon Critchley notes in Ethics—Politics—

Subjectivity, in “Kantian terms, the turn towards the subject is the Copernican turn, where

cognition no longer follows the object, but rather where the object comes to depend on

the subject’s constitution of objectivity” (53). It is precisely this grounding of cognition

in the subject rather than the object, where all that the subject can know is his own mode

of perception that becomes the basis for the epistemological violence that Lacan locates

in emphasizing the look over the gaze. Yet this Kantian understanding of the relationship

between subject and object must be understood within the larger historical scope of

transforming social relations. Critchley notes “the subject is that which is thrown under as

a prior support or more fundamental stratum upon which other qualities, such as

predicates, accidents and attributes may be based . . . As Heidegger points out, during the

Middle Ages the meaning of the words subjectum and objectum was precisely the reverse

of their modern signification” (51). The Kantian turn then marks a transformation of

previous notions of subject and object, of the grounds for knowledge and the individuals

seeking knowledge which Lacan problematizes through the introduction of his concept of

the gaze.

As Lacan notes, Sartre similarly takes up the problem of the gaze, and locates

within the gaze the possibility of a space of intersubjectivity. For Kant, all that an
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individual can know is their own sensory apparatus, “[e]ven if we bring our intuition to

the highest degree of clearness, we should not thereby come any nearer to the constitution

of objects in themselves. We should still know only our mode of intuition, that is, our

sensibility” (A43). In other words, all that we can see for Kant is our own modes of

seeing. In the Kantian view, intersubjectivity can only be located through the aesthetic

appreciation of the art object which, when we concur about an aesthetic judgment,

affirms our shared capacities of perception. The look of two subjects which affirms a

sense of intersubjectivity can only meet through the medium of the art object. However,

Sartre reaffirms the possibility of a more direct intersubjectivity through which the

subject of the other is recognized in his look which simultaneously confers subjectivity

on the self. As Lacan describes it, “[t]he gaze, as conceived by Sartre, is the gaze by

which I am surprised—surprised in so far as it changes all the perspectives, the lines of

force, of my world, orders it, from the point of nothingness where I am, in a sort of

radiated reticulation of the organisms” (84). However, for Sartre the gaze must be located

in another subject, whereas for Lacan, the gaze is located in the imaginary, “not a seen

gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other” (84). And it is precisely an

epistemological violence against the gaze of this Other that is history that is staged in

historicism which seeks to overdetermine the space of History and eliminate the

possibilities of its gaze which is inscribed in the irrecoverable point of trauma.

In the Lacanian schema of the gaze, it is from the point of light that the object

looks back at the spectator, and the spectator plays with the screen in order to protect

himself from that light. “[A] beam of light directing our gaze so captivates us. . . it

appears as a milky cone and prevents us from seeing what it illuminates, the mere fact of
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introducing into this field a small screen, which cuts into that which is illuminated

without being seen, makes the milky light retreat, as it were, into the shadow, and allows

the object it concealed to emerge” (107-108). It is only through the opaque screen that

objects can become visible, yet the screen functions to form both how the subject looking

can be seen and how the object gazing sees, mediating the relationship between the two.

And it is precisely historicism that acts as the opaque screen between the trauma of

history and the subject, attempting to account for and block out the light that would make

vision and legibility impossible. Against the pure light through which nothing can be

visible, the screen functions as a sort of defense mechanism against making all things

known, and the human subject “is not, unlike the animal, entirely caught up in this

imaginary capture. He maps himself in it. . . In so far as he isolates the function of the

screen and plays with it. Man, in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that beyond

which there is the gaze” (107). While the subject looking out can only grasp his own

images of the object, the gaze looking at the subject is similarly transformed by the

opaqueness of the screen, and the subject is made into a picture. Lacan notes that “if I am

anything in the picture, it is always in the form of the screen, which I earlier called the

stain, the spot” (97). And it is only a redeemed humanity, in Walter Benjamin’s terms,

that can do away with this screen against history, and “only a redeemed mankind receives

the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has the past

become citable in all its moments.” The goal is not, then, the impossible recovery of the

historical truth, but the recognition of the intersubjective play with the screen between the

eye of the subject and the gaze of history.

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For Jameson, the hermeneutic of modes of production and the larger structuring

of social formations will allow the past itself to “become an active agent . . . and . . . to

come before us as a radically different life for which rises up to call our own form of life

into question and to pass judgment on us, and through us on the social formation in which

we exist” (479). The past then cannot be closed off because it is the other that gazes out

at us through the screen of history, altering our own understandings, and our own

conditions of possibility, turning the subjective I of the present moment into an object

which must also be comprehended from the standpoint of the other. “Now. . . it is the past

that judges sees us, and judges us remorselessly, without any sympathy for our

complicity with the scraps of subjectivity we try to think of as our own fragmentary and

authentic life experience” (479). To comprehend history is then not simply to grasp the

objective truth of a prior moment, but rather to comprehend also how the impossibility of

grasping the objectivity of the other of history and the ways in which the traumatic

history is contained and structured within the present moment, as residual modes of

production which help to reveal the structure of the larger social formation, as impossible

traces and absences of a trauma which cannot be narrated yet whose ambiguities must be

traced out in ever new configurations.

 Hegel, Haiti and Zombies: Universality and its Discontents

History is the unity of continuity and discontinuity. Society stays alive, not
despite its antagonism, but by means of it; the profit interest and thus the
class relationship make up the objective motor of the production process
which the life of all men hangs by, and the primacy of which has its
vanishing point in the death of all. This also implies the reconciling side of
the irreconcilable; since nothing else permits men to live, not even a
changed life would be possible without it. What historically made this
possibility may as well destroy it. The world spirit, a worthy object of
definition, would have to be defined as permanent catastrophe. Under the
all-subjugating identity principle, whatever does not enter into identity,
whatever eludes rational planning in the realm of means, turns into
frightening retribution for the calamity which identity brought on the
nonidentical. There is hardly another way to interpret history
philosophically without enchanting it into an idea.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Negative Dialectics, 320

While in the previous chapter I focused on the ghostly hauntings produced by

capitalism’s epistemic erasures, in this chapter I emphasize that these traumas are not

only ghostly and ephemeral, nor do they take place exclusively in the order of discourse,

knowledge and history; rather, the circuit between the rational order of discourse and the

material disorder of being is structured to produce individuals and communities that are

unequally exposed to violence and death, allowing for their unmitigated exploitation as a

kind of bare life. This bare life is present and material, even as it is continually rendered

both invisible and socially dead. For this form of non-anthropophorous humanity—that

humanity that does not bear the name of Man—I employ the figure of the zombie, along

with its specific cultural history in colonial Haiti and its development in U.S. popular

305
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culture. This figure ruptures the normative constitution of the human and asserts the

possibility of a new order, one that cannot be recognized as simply human from within

our current framework, but which punctures this framework with its immanent limit. I

therefore maintain the importance of the zombie’s historical and material foundations in

the cultural imaginary of the enslaved instead of assuming that the zombie is a

postmodern phenomenon that can be readily excised from the conditions of its

emergence. This history reveals modernity’s necessary creation of a figure whose

selective exclusion from the sphere of life grounds the possibility of the modern. The

zombie is a figuration for the impossible element that ruptures the universality assumed

by discourses of liberal humanism even as it serves as the foundation for these

discourses. In this way, the zombie imposes the necessary task of rethinking the

historically specific formation of humanity under capitalism by attending to the systemic

exclusions this concept inevitably produces.

If the figure of Man constituted by the dominant bourgeois ethnoclass represents

progress within the framework of capitalist historicism, these remnants of non-

anthropophorous humanity represent all that is left by the wayside and is not subsumed

by the teleological movement toward universal humanity and freedom. They are the

unassimilated remnants at the bottom of the ever-growing pile of debris that Benjamin’s

angel of history, blown backwards by the storm of progress, gazes both languishingly and

impotently upon. But because of this, they embody another history, an ahistorical history,

which allows one to negotiate the political problem of universality from the standpoint of

a particular placed firmly beyond its limits. My project here might be described as

bringing together the impulses contained in two works: Susan Buck-Morss’ Hegel, Haiti
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and Universal History and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride, Prejudice and Zombies: The

Classical Regency Romance—Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem. The figure of the

zombie radically ruptures universal history, understood in the Enlightenment sense as the

rational unfolding of human freedom, filling it with the "ultraviolent zombie mayhem"

that marks the West's colonial history and rendering inoperative the system of legibility

that makes its universal history coherent. The closed, Enlightenment understanding of

universal history, represented perhaps by none other than the artfully constructed style

and tightly controlled narrative of Austen's canonical work, Pride and Prejudice, must be

made to admit of that which is illegible to its own framework and which cannot simply be

encompassed within a more inclusive universality. This leads to a rupture produced by

the necessarily aporetic nature of universality itself. Grahame-Smith’s novel does not

simply place Pride and Prejudice and zombies side by side, for the zombies infest,

contaminate and deface the original narrative rendering it illegible. The problem of

universal history is thus more than a matter of including the narrative of the oppressed

alongside or within a more general, more universal history, for its very inclusion

undermines the presumed structure of universal history itself.

Buck-Morss’ work begins with the important task of locating the material

conditions for the production of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in the Haitian revolution,

disrupting the dominant theories on the origins of the dialectic by incorporating it into a

broader understanding of world history. While the majority of Hegel scholars have

located the formation of the master-slave dialectic in the intellectual history of

continental philosophy, Buck-Morss intervenes by rediscovering its origins in the self-

liberation of Haitian slaves. “The actual and successful revolution of the Caribbean slaves
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against their masters is the moment when the dialectical logic of recognition becomes

visible as the thematics of world history, the story of the universal realization of

freedom” (59-60). The centrality of Haiti revises the simplified narrative of Europe as a

self-contained whole that evolves independently from the remainder of the world. In this

way, the development of Hegel’s thought cannot be imagined simply as a movement in

the realm of the abstract, but is deeply tied to the concrete social and historical conditions

in which he wrote, conditions founded in the colonial appropriation of the world and the

demands of labor that this produced. Buck-Morss is writing against the Eurocentric

appropriation of universal history that has taken on a positivist emphasis and functions

through the erasure of all that does not fit the logics of its dialectic. Through this

appropriation, alterity is annihilated to produce a narrative in which everything can be

subsumed in the teleological self-development of Europe. Hegel, too, is integrated into

the structure of a positivist historical totality that would erase the material origins of his

thought in Haiti, indeed, that would seek to erase any consideration of Haiti at all. It is

thus necessary to break down the coercion towards positive knowledge, in order to make

visible how this form of knowledge operates in the domain of the social and to ultimately

examine its limits.

However, the problem of universal history goes far deeper than simply its

appropriation by the West, but must deal with the fundamental logics of universality

itself. Buck-Morss’ “Hegel and Haiti” attempts to rescue the idea of universal history

from its appropriation by the singular positivist narrative of the West and the system of

domination that it has continually enabled, but does so by reinstituting a depoliticized

universal. She notes that “[i]f the historical facts about freedom can be ripped out of the
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narratives told by the victors and salvaged for our own time, then the project of universal

freedom does not need to be discarded but, rather, redeemed and reconstituted on a

different basis” (865). It thus becomes a question of whether it is this particular form of

Eurocentric universal history, or whether it is universal history as such that functions in

this manner. Furthermore, it raises the question of how one can orient a universal history

towards all of those processes that fall outside the predetermined dynamic of historical

advancement, for the very determination of what constitutes historical advancement

belongs to the order of domination that must be resisted. Buck-Morss’ solution is to turn

towards the sheer particularity that must always escape a more structured universality.

For Buck-Morss, the universal integration of humanity will ultimately become possible

only through the absolute particularity of actual historical events, which escapes any

narrative framework. Such a history, however, risks radically narrowing the possibilities

of politics, and threatens to dissolve into sheer difference which ultimately becomes

indistinguishable from sheer homogeneity. In Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, Buck-

Morss continues to focus on the “historical specificities of particular experiences,

approaching the universal not by subsuming facts within overarching systems or

homogenizing premises, but by attending to the edges of systems, the limits of premises,

the boundaries of our historical imagination in order to trespass, trouble, and tear these

boundaries down” (79). Even as Buck-Morss attempts to critique the dominant system of

universality, explicitly critiquing the overarching systems and homogenizing premises

embedded in the dominant narratives of history, her model is one of spatial expansion

and accumulation that seems to reflect the colonizing tendencies of Western rationality. It
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is a form of universality that tears down boundaries in order to integrate what is beyond

the border into its own system.

