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Intoxication and Acceleration

Presented at ‘Intoxication 2013’, the University of London Institute in Paris Postgraduate conference (28 June 2013

Academia.edu version for download

Aversion to information. Rudiments of a state of rapture. Great sensitivity to open doors, loud talk, music.
Walter Benjamin, first experiment in taking hashish, 18 December 1927[1]

In his interview ‘The Rhetoric of Drugs’ (1989), Jacques Derrida remarks on how the drug user is condemned for their escapism from community: ‘he cuts himself off from the world’ and ‘escapes into a world of simulacrum and fiction’.[2] The drug user is similarly condemned on the grounds of a politics of productivity, as they ‘produce […] nothing’ (236). In line with his tracing of the instabilities and equivocations of this ‘rhetoric of drugs’, Derrida also notes how drugs constantly cross the line of production. The supposedly escapist and unproductive can turn productive. In the case of sports drugs can become, Derrida suggests, the ‘artificially natural’ mode of augmentation that could produce the superior ‘being’ (249). Drugs, as Derrida notes, are a pharmakon (234). In this case the pharmakon lies in the unstable oscillation between escape into the transcendent and immersion in the immanent.[3]

            Here, I want to trace intoxication (and more particularly drug intoxication) as a site of the desire for immanence, production, and the possibility of a new ‘being’. This is intoxication not as unproductive detachment from or dissolution of the social bond, but intoxication as attachment, immersion, and (hyper) productivity. Intoxication is taken not some transcendent experience, some escape from the social or from the body, but a radicalized experience of immanence, of insertion within the social bond to its maximum extent, and of radical intensification. Of course this form of intoxication aims at breaking the social bond, or ‘desocializing’ as Derrida puts it (250), but through a traversal or line of flight into immanence. The ‘social disconnection’ (Derrida 251) that drugs cause works, in this case, by an absolute connection.

            If drugs, and other experiences of intoxication, are taken as paths to an experiential immanence then this immanence can only be achieved through acceleration. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari state: ‘All drugs fundamentally concern speeds, and modifications of speed.’[4] We accelerate from beyond the stasis of our existent social position into an intensified experience of immanence that tracks lines of flight. These lines do not lead into a transcendent world, but reconstruct and rearrange the actual world.

   

         To be clear my aim is not to validate this coupling of intoxication, acceleration, and immanence. Instead I wish to critically explore what I regard as a particular fantasy of immersive immanence and its correlation with acceleration and production. This is not intended as yet another moralist discourse on drugs. In fact, as we will see, actual drugs are not always at stake. Drugs take on the role of being a simulacra or fiction. What is at stake is a desire. This is a desire for a real production. Contrary to the simulacral discourse of drugs, the simulacrum is put at the service of a collapsing of fantasy in intensification and immanence.

Giving them Drugs, taking their Lives Away

In his review essay on the work of Gilles Deleuze ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, published in 1970, Michel Foucault suggested LSD and opium might counter stupidity. He concluded:

Drugs – if we can speak of them generally – have nothing at all to do with truth and falsity; only to fortune-tellers do they reveal a world ‘more truthful than the real.’ In fact, they displace the relative positions of stupidity and thought by eliminating the old necessity of a theatre of immobility. But perhaps, if it is given to thought to confront stupidity, drugs, which mobilize it, which color, agitate, furrow, and dissipate it, which populate it with differences and substitute for the rare flash a continuous phosphorescence, are the source of a partial thought – perhaps.

Deleuze remarked in a footnote ‘What will people think of us?’

            Foucault’s remark suggests that in part the effect of drugs is to eliminate a ‘theatre of immobility’. They provide the intensification, mobilization, and acceleration, which offer an experience of ‘continuous phosphorescence’. It is the work of Deleuze and Guattari that takes-up this experience in a mode that links drugs and acceleration. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972) is relatively silent on drugs, with only a few mentions, in regards to R.D. Laing and American literature. The book is rather more explicit about acceleration, with its suggestion that ‘We can never go too far in the direction of deterritorialization.’[5] The generally ‘trippy’ (to use an appropriately kitsch term) atmosphere of some parts of the book, the selective manner of its adoption, and the milieu to which it appealed, meant that despite its often marked tone of sobriety Anti-Oedipus was taken by some as a license for drug and other forms of ‘accelerative’ experimentation.

            A Thousand Plateaus (1980) reconsiders and recalibrates the discourse on drugs. Deleuze and Guattari still insist that ‘Drug assemblage’ is one of molecular revolution, allowing us to perceive the imperceptible, have a molecular perception, and invest that perception with desire:[6] ‘Drugs give the unconscious the immanence and plane that psychoanalysis has consistently botched (perhaps the famous cocaine episode marked a turning point that forced Freud to renounce a direct approach to the unconscious).’ (284) Drugs don’t turn to the fantasy production that marks the psychoanalytic unconscious as ‘a dualism machine’ (284). Rather than the ‘gross molarities’ of Oedipus, drugs can embark on imperceptible becomings that are constructive and immanent.

            While Deleuze and Guattari insist, in Spinozist style, that drugs must be granted their own causality and can’t be reduced to ‘generalities on pleasure and misfortune’ (283), they also sound a more cautionary note. Drugs may be a matter of speed, but this speed is variable: the time of drugs is at once one of ‘mad speed’ and ‘posthigh slownesses’ (283). That is, what William Burroughs calls ‘junk time.’ Deleuze and Guattari now suggest that acceleration, ‘mad speed’, is not to simply be endorsed, as deterritorialization can run out-of-control. A delinking line, which is only speed, means ‘the lines of flight coil and start to swirl in black holes’ (285). In such cases the drug user does not connect with immanence, but reterritorializes. They reterritorialize on the identity of the user or addict: ‘The causal line, or the line of flight, of drugs is constantly being segmentarized under the most rigid of forms, that of dependency, the hit and the dose, the dealer.’ (ATP: 284) We are no longer, as Deleuze and Guattari say, ‘master of speeds’ (285).

