preference of paths

Supposing the other letters have not been about love, this one makes its proclamation to the contrary. In a final essay, a student of mine (CC) wrote about the perspective of the object in relation to Margery William’s story, The Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real. It’s easy to see from the very beginning, how inanimateness or deadness is taken as preceding existence or presence in the world, and that also places emphasis on the use of the term “object” in relation to people; what seems to be a metaphor-concept for people is perhaps more than that already. As CC describes, the rabbit emerges as an object through processes of “real” abstraction, which demonstrate the ways in which its being acted upon is a means of its becoming worn, its “fraying,” a term Derrida takes up from Freud in “Freud and the Scene of Writing” (thanks CM for this reference). The difficulty of grasping this process (not just a matter of understanding but of touching/taking hold of/feeling) has a correlate, as CC notes, in Winnicott’s discussion of object relating vs. object use: “Within the context of Winnicott’s understanding of object use there seems to be an implication that object usage is equitable to the love of an object; that the child must destroy the object so that it can love the object, or that in loving the object the child destroys the object. One cannot love an object that they cannot accept is an ‘entity in its own right’ and not simply a ‘bundle of projections,’ for the love of the self-made projected object is simply the love of oneself (Winnicott 118-120).” It’s Williams’s story that adds the terms of love explicitly, and CC’s paper identifies and lingers over these terms.

In thinking about this, I’m interested in how this process of destructiveness “places the object outside,” which is the moment responsible for the object becoming an “entity in its own right,” about which there is an implicit priority. In other scenes, such a placing “outside” is a gesture that is protective or defensive on one side and hallucinatory on the other, part of the distorted perspective of mental abstraction, which registers in complicity’s desire to see oneself there simply so that an “outside” can be experienced or felt as non-illusory. I’m interested in how this constitutive relation detailed in the Winnicottian scene relates to the otherwise protective /defensive gesture. Perhaps, as Balint describes, this indifferentiation accounts for the primacy of primary love, which disregards the object totally. But this prevalence raises a question about the implicit value placed on the “entity in its own right.” If this common work of putting something “outside” brings complicity and love into relation, it’s interesting that love becomes significant because it carries the possibility of feeling that complicity otherwise denies. Love (perhaps here it’s useful to re-invoke preference as Vor-liebe (although below Derrida will cite Freud as using “Bevorzugung)) is able to shore up the inadequacy of complicity not because it is reparative but because it reveals itself (from the perspective of the object) as destructive. This is a possible explanation of how the protective or defensive aspect of complicity also wants to hide from or de-link its destructiveness so that one can continue to love oneself (through others). Maybe that’s much the course of things but I feel radically uninclined in this way.

How to love that which is real about the object, when what is real is the process only of fraying? Derrida writes,

“An equality in resistances to the fraying or an equivalence in the forces fraying would eliminate any preference in choice of itinerary. Memory would be paralysed. It is the difference between frayings which is the real origin of memory and thus of the psyche. Only that difference frees a “preference of path” (Wegbevorzugung): ‘Memory is represented’ (dargestellt) by the differences in the frayings between y-neurones.’ We must then not say that fraying without difference is insufficient for memory; it must be stipulated that there is no pure fraying without difference.”

Memory’s being the “very essence” of the psyche accounts for this imperative. This stipulation turns away, as does Williams’s story, from the Lacanian real as hole or lack. If there is only fraying with difference, we might also say that there is only loving as becoming real, but then how is it that we must also account for so much brokenness, deception, misdirection, errant and irreversible fraying in these processes, when “fraying with difference” seems to displace the insufficiency of conceptualizing “fraying without difference”? Thinking about what is being frayed in this differentiating moment draws me back to CC’s earlier questions about the found/created distinction. Perhaps this is a site of violence (in contrast to destructiveness) where there is played out the demand of this question repeatedly. What if you were to see the processes repeated, the movement of this repetition, even against the seductive appearance of it being for the first time? Is this “entity in its own right” something encountered along the Wegbevorzugung or not, I wonder? And what is the difference between the “preference of path” (Wegbevorzugung) and “fraying” (Bahnung), the “breaking of a path (Bahn)”?

Further thoughts on the non-space of the university

At an institutional event today—a forum on unionization sponsored by the faculty senate and the MN Daily—I was reminded of what institutional space does. It frames a debate around the terms of those who represent power but appear as the market, as if those terms were somehow simply “there” to be represented. This is common enough and easily perceptible as the structure and effect of capitalism, but within an institution, such as the public university, where this phenomenon also sits as subject to a critique of power/knowledge, to behold it is yet another thing. This is a comment about incivility, on the one hand—it’s a comment about the space not being able to hold, within the terms it had established, a challenge to this frame itself. In this regard, it’s possible to see the apparent contingency of the event being called to an end before I got a chance to ask my “question” as far less contingent than that. I was about to ask a fairly “civil” “question” (the discussion, it had been stressed, should be considerate and should be civil, as should the Bureau of Mediation Services hearings, which had taken place in the preceding week), but also to call into question the terms that were being put forth, including the terms of civility (from which I also feel myself excluded, as someone who has been identified as too angry or as too aggressive, in tone, which I also feel amounts to my exclusion from the BMS hearings). The fact is, incivility is not an appealing position for unionization, either. The question, my question—How is it that a union could address and be critical of the changes in the public university in the past ten to fifteen years?—is always to be balanced against needing to appeal to individuals’ self-interest, in other words, strategically needing to validate the concerns expressed by both Aaron Sojourner and Joel Waldfogel about the compression of salaries, for example, when Waldfogel’s salary is over three hundred thousand dollars. So this is the point at which my civil question turns uncivil, and I hope that in writing about it, I can also attempt to do some further work on understanding the “work” of contingency in the university.