In many ways, Buck-Morss’ universality is constructed in opposition to the

fragmentation of the social order induced by a shallow multiculturalism in order to

discover a form of humanity that exists beyond cultural limits. However, in forming this

universality, the affinities and collectivities necessary for politics are dissolved into sheer

difference, so that what is formed is precisely the universality of what is undifferentiated.

If liberal capitalist universality functions through the dynamics of the emic and phagic

incorporation of alterity, Buck-Morss’ form of universality subsumes alterity in the

purely phagic mode, attempting to incorporate the Other without differentiation. The

zombie, however, is that alterity which does not simply seek incorporation into the given

structure of our universality, but threatens to phagically incorporate us, asserting this

alterity not merely as a passive object upon which we operate, but as something capable

of gazing upon, threatening and devouring us. It is the Other capable of looking back and

making an Other of us. However, Buck-Morss disavows this form of alterity, instead

insisting on a universality that functions through the erasure of particularity. She is thus

critical of the processes that allow individuals to become “part of humanity indirectly

through the mediation of collective cultural identities,” and instead emphasizes that

“human universality emerges in the historical event at the point of rupture. It is in the

discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking

point give expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits” (133). These

ruptures then can only be ruptures of the given totalizing system, ruptures of particularity

into universality. Yet, in Buck-Morss’ conception, in order to produce a universal history,

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one must cultivate a relation toward the historical rupture that disavows all cultural

affiliation and solidarities: “A person’s nonidentity with the collective allows for

subterranean solidarities that have a chance of appearing to universal, moral sentiment,

the source today of enthusiasm and hope” (133). For Buck-Morss, the purpose of

universality is not merely a matter of dissolving older forms of identification and

solidarity and forming new ones. These new subterranean solidarities are ultimately never

allowed to solidify, for such concretion would be in opposition to the universalizing

principle that Buck-Morss sets out.

Ultimately, this universality is produced only by the sheer particularity of each

element, so that it is the universality of that which necessarily escapes the abstraction of

the universal. Nonidentity itself then becomes a fetish that serves as the basis for the

superior and more general identity of the universal, which then evades any consideration

of the material and social processes at work in the production of nonidentity and identity.

If one understands universality as that which exists underneath the layer of culturally

constituted difference, then the unfolding of universal human freedom can be understood

only as the unfolding of indifference. Buck-Morss’ reading of the ruptures in history

focus on how various historical actors necessarily escape from the dominant narrative of

history that is imposed upon them, that would too-easily produce a system of legibility

through the categories that occupy our present moment. It is thus the attempt to move

beyond the idea that all formations of history are political, and therefore marked out by

social conflict, by attending to the material specificities of the event itself. She notes that

ultimately there is no tale of historical redemption that can fully encompass the actual

complexities of the revolution, “Hegelian, Marxist, or otherwise. Indeed, viewed from the
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midst of the slave uprising, no historical narrative emerges of any kind . . . The rebels

were never a monolithic mass . . . Slave leaders fought against and betrayed each other”

(144). The actual events evade any simple incorporation or abstraction into the linear

narrative that forms universal history. Instead, what constitutes the universal nature of

universal history is precisely its inability to be integrated into a closed, linear narrative:

the “less we see historical actors as playing theatrically coherent roles, the more

universally accessible their human dilemmas become” (145), and “[n]othing keeps

history univocal except power” (155). However it may also be worth remarking that

nothing makes history vocal except our own particular social and political context,

nothing allows for the integration of a particular, the mute artifact or the bare narrative

into a comprehensible structure that would constitute the voice of history except our own

situated and therefore limited social circumstances.

What one is left in Buck-Morss’ analysis is only a roving and expanding

imagination that can never settle down long enough to take sides, and ultimately a kind of

political paralysis in which it becomes difficult to imagine any form of opposition.

“Empathetic imagination may well be our best hope for humanity. The problem is that we

never seem to imagine this humanity inclusively enough, but only by excluding an

antithetical other, a collective enemy beyond humanity’s pale” (144). The problems of

politics and inequality are thus dissolved into an ethical problem of the imagination; it is

only the exclusive structure of our imagination of humanity that leads to these

inequalities. While one would hope that the best hope for humanity would go beyond

mere empathetic imagination, for Buck-Morss, such an imagination is necessary, for

without such a vision:

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any political movement that attempts to transform the death’s head . . .

into an angel’s face . . . is far more likely to unleash a human hell.
Imagination, intending to set the world aright makes a virtue out of
violence against the violator. If enlightened critique stops here, it
entrenches itself behind a self-imposed and self-defeating barrier, one that
must be dismantled if humanity is to progress beyond the recurring cycle
of victim and avenger. (144)

Thus, according to Buck-Morss, any taking of sides, any movement towards politics is

drawn necessarily towards the violence of annihilation. This might be seen as what Žižek

terms in “The Political and its Disavowals,” an ultra-political disavowal of politics that

erases the space of dialogic, political negotiation and heightens it immediately into the

Schmittian2 friend/enemy distinction. It seems then that we are caught in the dilemma

between a paralysis of empathetic imagination and the endless cycle of violence between

victim and avenger. Rather than deal with the possibility of politics, Buck-Morss thus

institutes an ethical regime constituted by the universality of sheer particularity, which

renders any possible politics unimaginable.

While Buck-Morss attempts to refashion universal history into an instrument of

liberation, she can only do so by dangerously focusing on the vicissitudes of the

individual subject while simultaneously emptying the structural differences that are

socially produced. It is not only that the individual experiences of historical actors lack

any easy coherence, but that the notion of universal history as the necessary unfolding of

freedom requires the erasure of collectivity. In her view, “[l]iberation from the

exclusionary loyalties of collective identities is precisely what makes progress possible in

2
See Carl Schmitt, Concept of the Political, where he argues that each specific field of knowledge is the
determination of criteria between two Manichean elements; “in the realm of morality the final distinctions
are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable. . .
The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between
friend and enemy” (26).
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history” (150). For Buck-Morss, the primary movement of history is the progressive

erasure of individual, collective identities in order to allow for the emergence of an

undivided, universal whole. And here we see the fundamentally Hegelian emphasis of

Buck-Morss’ conception of history, so that all history is for Buck-Morss the unfolding of

universal human freedom. Such universality comes dangerously close to the liberal

democratic consensus that functions to displace any critique against the system of capital

and its own form of universality: “The fight to free the facts from the collective histories

in which they are embedded is one with exposing and expanding the porosity of a global

social field, where individual experience is not so much hybrid as human” (149). The

emphasis on experience as “human” rather than that hybrid mix of the familiar cultural

and political categories of race, class, or gender, dissolves the contradictions and

articulations within the social that serve as the basis for the struggle into the empty

substance of the human. Thus, Buck-Morss claims that “[p]erhaps the most deadly blow

to imperialism would be to proclaim loyalty to the idea of universal humanity by

rejecting the presumption of any political, religious, ethnic, class, or civilizational

collectivity to embody this idea” (145). But the only thing that does embody this idea of

universal humanity is that empty form of the human, freed from any possible identity. In

this account, the individual becomes universal through being singularized, and it is

through this moment of singularity in which one does cannot be fully integrated into any

particular social identity, which then allows the individual to be incorporated into the

universal as the lack of identity. And this most deadly blow to imperialism that comes

merely through proclaiming loyalty to an idea seems to evade the necessity or even the

possibility of material struggle. An understanding that locates the possibilities of

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universality and difference rooted the social field constituted by material production

rather than in the imagination of cultural boundaries would likely provide a rather

different account of this most deadly blow to imperialism.

Buck-Morss’ emphasis on a Hegelian understanding of history further tends to

centralize in the realm of the idea, rather than material reality. “Universal history engages

in a double liberation, of the historical phenomena and of our imagination: by liberating

the past we liberate ourselves. The limits to our imagination need to be taken down brick

by brick, chipping away at the cultural embeddedness that predetermines the meaning of

the past in ways that hold us captive to the present” (149). Liberating ourselves from an

overdetermined understanding of the past may play an important part in the goal of

achieving real liberation; however, there are certainly more bricks that need be taken

down than merely those that limit our imagination. The removal of these bricks will

require less of an insistence human imagination and more of the very politics absented by

universality as sheer particularity. Furthermore, this insistence on the universal structure

of history nevertheless imposes a truth that displaces and contains the possibilities of the

multiplicity it expresses. “We will never have a definitive answer to the intent of

historical actors, and even if we could, this would not be history’s truth. It is not that truth

is multiple or that the truth is a whole ensemble of collective identities with partial

perspectives” (151). Yet what constitutes the truth of historical truth for Buck-Morss is

the imposition of a certain Hegelian and teleological understanding of the unfolding of

human freedom, which itself can only be a partial truth. Buck-Morss acknowledges the

impossibility of knowing the intent of historical actors, but this is all brushed aside, for

“Truth is singular, but it is a continuous process of inquiry because it builds on a present

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that is moving ground. History keeps running away from us, going places we, mere

humans, cannot predict” (150). And this history that keeps fleeing from us is for Buck-

Morss the history of the unfolding of universal human freedom to be achieved through

the universal recognition of absolute particularity.

The Hegelian understanding of history as the rational unfolding of universal

freedom becomes deeply problematic, particularly under the conditions of neoliberal

capitalism when freedom is deployed as an ideology that justifies the continuation of

exploitation. Freedom itself is not a univocal concept. David Harvey in A Brief History of

Neoliberalism explains how the concept of freedom functions to enable neoliberal

reforms that ultimately exacerbates class inequality by abolishing the compromises of the

Keynesian state in favor of the freedom of the market. Harvey cites Karl Polanyi in

noting that “the meaning of freedom becomes as contradictory and fraught as its

incitements to action are compelling” and the neoliberal understanding of freedom,

“degenerates into a mere advocacy of free enterprise . . . the fullness of freedom for those

whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance of liberty for

the people” (36-37). Thus, while it is clear that Buck-Morss is considering the specific

historical conditions in colonial Haiti, the assumption of universal human freedom taken

as the cypher to read human history in our own moment runs the risk of being thoroughly

incorporated into the neoliberal system. “Any political movement that holds individual

freedoms to be sacrosanct is vulnerable to incorporation into the neoliberal fold” (41).

Therefore what becomes central is the need to closely examine this concept of freedom

which has become so uncritically employed by the Hegelian assumption regarding

universal history as the progressive unfolding of universal human freedom. The truth of
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history as the rational unfolding of human history thus serves to erase the formation of

truth as a social practice involving a movement of negotiation between multiplicities.

Anthony Bogues in Empire of Liberty similarly examines how the concept of

freedom has become central to the neoliberal form of empire and the very different

conceptions of freedom developed by slaves in the Haitian revolution. Bogues thus

makes the distinction between liberty and freedom, with liberty being the Western form

of freedom that is imposed as a condition of neoliberalism, and freedom being the name

of alternate possibilities opened up by a close analysis of the Haitian revolution. Bogues’

analysis of the current deployment of freedom is similar to that of Harvey, attempting to

break down the empty form of liberty and examine how it functions in the circuit of late

capitalist power. “[A] language had to be found that could stabilize the primacy of the

market ethic for at least some time. The organizing language for this new ethic was a

conception of ‘freedom.’ Thus, as neoliberalism became the dominant ideology of

imperial power, it worked through an ideological space in which ‘freedom’ became the

‘common sense’” (4). A certain conception of freedom as the freedom of the market is

deployed as a means of ensuring unfreedom in terms of the social relations of

exploitation. It is not then, as in Buck-Morss, that there is a singular form of freedom that

universal history is capable of revealing, but the very concept of freedom becomes a

space of contestation. Looking back to colonial Haiti, Bogues notes that there were

already multiple conceptions of freedom that were in contestation. Citing Carolyn Fick’s

account of a French colonial officer, he notes that “slaves were, in his words,

‘unambitious and uncompetitive, the black values his liberty only to the extent that it

affords him the possibility of living according to his own philosophy.’ The question
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before us, one that we have yet to fully grapple with, is, what was this philosophy of

freedom?” (114). What is necessary is not merely the acceptance of a given liberal

enlightenment conception of freedom, but of troubling the concept and inventing new

forms of action that might develop into new forms of freedom.