            Of course we could and probably should note that this discourse risks returning to the extrinsic moralism Deleuze and Guattari has claimed to avoid. Accusing drug users or addicts of being locked-in anti-social identities and chains of dependency is not so far from the discourse of the police. Of course Deleuze and Guattari would insist that their aim is to suggest the drug addict returns themselves to social orders of control, rather than pursuing a true or real construction that might rupture with the normative forms of territorialisation. This is part of their rejection of fantasy, and their insistence that the collapse of the drug user is one that results in falling into ‘hallucinations, delusions, false perceptions, phantasies, or paranoid outbursts’ (285). What is wrong with these experiences is that they are not ‘rich or full’, they are not ‘passages of intensities’, but result in ‘a vitrified or emptied body’ (285). The problem with this use of drugs is that it is not immanent enough – ‘Drug addicts continually fall back on what they wanted to escape: a segmentarity all the more rigid for being marginal, a territorialisation all the more artificial for being based on chemical substances, hallucinatory forms, and phantasy subjectifications.’ (285)

            Rather than disappearance or immersion, the emphasis now falls on construction. This is an ‘art of dosages, since overdose is a danger’ (160). It is not a matter of blazing a path. Instead it is even a matter of absence of abstinence: getting drunk, but on pure water’, or ‘getting high, but by abstention’. This is a critique of drug use based upon a discourse of immanence: ‘Drugs do not guarantee immanence; rather the immanence of drugs allows one to forgo them.’ (286) While I think this is not particularly satisfactory as a mode of critique, it indicates the priority Deleuze and Guattari give to a ‘molecular’ becoming that folds-in to immanence. Constantly warding off any trace of the negative results in its occulted return, which tries to specify and delimit what molecules we can connect with. This selection, unsurprisingly, in the name of a ‘vital assemblage’ (286). To use the ironic sample of Emperion’s classic track ‘Narcotic Influence’: ‘Giving them drugs, taking their lives away’… Deleuze and Guattari conclude, in seeming contradiction, that drugs don’t lead to the plane of immanence, but ‘in fact the plane must distill its own drugs, remaining master of speeds and proximities.’ (286)

Ya Buzzin

In response, the discourse of Nick Land and the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit (CCRU), articulated at Warwick in the 1990s, insists on a return to full-blown immanence. Rejecting any holding back, and working in the wake of the mass pharmacological experiment of rave culture, they strip-out the cautionary moralism of Deleuze and Guattari’s discourse. Their motto could have been William Burroughs statement, from The Naked Lunch (1959): ‘The addict regards his body impersonally as an instrument to absorb the medium in which he lives, evaluates his tissue with the cold hands of a horse trader.’[7]

        Here acceleration abandons selection. In Land’s words ‘Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.’ The only option is to immerse in the backwash of this runaway process, which in Land’s metaphysics infiltrates the present from its realized future. What Deleuze and Guattari tended to regard as fleeting and asymptotic converges on absolute deterritorialization that has happened, but not now or here: ‘Neo-China arrives from the future.’ Immanence, in this discourse, is perfectly aligned with the trendlines of contemporary capitalism taken as site of absolute deterritorialization momentarily deferred. What we had now, or then (in the ’90s), were traces of that future which we should seize as paths to full future immanence.

            The accelerative beats-per-minute of rave into Jungle and drum n’ bass offered a new passage into lived affective intensity and immanence – ‘text at sample velocity’. This was combined with the drug culture of rave and post-rave, which ranged across the spectrum of pharmaceutical options in the pursuit of catching-up with that speed of the music. Walter Benjamin, writing of his experience on hashish in the 1920s, noted: ‘The music, which meanwhile kept rising and falling, I called the “rush switches of jazz.”’[8] He continues, hilariously, ‘I have forgotten on what grounds I permitted myself to mark the beat with my foot. This is against my education, and it did not happen without inner disputation.’[9] Rave and post-rave dance music cultivated these ‘rush switches’ to an extreme degree. Drug use + Jungle = CCRU, we could say. True abandonment requires the breaking of all bonds, and drugs and Jungle would be two means.

            This also had a deliberately anti-political element, derived as from Lyotard’s delirial accelerationist rupture with ‘left moralism’ in Libidinal Economy (1974). In Mark Fisher’s retrospective: ‘The Ccru defined itself against the sclerotic stranglehold that a certain moralizing Old Left had on the Humanities academy. There was a kind of exuberant anti-politics, a ‘technihilo’ celebration of the irrelevance of human agency’. The political and cultural fate of this discourse was not unpredictable. Embrace of the trendlines welcomed self-dissolution, which gained an appropriate accompanying mythology. The retooling of accelerationism in the present moment owes much to repetition of this moment, which indicates the strangely nostalgic form of such a Futurist discourse.

            While more admirably rigorous than Deleuze and Guattari, and less beholden to the minor or molecular ‘good hippy’ (as Lyotard sarcastically put it vis-à-vis Baudrillard), the discourse of Land and the CCRU was deliberately terminal. Immanence achieved, but deferred until its retroactive arrival, could easily generate the same moralisms of adjustment and conformity to acceleration and immanence that we found with Deleuze and Guattari. In this case adjustment and immersion come from the future and the traces of this ‘future’ are prefigurative markers to which we have to conform. This is an inverse moralism of conformity to anti-moralism traced through a delireal sci-fi future that draws its elements from the retro-kitsch of the present.

I’m the Platform

For one recent instance of this form of immersive, immanent and intoxicated ‘acceleration’ I want to consider Beatriz Preciado’s description of being-on-testosterone as a ‘transgendered’ body. I’m not so much interested in the politics of this particular experience in terms of gender, so much as the language and descriptive terms used to analyse this state. Her description is one distinguished from other drugs – coke, speed – to indicate ‘the feeling of being in perfect harmony with the rhythm of the city’. This already suggests the resonant immersion in the forms and forces of contemporary global capital, figured in the ‘rhythm’ of the city.

            This is an experience intimately and explicitly connected with contemporary neoliberal capitalism, which Preciado characterizes as ‘a new type of hot, psychotropic punk capitalism.’ Here capitalism converges and incites ‘molecular’ biopolitical transformation through ‘micro-prosthetic mechanisms’ and new ‘multimedia technical protocols’. What interests me is that, in common with the CCRU, the strategy Preciado pursues is one of identification and immersion with these new forms of power. The ‘drug’ experience, this molecular intoxication, is not a device of transcendence or escape per se, but rather insertion with and within the ‘chains’ of signifiers and ‘materialities’ of the present.