I have come to use the phrase “contingent faculty” to identify those who work in a position “without guarantee” at the university. This can include non-tenure-track faculty who are already included in the faculty instructional unit but don’t have tenure positions (term assistant professor, contract assistant professor). Here, contingency is seen as a politicized term, which many of these people may not identify with, due to the closeness of their standing to the tenure line and their disinclination to instead identify with those perceived as being still below, or of a different type of employee altogether. This group below, at the University of Minnesota, is understood as part of the P&A category (Professional & Administrative) and what I am writing to address is the unchallenged claim that held at tonight’s event, which was that these two groups of employees—tenure-line faculty and P&A instructional (“professional”) faculty—have separate interests and are distinct groups.

Waldfogel put forth this claim by initiating a distinction between tenure-line faculty and contingent faculty on the basis of research work, that contingent faculty teach “to eat” (and he has sympathy for anyone in this position and hopes they can find a way to get better terms) but that this is fundamentally different from what faculty do. He cited his own “research” study on those who supported the University of Oregon unionization and found that those who had a greater interest in research were less likely to be supportive of unionization. It’s easy to see where the argument goes, but I was struck by this formulation: “More productive, less supportive.” He went on to cite how just like other “amenities” that can be used (like the sports facility and new recreation center) to attract graduate students, amenities are need to bring in research faculty and unionization would be less appealing to those folks.

In my question turned uncivil, I would say, the only difference between my productivity and yours is that yours is paid for and supported by the institution, including this pathetic “research” study put forward to us tonight, which confuses effect for cause and is blind to the conditions of production.

I do research, I publish peer-reviewed articles, and I have a press interested in reviewing a book manuscript for which I will receive no “course release” to work on, no sabbatical to take, and no institutional grants to apply for. The people who are invested in maintaining this distinction, even at a very minimal level, are those who directly benefit from not having to share the responsibility of doing the work done by these employees. These are tenure-line faculty who can afford to “not get” the difference between the way that contingent labor is valued and the way their own is (acknowledging that there are still many who do get it). Is there much of a difference between the elitism espoused by Joel Waldfogel and the structure of this institutional space (the forum event itself) in which such a difference could go unchallenged? I wonder, tonight, how many more of such things I can sit through—the annihilating feeling of no one objecting to these terms (except, thank you, Michael Goldman). Waldfogel called the “method” of his research study “hogwash,” but its terms still stood. His measure of productivity was challenged but its ontological presuppositions were not and do not tend to get challenged even by faculty members in my own department (all of whom claim to be concerned about contingent faculty): the fact that within the university, the adjunct occupies the position, according to the definition in Merriam-Webster of being “added or accompanying in a subordinate capacity.” This is further qualified, in Merriam Webster, as “attached to a faculty or staff as a temporary or part-time member.” It is in this light that the stakes of Waldfogel’s phrase, “more productive, less supportive” emerge. In the humanities, productivity’s more familiar name is publication. The “more supportive, less productive” side, in contrast, is not, in actuality, another side, it is an included aspect of this productive labor, in all of the ways that are described in Marx and taken up by Silvia Federici, Selma James, and other Marxist feminists. Of course, this makes apparent the investment in the invisibility of this work. The way in which the reality-effect of the two sets of separate interests flickers and blinds.

I would go on to say: see here, your productivity is the result and real abstraction of so much other productivity. And this is probably obvious to a number of people in the room. It’s not the “market,” it’s the politics of the university. What’s less obvious, though, is what all the silence is about. Why didn’t I just say—I was right in front of the microphone when it was called done—oh, I’m sorry, I’ve got this question and I really just have to ask it? We’ve all been here, and we’ve been waiting, and we’ve heard enough from you. Silence, complicity (the past participle of adjungere, “to link up, join, add, attach”), “civil” guilt. This is also an a/effect of the terms in which it was all framed. The adjunct is included; she is invited to speak, so long as it’s in these terms; she can stand in line for the microphone, to ask her question, but her turn will never come. She will never get to decide about the terms of productivity, even though, ontologically, she is committed to that productivity. I think when we say that tenure-line faculty “don’t get it,” this is what I we mean, even though it’s often offered as an excuse or justification for this lack of understanding.