As opposed to the reading of the Hegelian dialectic where the slave is conceived

of as seeking recognition on the same level as the master, Anthony Bogues uses Frantz

Fanon’s critique of the master slave dialectic in order to establish the possibility of new

forms of freedom which trouble the assumed unfolding of human universal freedom as

conceived by the limited European imagination. “The master wants the slave to work and

desires recognition only to the extent that it will make the slave work. The slave wants

freedom and faces the master to destroy the system of slavery” (114). Thus what makes

the freedom of the slave possible is more than the simple unfolding of an encroaching

universality, but an overthrow of the established system that determines and constitutes a

particular concept of freedom. The Haitian revolution then was not merely one in which

the slaves simply fulfilled the dream of universal equality of the French revolution, rather

it exposed the very limits of European universality in the attempt to establish a new order

of freedom. The dialectic between the Haitian revolutionary and the slaveholder was

“neither one of recognition nor one of unequal encounter, but one in which new forms of

freedom are being imagined, plotted, and enacted wherever possible” (114). The

emphasis on a Euro-centric notion of freedom that then doesn’t interrogate the very

notion of freedom can serve to problematically propagate the system of inequality,

particularly when that freedom is premised on the unfreedom of others.

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Buck-Morss’ emphasis on the integration of the former Haitian slaves into the

universality of humanity is further complicated by Bogues’ emphasis on the way the way

that they cannot simply be brought into the structure of a given universal humanism. The

slaves “experience historical trauma in which social wounds cannot simply be erased by

democratic inclusion. Instead, these wounds produce cries, not laments. These cries force

us into another set of questions—about living, about what we are, about the nature of

freedom itself” (100). Bogues’ goal is thus significantly different from Buck-Morss.

While Buck-Morss attempts to divest the individual subject of the markers of identity so

that it can enter into a community of universal humanity, for Bogues it is to reinvent a

new freedom:

The current objective of power is to construct a ‘politics of being,’ to

preserve life as it is, to stop action and foreclose possibility, since the
human world is our own artifice. To reinvent action requires us to move
beyond this ‘politics of being’ to a politics of the radical imagination.
Such a politics functions in two ways. First, it deciphers the codes of
power , and second, it allows us to think outside the death-drive of power.
It allows us to construct freedom not as an absolute but as an ever-
changing contingency of our fragile imperfectability. (120)

While this new freedom does traverse the space of the imagination, as with Buck-Morss,

more centrally, its purpose is to form that functions without coercion, to invent and

enable new ways of life that would maintain its fidelity to the open possibilities of human

freedom. Thus freedom is not univocal and not a universal; indeed, the form of freedom

employed by colonial Europe is premised on the unfreedom of others: “Greek freedom

allowed the enslavement of another. It was a freedom predicated upon enslavement. It

was the kind of freedom that was practiced during the period of racial slavery in

America” (100). Central to the reinforcement of Western freedoms is the continued

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unfreedom of the non-Western, non-anthropophorous Other, and the reimagination of the

concept of freedom holds the possibility of radically rupturing the teleological narrative

of the progressive unfolding of Western human freedom.

Historical Zombies and Zombie Histories

Pride, Prejudice and Zombies is what could rightly and without exaggeration be

called a work of bad literature. The delicate sensibilities and the subtle and understated

ironies that mark Pride and Prejudice as a classic are effaced by the attempt to

appropriate the original work and make it a commodity within the postmodern

marketplace. Grahame-Smith performs what might be seen as the postmodern move par

excellence, creating a pastiche of a work of canonical English literature by remixing it

with the seemingly postmodern figure of the zombie. The novel maintains approximately

eighty-five percent of Austen’s novel and introduces, “ultraviolent zombie mayhem,” in

order to efface the original in ways that maintain enough of its form to be recognizable,

while still introducing the figure of the zombie. Jane Austen’s famous opening passage

from Pride and Prejudice, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in

possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the

feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is

so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful

property of some one or other of their daughters” (1) thus becomes, “It is a truth

universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more

brains. Never was this truth more plain than during the recent attacks at Netherfield Park,

in which a household of eighteen was slaughtered and consumed by a horde of the living
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dead” (7). The subtle irony that established a second layer of meaning in the original is

erased and replaced with an account of violence that is utterly contextless and

meaningless. The novel’s introduction of the colonized and brutalized Other into the

bourgeois English countryside can be read as an allegory for the alternate histories that

rupture the Hegelian understanding of a rationally unfolding universal human freedom.

My claim here is not that intentional fallacy of claiming that Graham-Smith

intends his novel to be a critique of colonialism and the structure of European universal

history; indeed, it would be difficult to locate any intention other than the same crass

commercialism that gave rise to such similar titles as Sense and Sensibility and

Seamonsters, Jayne Slayre, and Mansfield Park and Mummies. Rather, there is a political

unconscious that continues with the history of the zombie as that form of humanity that is

removed from the sphere of the human and has its capacity for life stripped from it in the

process. Rather than simply take the zombie as a product of postmodern kitsch, I want to

trace out its history, which is to be located in the cultural production of Haitian slaves

during colonial modernity rather than in our own moment of postmodernity, and enters

into the consciousness of U.S. American mass culture only through the occupation of

Haiti between 1915 and 1934. By disinterring the historical sedimentations located within

in the figure of zombie, I propose to employ this seemingly postmodern method, wherein

the critical work of the “and” in the title, Pride, Prejudice and Zombies, joins the

canonical with the seemingly illegible to rupture the Eurocentric appropriation of

universal history and provide a new understanding of the universal as necessarily

entailing an intersection of multiple inhabited worlds which cannot be reduced to or

incorporated under a singular universality.

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It is not simply that the particularity of the zombie escapes the framework of an

overarching universality, but rather provides a counter-universal to the narrative of ever-

expanding human freedoms. It is an understanding of the world just as encompassing and

which therefore cannot be integrated into the framework of the dominant narrative of

progressive liberation. The limited structure of bourgeois European universality in this

context serves to efface alterity through an easy consensus, instituting an ethical regime

that obscures the necessity of politics. Against a liberal humanism that emphasizes the

progressive unfolding of a positive history and presents the human as a transparent object

to be administered, the figure of the zombie functions as its discontent and opaque Other.

It stands at the intersection between life and nonlife, subject and object, and must

therefore always be contained in order to secure the borders of the contemporary

conception of the subject. The recuperation of the figure of the zombie and the history it

embodies disrupts the fundamental assumptions of universal humanism and allows for

the reconsideration of a humanity formed from the standpoint of those who have been

located beyond the borders of the human. While the discourses of universality attempt to

capture the broad spectrum of humanity within its forms of representation, the figure of

the zombie emphasizes that this universality always operates through a system of

exclusions in which the conception of what most properly represents the human is

constructed against that which must be absented from its ranks.

It is thus important to locate the zombie’s origins neither in folklore nor in myth,

but in the conditions of early modernity established in colonial Haiti. As Kyle William

Bishop notes in American Zombie Gothic, the zombie is distinguishable from figures of

vampires, ghosts and werewolves from European folklore, because "[w]hile those
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monsters have such cross-cultural mythologies the zombie remains purely a monster of

the Americas, born from imperialism, slavery, and—most importantly—voodoo magic

and religion" (38). William Buehler Seabrook’s ethnographic account of the zombie,

Magic Island, which is generally credited with introducing the figure of the zombie to the

United States, remarks on the zombie’s particularity to the island of Haiti: “Werewolves,

vampires, and demons were certainly no novelty. But I recalled one creature I had been

hearing about in Haiti, which sounded exclusively local—the zombie” (93). The zombie

then cannot simply be dismissed as a figure that has its origins in an older historical

consciousness; rather it emerges from the culture of those who were experiencing the

brutal underside of modernity. Furthermore, despite Bishop’s claims that the zombie is

“purely a monster of the Americas” it would be better to recognize that modernity itself

created the conditions of a promiscuous impurity in which European colonialism

intersected with African culture and religion on the islands of the Caribbean, which were

occupied themselves by indigenous peoples.

Indeed, the Haitian voodoo from which the zombie emerges is characterized by its

combination of elements from different cultures. Alfred Métraux’s ethnographic account,

Voodoo in Haiti, notes that voodoo is marked by the “very syncretic quality by which it

mixes together, in almost equal proportions, African rites and Christian observances”

(15). The appropriation of the Catholic tradition in voodoo allows the basic tenets of

African faith systems to endure, albeit in a much altered form, in the face of the constant

attempt to eradicate these faith systems. The simultaneous acceptance and transformation

of imposed culture then serves as a clandestine means of resistance which allows for the

continuation of cultural forms that can be mobilized as a resource against colonizing

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forces. As Zora Neale Hurston notes in Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and

Jamaica, Damballah Ouedo can be represented by St. Patrick or Moses because of their

association with the symbol of the serpent (116). The individual loa of African faith

systems come to be represented in Catholic figures which prove particularly helpful in

maintaining multiplicity because of the proliferation of local saints. It necessary to

recognize the complex multiplicities inherent in Haitian culture and the tensions

embodied within its figures. Thus while Haiti is understood to be a predominantly

Catholic country, what it means to be Catholic in Haiti is clearly quite different from

what it might mean to be Catholic elsewhere in the world. The double meanings of the

term “catholic” which pertains not only to a particular Christian sect but also to the

universal thus invites us to rethink the problem of universality from the standpoint of

Haitian culture in which the universal is always adulterated and impure. It is precisely the

multiplicity of these interminglings that urges us to consider a multitude of universalities

rather than a singular universality. If the zombie can be thought of a as “purely a monster

of the Americas,” it is only because America itself is purely the site of impurity, where

the cultural practices from which voodoo and the zombie emerge develop through a

complex history.

Hans W. Ackerman and Jeanine Gauthier attempt to provide an anthropological

account of the development of the zombie from an analysis of African cultures; however,

the attempt to locate it as a monster from the African tradition is ultimately unconvincing

and reifies both the cultures of Africa and those developed in the Caribbean through the

colonial encounter. Ackerman and Gauthier’s methodology consists of examining the

various attributes of zombies in Haiti and connecting them to cultural traditions from
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various regions in Africa. According to Ackerman and Gauthier, “all components of the

zombi [sic] concept—namely, duality of the soul, bodily and spirit zombis—are African

in origin. A likely area of origin is the coastal region of West and Central Africa. From

there, it was transported to the New World by slaves, apparently with little variation”

(489). Yet there is also much ambiguity in their analysis; one particular aspect of the

Haitian zombie is that tasting salt would remove the spell that created them and release

them back to death. The origin of this aspect is said to be found either in “Dahomean

belief that the dead can be given anything but meat and salt. . . An alternative origin of

this diet is European. Not only does salt have a special place in the Bible, where it is

mentioned many times, but it also was said in Europe that the devil abhorred salt” (479).

Furthermore, Ackerman and Gauthier note that another aspect of the zombie is that “[a]t

death, the zombi instantaneously leaves the body and flies away. It then attends the

prayers at its own funeral for nine days (the novena of Catholic ritual)” (486). The

European influence on the production of the zombie is here quite explicit with the

reference to the Catholic ritual, and it is clear that while the zombie may trace some of its

characteristics back to African cultures, it is also produced through the cultural conditions

that arise in colonial Haiti.