            The result is the common gesture of the immanent and networked litany:

I inject a crystalline, oil-soluble steroid carbon chain of molecules, and with it a fragment of the history of modernity. I administer to myself a series of economic transactions, a collection of pharmaceutical decisions, clinical tests, focus groups, and business management techniques. I connect to a baroque network of exchange and to economic and political flow-chains for the patenting of the living. I am linked by T to electricity, to genetic research projects, to mega-urbanization, to the destruction of forests and the biosphere, to pharmaceutical exploitation of living species, to Dolly the cloned sheep, to the advance of the Ebola virus, to HIV mutation, to antipersonnel mines and the broadband transmission of information. In this way, I become one of the somatic connectives that make possible the circulation of power, desire, release, submission, capital, rubbish, and rebellion.

The conclusion: ‘I’m the platform that makes possible the materialization of political imagination.’

            This is an intoxicated and willed extinction of the self, especially the gendered self, into the mere ‘platform’ for affects, materialities, and signifiers. Insertion is the aim. Yet, this is figured not simply as immanent extinction and immersion at the expense of agency. Instead a strange new form of ‘agency’ is born: ‘I’m both the terminal of one of the apparatuses of neoliberal governmentality and the vanishing point through which escapes the will to control of the system.’ What might be thought to imply the surrender of the self to neoliberal capital is, it is claimed, a ‘vanishing point’ to immanent exit. This is registered in the usual discourse of neoliberal availability: ‘I am a copyleft biopolitical agent that considers sex hormones free and open biocodes, whose use shouldn’t be regulated by the State commandeered by pharmaceutical companies.’

            The aim is to ‘produce a new sexual and affective platform’ in which ‘T is only a threshold, a molecular door, a becoming between multiplicities.’ The reference to the ‘threshold’ and ‘molecular door’ echo the weird fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, or Lovecraft channelled via Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. The choice is, however, of what I’d call the hippy Lovecraft. This is the Dunsanian Lovecraft of transformation and metamorphosis, of Through the Gates of the Silver Key, happily consonant with Deleuze’s Jungian roots. What is displaced is the Lovecraft of horror. The molecular door is affirmed and positivised as exit and escape, traversing the platform-being of contemporary capitalism, rather than the negative horror of loss and dispersion.

            This is the strange logic of holding-on at work, in which immersion is disappearance but one that pushes or nudges immanence beyond the supposed limits of the capitalist form. True to Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-oedipal formulations it traces agency and possibility as modes of ‘hypertrophy’.[10] The primary target is the State, as symbol of control of fluxes and flows, which makes the usual correlation of power with planning, capture, and transcendent control. Immanence flees beneath, in terms of riding, supposedly, the lines of capitalist flight. The conformity of this strategy with neoliberal capitalism’s own imaginary is not commented upon.

Closing the molecular door

The problematic core around which these discourses turn is one of absorption into actuality as the site of transformation. The stakes here turn on the right choice of molecule to enter into molecular becomings. This is a metaphysics of self as platform to insert the self into ‘real’ production. ‘Real’ here is not the usual sense of ‘real production’ as manufacturing, etc., versus ‘financial or fictional capital’. Obviously this distinction doesn’t hold up. Instead ‘real’ here has the Lacanian sense, vectored through Deleuze and Guattari, of immersion into a machinic production that encompasses all the flows and fluxes, simulacral and ‘real’, in one metaphysics of differentiated production. Of course, I’d suggest, lurking within this metaphysics is a suspicion of the fictional or simulacral, which is rapidly displaced by the productive virtual.

            In the moment of capitalist crisis this immersive acceleration refigures the triggering of production, of creative destruction directed against the ‘bourgeois ego’, as we immanently inhabit our own potential or actual obsolescence. Drugs or intoxication are not matters of insulating or cushioning against this loss, but active choices to intensity and inhabit this process. The ‘platform being’ of the present moment is the being of creative destruction. What is welcomed here is not the accelerative force of capital, which has dispersed into intractable crisis, but the future possibility of restarting that acceleration through stripping out the ‘residues’ of humanism and the remnants of the welfare State.

            This is the peculiar intoxicated acceleration of our moment: a capitalist ostalgie that retools the search for transcendence through drugs into immanence that selects only overload. The inadequacy of this discourse should be self-evident. The fading of dreams of jouissance in counter-culture is turned into a nihilistic inhabiting of the superior force of the only actuality we have: capitalism in crisis. What is lost is any negativity, any displacement or resistance, as that negativity is hyperbolically reinscribed as the negation of the self. It’s enough to make you want to take drugs.

---

[1] Walter Benjamin, On Hashish, intro. Marcus Boon, ed. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), p.20.

[2] Jacques Derrida, ‘The Rhetoric of Drugs’, in Points: interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp.228-254, pp.235-6.

[3] The exception to this structure, in fact an exception at the origin, is Thomas De Quincey. His Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) not only insists that opium is not intoxicating, but that is also serves a transcendental function. Opium increases the capacity of the intellect to subsume content under form; in the language of Kant it augments the transcendental schematism.

[4] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), p.282.

[5] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus [1972], trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p.417.

[6] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.282. Further page references in text.

[7] William Burroughs, The Naked Lunch [1959] (London: Paladin, 1986), p.63.

[8] Benjamin, On Hashish, p.55.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p.98.

Tuesday, 28 May 2013

Ursine Accelerationism

In Andre's Platonov's The Foundation Pit the 'unknown last proletarian' (107) and last instance of 'residual exploited labour' (107) on the collective farm is a bear who hammers at the forge. In fact the forge is a 'shock' workshop and the bear is not only the last proletarian but also the first shock worker (udarniki). After been taken around the collective farm to denounce kulaks - in actuality, those who have mistreated him - the bear sees a banner 'For the Party, for Party loyalty, for the Shock Labor Forcing Open for the Proletariat the Doors into the Future!' (128).

Taking this injunction absolutely the bear begins to hammer out iron at a frantic rate, distressing the villagers as his labour threatens to ruin the iron (and therefore figuring the excess of 'shock work' that stormed to destructive attempts at production). The bear wants to force the door for a proletarian future 'expending all this furious, speechless joy into the zeal of labor' (128).