I can’t help but think of this “not getting it” in those terms that Brecht uses in explaining his dissatisfaction with how Mother Courage (in his 1938 play Mother Courage and Her Children) was received by audiences. He was disappointed that by and large, audiences felt empathy for Mother Courage (Anna Fierling), who killed, or let die, her three children, in her blind drive to profit off of the war. Brecht was disappointed that audiences empathized with her conflict rather than that they able to perceive that she “didn’t get it.” I often think about that difference when it is described (empathetically) that faculty “don’t get it.” Can Mother Courage be seen differently for not getting it, for not perceiving her life is contingent upon the death of her children? As Rei Terada describes in “Repletion: Masao Adachi, Landscape Film and Real Abstraction,” this distinction is also apparent in thinking about real abstraction, that “understanding real abstraction by definition departs from the sensory experience of real abstraction rather than being constituted in it.” Brecht’s dissatisfaction with the reception of Mother Courage can be seen in this way; it’s no wonder that he gives up on experience. He would have to in order to want to insist upon Mother Courage’s not-getting-it. If, in Terada’s model, understanding real abstraction can be seen as constituted by the sensory experience of real abstraction, not-getting-it is already inside all of that. Not-getting-it isn’t a transcendental position that fails to think outside itself; not-getting-it is the condition in which real abstraction is experienced, sensorily, by contingent faculty. It is a different kind of failure.

Although “contingency” is a term that is located, philosophically, opposite to necessity, perhaps as Merriam-Webster again, “happening by chance : affected by unforeseen causes or conditions : not patently necessary : unpredictable in occurrence or outcome,” contingency bears traces of the same kind of dependence that comes up with the term “adjunct”: “dependent on, associated with, or conditioned by something else.” Etymologically, this goes further, through an association with “touch,” as the present participle of contingere “to touch on all sides.” Contingency is a position whose associated sensorial experience is one of being touched on all sides by not-getting-it, so that one’s merely being the effect of this is equivalent to one’s annihilation, or feeling of being destroyed, even when “included.” It’s not just about the visibility of the work done by these faculty, although I often come back round to that; it’s about the way in which these positions form the basis of a critique of the institution of the university that does not in turn continue to valorize the uncritical linking of power/knowledge.

Last week in the BMS hearings, a senior lecturer in the Carlson School of Management testified, via his experience on the faculty senate, to the percentage of courses taught, across the university at each level (from 1000-level courses to 8000-level courses), by non-tenure-track faculty. Beginning with 1000-level classes, this number was over 50%; even at 8000-level courses, the number was still around 39%. The university maintains a quoted standard that no more than “25%” of courses should be taught by non-tenure-line faculty. These are courses that should be taught by tenure-line faculty; that they are not illuminates the extent to which the university is underfunding departments with enrollments that exceed their faculty teaching capacity. Where does this divestment in teaching come from? It does not come from “the market,” even if the market were some kind of veritable Mississippi, dividing the campus in two; it comes from the political investment in the financialization of the university, its professionalization, and its optimalization of profit (plus everything else and all that). No one can get out of it, but can you feel “dead” to it even as you are touched on all sides? That space that is most appropriated, most exploited, most alienated? How do you not-valorize that space?

"Maybe, I prefer a bit of muddle to the use of a gadget."

This title quote comes from Paula Heimann's essay, "About Children and Children-No-Longer," about which I have been thinking and writing. After making the above statement, she rescinds it, writing, "I must contradict my last sentence. I do not like muddled thinking at all, although I am guilty of it only too often as just now. I meant to express my strong dislike against introducing any gadget into the psychoanalytic relationship. I probably should not be able to handle it correctly" (339). The quick distance Heimann takes from the "muddle"--it's only there to illustrate a kind of option that might represent a state of not having the "gadget" (the "gadget" in question, a tape recorder)--is something I'd like to think about. But the impulse to ask a question about status of the muddle in relation to the gadget also opens immediately into the problem that such a question is, as Winnicott writes, "not to be formulated" (Playing and Reality 17)* and yet: does the renunciation of the muddle take place because it is already too much like a "gadget"--too much of a thing that can be applied to thinking--or because it operates as a kind of fetish, and so threatens to expose a space that might indicate the absence of method in psychoanalysis?

What is interesting to me about Paula Heimann's term "children-no-longer" is that it clearly locates the adult in relation to a state now passed; in contrast, "grown-ups" suggests having one's sites on the movement forward. Philli, the other day, talking about her feeling that it would be "impossible" to grow up, for example, that it "would take so long." The "grown-up" who knows the other side of this feels the pressure to "grow up" in his/her various ways. The pressure to do so is in every place; even when it is not clearly ideological, as in professionalization, or in determining one's identity, it is there, perhaps simply, as time.

The child-no-longer has no better method than anyone else for getting through the day and the way it throws up, at every juncture, something that needs to be gotten through. But since these forms of mediation appear socially, they seem to require a facility with method--with something, I think, that we think of as providing a procedure or process for getting through. It's, I suppose, obvious why "method" is posited here. Or why the question of method is so firmly lodged in the junctures. Conversations in the recent panel I took part in at the ACLA, "From Extraction to Exhaustion" repeated these questions--something like, what if you move backward into rather than forward from/with method? Maybe it's not spatial (backwards) or regressive but one thing to contend with, on the one hand, is the feeling that it is; on the other hand, it registers in the feeling of not being included in the any of the movements are are pushing forward, coming into being. There, the psychotic aspect of the "child-no-longer" comes into play, in the feeling of having hallucinated oneself into the story about how something has come to be.