The zombie enters into U.S. mainstream consciousness through the colonial

encounter with the United States, with both Hurston’s Tell My Horse and Seabrook’s

Magic Island functioning as ethnographic accounts that attempted to make Haitian life

comprehensible to a Western imperial audience. However, these original zombies are not

the flesh-eating monsters commonly depicted in current mass culture, rather they are a

figure of the enslaved who have been brought back to life in order to be made to labor.
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When Hurston asks why the corpses were not allowed to remain dead, she is told that “A

was awakened because somebody required his body as a beast of burden. . . B was

summoned to labor also but he is reduced to the level of a beast as an act of revenge. C

was . . . given as a sacrifice to pay off a debt to a spirit for benefits received” (182). The

dead are thus made to return to life in order to function within the economy of labor, but

this labor is further integrated into the colonial economy. Seabrook recounts a tale of how

zombies were brought to labor in a modern factory when HASCO (the Haitian-American

Sugar Company) offered a bonus for bringing in new workers. Seabrook’s account

emphasizes the technologically advanced nature the factory: it was “an immense factory

plant, dominated by a huge chimney, with clanging machinery, steam whistles, freight

cars. It is like a chunk of Hoboken . . . It is modern big business, and it sounds it, looks it,

smells it” (95). This modernity of the American factory is contrasted to the superstition of

the Haitian; however, despite the apparent basis in superstition, the zombies nevertheless

appear at the factory: “One morning an old black headman, Ti Joseph of Colombier,

appeared leading a band of ragged creatures who shuffled along behind him, staring

dumbly, like people working in a daze. . . they still stared, vacant-eyed like cattle, and

made no reply when asked to give their names” (95). It is simply the case of the

superstition existing outside or alongside the modern; rather the conditions of exploitative

labor in the factory necessitates the emergence and the creation of the zombie. Indeed, the

general attitude toward the zombie is less one of terror than one of pity; the fear that the

zombie embodies in this context is the fear of being turned into a zombie, the docile and

lifeless laborer who possesses only the mechanical semblance to life.

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Furthermore, the zombie marks a point of radical and threatening rupture to the

forms of rational knowledge produced by the West. Upon encountering an actual zombie,

Seabrook temporarily experiences a moment of vertigo as though the grounds of his

knowledge had fallen away: “I thought, or rather felt, ‘Great God, maybe this stuff is

really true, and if it is true, it is rather awful for it upsets everything.’ By ‘everything’ I

meant the natural fixed laws and processes on which all modern human thought and

actions are based” (101). Seabrook’s immediate reaction is one of the confusion between

thought and feeling, for the disturbance to the level of the rational is so deep as to have

threatened the entire structure of knowledge. It marks the collision of one internally

coherent system of knowledge with the possibility of that which would fundamentally

subvert it. When speaking to his guide, Polynice, about the experience and trying to

rationalize it, Seabrook notes that “it is a fixed rule of reasoning in America that we will

never accept the possibility of a thing’s being ‘supernatural’ so long as any natural

explanation, even farfetched, seems adequate,” to which Polynice replies, “If you spent

many years in Haiti, you would have a very hard time to fit this American reasoning into

some of the things you encountered here” (102). The reasoning American is made to

confront the colonial reality of Haiti, a space in which his own ordering of knowledge

does not seem to apply, much as the assumed freedom and liberty championed within the

United States did not apply in the colonial encounter in the broader Americas. What then

results are two logics that are not fully incompatible but in which one can grasp the other

only through a kind of misunderstanding.

This is most evident in Hurston’s portrayal the Haitians through a series of

conversations. She notes that there is a characteristic self-deception that runs through the
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populace, so that if you asked them about voodoo, they would claim that there is “no such

thing as Voodoo in Haiti, and that all that has been written about it is nothing but

malicious lies by foreigners” (83). Hurston’s analysis is that since the Haitian people

know that voodoo has been used to portray them as savage and uncivilized, in order to

escape those assumptions, they simply deny the existence of voodoo. The other way of

reading this, that Hurston seems entirely unaware of, is simply that the voodoo written

about by the foreigners, which is used to portray the Haitians as irrational savages, does

not exist in Haiti, however, the voodoo that provided the ceremony which opened the

Haitian revolution in 1791, and the voodoo that served as the basis of resistance against

U.S. occupation in the Caco war may well have continued to exist, despite continued

attempts to suppress it. The assumption that Hurston makes of her superior knowledge

thus makes the Haitian illegible within her order of speech and knowledge, so that the

Haitian’s speech could be summarily dismissed.

Hurston’s inability to comprehend the underlying reason of the Haitian comes out

perhaps most strongly in the discussion of debt. When she asks an unnamed Haitian

politician what they planned to do about the nation’s poor, the politician points out how

the country had been robbed completely, indicting both French and U.S. colonial

incursions. Hurston then brings up the “embarrassing debt” Haiti owed to the French and

Germans, and how the U.S. had lent Haiti money to cover those debts, elucidating the

distinct economy of debt that had been constructed by the colonial powers. The Haitian

politician replies: “We never owed any debts. We had plenty of gold in our bank which

the Americans took away and never returned to us. They claimed that we owed debts so

that they could have an excuse to rob us. . . The Americans did force us to borrow the
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money so they could steal it from us” (85). Hurston reads this simply as a lie. “His

statements presupposed that I could not read and even if I could there were no historical

documents in existence that dealt with Haiti. I soon learned to accept these insults to my

intelligence without protest because they happened so often” (86). What occurs here is

not merely the insult to Hurston’s intelligence, but the encounter of two conflicting

senses of the world, neither fully compatible with the other. Within Hurston’s narrative,

the Haitian’s speech is ultimately disqualified from belonging to the same realm of

rationality as the understanding of the West, instituting a political situation in which

Haitians are incapable of participating, in which they could be said to have the phôné of

the animal cry of pleasure or pain, but not the logos of speech that would allow them to

be equal participants in political discussion.

However, the statement of the Haitian politician, that they “never owed any

debts,” could perhaps be better read as referring not just to the immediate situation with

American lenders, but to the whole history of debt in Haiti, which began shortly after the

nation won its independence from France. The common narrative of how Haiti went from

being France’s most profitable colony to the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere

often involve racist assumptions about the freed slaves’ capacity of self-rule. This

narrative ignores the central fact that when France granted recognition of the nation of

Haiti, two decades after the Haitians had won their war for independence, it enforced an

indemnity of “150 million francs (roughly $3 billion in today’ currency) to compensate

the slaveholders for their losses” (Dubois 7). These losses included the loss of the slaves

themselves, so that not only did the slaves have to win their freedom through the Haitian

revolution, but they also had to purchase it from the nation that espoused the old motto of
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liberty, equality and fraternity. The Haitians agreed to the terms of this indemnity only

under the coercion of the French navy, which was ready to blockade all maritime

commerce. Further, this indemnity served as the basis for what can only be seen as the

continued enslavement of the Haitian people, through the cycle of debt produced by

increasingly predatory loans. “Though the amount of the indemnity was later reduced to

60 million francs by France, the cycle of debt only worsened. By 1898, fully half of

Haiti’s government budget went to paying France and the French banks. By 1914, that

proportion had climbed to 80 percent” (Dubois 8). This cycle of debt included the French

control over the Banque Nationale d’Haiti in 1880, and over the Haitian national treasury,

which was transferred to the United States in 1909.

Hurston’s insistence on the legitimacy of the debt owed to the United States

bankers, and therefore tacitly the acceptance of the original debt owed to France,

functions within the framework in which the slaves could be forced to pay for their own

freedom, and in which this national debt could be endlessly passed on to future

generations, reproducing conditions of exploitation similar to slavery under the guise of

debt. The assertion by the Haitian politician that “we never owed any debts” is more thus

than just a statement of historical fact that could be simply valued as either truth or lie, as

Hurston does, but an assertion of a fundamentally different order in which the freedom of

the slaves need not have been bought from the slave owners, and in which this the eternal

indebtedness produced by the French indemnity is made visible as slavery’s continued

legacy. Tell My Horse, unbeknownst to its author, stages the political situation in which

one mode of comprehending the social totality encounters another, and attempts to

incorporate it into its own presumed universal logic. However, the logics that Hurston
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imposes, the logics shared by the majority of her U.S. audience, are resisted by the

Haitian who asserts a qualitatively different understanding which cannot simply be

incorporated into Hurston’s without at the same time radically changing it. If the

televangelist Pat Robinson is able to claim that the dismal condition of modern Haiti is

the result of the slaves making a pact with the devil to win their freedom, we might

perform this same kind of dual reading by noting that Robinson is indeed correct, the

devil in question being the French.

The production of zombies is the production of a dead body that has only the

mechanical semblance of life necessary for labor. This production is deeply imbricated

with the ongoing colonial exploitation of Haiti itself through the cycle of debt. The

zombie can be located in both those laborers sent to work in the HASCO factory who are

reduced to the semblance of life, and in the situation of Haiti in which 80 percent of its

national budget is dedicated to paying down the interest on an indemnity enforced by

sheer violence. Ultimately, however, both Seabrook and Hurston end up containing the

rupture of the rational order represented by the zombie by encapsulating it within a

discourse that assumes the zombie is the result of pharmaceuticals that induce brain

damage: “it is not a case of awakening the dead, but a matter of the semblance of death

induced by some drug known to a few. . . . It is evident that it destroys that part of the

brain which governs speech and will power. The victims can move and act but cannot

formulate thought” (Hurston 196). Similarly, Seabrook clings to the hope of rational

explanation in his own encounter with the zombie: “my mind seized the memory as a

man sinking in water clutches a solid plank—the face of a dog I had seen in the

histological laboratory in Columbia. Its entire front brain had been removed in an
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experimental operation weeks before; it moved about, it was alive, but its eyes were like

the eyes I now saw staring” (101). Thus, what rescues both from having to reckon with

the disruption of their own given order of knowledge is the reinforcement of that order.

The disorder that reveals the contingency of all order discussed by Foucault, a disorder in

which the alternate position of the Haitian might momentarily be recognized as fully

legitimate, is smoothed over and erased. Hurston and Seabrook are similarly unable to

move beyond the assumptions about the occupation of Haiti. Hurston, despite being in

conversation with multiple Haitians who all speak out against the U.S. occupation instead

asserts that it is the in national character of Haitians to “deceive themselves about

actualities and to throw a gloss over facts” (82), thus allowing her to continue to assume

the benefit of the occupation. In this way, these ethnographies tend to be far less about

the people of Haiti than they are about the limits of the American comprehension of Haiti

in the colonial context. The assumption that the production of the zombie arises from the

savagery of the Haitians erases the way that the production of the entire population of

Haiti as a form of life that is made to exist for the sole extraction of their labor is

produced by the colonial system of exploitation and the continued cycle of debt that

emerges from it.

The zombie functions as a rupture of the structure of colonial knowledge imposed

by the ethnographic accounts of Hurston and Seabrook, which are themselves produced

in the context of the U.S. occupation of Haiti. This potential rupture must be continually

contained, even in much contemporary scholarly work on the figure of the zombie. Thus,

Bishop is capable of arguing that the early voodoo exploitation films set in the Caribbean

and featuring the zombie allow U.S. American audiences a chance to "vicariously sample
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the pleasures of colonization and imperialist exploitation that, as a nation, it had

essentially been denied" (66). Undoubtedly, the extent to which these colonial pleasures

have been denied will likely be contested by those familiar with the histories of the

Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico, to name only a few of the places directly influenced

by the colonial ventures of the United States, not to mention its interventions in the

political sovereignty of nations throughout Latin America. One more familiar with the

history of the United States and the contradictions it produces in enacting its ideals of

freedom has to wonder whether Bishop’s statement regarding how "the United States was

once a colonial entity itself, [and is] now an autonomous country that cherishes freedom

and equality above all else" (60) is to be taken in all seriousness. There are some rather

explicit differences between the settler colonialism that founded the United States and the

extraction colonialism employed throughout the Caribbean that are elided in Bishop’s

identification of the United States as once a colonial entity on an equal footing with Haiti.

To make such a comparison is to erase the history of United States intervention in Latin

America and the Caribbean which must be made central to any attempt to understand the

zombie as a figure that emerges through these ethnographic practices in Haiti, practices

that cannot be disentangled from United States colonialism. Instead, the figure of the

zombie represents the absolute rupture of these logics, a form that is rendered as

unspeaking and incomprehensible within the context of Western knowledge, but who

nevertheless threatens to radically reconfigure that knowledge.