This is the interchange of animality and the status of the proletariat - the proletariat as animal and animal as proletariat (see Timofeeva). In Annie Epelboin's analysis, this is acceleration as destructive return to chaos:

'The bear symbolizes a prehistoric future .... He casts doubt on the validity of the creation myth itself. As an "unknown proletarian," representing the people as whole, and as a blacksmith, the bear is remiscent of the "hammerer-bear" of Siberian myth who, by inventing the forge, inaugurates cosmic and social order, presiding over the creation of the world. Platonov's bear, however, does not so much create the world as annihilate it. He is, at least potentially, the agent of ultimate destruction. Wanting to force open the doors of the future, he threatens to return the world to primordial chaos. Wanting to force the pace, to accelerate time, he shows us that time is reversible.'

Annie Epelboin, "Metaphorical Animals and the Proletariat" in Essays in Poetics 27 (Autumn 2002), p.181, qtd. in Andrei Platonov, The Foundation Pit, p.222

The shock acceleration of labour in 'speechless joy' (jouissance?), reverses itself into a chaos that ruins any linearity. In the moment of the revolution, in the revolutionary negativity of the proletariat doubled with the animal, the revolution revolves and reverses.

Wednesday, 15 May 2013

There is no "aesthetics of communization": A Reply by Daniel Spaulding (guest post)

Many thanks to Daniel Spaulding for his rapid response to my paper 'Aesthetics of Communization'. I hope to reply on Monday, but there is probably more common ground that might at first appear.

 There is no “aesthetics of communization.” Indeed to claim as much suggests that the inquiry has been posed at the wrong level, as if communization were a thing to which aesthetics might be attached – a predicate added to a subject. Communization is not a subject; it is, rather, a process that abolishes existing relations. The question then is whether a process (moreover, a process that has never yet truly occurred) can in fact possess an aesthetics. If we take “aesthetics” broadly to mean sensuous appearance, then yes, communization will necessarily have its modes of appearance; there will be movements of matter, form, affect, and so forth that will neither look nor sound nor smell nor taste nor feel like the world mediated by capital. However, if we take seriously communization theory’s basic contention that revolution in the current phase of capitalism cannot proceed as the affirmation of an existing position within class society, but only as a break with the reproduction of the totality of capitalist relations, then there is today no standpoint from which to elaborate a positive aesthetics adequate to communism. From the perspective of communization we cannot possibly speak of an ascendant proletarian art in the same way as we can speak of the historical ascendance of bourgeois art, because communization takes the form of the immediate abolition of class society rather than the affirmation and universalization of a class that might possess its own particular representational structures.

Hence the “aesthetics of communization” can only be designated as a placeholder for the forms that are, or will be, immanent to the practice of negating existing forms of appearance (the real abstractions of capitalist society). From our current standpoint there can be no counter-aesthetics opposed to the commodity-form, for instance, but only an aesthetics of the commodity-form’s contradictions and, perhaps, of the material practice by which that form may eventually be abolished. The same goes for any hypothetical counter-aesthetics of, say, free giving as opposed to exchange, or of immediately social individuality as opposed to the reifications of gender. To the extent that this is a positive aesthetics, however, it is not an “aesthetics of communization” but rather something else, perhaps worth analyzing in its own right (art in this guise may be the object of the disciplines of art history, aesthetics properly speaking, and so forth, but not communization theory). On the other hand, to the extent this aesthetics is only negative it is perhaps not an aesthetics at all but a practice. Hence Benjamin Noys is quite right to point to a double-bind: for communization, there is no aesthetics but in practice, but if there is “aesthetics” there is no practice. To describe the “aesthetics of communization” is to describe something that cannot exist except potentially and in contradictory form, and that would also cease to exist if it were to be realized, given that “art” as we know it is also a category of capitalist society.

Unless I am mistaken, however, Noys is not responding to an existing positive aesthetics of communization per se but is rather attempting to describe, first of all, the aesthetics of communization theory, and second, the implications of this body of theory for artistic practice. Thus his critique is posed at the level of representation, as a meta-critique. I believe this equivocation between practice and text explains many of the paradoxes of his essay. Noys observes a contradiction between the “figures, tropes, and forms” of the communization literature – namely, “immediacy, immanence, acceleration, and dispersion” – on the one hand, and the persistence of artistic practice, on the other. He also superimposes this contradiction onto the polarization within communization theory between groups that affirm the possibility of elaborating “forms of life” in the present as opposed to those who deny any prefigurative politics. The question he asks is: How is communization theory able to reconcile its allegiance to purely negative practice 1) with the continued existence of particularized artistic practice as opposed to generic social practice, and 2) with its own existence during non-revolutionary periods? I take his implication to be that communization theory does not reconcile these problems: it is a contradictory formation. It therefore seems reasonable to interpret Noys as offering preliminaries for a symptomatic reading of the structural contradictions of communization discourse – of its political unconscious, perhaps. In the process, however, “communization” comes to name a text rather than a practice.

It seems to me that Noys’s reading of communization in terms of essentially literary categories misapprehends the relation between theory, practice, and representation, at least at this historical conjuncture and as elaborated in the communization texts under consideration. The problem is that Noys can seem to collapse the temporality of theory with that of the historical limit or horizon itself. (I should be clear that I am now speaking primarily of communization theory in its non-voluntarist articulation; Noys’s criticisms may indeed apply to certain ideas grouped under the label, but the tactic of identifying a tension within “communization theory” already presumes the field’s coherence – its difference, for example, from insurrectionary anarchism – when this in fact remains to be argued.) Communization theory may then be reduced to a fetishization of the utmost break, rather than a reflection on the structure of the social totality that produces the break. Consequently the persistence of other things besides revolution itself is taken as a problem for the theory rather than as an element of what it in fact predicts. What yet remains to be done (communization) is then identified as what is supposed to be happening now; what is supposed to be happening then calls for an aesthetics (since aesthetics above all refers to present appearances); what is now happening in reality is then found inadequate to the (distorted) image of the theory; and finally the “aesthetic” element is found to be contradictory due to the collapse of one temporality into the other. Such a perspective ultimately attributes communization theory to a normative or utopian standpoint as opposed to recognizing the theory as conditioned by possibilities immanent to processes that are already occurring but which do not yet constitute a revolutionary situation.