Today in the bi-weekly installment of a reading group that I've been taking part in on financialization, led by Miranda Joseph, we were joined by Leigh Claire La Berge, who has written about literary aspects of abstraction and representation in relation to finance, and I felt like this conversation somehow took place for me in the above framework, roughly sketched out. Here, the conversation was explicitly about method and interdisciplinarity, proposing the mediation of various dualisms, such as form/content, or abstract/concrete, or representation/reality, as the work to be done (does the child play and not work simply because it is not required to muster the same kind of energy just to keep things going, to maintain the capacity to set things in motion at every instance?).

So I think the question raised for me here--after a day like today, a day that felt like a continuous hallucination of myself into forms of being that no longer count me in, or that have counted me dead, in various ways, which is a very intensely narcissistic thing as well--is why I'm always lingering in these spaces, from which it feels like others have passed on through, or if they haven't, they are aiming to? Or it's this idea of myself as doing so that I can't let go of. But if the insistence on that is not pathological but rather a part of one's being a child-no-longer, does it mean it's a state that you can continue to hold, even though it's dead to others--dead to those who have moved on to other terms, to fields and disciplines where the stakes require justification on other terms? Why, or in what situation, do we see the dead things behind as "everything"--the everything we want to bring along with us--and not the "nothing"? This was a question that arose for me in Michelle Cho's lovely talk, "Genre Worlds," and in the discussion that followed. Here, I lose a sense of what I'm talking about because I'm talking about so many levels, and for much of the time of the talk all I could be aware of was the way that the room like a space of total loss, giving rise to a very acute feeling of suffocation, a form of the feeling of not making it through. That's what it was, anyway.

Winnicott, who discusses the importance it being a "matter of agreement" not to ask and thus decide whether something was found or created, and yet that's always the demand that method makes, to determine this in some way. I wonder if the feeling that going "back" and trying to pick something up is painful comes not so much from one's encounter with reality (i.e. that whatever it is that is being picked up is not "there") but from being compelled to make this choice between what is found and what is created (which is just as unfathomable as the "impossibility" of growing up).

In object relations, this would be the pain associated not with the destruction of the object, but with pain affecting the ego, the "narcissistic hurts" suffered in time. Looking back on this formulation in Heimann's essay, "About Children and Children-No-Longer," it's notable that the description of "narcissistic hurts" comes up when she is talking about the difference between the "regressed" person and the state of original childhood. She writes, "The regressed person, adult or child, suffers from a breakdown of advanced functions, suffers from destructive processes affecting developmental achievements. This implies narcissistic hurts, wounds to self-esteem, shame, a sense of being let down by oneself, failure in many respects" (335). These "hurts" or "wounds" or "shame" seem to point to the vulnerability that the ego must always feel, on the edge of its own destructiveness, as Freud describes, as a border-animal, a Grenstier, whose method, though it might be perceptible to others in this kind of retrospective glance, is nothing other than a kind of hugging to oneself of something--a piece of "time" frozen, an otherwise nothing--about which you have not been compelled to choose, I found it/I created it.

Such was the view out/of the window today in Walter 101: against the backdrop of the fallen classic grandeur of the building of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, which is in the middle of being torn down and so boarded up, an April snow large-flaked and gusty. And there continues to be something about the snow--about the way that I experience it as an enclosure (or the perceptibility of an enclosure) close to the form of an embrace--that seems to lend itself to imagining the afterlife of dead letters, those objects that continue to transmit their messages, as falling down to earth.

*Winnicott's passage reads: "Of the transitional object it can be said that it is a matter of agreement between us and the baby that we will never ask the question: 'Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?' The important point is that no decision on this point is expected. The question is not to be formulated. (Playing and Reality 17; italics in original)

Note: As always, a form of working through with RT. So much also moves from the totally moving series of conversations had around what is found/what is created with RP, CC, and AL in the Spring 2016 course "Psychoanalysis and Lit II"; this, in turn, was found/created in "From Exhaustion to Extraction" and continues to converse there, after the conversing is past.

Picture: Still from Hirokazu Koreeda, After Life (1998).

cruel attachment and negative preference

In a recent lecture, “Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism,” Miranda Joseph disputed with the celebratory revival and appropriation of Bartleby; seeking a subject that was more “neither/nor” (neither capitalism nor revolution), a subject that is theorized following the terms of Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” Jospeh opposed Bartleby’s negative preference with Berlant’s idea of negative attachment. In Cruel Optimism, Berlant also references Bartleby:

           

Cruel optimism is in this sense a concept pointing toward a mode of lived immanence, one that grows from a perception about the reasons people are not Bartleby, do not prefer to interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used to, to syncopate with it, or to be held in a relation of reciprocity, reconciliation, or resignation that does not mean defeat by it. (28)

I also think there is much to be critical of in the elevation of Bartleby as a figure of political resistance, and yet I think that the figure of Bartleby raises more questions than it answers about political subjectivity. To begin with, then, the primary question raised by Bartleby is the question of what it means to prefer. The story of Bartleby never resolves the ambivalence about preference that some would read into it; rather, it sets in motion the problem of preference as a political gesture. 