The Two Endings of Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend

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I want to resist the obvious reading of the zombie as a figure for Giorgio

Agamben’s notion of bare life; instead, I read the zombie as the exact opposite of bare

life, rather than the management of undifferentiated life, the zombie confronts the bare

life asserted by liberal humanism and reasserts the radical rupture of politics. Here, I want

to make use of two possible readings of the concept of politics, both of which center

around Aristotle’s distinction of the human in Politics. In Homo Sacer, Agamben reads

the problem of politics as fundamentally ontological in which the distinction between zoē

and bios becomes mapped onto the distinction between phôné and logos; in contrast,

Jacques Rancière maintains the political problem as fundamentally the problem of the

division between those who possess phôné and those who possess logos. Homo Sacer,

begins with the distinction between two notions of life in Ancient Greece: the bios and

the zoē. The bios refers the mode of life proper to a group or individual, whereas zoē

refers to natural life as such. Thus, Agamben describes the decisive event of modernity as

that the zoē has entered into the sphere of the polis such that bare life becomes

politicized: “decisive fact is that . . . the realm of bare life—which is originally situated at

the margins of the political order—gradually begins to coincide with the political realm,

and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter into a

zone of irreducible indistinction” (9). In Agamben’s reading, the problem that then

emerges in our current moment is that the properly political space of speech where the

community determines the good and the bad, the just and the unjust becomes a matter for

the undifferentiated management of life. Under the state of exception, this management

of life can then become the application of death with impunity.

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Agamben’s emphasis on the political distinction being between bios and zoē leads

to the ontologization of politics and an undifferentiated global situation in which the logic

of the concentration camps, “which is now securely lodged within the city’s interior, is

the new biopolitical nomos of the planet” (176). Thus it would seem that biopolitics has

completely taken over the proper space of politics itself, and that all are equally subjected

to the logic of the camps, ultimately concealing the way in which modernity is defined by

the differential exposure to violence and exploitation, and erasing the political situation

that is always elaborated through this differentiation. Indeed, Agamben’s thesis relies

upon a certain reading of Aristotle’s definition of politics that focuses on its ontological

rather than political significance. Agamben quotes Aristotle at length in an important

passage that I also want to discuss in relation to Jacques Rancière:

Among living beings, only man has language. The voice is the sign of pain
and pleasure, and this is why it belongs to other living beings (since their
nature has developed to the point of having the sensations of pain and
pleasure and of signifying the two). But language is for manifesting the
fitting and the unfitting and the just and the unjust. To have the sensation
of the good and the bad and of the just and the unjust is what is proper to
men as opposed to other living beings, and the community of these things
makes dwelling and the city (1253a, 10-18).

For Agamben, Aristotle is here defining human beings against merely animal beings, so

that politics is about cultivating the good life within the totality of the human society.

“The fundamental categorical pair of Western politics is nor that of friend/enemy but that

of bare life/political existence, zoē /bios, exclusion/inclusion. There is politics because

man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare

life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive

exclusion” (8). Thus the production of bios, as that particular form of qualified life in
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opposition to bare life, takes precedence here so that politics is about the cultivation and

production of the proper form of life of general humanity.

However, Rancière reads this passage quite differently, not as making an

ontological distinction about the human as such, but as already instituting a political

division between human beings. The distinction between the animal who possesses only

phôné as a means of expressing pleasure and pain and the human that possess the logos

that enables it to enter into a shared community of the good and the bad and the just and

the unjust is at the same time a distinction between individuals, like slaves, who are

excluded from participation in the polis and the citizen who properly belongs to the life

of politics. Thus for Rancière, “the simple opposition between logical animals and phonic

animals is in no way the given on which politics is then based. It is, on the contrary, one

of the stakes of the very dispute that institutes politics. At the heart of politics lies a

double wrong . . . over the relationship between the capacity of the speaking being who

is without qualification and political capacity” (22). The space of political contestation is

precisely where it is determined what properly constitutes political speech as opposed to

the excluded speech of the mere animal, and therefore a distinction between those

capable of voicing this political speech and those who are unqualified for speech.

Rancière’s reading of Aristotle is thus in direct contrast with that of Agamben who argues

that “Politics situates the proper place of the polis in the transition from voice to language

The link between bare life and politics is the same link that the metaphysical definition of

man as ‘the living being who has language’ seeks in the relation between phonē and

logos” (7). For Agamben, politics is already a place of ontological indistinction where the

span between bios and zoē and bios is navigated within the human as such. For Rancière,
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this distinction is always social, and therefore the distinction between those who are

represented as bearing only zoē—the unqualified life of the animal who possesses only

phôné—and those who are express the proper bois through their possession of logos.

The zombie then represents not merely the human creature that is reduced to the

bare twitches and palpitations of animal life as such, but the social and political decision

that renders them comprehensible as bearing only animal life. The human as bare life is

produced, no less than the human capable of participating in the polis. Here, I want to

turn to a reading of Francis Lawrence’s 2007 film, I am Legend, is a quintessential

zombie movie. Structurally, the film includes all the elements that one would expect, and

which makes it in many ways functionally interchangeable with nearly every other

zombie movie. In the film, the measles virus is genetically engineered to attack cancer

cells, resulting in the effective curing of cancer; however, a mutation in the virus changes

the majority of humanity into what is represented as an unthinking, violent mass that

attacks and consumes their uninfected counterparts. These infected thus contain many of

the standard zombie tropes, except with the additional detail that they are sensitive to

ultraviolet radiation. Robert Neville, a scientist immune to the virus played by Will

Smith, is the last survivor in New York who attempts to cure the infected host that

surrounds him. What we see then is the setting up of a situation in which life appears to

be reduced to bare life, in which, to quote a videolog made by Neville detailing his

experiments: “Possible decreased brain function, growing scarcity of food is causing

them to ignore their basic survival instincts. Social de-evolution appears complete.

Typical human behavior is now entirely absent” (Lawrence). Yet, at the same time, the

film constantly undermines this determination of the complete social de-evolution of the
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infected. If this moment of decision functions as universal humanity’s proclamation over

and against its non-human others, the film constantly attempts to make visible this act of

distinction.

During the scene in which Neville determines that the social de-evolution is

complete, he is constantly and conspicuously unable to meet the gaze of the camera, as

though he recognizes the disingenuousness of this assertion, yet at the same time must

continue to make this assumption in order to alleviate his own guilt. Through his

attempts to cure the virus, Neville has been capturing the infected and experimenting on

them in his high-tech lab in the basement of his house. In one scene that takes place in

this lab, Neville has captured a female infected, and has her strapped down to a stretcher

in order to inject a trial version of the vaccine. Upon injection, the zombie writhes in pain

and lets out a long scream of pain. Yet, in this moment when the human has been reduced

to its most carnal and animal form, where it is capable of emitting only the scream of

animal pain lacking any logos, the composition of the film refuses to allow it to be

reduced to a bare animal. The camera zooms in to a tight close up of the zombie’s face,

contorted in pain with her mouth open in a wide and piercing scream, yet what the film

captures in this moment is not the zombie’s monstrous inhumanity, but the fillings and

the dental work on the teeth themselves. In the moment of the infected human’s absolute

reduction to animality, what the film then reveals is precisely the latent marks of

humanity within it, in the very structures that modify the voice and turn it into speech.

The political distinction between speech and voice thus becomes troubled, because that

body which is to be capable of only eliciting the animal cry of pleasure or pain is marked
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by the sociality that would have allowed it to enter the political logos and the proper

determination of the just and the good.

In a second scene in the lab, Anna, a survivor who finds Neville at the end of the

film, views the female infected as Neville prepares a vial of vaccine. “Do you think that

can cure her?” Anna asks, to which Neville replies, “No, this will almost certainly kill it”

(Lawrence). There is thus this movement that Neville takes for granted, from “she” to “it”

that unthinkingly renders the zombie inhuman and thus an object upon which

experiments can be performed with impunity. While Neville assumes that this zombie life

has been reduced to bare life in an ontological situation, there is the fundamental political

distinction being made which Anna troubles in her passing identification with the

zombie. Within the context of Neville’s closed framework, it is the ontological alteration

of the human body by the virus that turns it into the object of experiment; yet, beneath

this apparent ontological distinction, the film is also constantly highlighting the political

situation in which what is exposed is a series of social relations. Thus politics attempts to

mask itself as mere ontology, posing either the assumed biological universality that often

takes the form of “we are all human” and conceals the actual social disparities made in

determining the position individuals occupy in the differential structures of exploitation,

or through the radical dehumanization of the Other who refuses to accept the imposed

universality of the West. Looking at a series of photos of Neville’s test subjects posted on

a wall, Anna asks, “Did all of them die?” to which Neville responds in a quick, clinical

tone, “Yes.” Anna exclaims, “My God,” and “Neville replies, “God didn’t do this, Anna,

we did.” Neville here thus misreads the horror that Anna expresses, which is not merely

in response to the existence of the zombies, which would make little sense in this context,
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but rather in response to very experiments that Neville was conducting in his attempts to

cure the virus. The moment of recognition of human alterity is thus dispersed through an

assumption of the other’s always already present monstrosity.

However, even as undermining the structures of universal humanity assumed by

Neville, the film creates a tension by encouraging the audience’s identification with

Neville through the star system and the generic trope of the action movie in which Will

Smith so often plays the hero. Despite Neville’s diagnosis that the zombies have

experienced complete social de-evolution and no longer exhibit any human social

behaviors, we are constantly confronted with the lingering if hidden remnants that expose

the continued humanity of the zombies. Directly after capturing the female zombie that

Neville takes to his lab through an elaborate trap that resembled a Rube Goldberg

machine, involving a series of pulleys and a car trailer used as a counterweight, the alpha

male zombie constructs a version of the same machine to capture Neville. Neville’s

observation that “an infected male exposed himself to sunlight today. Now it's possible

decreased brain function or growing scarcity of food is causing them to ignore their basic

survival instincts” (Lawrence) appears completely falsified. Instead, the universal

humanity that Neville attempts to embody himself, which is reduced to a single character

for the majority of the movie, must continually attempt to reinforce itself against the mass

of non-anthropophorous humanity that it has created. Thus, if the essence of the human is

in its ensemble of social relations, it is important to note that this cutting off of social ties

is also itself a specific social relation; and universal humanity, through its elimination of

its others within the sphere of the human thus institutes a relation of exclusion that

enables and justifies certain forms of exploitation.

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At the same time that we identify with the trope of the dashing action hero, we are

faced with the fact that Neville is in actuality a character deeply damaged by his social

isolation. Yet this isolation from the non-human Others embodied in the zombie is

precisely what allows for Neville to portray himself in the standard form of the action

hero. Throughout the film, Neville’s mannerisms are marked by the psychological

damage wrought by his absolute isolation. He is plagued by the constant traumatic

flashbacks of the time before the virus outbreak and is literally unable to move on. When

Anna urges him to move on with her to a rumored survival colony in Vermont, Neville

replies that “I could fix this. This is ground zero. This is my site” (Lawrence), echoing

the exact same words that he told his wife as she was departing the island amid the

outbreak. Before meeting Anna, part of Neville’s daily routine involves going to rent and

return videos at a store, in which he has set up mannequins who represent his only

contact with what he recognizes as human form. Thus the universal humanity, incapable

of recognizing its Others, can only recognize itself in the hollow and emptied forms

without substances that it has created and set up for itself. This allows for the radical

violence against the alterity that does not conform to its own model of universality. And

those voiceless mannequins, lacking voice, are imaginatively given voice in Neville’s

interactions with them. When the alpha male zombie moves one of the mannequins,

named by Neville “Fred,” in order to set up a trap, Neville can only respond with shock,

ultimately shooting the mannequin whose uncanny movements are both desired and

frightening.

I Am Legend has two endings, both equally unsatisfying in terms of resolving all

of the issues raised in the earlier parts of the film. In the ending included in the theatrical
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release, Neville, anguished by the death of his dog, goes on a suicidal rampage against

the zombies. Neville is ultimately overrun but saved by Anna who takes him back to his

house. The zombies follow them home, leading to a battle that ultimately concludes in the

underground lab. While Neville and Anna are pursued into the lab they notice that the

female zombie they had captured had begun showing signs that their cure for the virus

was working, with the zombie returning to a more human form. As the alpha zombie

throws itself against the glass door of the containment room where Neville, Anna and

Ethan have fled. As the glass begins to crack, Neville screams repeatedly: “I can save

you. Let me save you. You are sick and I can help you. I can fix this. I can save

everybody” (Lawrence). His screams rise to a shriek, and suddenly his speech, the logos

that allowed him to determine the just and the good—with his own determination of the

good being to cure the virus and restore the humanity that had been lost—suddenly

echoes the voice of the female zombie in the initial experiment and becomes the

incomprehensible animal scream of phonē.