To ward off this line of reasoning it is necessary to insist on the uneven temporality of present struggles. While it is possible to say that accumulation of surplus capital alongside surplus labor, the weakening of the wage as the dominant form of social mediation, the destruction of unions and the left, and so on, increasingly point to communization as the logic of proletarian struggle in the present moment, it would clearly be absurd to claim that none of the elements of the “programmatist” era survive into the post-1960s period. Nor are these forms present merely as archaisms, to be swept away before the millenarian revolution: they are exactly what remain to be overcome in struggle. The reading of communization theory as “accelerationist” in a pejorative sense may then result from eliding structural analysis of a revolutionary sequence possible (but by no means certain to transpire) under current or imminent conditions with the literal time of the present. The fact that many texts in this corpus argue that communization must be rapid and contagious is strictly speaking another issue; these texts do not necessarily argue that the “prairie fire” will break out tomorrow, nor that it will escape being extinguished, but rather suggest what will be necessary for the reproduction of non-capitalist life. A critique of this particular aspect of communization theory would have to be offered in terms of the feasibility of other strategies in a given (if hypothetical) revolutionary conjuncture, rather than lodged against an undifferentiated “accelerationism.”

What remains, now, is to draw conclusions for current practice – both political and artistic, though it is the latter that concerns us at the moment. Let me repeat that there is no aesthetics of communization. This is not, however, to say that we cannot “make it with communization.” Even for an analysis that accepts the thesis of real subsumption, the totality of capitalism remains contradictory: indeed this analysis, as opposed to the pessimistic conclusions of Debord and the later Frankfurt School, has no greater purpose than to indicate that the dialectic of capital’s expansion leads to the destruction of its own conditions of reproduction. Hence the ruptures from which a practice may be elaborated are not positive/normative positions external to capitalism but are rather immanent to capitalism’s structure as the “moving contradiction.” In turn, the appeal to a “beneath” of the state of things that Noys questions as a form of “lurking vitalism” does not necessarily call forth an ontology of capture and escape, but rather indicates that the forms of appearance presented as true in capitalism are in fact only one side of a contradiction. The point here is not that real abstraction is mere illusion – to be dispelled, perhaps, with the aid of art – but rather that each instance of abstraction (value, abstract labor) has as its reverse an instance of the concrete or particular (use-value, concrete labor). These instances of the particular are subsumed to the totality but are nonetheless in contradiction with it. Indeed both the general and the particular as they exist for us are within capitalism; communization is not the affirmation of one pole (use-value, concrete labor) at the expense of the other but the abolition of both, and hence also of the totality. The persistence of contradictory forms is then simply the material with which art has to do today. If art has a function in anticapitalist practice it may now be to hold open the non-identity or gap at the heart of the capitalist value-form, not so much as a defensive maneuver against the universality of bad life, but rather as a material practice conditioned by the real movement of negation.

Sunday, 12 May 2013

The Aesthetics of Communization, Xero, Kline & Coma Gallery (May 11 2013)

Link to downloadable version

Communization is a theory of revolution primarily developed out of the French ultra-left during the mid-1970s. It poses the necessity for revolution as the immediate process of communist measures – communization – without transition. Here I want to talk about the aesthetics of communization in two senses. The first is to probe the kinds of aesthetic figures, tropes, and forms that communization theory uses to construct its own particular ‘problematic’. This is not, to be clear, to dismiss communization as ‘merely’ an aesthetic politics. Instead it is a way to grasp the form of communization, including the diversity of those forms. There are, as we will see, different communizations and different ways of posing the problem of communization. One way to grasp this plurality is to trace different aesthetic emphases and choices in the deployment and use of the key figures and tropes of communization. The second sense of the aesthetics of communization I will explore concerns the implications of communization theory for aesthetics and the contemporary practice of art. What would art after communization look (or sound, or read) like? Again, consideration of this sense will bring out tensions and differences in the forms of communization. Can we practice a communizing art? Is art impossible in the horizon of capital? If that’s the case can we practice the impossibility of art?

Figures of Communisation

The refiguration of communism as communization suggests the centrality of the figure of activity and process. ‘Communism’ is, precisely, an ‘ism’, a suffix forming the name of a system or school of thought, while ‘ization’ is a suffix denoting the act, process, or result of doing something. This activity or process is one that is apparently tautological: communization is the production of communism by communization: ‘[T]he communist production of communism’ (Anon 2011: 6); or ‘Communisation is not the struggle for communism; it is communism that constitutes itself against capital.’ (B.L. 2011: 148). There are no non-communist ways to communism; hence communization is communism is communization. We make communism by making communism. If this is the conditioning trope, I want to explore the tautological process of communization in the linked figures of immediacy, immanence, acceleration, and dispersion. In terms of their destination in a common fluidity it will be no surprise that we find these figures merging and flowing into each other.

 The activity or process of communization is also immediate. While a process or activity suggests something which takes time, the time that communization takes can only be the immediate production of communist relations: ‘The revolution is communisation; communism is not its project or result.’ (Anon 2011: 6) There is no figure or problem of transition from capitalism to communism via socialism or, if we are more sceptical, we could say that transition is displaced or refused. So, there is no transition to a new communist state, but rather ‘the simultaneous disappearance of the social classes’ (de Mattis 2011: 24). If there is no need to build or make communism, then why is communization an activity? It is an immediate activity in the process of revolution itself, which refuses any non-communist measures (such as the seizure of the state, the retention of money, maintaining armies or other capitalist institutions, etc.). The qualitative leap to revolution (Hic Rhodus, hic Salta!) is the leap into communization.

This immediacy is linked with the trope of acceleration (which I will discuss separately later): ‘The revolution will be both geographic and without fronts: the starting points of communisation will always be local and undergo immediate and very rapid expansion, like the start of a fire.’ (B.L. 2011: 154; my italics) It used to be a ‘single spark’ that would start a ‘prairie fire’ and we don’t seem so far from this Maoist figure, except we now have the refusal of any slowing down in this incendiary process.