In my reading, this problem is also explored in Hannah Arendt’s theory of proairesis, which precedes or informs the distinction between the social and political. I’ve described all of this elsewhere, highlighting preference not as a form of activity, but as a problem for activity. Rather than seeing how Arendt problematically divides these “realms,” I was focusing on how preference not only exposes assumptions about ideas of (political, revolutionary) activity, but poses the question about how these models are formed in the first place. The question of preference does so because, as Arendt spells out, it is an issue of proairesis, literally of pro-airesis, of a choice before choice. It thus occurs at the intersection of one’s political activity and one’s social status, at the intersection of one’s capacity to produce one’s identity or attitude or to be produced (structurally, logically, institutionally) as an identity. Tracing out the consequences of some of Arendt’s observations, I have described how that faculty, that capacity, is worthy of being seen in its own right, not merely as an extension of the idea that in spectating or observing (or in judging) we are already taking action, as Jacques Ranciere formulates, for example, in The Emancipated Spectator.

An important part of this conceptualization resides in Arendt’s formulation of preference in “Reflections on Little Rock” as something has the capacity to intervene in the social realm. This is an understanding of preference as pre-political that I think is important to rethinking reified notions of political action that are understood as revolutionary. But an aspect that I did not initially explore is the fact that this presentation of preference in “Reflections on Little Rock” emerges in the context of the issue of school segregation and interracial marriage. And here, Arendt’s insistence on identifying school segregation/integration and miscegenation as things belonging to the social realm rather than the political is clearly in error. 

In her book Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Indiana UP 2014), Kathryn T. Gines argues that Arendt’s distinction represents a severe limitation in Arendt’s thinking about the Negro question (which also rests on her understanding of anti-Black discrimination as a “Negro problem” rather than a “white problem”) and that this has consequences for her ideas about representative thinking and judgment. Gines argues that these shortcomings can be seen in light of her presentation of the Jewish question and the ways that this question is extended, although not explicitly connected to the Negro question.

Seen from this perspective, it’s hard to read Arendt’s essay, along with her other discussions of the problem of race in America, as something other than emissions of a form of white privilege that is little different from white racists of the time, as Gines points to. To consider the concept of preference from this perspective, however, allows for a consideration not so much of how racism emerges through preference, as Arendt is arguing it should (and should freely be allowed to), all the while, of course, not being able to see the contradictions and discriminations (those private, interested things) that she was applying to the political (the realm that she believes should be disinterested, a reading that Gines also thoroughly exposes the contradiction of in terms of her response to James Baldwin, refuting “love” as a political emotion (extension of this in recent debunkings of dwyl (do what you love)).

Rather, the conjunction of preference (via Arendt’s explicit and implicit formulations of preference as something that has the capacity to intervene in the realm of the necessary) and race allows us to turn the way that the “white problem” rewrites as “choice” things that are always mediated by necessity, always mediated not only by the economic necessity or social, but by the way that these political, institutional, and structural conditions get coded or written as bodily necessity. In describing this process, I am following Denise Ferreria da Silva’s formulation of the way that the racial already marks a place for the rewriting of the body via cultural difference. Although it’s difficult with Arendt, and one wants to be very clear about her problematic assumptions and ideas, I do think that she, like Bartleby, provides not so much a model in which these issues are resolved as the kind of nexus in which they can be perceived.

What becomes interesting about this to me is the way that “choice” remains very much at the center, conceptually and otherwise, of the problem, contemporarily phrased, of the “post-racial” or of “racism with race” and also in the critical elaborations of this paradigm. I’m thinking, as I loop back around to where I began, of the way that this emerged in Miranda Joseph’s lecture. Although gesturing to some of the ways that the financial crises of 2008 and 2009 disproportionately affected people of color and also gesturing critically to the discourse of fiscal “responsibility” that drives the terms of debt under capitalism, Joseph’s terms for understanding the problem of debt remain the problem of an “entrepreneurial” subject, a subject, who, as Arendt figures the black parent in “Reflections,” is “involved in an affair of social climbing” (194). Arendt’s whole point—that “free choice” be upheld—is discredited by the fact that segregation is not the same as forcing parents “to send their children to an integrated school against their will” (212). But her point remains important, abstractly, because it is this same version of “free choice” that remains powerfully imbedded in liberal desire.

Joseph highlighted this dynamic at the end of her talk when she identified the way that the desire for quality education and safety fuels middle-class decisions about home-ownership, namely by buying one’s distance from racialized poverty. What I thought was interesting about this conceptualization was that Joseph returned to Berlant’s problem of attachment as a way of talking about this very complex dynamic, in which the desires of white parents about the choice of associations can be seen not to produce race (as Joseph described) but to deploy produce a subject for whom raciality is something substantive, something essential.