And here the two endings diverge. In the theatrical release, the alpha zombie

continues to throw himself against the glass, with it shattering in a pattern of cracks that

resembles a butterfly. Neville then recalls his daughter who, on the night of their parting,

made a butterfly figure with her hands while saying, “Look daddy, a butterfly.” Neville

turns to look at Anna and sees a butterfly tattoo on her neck, thus assuming that this is a

message from God. Anna asks what he is doing, he says, “I’m listening.” What he is

listening to in this case is the God that Anna assumed had drawn her to Neville’s lab for

some higher purpose. Neville then places Anna and Ethan into a safe in the lab along

with a sample of the blood from the now cured zombie. Neville then pulls out a grenade
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from a drawer, and proceeds to destroy both himself and the zombies in the lab, leaving

Anna and Ethan free to emerge the next day where they travel on to find the survivor’s

colony, bearing the cure. The film then concludes with a voice-over from Anna: “In

2009, a deadly virus burned through our civilization, pushing humankind to the edge of

extinction. Dr. Robert Neville dedicated his life to the discovery of a cure and the

restoration of humanity. . . We are his legacy. This is his legend. Light up the darkness.”

In this ending what we have is the result of the universal humanism that is incapable of

recognizing the humanity of its others. Explosive violence goes hand in hand with

universal liberal humanism; for that which does not concede to our conception of the

universal can only be placed outside the pale of humanity, can only be turned into the

absolute enemy with whom one must engage in total war. All of the hints and the

foreshadowings of the humanity of the zombie is thus ultimately eradicated in the final

explosion which, at the same time, is what allows Anna and Ethan to continue on and

restore their version of humanity.

In the second ending, instead of continuing to throw himself against the

containment glass, the alpha zombie stops and draws an image of a butterfly on the glass

with the mud on his hands. Neville hears the whispered voice of his daughter, “Look

daddy, a butterfly,” and suddenly that political moment of distinction in which the

zombie was rendered the Other incapable of speech and communication becomes visible.

Neville looks around and discovers the tattoo of a butterfly, not on Anna, but on the

female zombie that he had captured and incapacitated. As Neville prepares to open the

door of the containment area and wheel out the female zombie, Anna asks what he is

doing, and he replies “I’m listening.” However, this time what Neville is listening to is
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not God as that figure of divinity that ultimately grounds his own understanding, not the

God that had made man in his own image, but to the Other whose image is anything but

his own. As Neville wheels out the female zombie and gives her an injection that

neutralizes the sedatives that had incapacitated her, it becomes clear that beneath

narrative of the generic zombie movie lies another narrative that is only visible from the

side of the zombie. The alpha zombie gazes on the female with a look of concern as the

female reaches up to caress his face. They nuzzle against each other in something akin to

a kiss. Opposing the narrative of the action film then is the recognizable narrative of the

prince saving the captured princess from the evil that abducted her. The audience’s initial

identification with the action star thus becomes troubled by this second narrative which

undermines it. “I’m sorry,” Neville says as he collapses to his knees with a look of shock

on his face as the camera pans to the images of the zombies he had captured. The

zombies, their objective completed, leave and the film ends with Neville, Anna and Ethan

all travelling to Vermont.

While the ending contained with the theatrical release erases the political decision

between these two versions of humanity, the second ending emphasizes the properly

political dimension that goes into the system of identification produced by the film. It is

not merely that there are two conflicting sets of interests within a shared universality; as

Rancière notes, “A dissensus is not a conflict of interests, opinions or values; it is a

division inserted in ‘common sense’: a dispute over what is given and about the frame

within which we see something as given . . . This is what I call dissensus: the putting of

two worlds in one and the same world” (69). Indeed, the two narratives exposed in the

alternate ending are ultimately incompatible. In order for the narrative of the action star
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to maintain its coherence, it must make a victim of the zombies. The screams of Neville

of “let me save you” make it clear that in order to maintain his own heroism, the zombies

must take the place of the victim whom he can save. This kind of liberal humanism

ultimately proceeds through a kind of victimization of the Other which allows it to

function. However, the infected in this case do not want to be saved, and, indeed, what

constitutes rescue for Neville is only a kind of violence to them. The rescue is actually a

form of violence that reduces the other to the victim whose salvation can only come in

the entering into the imposed universal humanity embodied by the star of the film.

Instead, it is the alpha zombie who is there to save the female. There is thus a mutual

exclusion between these two readings that cannot be reduced to a singular order in which

each are making demands that are comprehensible within the framework of the other. The

film thus rehearses and makes visible the fundamental political distinction that underlies

the assumption of bare life, the distinction which is made between those who bear the

animal life of the zoē and those who bear the properly political life of the bios.

What the two endings of I am Legend makes visible is the movement between

politicization and depoliticization inherent in universality. The ending included with the

theatrical release patently failed in terms of fulfilling the narrative structure set up by the

film with its foreshadowings of the inherent humanity of the zombies. All the subtle

moments preparing for the rupture of the narrative through the plot twist that the entire

film was leading to are subverted in order to enable the continuation of the generic action

film. In the same manner, the narrative of liberal humanism fails to see the alterities that

are made visible and waiting to rupture into the light, but this is a deliberate failure to see,

because this failure undergirds its own continuation as the universal. In the wake of the
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Haitian earthquake in 2010, Haiti could only be figured as the victim of nature who could

be rescued by the magnanimous West. The West’s role in that victimization through the

history of debt is erased in order to turn Haiti in to the victim that can be saved through

the West’s generosity. This moment of victimization underlies the West’s self-arrogated

universality. The 2010 earthquake cannot be thought of merely as a natural disaster, but is

necessarily one influenced by the economic conditions in Haiti which are deeply

imbricated with its political and economic situation. The lack of rebar in the

reinforcement of buildings, the lack of adequate medical services, the lack of food, water

and sanitation in the wake of the earthquake are more than merely natural disasters, but

the result of a political and economic situation in which the extraction of labor through

the mechanisms of international debt is allowed to continue unabated.

The second ending, which makes the political visible is at the same time playing

out in Haiti, with the demand not just for international aide that would portray them as

victims of nature, but through the demand for reparations against the French. It marks the

situation in which the other is capable of engaging in political speech, not just as the

passive victim to be saved, but as one equally capable of engaging in the discussion of

the just and the unjust, and the good and the bad. It thus ruptures the given order of

liberal politics and the accepted ordering of speech imposed by the West. As Rancière

notes, “Politics exists because the logos is never simply speech, because it is always

indissolubly the account that is made of this speech: the account by which a sonorous

emission is understood as speech, capable of enunciating what is just, whereas some

other emission is merely perceived as a noise signaling pleasure or pain, consent or

revolt” (23). It is then not simply that one accounting of the world can be captured and
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incorporated into a more universal one, but that there are two fundamentally different and

incompatible readings of the world that cannot be brought under a singular universality.

And it is the multiplicity of speech situations that makes politics necessary. The universal

then is not the space where anything is resolved; rather it is the space of that perpetual

irresolution and conflict that marks out the political, and between the two endings of I am

Legend, perhaps only the one that emphasizes the heroics of the self-arrogated human can

play to popular audiences, but this does not erase those moments where the humanity of

the unthinkable Other threatens to rupture the smooth narrative and institute another

possible humanity, another possible universality.

Towards a Non-Hegelian, Darwinian Marxist Historicism

Universality is always a political category that in its moment of instantiation must

be filled with some particular content. It is the struggle to determine which world will

count as the universal that marks out what is properly political, so that what becomes

visible is less a teleological movement of ever-greater advancement than a system of

struggle and rupture. Rather than focusing on universal history as the necessary and

teleological unfolding of human freedom, I want to do away with necessity and open up

the space of contingency. In doing so, I want to perform a reading of Marx that moves

beyond the Hegelian emphasis that is so often placed on Marx’s understanding of history

and class struggle, in order to move away from any inherent teleology. Instead of Hegel,

one might thus turn towards Darwin as that model to which Marx himself was drawn in

his later works. Of all the aspects of Marxism, it is perhaps in the realm of Marx’s

concept of history that is read most persistently as Hegelian, and most often critiqued by
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poststructural and postcolonial theorists alike. Yet, Marx’s relation to Hegel shifted

throughout his writings, and by the time he is writing his later works, particularly the

Grundrisse and Capital Volume 1, there is a great deal of resistance towards the Hegelian

understanding of history, that, indeed, by this point in his career it was Darwin’s

inherently non-teleological understanding of the natural world rather than Hegel’s

teleological unfolding of Geist that informed his understanding of history. A non-

Hegelian reading of Marx will thus allow us open a space for the ruptures of non-

anthropophorous humanity into the logics of capital.

In White Mythologies: Writing, History and the West, Robert Young argues that

the Hegelian emphasis in many contemporary understandings of Marx’s analysis of the

historical movement of modes of production is relatively recent, and only occurs with

Lukács’ influential History and Class Consciousness. “Lukács argued for the primacy of

history over economics as the most significant element in the methodology of Marxism.

His stress on Marxism as a historical method that presupposed and required the idea of

totality initiated a course that determined the history of Western Marxism to our own

day” (55-56). Thus, for Young, the predominant Marxist rejection of poststructuralism in

the late 1980s, occurred because of the “defence of a belief in the rationality of the

historical process” (54), and is a holdover that from the Hegelian understanding of history

as the immanent unfolding of Geist. This Hegelian emphasis also leads to the assumption

of the rationality inherent to the historical processes themselves which focuses on an

abstract notion of history rather than the intricacies of the actually existing economic

processes. The assumption of a simple movement between various modes of production

thus comes to supersede concrete economic analysis, allowing for the integration of the
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non-Western world merely as a primitive historical site that must undergo the same

processes of development as the West in order to catch up. In opposition to any

inherently rational process in history, Young argues that “As a form of understanding,

history will necessarily also be subject to a whole range of questions that surround

interpretation, representation and narrative in any form” (54). While I want to similarly

decenter the emphasis on an inherently rational project of history, I do so not to discard

Marxism as a whole, but to better attend to the particularity of the processes that Marx

discusses. A non-Hegelian, Darwinian Marxism may well produce a better basis for

understanding Marx’s project in Capital than a reading of it that attempts to trace a self-

unfolding rationality.

The relationship between Marx and Darwin is perhaps much closer than generally

recognized.3 Marx and Engels had certainly read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species—

published on November 24th, 1859, only eight years before the publication of Capital

Volume 1. Furthermore, Darwin’s theories, not unlike those of Marx, have historically

been appropriated by those who would emphasize a teleological model of development

for various ideological reasons. In the case of Darwin, the introduction of teleology into

his theory of evolution results in the proliferation of eugenics in the early and mid-

twentieth century, serving as one of the primary ideological bases for the justification of

genocide. However, it is only through the vast misunderstanding and simplification of On

the Origin of Species that Darwin’s theories of evolution through natural selection came

to be understood in a teleological light. The popularized phrase, “the survival of the

3
For another discussion of the relation between Marx and Darwin, see David Harvey’s A Companion to
Marx’s Capital.
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fittest”,—incidentally coined not by Darwin, but by Herbert Spencer in Principles of

Biology—does not mean, as often assumed, the survival of the strongest or the smartest.

Rather, the statement amounts to a little more than a nice little tautology which might be

fully enunciated as “the survival of the fittest to survive”; in other words, those organisms

which are most fit to survive will survive. As Steven Jay Gould notes in “Darwin’s

Untimely Burial,” the “fittest” that Darwin describes here is understood in a local,

environmental context; it refers to “‘improved design,’ but not ‘improved’ in the cosmic

sense that contemporary Britain favored. To Darwin, improved meant only ‘better

designed for immediate, local environment’” (97). Since this fitness is only in regards to

the organism’ survivability in its immediate environment, and not in regards to any

universal situation, it removes any possibility of a universal teleology since the

immediate local environment and what comprises being fit to survive in that environment

will certainly change.

It is clear that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is in its essence a non-

teleological text, and it is this very movement against teleology that excites both Marx

and Engels. In a December, 1859 letter to Marx, Engels writes: “Darwin, by the way,

whom I'm reading just now, is absolutely splendid. There was one aspect of teleology

that had yet to be demolished, and that has now been done. Never before has so grandiose

an attempt been made to demonstrate historical evolution in Nature, and certainly never

to such good effect” (Engels, “Engels to Marx in London”). This emphasis on the

demolishing of teleology readily contradicts any attempt to read Marx and Engels in a

mode that emphasis a Hegelian teleology. Similarly, in a January 16th, 1861 letter to

Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx himself writes, “Darwin’s work is most important and suits my
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purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle. . .