Of course the deferred question is when does this immediate process begin, or has it already begun? Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, who make occasional use of the term (there are some brief mentions of communization in This is Not a Program (2011: 68), and at greater length in the Call), imply that communization has begun now with forms-of-life and communes that escape the net(work) of imperial capital. On the other hand, Theorié Communiste (TC) insist that it can only begin in the revolution and hence all that we can have is a negative prefiguration of the limits of capitalism and glimpses of this future moment. This also suggests how activity and immediacy interact: our activity is making communism immediately, but this can’t be done simply immediately. It will take time: either the time of struggles from now into communism, or the time of the revolution itself as we hit the limits of capitalism.

If the temporal figure is immediate we might say the ‘spatial’ figuration is immanence. We are drowning is the waters of capitalism and the advice, as in Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), is not to struggle out of the water, which is to drown for sure, but to immerse in the destructive element. There is no outside, no cobblestones beneath the beach; we are subsumed by capitalist social relations horizontally, across the planet, and vertically, down into the very building-blocks of life. In Gilles Dauvé’s amusing characterization TC are accused of producing a ‘proletarian structuralism’ (Dauvé 2008: 93), in which capitalism dominates all. This characterization of immanence carries different inflections: from the extreme position of TC – in which capitalism is totality, but contradictory totality – to Tiqqun’s emphasis on forms-of-life that can traverse capitalism on its own ground, or to Dauvé and Nesic’s assertion of invariant communist struggle.

It is at these points of the inscription of struggle that we encounter the figure of acceleration. We have already seen how immediacy is linked to acceleration: ‘communisation will always be local and undergo immediate and very rapid expansion, like the start of a fire.’ The dominance of capitalism at all points implies the acceleration of struggle at all points: ‘[E]verything depends on the struggle against capital, which either deepens and extends itself or loses pace and perishes quickly.’ (B.L. 2011: 148; my italics) If ‘the movement [of communisation] decelerates’ (B.L. 2011: 150), then we fall back from communisation and into socialisation (a more ‘traditional’ process of the socialisation of the means of production). To force the immediate production of communization requires the speed to outpace the forces of reaction, which are seen as implanted largely within the process of revolution (another contention that could be debated[1]).

This acceleration also relies on a dispersion of points of struggle, thanks to the loss of compactness of the proletarian condition. The end of what TC call ‘programmatism’ – the traditional forms of workers’ identity, affirmed in unions, parties, and states – produces a dispersion of the proletarian condition. Rather than dispersion indicating a weakening of energies, instead it is taken by communization as suggesting a pluralisation that requires no condenser (to borrow from Trotsky’s image of the party as piston and the proletariat as steam). These dispersed energies recompose, for TC, a new figure of the proletariat without party and formal organization. For Tiqqun they indicate a pluralisation of the struggles of forms-of-life which don’t simply cohere into the ‘proletarian’ as classically conceived.

These are all figures of fluidity: ‘Human activity as a flux is the only presupposition of its collective, that is to say individual, pursuit.’ (B.L. 2011: 152) This fluidity predicates on constant expansion: ‘communisation can only exist in a dynamic of endless enlargement.’ (de Mattis 2011: 25) This figural context, in which prefiguration lies unstably on either side, both here-and-now and in the process of revolution, seems to me the tension communization bequeaths to contemporary practice, and contemporary artistic practice. Do we have simply a negative prefiguration, which I’ll discuss shortly, or can something emerge that indicates a possible future?

The End of Programmatism

In terms of our second sense of the aesthetics of communization – what are the implications of communisation for the practice of art today? – I want to suggest we can draw on the notion of the end of programmatism proposed by TC, and the general agreement by communizers of all stripes that ‘traditional’ forms of workers’ organization are finished or empty. If we take the parallel Alain Badiou (2007) draws between the political avant-garde of the Leninist Party and the artistic avant-garde of the 1920s in The Century, we could suggest that both forms have been hollowed-out. The end of programmatism is also, we could say, the end of the programme of the avant-garde – attached to small groups, privileged artists, the manifesto, etc. Badiou, elsewhere, concludes on the need for a post-party politics, and so we could also suggest a ‘post-avant-garde art’. Of course, declaration of the death of the avant-garde and calls for reinvention of the avant-garde are commonplace to the point of banality; even the proposals of ‘relational’ or ‘post-production’ art by Nicholas Bourriaud, borrow this trope. What kind of precision, if any, can communization bring to this situation?

One way to answer this question is to consider the reflections of TC on the ‘avant-garde’ practice of the Situationists. Guy Debord, de facto ‘leader’ of the SI, was acutely conscious of the finitude of the avant-garde. In his last film In girum imus nocte et consimimur igni (1978) Debord stated that: ‘Avant-gardes have only one time; and the best thing that can happen to them is to have enlivened their time without outliving it.’ (2003: 182) Although they display this awareness TC argue that the SI remains in an equivocal position on the cusp of the end of programmatism, both artistically and politically. On the one hand, they are able to trace out the end of art and the end of work, the impossibility of proceeding in terms set even by an ultra-left programme. On the other hand, they have nothing to replace this programme with and so fall back on nostalgia or practices which invoke the old models they have ruled out.

While the SI aimed at a dialectical supersession of art through its suppression and realization in revolutionary practice they tended to remain split between the aesthetic, with most artists expelled in 1962, on the one hand, and the political termination of art, on the other, with art returning in nostalgia for past adventures and possibilities. In the first aesthetic moment the ‘constructed situations’ of the early SI presage revolution in the forms of enclaves or moments within the reign of the spectacle. They are affirmative counter-possibilities, and this belief in a counter-art remains close to the belief in an affirmative proletarian identity found in council communism by the SI. The aesthetic SI continues to make art as they continue to make revolution.

For Roland Simon it is the penetration of real subsumption – the dominance of capitalism that reworks the production process to capitalist ends – that signals the end of this possibility, along with the end of an alternative ‘working class’ identity; any such ‘moments’ or artworks cannot be realized under the dominance of capital. In contrast, following through on the rigorous negativity of revolution, Simon (2009) argues that the suppression of art and the ‘politicization’ of the SI indicates a recognition that ‘art’ can only take place within the revolutionary process – within communization. Therefore, ‘constructed situations’ might better describe the process of revolution – qua communization – than the pre-revolutionary and prefigurative process of ‘triggering’ revolution.