My question, which has to do with how this complex dynamic could be understood, was recognized as a question about what constitutes this desire for distance from racialized poverty, and Joseph described (in terms that would also befit the parvenu) how African Americans that were showcased on Oprah’s “Debt Diet” were shown to also have the same desire, that is, the desire to distance themselves from their race, from racialized poverty. What is remarkable about this response is that the terms of “free choice” remain embedded even as the ideology of personal responsibility is brought into question. And it’s interesting that free choice emerges here, where race is identified by recourse to a projective structure (here, the Berlantian attachment to an object that inhibits one’s aims, that is produced as “other” and thus as “bad” or “cruel”) that seems capacious enough to include the “problem” of race as one of its possible “objects.” In this sense, Joseph’s slogan, to “seize the means of temporal production,” is even more explicit in its erasure of the inhering relationship between temporal production (the production of the entrepreneurial subject, for whom “choice” is a real possibility) and the production of others in space as racialized subjects. 

picture: Francisca Sutil, Mute 14 (2009/10)

Preference and the Revolutionary Spectator

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or, another rejection (this one, from the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, theme: Errans)

Abstract: In contrast to the importance placed on acting in theories of the revolutionary subject in the twentieth century, this project explores the errantry of contemplative activity. Going astray “in the mind” leads, both in political and in psychoanalytic theory, to the philosophical problem of preferring and “preferring not to,” to preference, the mediation of freedom and necessity, of unconscious and conscious desires. The project aims to highlight forms of activity that have been historically marginal in traditions of revolutionary thought and action, such as contemplation, spectatorship, the private realm, aesthetic judgment, and reproductive labor. The project takes up the central question proposed by the core project Errans: how can the negative capacity of errantry be maintained without its being valorized as negativity and thus reinserted teleologically? In answer to this question, I propose to explore the aesthetics of preference, which encompasses various attitudes of contemplation and spectation that are employed in the realm of political activity and can be seen to underlie actions or movements described as errant.

Beginning in the 1970s, Marxist theories of revolutionary transition have tended to emphasize the importance of what I call “negative preference,” a moment that is supposed to escape, through a form of negative agency, subsumption into the system of capitalist production. Theorists of negative preference, such as Deleuze, Hardt and Negri, and Ranciére, have frequently applied Melville’s Bartleby’s utterance “I would prefer not to” as one of its absolute instances, but I argue that this version of negativity is also a form of errantry, a truth statement that produces further questions about freedom and necessity. During the last fifty years, feminist Marxists who argue for the importance of reproductive labor, including Maria Mies, Silvia Federici, and Selma James, have provided ways for thinking about freedom from the reproduction of circumscribed choices within gendered institutions. Taking up the problems of freedom and necessity marked by these traditions, contemporary thinkers of revolution craft a space for contemplation as a condition of praxis, but the tendency of theories of change is to convert the tension between the voluntaristic (or contemplative) subject and an involuntary negativity into a form of necessary action or the necessity of practice. More often than not, passing over moments of spectation and contemplation reflects gendered assumptions about the priority of practice, dismissing depoliticized forms of life that become equated, through the idea of preference as personal choice, with liberal and neoliberal dispositions and with deliberation about “means” rather than about “ends.”

In contrast to the importance placed on the necessity of acting in theories of the resistant or revolutionary subject, this project explores the errantry of contemplative activity. It provides a counternarrative to these stories of the resistant or revolutionary subject by looking at the subject’s tolerance—rather than its sublation—of the conflict between voluntary and involuntary activity. Going astray “in the mind” leads, both in political and in psychoanalytic theory, to the philosophical problem of preferring and “preferring not to,” to preference, the mediation of freedom and necessity. The project aims to highlight forms of activity that have been historically marginal in traditions of revolutionary thought and action, such as contemplation, spectatorship, the private realm, aesthetic judgment, and reproductive labor. This project takes up the central question proposed by the core project Errans: how can the negative capacity of errantry be maintained without its being valorized as negativity and thus reinserted teleologically? In answer to this question, I propose to explore the aesthetics of preference, which encompasses various attitudes of contemplation and spectation that are employed in the realm of political activity and can be seen to underlie actions or movements described as errant.

Although not herself a Marxist, I turn to the texts of Hannah Arendt, written during the sixties and seventies, to work through the problem of freedom and necessity as it pertains to judgment, contemplation, and the gendering of these faculties within the Marxist tradition. The project develops a theoretical framework based on the Arendtian notion of “preference,” which Arendt introduces through the Aristotelian term proairesis (literally pro-airesis, a “choice before choice”) to describe a “proto-will” involving the ambiguity and mediation of freedom and necessity. In her 1970 The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt describes proairesis as a faculty that modifies willing, meant to establish an alternative to the development of willing as the realization of thinking into action.

Arendt does not develop preference as one of her central terms, but it returns in her discussion of the importance of judgment, where preference refers to the desire to “go astray”: “I prefer before heaven to go astray with Plato rather than hold true views with his opponents [Errare mehercule malo cum Platone…quam cum istis (sc. Pythagoraeis) vera sentire].” Preference is thus an articulation of the voluntary-involuntary nature of willing in general, and of the role played by aesthetic judgment in thinking and acting. I argue that insofar as it represents the problem of the voluntary-involuntary subject, preference underlies contemplation and errantry. Its claim to validity departs from accepted or normative truths, but rather than being a purely active negation of the truth, this departure signals an acceptance of the ambiguity in acting and spectating, and in the production of truth and error.

