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.

it was littoral

In her 1989 preface to the second edition of Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labor, Maria Mies wrote:

I do not expect that the new edition of this book will be able to convert these or other global players to an understanding of capitalism as an iceberg economy. But I do hope that it will help ordinary people in the South and North not to despair when this iceberg economy again, and rapidly, produces one crisis after another. Icebergs are very unstable. (xviii)

There is, of course, the echo of crisis to receive with skepticism, in Mies's formulation; this, after all, isn't it the motor of accumulation? But I think, without getting into it, that as Mies describes, the crisis is the thing that surfaces. In their discussion of the way that the term "cognitive capitalism" covers over other forms of labor, George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici register instead the way that capitalism "can restructure the accumulation process by taking advantage of the inequalities within the global workforce" ("Notes on the Edu-factory and Cognitive Capitalism" 128). I had forgotten that Mies's model literally invoked the iceberg, but as Caffentzis and Federici note, it does:

The huge "iceberg" of labor in capitalism (to use Maria Mies' metaphor) was made invisible by the tendency to look at the tip of the iceberg, industrial labor, while the labor involved in the reproduction of labor-power went unseen, with the result that the feminist movement was often fought against and seen as something outside of the class struggle. (128)

It seems worth noting how Caffentzis and Federici describe the way that this "undergrowth" becomes taken as something antagonistic to struggle. Mies is interested, of course, in mobilizing this base for struggle, which involves, according to her, tracing the "'underground connections' that link the processes by which nature was exploited and put under man's domination to the processes by which women in Europe were subordinated, and examine the processes by which these two were linked to the conquest and colonization of other lands and people" (77). This relationship has been illustrated:

Tracing these "underground connections" might be a way of thinking about the kind of knowledge work involved in establishing these terms in relation to one another, the work involved in thinking about how inequality based on race and sex are the terms around which reproductive work is organized. But the caveats are all there against the becoming "fluid" of these connections, against their being lost in the organization of some total system (a.k.a cognitive labor).

Mies's book was originally published in English in 1986, the same years as German artist Rosemarie Trockel's wool picture (Wollbild) Eisberg:

To wool enthusiasts, Eisberg might not merit special attention; its small size (30 cm2) permits it to be considered as a swatch, a sample that is knitted up to measure gauge. Two years after Eisberg, Trockel made a piece of identical size; however, in this piece, titled For Those Who Do Not Like Wool Pictures But Are Communists Nevertheless, primed canvas has been stretched over the hand-knit swatch. Trockel's pieces, as Caroline A. Jones notes, invoke a feminism that might be outdated now (and then?)—aren't we so over that, too?—but I'm with Jones in wanting to stick with her feminism, if only because it seems like whatever it permitted its dismissal is related to (the return of) the dismissal of reproductive labor in contemporary accounts of a total system. To venture, then: in writing on Trockel's work, one of the strains that is often emphasized is the way that she raises the question of automated, machine work (the knitting machine) in relation to the handicraft. Trockel's work, in this regard, is often seen to be critical of such automation; it is often he case that in works that involve hand-knitting (such as Eisberg, which depicts the "back side" of the most typical knitting stich, stockinette), Trockel is seen to be registering, as Jones writes, "process" instead of "pattern." Such a celebration, however, of the artwork as craftwork, only returns to the question of the passe quality of such work. There is no progression from "pattern" (automation) to "process," nothing about the materiality of work in these works; rather, it is about this kind of perpetual eclipsing of the one in the other because what each posits, but also forecloses, is the fact of the illusiveness of this "underground," as well.

pictures: "Iceberg Model" from Ecosocialist Horizons; Rosemarie Trockel, Eisberg, from the exhibit "Textiles: Open Letter" at the Museum Abteiberg

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.

this is enough

One of the most common desires of critical work is to get beyond the binary. There are many figures for the division--contradiction, antagonism, double bind, splitting--terms that also involve the construction of definitions that function to make clear the boundaries at work between terms. As Maria Mies describes in Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (London: Zed Books, 1986), the strategy of the feminist movement to reject "all dualistic and hierarchical divisions, created by capitalist patriarchy, viz., between public and private, political and economic, body and mind, head and heart, etc.," was the right strategy, and I agree with her assessment that there is still work to be done here, in demystifying "all colonizing divisions," but the next part of the argument, which for her involves the "desire to 'become whole' again" (35), raises more questions about what kind of strategy there is to have in moving forward, and this in no small way relates back to how the divisions, splitting, and difference are conceptualized in the first place.

Of primary interest for her analysis is "the interplay between the sexual and international division of labor." She reflects on what terms we should use to describe these divided and yet related sides of the world market (and similarly, it's a question of how to refer to the divided and yet related aspects of the sexual division of labor). She writes, "If we follow the feminist principle of transcending the divisions created by capitalist patriarchy in order to be able to establish that these divisions constitute only parts of the whole, we cannot treat the 'First' and 'Third' world as separate entities, but have to identify the relations that exist between the two" (39). Her effort to relate the two parts involves thinking about "polarization": "one pole is getting 'developed' at the expense of the other pole, which in this process is getting 'underdeveloped'" (39). The terms of development thus function to describe the international division of labor, but the structure that she presents here is generalized as well to other divisions. Unlike "First" and "Third" world countries, or "center" and "peripheries," she argues that the process of polarization put to use by capitalist patriarchy requires terms that "identify the relations between the two" at the same time that they clarify how the processes produce distinct poles. The polarization that she describes happens both on the level of material reality and on the level of the concepts--both in relation to mental and material labor (see her reference to the distinction in Marx, page 51), and it is because it is preceded by a division of labor that for her is thoroughgoing that this division (like the others that she describes) does not adequately describe the conditions of capitalist patriarchy, but its effects. The division that she finds as primary or thoroughgoing is the designation of the "'production of new life' as 'natural' and not as a historical fact" (51). The polarization of the production of new life and the production of historical life is covered over by the division of labor (between mental and material labor), with the result that the production of new life is underdeveloped, economically and conceptually, and the production of historical life is overdeveloped. 

The "desire" to transcend these divisions, to find a place of "wholeness" again (as problematic as this might be, as Paige Sweet points out) is supposed to take place in opposition to the desire or the force that compels polarization (for the benefit of overdevelopment). She writes: "The very motor driving on this polarization of the world economy, namely, the capital accumulation process, is based on a world view which never says 'This is enough'" (39). As a "motor" of the world economy, polarization functions because there is a world view behind it which never says "enough." Here, the belief in an endless, limitless process functions to describe that "world view." What is the relation between the desire to overcome the binary, to find wholeness, and to say "this is enough"? Who, or what, would such a revolutionary spectator be?

pictures: Philli's feet and a drawing of a pufferfish; Rosemarie Trockel, A Cosmos (2011)