Despite all shortcomings, it is here that, for the first time, ‘teleology’ in natural science is

not only dealt a mortal blow but its rational meaning is empirically explained” (Marx,

“Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle in Berlin”). Through their letters we discover that both Marx

and Engels are not simply a-teleological, but actively anti-teleological in a way that

complicates any simple reading of Capital as a teleological text. What is central here is

that both Marx and Engels are seeking to disrupt standard Hegelian teleology in order to

assert something new, and this goes far beyond the act of turning Hegel on his head by

merely inserting a materialist teleology in the place of a spiritual one.

Indeed, Marx explicitly attempts to disarticulate the very teleology that he is often

accused of: “in Hegel’s Philosophy of right, Private Right superseded equals Morality,

Morality superseded equals the Family, the Family superseded equals Civil Society, Civil

Society superseded equals the State, and the State superseded equals World History”

(119). Here we can recognize the progression of greater generality and universality in

which Hegel privileges the general over the particular which implies a certain teleological

movement, and we can also recognize an echo of the teleological reading of Marx’s own

works: primitive communism superseded equals the Asiatic mode of production, the

Asiatic mode superseded equals the feudalism, feudalism superseded equals capitalism,

and so on. Yet Marx here directly criticizes Hegel’s model, noting that instead of a

simple teleological subsumption, “[i]n the actual world, private right, morality, family,

civil society, state, etc., remain in existence, only they have become moments of man—

state of his existence and being—which have no validity in isolation, but dissolve and

engender one another, etc. They have become moments of motion” (119). Marx’s critique
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here can be seen as twofold. On one hand, the movement of increasing generality does

not erase the previous categorizations so that Hegel’s focus on world history to the

detriment of the particular does not capture a full view of history, despite its claim to be

“world history,” so that the movement is only a movement of abstraction from one

category to another. On the other hand, it is this very forward movement towards abstract

generality that becomes the object of critique; the moment of movement is engendered

not forward into a greater universality and abstraction that subsumes the previous forms,

but laterally, between the elements that continue to persist

It would thus be a mistake to imagine that one mode of production necessarily

engenders a more advanced one. In a way parallel to Marx’s critique of Hegel’s

Philosophy of Right, although certain forms of production may require some previous

form—the production of machinery, for example, requiring the production of specialized

tools—the advent of a new mode of production neither entirely subsumes the previous

mode, nor does it represent a more general, higher form. The teleological assumption of

the modes of production only occurs through the imposition of a teleological goal upon

the process of production which is not in itself inherently teleological—maximization of

productivity, for example. Here we might make reference to the various appropriations of

Darwin’s “survival of the fittest.” Where the structurally empty space of “the fittest” in

Darwin’s conception is filled with ideological concepts to engender a particular

teleology—for example, the strongest or most intelligent—Marx’s empty space in terms

of the most apt mode of production can also be filled in with the notion of maximum

productivity, for example. But this space of what determines the most “fit” mode of

production is structurally empty, and Marx’s projection of the liberation of humanity

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from need can be read as separate from his model, which allows Marx to escape the

accusation of simply inverting Hegel’s teleology. Nevertheless, even if separate, this

clearly marks the utopian potential of humanity’s appropriation of his own historicity, of

his own modes of production. Furthermore, the development of these technologies are

directly related to the relations of production they engender, and from these relations of

production, the social relations. “Technology discloses man‘s mode of dealing with

Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare

the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow

from them” (Capital 236). If the development of technology functions in a non-

teleological manner, so too then does the development of social relations, so that one

cannot simply place one set of social relations as temporally prior to another, as often

occurs with the third world.

From the non-teleological existence of multiple imbricated modes of production

we might pose the Darwinian formation of an ecology of the modes of production as

means of describing their interaction. Marx himself writes of the economic mode of

production in terms of natural history, inviting the extension of this analogy to look more

specifically at the development a larger social formation. From Marx’s standpoint, “the

evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history,

can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he

socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them” (Capital

7). The language Marx uses here makes clear reference to his recent reading of Darwin,

and the comparison between the economic formation of society and the process of natural

history implies a non-teleological understanding of this formation, such as might be

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found in Darwin. Indeed, Marx refers specifically to Darwin when justifying the scope of

his own project, noting in a footnote that “Darwin has interested us in the history of

Nature‘s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which

organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the

productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation,

deserve equal attention?” (Capital 236). Thus Marx focuses on the “organs [which] serve

as instruments of production for sustaining life” in humans, which is to say, the

instruments of production and their relation to the mode of production.

Thus Marx’s analogy between the history of human production and the evolution

of plants and animals forms the basis for a consideration of technology in a non-

teleological, Darwinian manner. “Nature’s technology” and the technology of humanity

can be analyzed in similar ways. Indeed, Marx makes some moves towards a closer

examination of the particular tools of production in a society. He notes that in

Birmingham, “500 varieties of hammers are produced, and not only is each adapted to

one particular process, but several varieties often serve exclusively for the different

operations in one and the same process. The manufacturing period simplifies, improves,

and multiplies the implements of labour, by adapting them to the exclusively special

functions of each detail labourer” (Capital 236). Here Marx clearly phrases his analysis

in the Darwinian terms of natural selection where it is the implements of labor that are

undergoing transformation in the manufacturing process. According to Marx, this

diversification of instruments in the process of production also “creates at the same time

one of the material conditions for the existence of machinery, which consists of a

combination of simple instruments” (Capital 236). Yet it is important here to notice that
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nothing necessarily impels the movement towards machinery, there is no teleological end

to which these processes are ascending; rather the diversification of these implements are

being adapted to the labourer, and are thus the products of humanity.

The connection becomes somewhat more explicit later in Capital where Marx

cites specifically from Origin of Species to examine the development of particular

instruments of production, emphasizing the non-teleological nature of the evolution of

production. Citing Darwin, he notes that “So long as one and the same organ has different

kinds of work to perform, a ground for its changeability may possibly be found in this,

that natural selection preserves or suppresses each small variation of form less carefully

than if that organ were destined for one special purpose alone” (Capital 249). And it is

directly from Darwin that Marx continues his analysis of the implements of production.

“Thus, knives that are adapted to cut all sorts of things, may, on the whole, be of one

shape; but an implement destined to be used exclusively in one way must have a different

shape for every different use” (Capital 249). For Marx then, one can see that the modes

of production function directly in a Darwinian fashion, where the specialization towards

performing a specific task involves an increase in productivity and a more specific shape.

Yet this does not simply instill productivity as the ultimate teleological goal towards

which human societies move. Parallel to Darwin’s removal of the teleological end of

evolution, we must remove the teleological end in society, even if we find that end in

communism. Instead, we might see the development of society as the resolution of

conflicts within any given social formation that moves towards the determination of the

fittest way of organizing society. If communism appears as that goal, it is not because it is

a teleological necessity, but because, given the conditions and the needs of individuals in
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society, it represents the most fit way of organizing the social; and the articulation of this

vision must take place in the spheres of the economic, the political, the social.

Rather than merely a teleological model of the unfolding of the various modes of

production, there is thus a political moment at the center of the economic that determines

what is to occupy the empty space that fills the question of “advancement.” Under the

conditions of neoliberal capitalism, where the space is constantly filled in by the

generation of ever-greater amounts of surplus value, the development of the modes of

production have only lead to greater exploitation through the mechanisms of imposing

international debt and ultimately austerity. Maurizio Lazzarato argues in The Making of

Indebted Man, that it is not merely the finance economy, but rather the debt economy that

marks out neoliberalism, with “what we reductively call ‘finance’ [being] indicative of

the increasing force of the creditor-debtor relationship. Neoliberalism has pushed for the

integration of monetary, banking, and financial systems by using techniques revelatory of

its aim of making the creditor-debtor relationship a centerpiece of politics” (23).

Furthermore, he notes, citing Ardant’s Historie fananciére de l’antiquité à nos jours, that

credit is “‘one of the most effective instruments of exploitation man has managed to

create, since certain people, by producing credit, are able to appropriate the labor and

wealth of others.’ What the media calls ‘speculation’ represents a machine for capturing

and preying on surplus vale in conditions created by modern-day capitalist accumulation”

(20-21). If this is the case, Haiti, in its embodiment of an economy ravaged by the

inescapable logics of debt may well represent a form that is not only coeval with the

West, but also a representation of its future, so long as these logics continue to go
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unchallenged in the interwoven structures of both politics and economy that constitutes

political economy proper.

 Conclusion: The Utopics of the Human

We cannot say what man is. Man today is a function, unfree, regressing
behind whatever is ascribed to him as invariant . . . To decipher the human
essence by the way it is now would sabotage its possibility. A so-called
historical anthropology would scarcely serve any longer. It would indeed
include evolution and conditioning, but it would attribute them to the
subjects; it would abstract from the dehumanization that has made the
subjects what they are, and that continues to be tolerated under the name
of a qualitas humana. The more concrete the form in which anthropology
appears, the more deceptive will it come to be, and the more indifferent to
whatever in man is not at all due to him, as the subject, but to the de-
subjectifying process that has paralleled the historic subject formation
since time immemorial. . . . That we cannot tell what man is does not
establish a particularly majestic anthropology; it vetoes any anthropology.
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 124

I began my dissertation with Foucault’s gesture toward the possible end of man as

the figure that grounds Western knowledge; I want to end by adding a corollary: the

European figure of Man may be at an end, but we have never been human. The

assumption that we, being human, necessarily belong to the order of universal humanity

has never ceased to impose the violence of deciding the borders of the human within our

own given framework. If the goal is to fundamentally subvert the framework of

exclusion, then the proper fullness of humanity to which we would belong—a fullness

which will have done away with the systems of differentiation that undergird continued

exploitation—might better be held in suspension and conceived not as something that we

embody within our present moment, but as that towards which we strive. For what it

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means to be human in our present framework, as Etienne Balibar notes in “Ambiguous

Universality,” is to concede to a norm. But this “normality is not the simple fact of

adopting customs and obeying rules and laws: it means internalizing representations of

the ‘human type’ or the ‘human subject’ . . . in order to be recognized as a person in its

full right, to become presentable (fit to be seen) in order to be represented” (61). But this

is not to entirely give up the concept of humanity, but to recognize that in order to

become representable and visible as human within our current framework is already to

enter into an order of violence. In this way, the fullest expression of humanity still stands

upon our horizon as that which is yet to come, and that which shall, perhaps, remain

forever yet to come. And only by recognizing humanity as that which we never were, that

which we are not yet, and that which we may never be can the concept of humanity be

redeemed from the history of violence—both epistemic and real—wrought in its name.

To lay claim to the name of man would be too much, would be to claim as redeemed that

which cannot yet be made good. Indeed, we have not yet subsumed and overcome our

humanity, as the increasingly popular posthumanism might assume, but instead have

always remained not yet human, in the state of an antehumanism which holds the full

concept of humanity in a state of messianic suspension.

In this way, the concept of the human may be said to be properly utopic: it

belongs to no place and ultimately to no one. The term “utopia” itself performs a certain

linguistic play, as the combination of the eutopia and the utopia—the good place and the

no place—which can be found at work in Thomas Moore’s originary Utopia, and might

also be located in the limits of that human who would inhabit such a place. Sylvia Wynter

locates our current descriptive statement of Man in the conditions of modernity in which
 360

the specific spatial ordering of the Western episteme determined the borders of the

human. Divine providence was conceived as holding the landmass of Europe above its

assumed proper place under water, while the Torrid Zone and the Western hemisphere

were both thought uninhabitable by rational man; the Torrid Zone because it was thought

to be too hot for rational human habitation, and the Western Hemisphere because it was

ostensibly not held above the water by divine election. The discovery of those humans

outside of the West’s predetermined spatial understanding of humanity meant their often

violent integration into the West’s epistemic framework, negotiating the tensions between

Man and his non-anthropophorous Others. Thus the present conception of the human,

even with its apparently benevolent integration of its others, has served as the violent

institution as one particular form of ordering, one particular form of imagining human

being and its relation to the social and material world which has, in order to shore up its

own order, made unimaginable any possible alternative. To claim the human as utopic

then is to recognize the limits of the current conceptions of the human, and to call for the

need to constantly rethink and renegotiate the human that lies at the base of our

fundamental epistemic structures. It is to recognize the difficulty of that task set out by

Fanon in Wretched of the Earth: “For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades,

we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new

man” (316). This new human that is to be set afoot is not merely the institution of one

form of man that exists in the present, but that it must be made new.