Turning from Arendt’s formulations of preference as an aesthetic activity that tolerates the ambiguity of spectating and acting, I explore the problem of the voluntary-involuntary subject in work that seeks to rearticulate the terms of private life in order to produce a resistant subject. I consider how writers have sought to transform literature into a forum in which an automatic resistance to capitalism can be theorized as a matter of aesthetics, and as a poetics. I explore this politicization of literature in several different contexts: the problem of “coerced freedom” in global feminist work of the 1980s (Maria Mies, Rosemarie Trockel, Silvia Federici, Selma James); the construction of the “other” in European poetry of migration (Zafer Senoçak, Zehra Çirak); and contemporary anticapitalist poetry’s intolerance of “apolitical” poetry (Jennifer Moxley, Joshua Clover). Methodologically, the project examines how literary form as poetry has borrowed from sociological models of political agency, but has also complicated sociological notions of history and subjectivity by giving poetic form to the epistemological aporia of the voluntary-involuntary subject.

In bringing together Marxist discourse, Arendt’s writings on preference, and anticapitalist poetry, I focus on two main theoretical issues: the concept of transition, or how necessity is overcome to yield freedom, and the priority of action as a mode of subjecthood. Arendt’s thinking about revolutionary transition and her critique of Marx form an important point of tension with post-Marxist ideas about the immanence and the immediacy of revolutionary transition, because while Arendt also critiques the idea of the transformation from necessity to freedom implicit in the transition, she helps us to think about how making the transition immediate, or doing away with it, does not solve the problem about freedom—or how, in modern thought, freedom is surrendered to necessity. Safeguarding freedom in periods of transition becomes important in the literatures I explore, which think about how contingent needs and desires are the first things to be destroyed in moments of crisis.

Bartleby, preferrer?

Two recent essays that engage both with "Bartleby" and with the idea of disobedience propose to think about what models of "resistance" are provided by this enigmatic figure/Melville's enigmatic text. Aaron Bady's "Bartleby in the University of California: The Social Life of Disobedience" looks at how disobedience is related to critique, and specifically to critique's dependence on its object, as he describes the difficulty of critiquing the privatization of the university, for example, without taking on the "very language of the corporate university itself." In "Bartleby's Occupation: Passive Resistance Then and Now," Jonathan Poore describes how Melville's story stages the "gap" between the point of view of production and the point of view of the market. Both Bady and Poore distance themselves from promoting Bartleby to an Example, as Deleuze does in "Bartleby, or the Formula," which, it's safe to say, informs the short list of recent theorists (given by Poore) who have: Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Zizek (and to which I would add Tiqqun). And both play with the idea and language of "preference," Bartleby's singular utterance, providing rich interpretations of this textual moment that make it seem all the more relevant to think about the theoretical implications of this term--of preference--for thinking about political activity.

In Bady's account, Bartleby presents the communicatory effectiveness of "negative affect," because his assertion of a "negative preference" (of preferring not to) suspends the possibility of engaging with him in a reasonable way, as soon all those in the office seem to be affected by these words, even the lawyer. Bady writes, "When he is presented with Bartleby, however—that obstinately present absence of affect—he can no longer be a copyist, because there is nothing to copy. He has no choice but to become a writer: he has to invent stories about a character whose apparent subjective core is an absence of subjectivity. Faced with Bartleby—a kind of subjective zero point—the narrator not only finds his own humanity cast into sharp relief, but he discovers that he must improvise, act, invent, and in so doing, becomes a person who, for the first time, also prefers." The analogy that Bady draws to the corporate university, to the UC, then, involves the identification of the UC faculty, staff, and students who protested, or assembled, or disobeyed as the crisis. In the above quotation, Bady describes how Bartleby initiates the "reaction" of the lawyer in much the same way that the chancellor and other administrative figures reconfigure their actions as reactions, in order to also reconfigure responsibility as not their own.

But how does the lawyer prefer? And how does the UC prefer (if the analogy is indeed, as I am reading it, between these figures)? Certainly, "Bartleby" illustrates the dependence of so-called figures of authority on those who are subordinate to them, as Bady also points out. Although it is not spelled out in the essay, Bady seems to arrive at the paradoxical kernel of preference (and its splitting into good and bad) when he describes how critique loses its capacity to resist because it is dependent upon power: "Instead of 'how not to be governed like that'—which might be expressive of a desire for the absence of governance—critique describes 'how to be governed, BUT how not to be governed not like that.'" What would be negative preference (a desire for the absence of governance) is flattened out, so to speak, into a choice between two options that really lead to the same place. This mode of preferring is the outcome of a critique that is not based on truth, but emerges from authority as a justification of its very existence (as power). The tendency to present "choices" as much more complex than action admits, as being conditioned by multiple factors, as (per Bady) "enshroud[ed]...in a kind of fog of war," etc., also takes on and appropriates the language of preference by disavowing the presence of a wish "not to be," or that one could prefer this "nothing" over a "something." A radical preference includes a capacity for the wish "not to be"; it's this that administrators cannot think, admit, or create.

