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)

being born later

In his recent book, The Bonds of Debt, Richard Dienst devotes a couple of paragraphs to Bertolt Brecht`s poem, ``An die Nachgeborenen.`` It is actually Benjamin who Dienst is discussing, and in particular a phrase of Benjamin`s that is often difficult to locate, and may in fact only be represented here in fragments: ``for the sake of the hopeless, we are given hope.`` Dienst describes Benjamin`s awareness of the schizophrenic organization of the Jetztzeit, that ``complex interval between wishful expectation and dread, teaching us to practice different modalities of anticipation and suspension, long patience and outright refusal (166),`` connecting Benjamin`s notes on Brecht`s poem to these ``conflicted moods`` (166, Dienst`s words). Benjamin`s notes read:

[line scratched out:] Example of genuine historical representation: `An die Nachgeborenen.` We claim from those born later not thanks for our victories but rather remembrance for our defeats. [not scratched out:] That is consolation: the only kind that can be given to those who have no more hope for consolation. (Dienst 166)    

The footnote attributes this passage to Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften Band I/iii (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag), p. 1,240), and although it is not the passage that I mention above, the common theme of consolation, from which Dienst distills an idea about remembering defeat, and in fact, establishing continuity on the basis of notions of defeat or failure. These grounds of  ``infinite indebtedness,`` which for Dienst also refer to the phenomenological aspects of the given, aspects that qualify it not as inert or fixed, but as fluid, ``to be drawn out in our encounter with it,`` form the basis of the types of political subjectivity that Dienst imagines possible.

Dienst`s point of departure suggests that thinking in dark times has to do with negotiating this point of historical continuity and transition. In the last lines of the poem, Brecht writes,

Think—

When you speak of our weaknesses,
Also of the dark time

That brought them forth.

The lines anticipate the perspective of historical judgment, proposing that the consolation is not only a form of historical forgiveness, but that such a position of spectatorship is central to the formulation of subjects who take up the project that Brecht (or Dienst or Benjamin) describes. Brecht`s seemingly straightforward caveat is also contorted by his effort throughout the poem to articulate the limits of speaking in dark times. And although his poems tend to be organized around the themes of state oppression and class conflict, they articulate less visible arguments about political agency. In actuality, they articulate the struggles of the bourgeois subject, struggles that become presented and seemingly resolved in terms of morality, and predominantly, in terms of complicity. If complicity is the only way that the bourgeois subject experiences political agency, the problem (and its solution) is not that to deal with the problem of debt we must refuse the morality of guilt and personal responsibility that accompanies it, or that, as Nietzsche found, guilt produces bad morality, but that the refusal of guilt as a form of moral or ethical activity or the construction of an alternative (take for example, Timothy Bewes` promotion of ``shame`` in his book, The Event of Postcolonial Shame) is an expression of its very centrality in conceptualizing political agency. Brecht is the great thinker of this bourgeois guilt, the thing that keeps the bourgeoisie from being able to identify as proletarians, and this is also why the problem of morality is one of identification. In other words, the circularity of refusal and recuperation works much like the aesthetic identification that is the object of Brecht`s critique. Projects that articulate the possibility of  ``refusing guilt,`` or ``refusing debt,`` are thus not that far from Brecht`s project refusing aesthetic identification, and there can be something to take from his determinations of complicity.
    
picture: Selected Poems by Bertolt Brecht, cover by Roy Kuhlman (Grove Press, 1959).

on no longer being a student-in-debt

the irony being that one is never no longer a student-in-debt...

It is hard for me to know where to stand right now; at a time that many experience as a hoped for or even waited for moment, a time of occupation that carries all varieties of forward-oriented activity. My lost feelings of collective action are hard to come to terms with, pushing as they do beyond the colloquial notion of "guilt" for not being more active, or activist, a feeling which several friends confessed to, tossing it around the other day. I feel I should be able to inhabit more profoundly something of the position that Mia McIver refers to in a facebook photo album titled, "We lost our jobs and found our occupations."

The idea of the student-in-debt, to which I refer above and elsewhere, is Morgan Adamson's brilliant rendering of the counterrevolutionary transformation of the "energy of student life" (the "life of the mind") into surplus value through the institution of debt. The sense of loss--the lost job--above pertains to both the conditions of unemployment within and without higher education, but perhaps also to the vulnerable position of labor to which McIver refers above all, to the position of one for whom the loss is not even the loss of a job, but the loss of this potential. What I mean to try and compel thinking about and understand in terms that express frustration with systems other than the job market is my own status of transitional unemployment.

In the economic sense, I never was a student-in-debt, and realizing this helped me the other day, to move a little bit past thinking of myself as the victim of market forces and a little bit in the direction of thinking about how such a position represents the inconsequential and superfluous elements of the global financial system. The position of transitional unemployment is occupied by those disregarded by a system that derives value from the equation between investment and return--and not the humanist value of academic labor, but the surplus value of student labor. It is thus the experience of oneself as an element of surplus value that represents the necessity and inevitability of student professionalization as a means of also sustaining oneself within this state of indebtedness. So having eschewed professionalization, it of course seems logical to conclude that one would have no hopes of entering into the profession, it being the case that from this position, one produces nothing of "value."

It is from this position that it becomes possible to understand the loss of a job and the experience of never having had one (i.e. never having had a job outside of the job of being employed or exploited as a graduate student instructor), or the actually more concrete realization of what it means to be only a student-in-debt.

picture: from at OccupyMN