Further, the utopic function to push our current conceptualization of society to its

limit, it is the attempt to think beyond the confines of our own thought to a liberated

society. The difficulty arises because the articulation of this liberated society takes place
 361

from within the limited standpoint of our own, and therefore is always limited. Thus, as

Eagleton notes in “Utopia and its Opposites,” utopia also functions as a figure of the

dystopian: “Since we can speak of what transcends the present in the language of the

present, we risk cancelling out our imaginings in the very act of articulating them. . . All

utopia is thus at the same time dystopia, since it cannot help reminding us of how we are

bound fast by history in the very act of trying to set us free from that bondage” (31). The

positing of utopia is always at the same time a reminder of the actual dystopia that we

inhabit; and the positing of the human is always at the same time a reminder that our

current conception is limited, is only one historical formation which is deformed by the

demands of our own mode of production. Indeed, the problem of articulating the utopian

future is also always one of articulating the form of humanity that might inhabit it, both

of which are limited by our present. The most prominent example of this may be in

Thomas Moore’s Utopia, where it is posited that both the chains for the slaves and the

chamber pots would be made out of gold. By linking gold to servitude and the

scatological functions of the body, it is denigrated as an object to be coveted; yet, the

very fact that this is necessary presupposes already our own structure of society in which

covetousness prevails. No matter how we try to figure the utopian or the human that

might inhabit it, we run into our own immanent limit placed upon the social nature of our

consciousness. And precisely because of this immanent limit, instead of reading utopia as

a positive figuration, Louis Marin, in Utopics, reads it as a self-deconstructive dis-

articulation that undoes its own formulation in order to expose the contradictions that

exist within our own form of society and attempt to neutralize them. The concept of the

human, too, might contain such neutralizing power.

 362

The Utopic Neutralization of Man

To name the human as utopic is not to claim that it merely occupies the space of

some ideal state of things; instead, the human is to be thought of as that form which

continually neutralizes any claim to be human. I thus want to emphasize the

understanding of utopia developed in Louis Marin’s Utopics and Fredric Jameson’s

reading of Marin in “Islands and Trenches.” What emerges from the readings of Marin

and Jameson is an understanding of the utopic as a form of neutralization that cancels out

the given contradictions and reconfigures them in a way that allows for the emergence of

new possibilities. The utopic text thus produces a mental operation that neutralizes the

predominant understanding of the social order. In a parallel fashion, the utopics of the

human might well allow the concept of the human to function as a means to neutralize the

initial contradiction between two genres within the human and make possible new

figurations, instead of its historical use of concretizing the bourgeois ethnoclass form of

Man against its Others. Central to the readings of both Marin and Jameson is the function

of the neutral, which serves as a structural inversion of Levi Strauss’ notion of myth. For

Levi Strauss in Structural Anthropology, “the purpose of myth is to provide a logical

model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it

happens, the contradiction is real)” (226). Myth is thus a means of attempting to smooth

over the contradiction that exists in the material by providing a solution on the logical

level; and it is clear how the concept of Man and its continual production of non-

anthropophorous Others, whose life and labor can be differentially valued, has served to

mythically conceal the central contradictions produced by capital.

 363

In contrast to the mythic resolution of real contradictions, the utopic functions to

expose the contradiction and raise it to a different level. The Utopian narrative is

conceived as “constituted by the union of the twin contradictories of the initial

opposition. . . a combination which, virtually a double cancellation of the initial

contradiction itself, may be said to effect the latter’s neutralization and to produce a new

term” (Jameson 79). The neutral thus performs a double cancellation of the initial

contradiction that exposes the impossibility of its full reconciliation by undermining

itself. In a form of a Greimas semiotic rectangle, the relations might be represented as

follows:

Mythic

S Resolution -S

-S S
Neutral Term

Figure 5: Greimasian Neutralization

Here, the neutral term performs not a dialectical resolution of the two pairs of terms, but a

double cancellation which deconstructs the mythic resolution while exposing the

impossibility of any simple resolution. This is the paradox of the neutral as expressed by

Marin: “If the synthesis of contraries is one and the other, both denied and conserved, the

neutral would mark out its empty place, waiting to be filled. Neither one nor the other,

waiting to be one and the other” (16). Thus the utopic is a dynamic force which opens a
 364

vacuum in the dominant conceptualization of reality by offering itself up as a solution

that deconstructs itself, a figure perpetually in process rather than a static moment. It

deconstructs itself and with itself the general ideology of representation and the

resolutions that ideology has proposed, allowing it to function as an object of mediation.

As process, it is “analogous to the riddles or the koan of the various mystical traditions,

or the aporias of classical philosophy, whose function is to provoke a fruitful

bewilderment and to jar the mind into heightened but unconceptualizable consciousness

of its own powers, functions, aims, and structural limitations” (Jameson, 87-88), not just

to refuting existing social relations, but also exposing the limits of the historical horizons

in which it is constructed. This neutralization which is central to the utopic offers a model

for posing a more open understanding of the human, a human which is at the same time

neither Man and its Others, and both one and the other. The human is thus not that form

of being which we occupy now, but the umconceptualizable limit which the utopic

always points toward and beyond. To place the human beyond any currently realized

genre of man thus preserves the empty place from its erasure in the structure of myth.

Yet, it is important to note that even while the utopic functions to deconstruct the

dominant ideology, it is not in itself beyond ideology; it is thus always a political form

which always must take a side. The utopic is, in Althusser’s sense, “an ideological

critique of ideology” (195), which nevertheless precedes the true understanding of the

historical contradiction and makes that contradiction available to a more theoretical

understanding. The negation effected against the initial mythic reconciliation of the

contradiction is made visible for critical analysis by the neutral, which serves as a

negation of the initial resolution. Thus the utopics of the human allows for that reified
 365

notion of Man to be disarticulated to reveal the system of contradictions it embodies and

mythically resolves, to make visible the silhouette of that figure of the human. The utopic

functions as an alienation effect that marks a critical moment in a society’s coming to

consciousness of its own conditions of existence, a point where changes in the material

base become available to critical consciousness by being first represented, though never

fully articulated, in utopic discourse. “Utopic fiction is thus an anticipating, but blind

judgment . . . This is so because for Raphael and More their present, their society hic et

nunc, does not include that possibility; it cannot articulate its own concepts. That will be

the epistemological privilege of the emerging society” (163). And because the fullness of

humanity is yet to come, and not merely a form that exists within the current system, it is

always beyond the articulation of our current society. Instead, the disarticulation of Man

prefigures a transformation in which society becomes capable of articulating the

previously hidden contradictions and thereby resolving them, even if that resolution

results in the creation of new contradictions which must themselves be articulated and

overcome.

Liberal humanism in our current moment might be understood as a kind of anti-

utopianism rather than in terms of its own understanding of itself as the fullest

development of human community and belonging. Tom Moylan develops the concept of

anti-utopia in Scraps of Untainted Sky, in order to make a distinction from dystopia.

While dystopia ultimately presents a formal inversion of utopia’s generic markers, which

nevertheless preserves the impulse towards radical change, the anti-utopia performs a flat

rejection of any utopian impulse. The term “anti-utopia” is opposed to dystopia in so far

as anti-utopia “should be reserved for that large class of works, both fictional and
 366

expository, which are directed against Utopia and utopian thought” (72). Thus liberal

humanism, in its reification of a particular form of man as the human, and ultimately its

hypostatization of the capitalist form of society, prevents any radical change and

functions as a static as a static representation that attempts to reify and fix a transforming

society. It attempts to prevent the movement of utopia that creates the cognition

necessary to negate the existing social conditions and make possible a qualitatively new

arrangement of society. The anti-utopia functions by attempting to show that any change

to the current social order will lead to catastrophic consequences, ultimately serving to

reinforce the given structures of exploitation. Thus liberal humanism can only confront

its Others through the integration of them into its own given order, while its actual others

are deemed inhuman or subhuman of not directly, then through the withdrawal of rights

and protections accorded to those who are properly human. The spectacular violence that

has marked the order of liberal humanism comes precisely from this logic where those

who do not fit within the predetermined structure of the human must be inhuman and can

therefore be subjected to total war.

Thus those figures of the sweat shop worker, the Chinese coolie, the Haitian

slave, and the zombie might be understood as dystopian figurations of the limits of our

current figure of man and the political economic systems from which it emerges and

which it reinforces. They function in the dystopian mode of revealing the negative the

negative tendencies of society, which constantly articulate the need for another

organization of the social world. In this way, the utopic and the dystopic are deeply

intertwined, in the same manner in which Theodor Adorno is at once the most pessimistic

and the most hopeful of the Frankfurt School philosophers, indeed, he is only because he
 367

is the most pessimistic that Adorno can remain the most hopeful. He is pessimistic in

terms of his uncompromising ability to discover the deformations in all forms of culture,

and it is only this which allows him to maintain hope in a qualitatively different society

and a qualitatively different way of life. In this way, Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno are

two sides to the same coin. If Ernst Bloch emphasizes the necessity of utopia in The

Principle of Hope, it is because his own social and material conditions in Nazi Germany

called out for the attempt to discover some hope within the context of a thoroughly

dystopian situation, just as for Adorno, caught in the false utopia of the United States, the

only exit was through the dystopian. In this way, dystopia is in alignment with utopia and

is shot through with strands of the utopian impulse which urges the imagination to

transgress the positivity of what exists into the negativity pronounced by the possibility

of what might be. According to Carl Freedman, “The construction of utopia among the

terrible reifications of actuality is true, not in the sense of attaining unproblematic

correspondence with pregiven reality, but in the sense of construing that which is at some

level only coming into being” (66). Utopia is then always on the side of becoming rather

than the side of being, always seeking to blast any given social constellation which has

crystallized into a monad out of the continuum of history, unfixing those social relations

that have become fixed and setting them into motion once again.

The alignment between the utopic and dystopian is brought about through a

negative reflection of the utopian in which the no-place of utopia is replaced with a sense

of the every-place of the dystopian text which stands in as a critique of the present

through its presentation of the fundamental conditions of its own modes of production.

Under the structure of late capitalism, this dystopia can be found not only in imaginary
 368

extrapolation, but in the lives of those exposed to unmitigated exploitation which calls

objectively for a new form of life. “Dystopia’s foremost truth lies in its ability to reflect

upon the causes of social and ecological evil as systemic. Its very textual machinery

invites the creation of alternative worlds in which the historical spacetime of the author

can be re-presented in a way that foregrounds the articulation of its economic, political,

and cultural dimensions” (Moylan, xii). This re-articulation functions as a form of

cognitive estrangement in which the author makes visible the elements of his own place

and time which impede the progression towards utopia. Dystopia thus has the “ability to

register the impact of an unseen and unexamined social system on the everyday lives of

everyday people” (xiii), making visible the systemic logic of the mildly disastrous.

Where disasters are assumed to be cataclysmic breaks with what went before, the

mildly disasters emphasize the tiny, systemically incorporated catastrophes which

perpetuate rather than rupture ongoing modes of oppression. It is the unremarkable

disaster of everyday life proceeding in its current, unredeemed form, to use a

Benjaminian turn of phrase. Because of the way in which these banal disasters are

incorporated in the dominant system, they can only be made visible through their

presentation in the heightened form in dystopia, a form of cognitive estrangement which

negatively figures the empty space through which qualitatively new social relations might

emerge. The dystopian is then, to borrow a phrase Herbert Marcuse uses in another

context, the power of negative thinking. If Foucault notes that the figure of Man might

some day disappear like a figure drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea, one might well

imagine the figures of non-anthropophorous humanity as those waves that will one day

negate it to open the space for new articulations within the man that will go hand-in-hand
 369

with the development of new social relations that would constitute the utopic. And

perhaps, only in this way, as the task of undoing what has become reified, can the

concept of the human be employed.

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