The rigorously negative formulation keeps dropping back into ambiguous gestures in the case of the SI. The so-called ‘pessimism’ of the later Debord can be seen as a sign of the difficulty in holding to this rigorous negative gesture and overcoming the desire for a ‘positive’ form of art now. This can be seen in his tendency to project back a nostalgic perception of the possibilities of the past that have become ‘lost’ in the present; whether a lost Paris, lost comrades, or the decline of the quality of alcohol, moments of the aesthetic recede into the past. Debord remains within, to use Marx’s words, ‘world-historical necromancy’ rather than the ‘poetry of the future’.

Burning Down the Gallery

The communizing position implies that with the evacuation of ‘proletarian identity’ and the ‘avant-garde’, and the evacuation of the potential fusion of both in some ‘passion for the real’, we must abandon any aestheticizing model of revolution and any aesthetic prefiguration of revolution. In these terms the ‘positive’ vision of the SI as regards aesthetics is not merely outdated but, strictly speaking, impossible. This bears some resemblance to the thesis of the ‘death of the avant-gardes’, but it does not imply a welcoming of this death as the opportunity for some new modes of practice or reinvention – from the relational to the reconfigurative, we might say. Instead, the TC critique implies, I think, the futility and necessary nullity of any affirmative revolutionary art. All that we can have is the rift that exists at the limit.

In the case of workers’ struggles this rift is indicated in suicidal struggles which register the limit that class identity forms. The result is the burning down of factories, attempts to claim as high a redundancy payment as possible, and other ‘exits’ from work (R.S. 2011: 119). Crashing against the limit that capitalism itself can no longer sustain the worker’s identity, the tragedy and possibility of struggle today lies in a rift from this identity and the confrontation with class as an exteriority. In this moment there can be a fleeting ‘de-essentialization’ of labour, and it is this negative moment that is prefigurative of a communizing process (R.S. 2011: 120). If I risk transferring these terms into art, we could say the identity of the avant-garde is the limit. Today, to continue to be an artist is the problem, an unsustainable identity. The rift would lie here with the ‘de-essentialization’ of art, posed as a limit we can no longer practice.

To take one, controversial, example we could say that this situation is already implicit in the practice of Andy Warhol. On the one hand, his work belongs to the moment of programmatism, with the discourse of the ‘Factory’ and the proliferating model of industrial and media proliferation and production. This renewed and estranged discourse of alienated labour is doubled by the nihilism that inhabits the practice of art as impossible. In his essay ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, from 1970, Foucault registers this equivocally subversive function:

This is the greatness of Warhol with his canned foods, senseless accidents, and his series of advertising smiles: the oral and nutritional equivalence of those half-open lips, teeth, tomato sauce, that hygiene based on detergents; the equivalence of death in the cavity of an evis­cerated car, at the top of a telephone pole and at the end of a wire, and between the glistening, steel blue arms of the electric chair. ‘It’s the same either way,’ stupidity says, while sinking into itself and infi­nitely extending its nature with the things it says of itself; ‘Here or there, it’s always the same thing; what difference if the colors vary, if they’re darker or lighter. It’s all so senseless-life, women, death! How stupid this stupidity!’ But, in concentrating on this boundless monotony, we find the sudden illumination of multiplicity itself – with nothing at its center, at its highest point, or beyond it – a flickering of light that travels even faster than the eyes and successively lights up the moving labels and the captive snapshots that refer to each other to eternity, without ever saying anything: suddenly, arising from the background of the old inertia of equivalences, the zebra stripe of the event tears through the darkness, and the eternal phantasm informs that soup can, that singular and depthless face.

Warhol’s stupidity registers the moment of exhaustion of the programme in advance and from within – a hollowing-out that would emerge in the 1970s and 1980s.

This ‘prefigurative’ negativity of the earlier ‘avant-garde’, or artists of the period of programmatism, seems to imply an odd temporality. Why should such negative gestures come in advance of the moment of the end of programmatism? Why should the most resonant artistic experiments in regard to communization (The Artists Placement Group, Duchamp, Warhol, etc.) come at the ‘wrong time’? We could hazard an interpretation from within the communzing problematic. While these ruptures with the regime of art and the artistic are chosen gestures, the end of programmatism might be said to make them necessary. If the end of art was an act, such as Duchamp’s giving-up of art for chess (equivocal as that was), now the artist faces the necessity of such gestures as they cannot self-reproduce as an artist. This does not, however, explain why all or most art of the present moment doesn’t seem to take this ‘negative’ form. In fact, as we will see, the present moment seems more dominated by the desire to turn the negative into new forms of ‘positivity’ – most notably new ‘objects’ and new ‘materialities’.

The emptying out of art, in its truly negative form, is, however, also registered by another strand of contemporary communization, which is pursued by the post-Tiqqun milieu. In ‘A Fine Hell’ (2013), ‘build the party’ argue that: ‘Aesthetics, therefore, is imperial neutralization, whenever direct recourse to the police is not possible.’ They unequivocally condemn aesthetics as originating as a counter-revolutionary strategy in Schiller, and they have no time for any ‘artistic communism’ out of the early Marx or the ‘Oldest Programme of German Idealism’. Instead aesthetics is synonymous with the aesthetic regime of Empire, with the aesthetic performing an ‘infernal synthesis’ on any antagonism. In common with their Agambenian roots, they regard aesthetics as a house to be burned down (Man without Content 115); or, in the case of Claire Fontaine, an art gallery to be burned down.

The alternative to the aesthetic is ‘the materialist obviousness of forms-of-life.’ The only art is the art of inhabiting our determinations rather than trying to escape them. In this traversal we must practice ‘an apprenticeship in the art of tying and unbinding.’ Art is impossible. Installation art can only make ‘little portable hell[s]’. Instead we have an (anti-) political practice that considers art as technique to form and find the dispersion or chaos of forms-of-life. This is a collective elaboration, a sharing or force they call ‘communism’. Here art seems to coincide with political practice as an unworking of the various imperial identities, including the identity of the artist.