Marxist interpretations of "Bartleby," as are mentioned by Poore, tend to emphasize the "negativity" or "absoluteness" of his withdrawal/refusal/preference as a way of conceptualizing as necessary the autonomy of this moment of refusal (so that it can be characterized--positively, by them--as a vacuous resistance). As Deleuze writes in "Bartleby, or the Formula," Bartleby's gesture--his rejection of a "non-preferred option," which "continually recharges itself"--is construed as action. Insofar as it can be seen as distinct from the lawyer-narrator, who observes the action, acting qua negative preference can be seen as pure activity, as an act in which the autonomy of movement that it seems to achieve is executed on the basis of this "negativity beyond negativity." My interest in "Bartleby," however, resides in the indistinction between Bartleby and the lawyer-narrator, an indistinction that would posit preferring and negative preferring as two poles of the same process, as is suggested in Bady's reading. The indistinction presented in the story resides in the ambiguity of Bartleby as actor (who prefers not to) and the lawyer-narrator as spectator (who prefers), and the many instances in which they seem to be one and the same figure (seeing each other through and as the bust of Cicero, for example). This ambiguity seems to function to remind the reader that at every instance, the actor is also a spectator, or as Hannah Arendt would put it, that there is "a spectator in every actor." Arendt's idea that preference functions like a "silent sense" to "approve or disapprove" of an action emphasizes the role that spectation has in radical activity, but also suggests that the radicality of Bartleby's negative preferring cannot be separated out from the lawyer-narrator's non-radical (i.e. neoliberal?) preferring.

In "Bartleby's Occupation," Jonathan Poore concludes that Bartleby's recent vogue and exemplary status in Occupy is "peculiar" and I agree with this (see Lauren Klein, "What Bartleby Can Teach Us about Occupy Wall Street"; Jonathan Greenberg, "Occupy Wall Street's Debt to Melville"; Jac Asher, "'Preferring Not To' in the Age of Occupy"; Regina Dilgen, "The Original Occupy Wall Street: Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener'"). Citing Bartleby's failure to resist in the way that contemporary activists, theorists, and literary scholars generally find, Poore writes, "Bartleby sought to express a principled opposition to the market in the form of a statement of preference, but his resistance remains a “dead letter” because to convert principles into preferences is merely to mirror the action of the market itself. Ultimately, then, rather than imagining the state as an effective mechanism of resistance to the market, “Bartleby” dramatizes the pervasiveness of the market (or properly speaking, market ideology), its ability to absorb resistance into itself." Poore describes how "Bartleby" stages a gap between the perspectives of labor and the market and ultimately shows how resistance to the market cannot take on the terms of the market (i.e. must step outside of market ideology), and he argues that critics such as Zizek and Hardt and Negri who invoke Bartleby as a figure also fail to step outside of the language (and ideolgoy) of the market. One aspect of the failure of Bartleby to function as a force of resistance has to do, according to Poore, with the way that privatization converts principles into preferences: "In other words, resistance itself essentially becomes privatized, as political principles find their primary expression in market preferences." This assessment of the co-optation of principles of resistance by the market also implies that the faculty of preferring consists is also already inscribed (and only legible) within the market. But this is also only the case if one returns to the conceptual opposition (between the state and the market, or between labor and the market) that Poore has convincingly argued becomes problematically conflated (in the figure of "society" or "social institutions") in the anti-capitalist movement.

But of course there are places where "society" is the conflation of these terms (i.e. according to Marx's ideas about "real subsumption" of labor under capital) or that social relations, indeed "society" changes as a result of changes in the mode of production. Arendt's idea that preference is the faculty of approbation or disapprobation only makes sense when it can be seen to function in opposition to this "society," where what is at stake is not the idea that "preferences" will only mirror the institution (be it the UC, the market, etc.,) they seek to resist, but the fact that preferences make an intervention in what appears as "the realm of necessity," which is dictated by various social institutions. The impact of this line of thought becomes clearer if we turn to Marxist feminist ideas, following Maria Mies, of the interpenetration of patriarchy and capitalism in the system of Capitalist-Patriarchy. Mies describes how "feminists not only challenged the division of labour but also the very divisions of 'work' and 'non-work'. This approach also put into question the accepted division, following from other dualistic divisions, between politics and economics" (Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale 31). One of the primary challenges raised by Marxist feminists in the 70s was that the "socially invisible" (31) work of reproductive labor is necessary for the reproduction of the working class, i.e. for productive, wage-labor. In effect, therefore, the realm of necessity and of "necessary labor" became redefined as "socially invisible" work. This has many other consequences, of course, but to return to "Bartleby," we might observe that one of the things the text presents is the interruption of productive labor and of the workplace with the reproductive labor of Bartleby, insofar as the office-space becomes his home; the private sphere of necessity, of domestic labor, erupts into the public space of the office (think of the narrator-lawyer's discovery that "for an indefinite period Bartleby must have ate, dressed, and slept in my office"). The text does not render this labor visible as labor, in the way that a feminist interpretation of it would, but it does suggest that what Arendt finds about preference, namely that the faculty of approbation and disapprobation can intervene in the realm of necessity by illuminating what appears as necessary to not be and vice versa, takes place primarily in this realm of reproductive labor, where actions that might otherwise be invisible appear as visible.

This is meant as a provocation, although not yet fully developed, to readings of "Bartleby" that focus on the power of his gesture as a way of creating a praxis based on the "negativity" of preference as a principle of action. As Bady, Poore, and other Bartleby readers have shown, there is no reason to presume that the "negativity" of preference is more immediately political (even if this is perhaps (!?) their unexpressed wish) than any other gesture, but what Arendt's and Mies's ideas about the ambiguous relations between "invisible work" and the "silent sense" present is the even a "wish for nothing," which forms the basis of radical preference, can intervene in what appears as necessary.