Of course these are, more or less, rigorously negative programmes. The difficulty, which seems to me to afflict communization generally, is the uncomfortable tracing of limits and rifts. These rifts are at once prefigurative, but also not. In the case of TC the only prefiguration is negative. The crashing into the limit of class identity is all there is, and so the artist could only crash into the identity of ‘artist’ as well. For Tiqqun and others there is something of a traversal within these determinations that promises a reformulation of forms-of-life. This vitalist interpretation suggests an excess encrypted within and against (this is the modelling of communization recently proposed by Stephen Zepke).

Expressive Negations

What does this clarify about our situation? To return to the story of the SI one of the ironies is that this story is often told today as an aesthetic story. Communization suggests the necessary termination of this story, so why should it persist? Why, to use a phrase of Johanna Isaacson (2011), do we think the legacy of the SI has been thought in terms of ‘lineages of expressive negation’? That is to say, the SI has tended to be mined for aesthetic gestures of negation that would somehow express, here and now, precisely a sense of revolutionary possibility. An exhaustive account would be beyond the limits of time and patience. What I would suggest is that these ‘the lineages of expressive negation’ have dominated many of the receptions of the SI: from Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces (1989), with its lineage of negation from the SI to punk, to McKenzie Wark’s The Beach Beneath the Street (2011), with its recovery of the ‘artistic SI’, the tendency has gone precisely in the other direction to that indicated by communization.

The difficulty then remains: how do we account for the ‘error’ of these readings? If Debord and the SI couldn’t hold on to a negative reading and persisted in nostalgia, we might say the limit of reading today turns the SI itself into an object of nostalgia. Marx’s ‘poetry of the future’ seems as distant as ever. We could argue that this is one sign of the current limit of class identity and the blockage which forces us back into nostalgia for ‘expressive negation’ at a moment that is, to say the least, unconducive to such forms. The additional irony is that such ‘negations’ are often justified and retained precisely because of their positive forms. It is the fact that they seem existent possibilities, rather the austere path of the resolutely negative, that lends them a certain heft in the ‘weightless’ experience of capitalism. I would suggest that it is precisely the paradoxical ‘positivity’ of these ‘expressive negations’ that exerts attraction and fascination in the present moment. In this way, and here I have some sympathy with the communizing critique, the risk is of a consolatory function of the aesthetic.

Making it with Communization

Can we then make anything out of communization? In a response to a questionnaire on Occupy sent by the journal October, Jaleh Mansoor, Daniel Marcus, and Daniel Spaulding argue that: ‘Art’s usefulness in these times is a matter less of its prefiguring a coming order, or even negating the present one, than of its openness to the materiality of our social existence and the means of proving for it.’ (2012: 48) This is a useful attempt to flesh out what art might do within the context of communization that suggests the absence of affirmative practice. Here it is a matter of the ‘materials’ we have to work with (and against), rather than some kind of guaranteed practice.

They go on to unpack this statement to argue that art registers the falsity of the capitalist universe and insist that bodies and things cannot be captured. The difficulty for me here is the modelling of capitalism as capture and the evasion of capital as totality. This ‘beneath’ the state of things, their metaphor, seems in danger of returning to the problematic metaphor of ‘beneath the cobblestones, the beach’. There is a tension of lurking vitalism, I find, which seems to fall away from the probing of art and labour, including the failure of labour.[2] Perhaps this vitalism emerges from the very rigour of the negative, as its flipside and ‘affirmative’ moment. This returns us to the tensions and problems of the SI and suggests that the ‘end of programmatism’ or the cusp of that ‘end’, remains less clear cut than we might imagine.

I say this not to assert superiority, but rather to assess the difficult problematic communization poses to us. The rigour of its negative formulations leave us in what may seem the unsatisfactory position of merely exploring negative prefigurations: limits, ruptures, suicidal activities, identifications with capital, and aesthetic regressions. Of course working with negativity is one of the definitional traits of the avant-garde, so this is not so unfamiliar. That said, and in perhaps ironically Wittgensteinian fashion, I’d say the problematic of communization might be useful as a kind of therapy for our prefigurative and ruptural desires. Therapy is, or should be, painful; in Freud’s famous formulation we hope to pass from hysterical misery to everyday unhappiness. In the context of communization we could rework this to suggest moving from an oscillation of hysterical misery and elation to everyday misery. That’s to say, to begin from where we are.

Bibliography

Angioma, Cherry (2012), ‘Communisation theory and the question of fascism’, libcom.org,

Anon., ‘Editorial’ (2011), SIC: International Journal for Communization 1 (2011): 5-10.

Badiou, Alain [2005] (2007), The Century, trans., with commentary and notes, A. Toscano, Cambridge: Polity.

B.L. (2011), ‘The Suspended Step of Communisation’, SIC: International Journal for Communization 1 (2011): 147-169.

Build the Party (2013), ‘A Fine Hell’, build the party blog,

Dauvé, Gilles (2008), ‘Human, All too Human?’ [2000], Endnotes 1: 90-102.

Debord, Guy (2003), Complete Cinematic Works, trans. and ed. Ken Knabb, Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Foucault, Michel (1970), ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, generation-online:

Invisible Committee (2004), Call

Isaacson, Johanna (2011), ‘From Riot Grrrl toCrimethInc: A Lineage of Expressive Negation in Feminist Punk and Queercore’, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 7.4:

Mansoor, Jaleh, Daniel Marcus, and Daniel Spaulding (2012), ‘Response to Occupy’, October 142: 48-50.

de Mattis, Leon (2011), ‘What is Communisation?’, SIC: International Journal for Communization 1 (2011): 11-28.

R.S. (2011), ‘The Present Moment’, SIC: International Journal for Communization 1 (2011): 95-144.

Simon, R. et collectif (2009), Histoire critique de l’ultragauche: Trajectoire d’une balle dans le pied. Avignon: Editions Senonevero.

Tiqqun (2011), This is Not a Program, trans. Joshua David Jordan, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

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[1] For example, see Cherry Angioma (2012) for a discussion of the problem of fascism as one undertheorized possibility.

[2] This is the on-going project of Jaleh Mansoor.