How to Read iek by Adam Kotsko

September 2nd, 2012 SLAVOJ IEK, a philosopher and psychoanalyst from Slovenia, is one of the few academics to have achieved a degree of genuine popularity among general readers. He regularly lectures to overflow crowds, is the subject of a documentary film (called simply iek!), and surely counts as one of the worlds most visible advocates of left-wing ideas. When iek first broke into the English-speaking academic scene, however, few would likely have predicted such success. For one thing, his research focused on an unpromising topic: the long-neglected field of ideology critique, a staple of Marxist cultural criticism that had fallen into eclipse as Marxism became less central to Western intellectual life in the second half of the twentieth century. Ideology is one of those philosophical terms that has entered into everyday speech with an impoverished meaning. Much as deconstruction means little more than detailed analysis in popular usage, so ideology tends to refer to a body of beliefs, most often with overtones of inflexibility or fanaticism. But as iek argued in his 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology, ideology is not to be found in our conscious opinions or convictions but, as Marx suggested, in our everyday practices. Explicit opinions are important, but they serve as symptoms to be interpreted rather than statements to be taken at face value. Racism, for example, iek recommends that we look for symptomatic contradictions, as when the anti-Semite claims that the Jews are both arch-capitalist exploiters and Bolshevik subversives, that they are both excessively tied to their overly particular tradition and deracinated cosmopolitans undercutting national traditions. In the Jim Crow South, blacks were presented simultaneously as childlike innocents needing the guidance of whites and as brutal sexual predators. In contemporary America, Mexican immigrants are viewed at once as lay-abouts burdening our social welfare system and as relentless workaholics who are stealing all our jobs. These contradictions dont show that ideology is irrational the problem is exactly the opposite, that there are too many reasons supporting their views. iek argues that these piled-up rationalizations demonstrate that something else is going on. A similar sense that something else is going on always strikes me when I read a review of ieks work in the mainstream media. (A recent example is John Grays review of two of ieks books in the New York Review of Books, to which iek has responded.) Now academics are always ill-used in the mainstream press, particularly if they deal in abstract concepts and refer to a lot of European philosophers. Yet theres something special about the treatment of iek. In what has become a kind of ritual, the reader of a review of ieks work always learns that iek is simultaneously hugely politically dangerous and a clown with no political program whatsoever, that he is an apologist for the worst excesses of twentieth-century Communism and a total right-wing reactionary, both a world-famous left-wing intellectual and an anti-Semite to rival Hitler himself. The goal is not so much to give an account of ieks arguments and weigh their merits as to inoculate readers against ieks ideas so they feel comfortable dismissing them. To find left-

wing thinkers and movements simultaneously laughable and dangerous, disorganized and totalitarian, overly idealistic and driven by a lust for power is to suggest: there is no alternative. Rather than simply knocking around a poor, misunderstood academic in the public square, it is an attempt to shut down debate on the basic structure of our society. The rolling disaster of contemporary capitalism war, crisis, hyper-exploitation of workers, looming environmental catastrophe demands that we think boldly and creatively to develop some kind of livable alternative. iek can help. The biggest obstacle facing the reader of ieks work is not the academic trappings the technical terms, the references to other thinkers but a writing style that defies convention. Broadly speaking, the general expectation of argumentative writing is that it will lay out a more or less straightforward chain of reasons supporting a clear central claim. Even though we acknowledge that this format is almost never encountered in its pure form, it still remains a kind of ideal. In ieks writing, though, its difficult to pick out anything like a thesis statement, and the argument most often proceeds via intuitive leaps rather than tight chains of reasoning. This is true even of pieces that are more or less totally non-academic, and it is doubtless one of the reasons his work is so often misunderstood. One thing I hope to show here, though, is that his method fits with his goals and with the kinds of phenomena he is trying to get at. Although ieks work can be difficult to get into at first, he is one of the most engaging and thoughtprovoking writers working in philosophy today, with a unique ability to get people excited about philosophy and critical theory. He is, in short, a gateway drug, and Im the pusher.
I.

Already in this brief discussion of ideology, one of the most consistent features of ieks work shines through: his fascination with contradictions and reversals. iek will frequently present what he views as a commonly accepted belief, then turn around and ask, But is not the exact opposite the case?! And then, as one continues reading, it often begins to seem as though the forcefully asserted opposite view is not quite ieks own; it too gets called into question, with the surprising result that the first nave view begins to look somehow less nave. The initial reversal can sometimes look alarmingly like a cheap, Christopher Hitchens-style contrarianism, particularly since ieks political writings often start with a mainstream liberal view and then assert one that sounds much more right-wing. Yet the point is not simply to provoke liberals or to play devils advocate. Rather, these reversals are part of a strategy to keep the thought in motion. Instead of proposing a solution or finding a resting place, iek relentlessly seeks out further conflicts and contradictions, carrying out what Marx called the ruthless criticism of everything existing. The goal is not to arrive at a settled view, but to achieve greater clarity about what is really at issue, about what is really at stake in a given debate. And what is always at stake is a conflict, because for iek, society is always riven with conflict and contradiction. Thats why ideology produces mutually conflicting answers its responding to an underlying reality that is inherently contradictory, a struggle so deep and irreconcilable that it cant directly be put into words. Nothing is a complete and harmonious whole, from quarks all the way up to the most abstract philosophical ideal. Nothing is inherently stable, but only temporarily stabilized. Its not that there are first positions that then come into conflict all our

positions amount to a kind of fall-out of our attempts to manage this ultimately unmanageable conflict. Remaining faithful to the Marxist tradition, iek believes that the most apt name for the conflict at the heart of modern society is class struggle. The struggle is not between two pre-existing classes the working class and the capitalist or owner class that happen to enter into some kind of conflict. These two classes are the fallout of capitalism, which is itself conflictual in nature: people worked before capitalism, but the working class as a massive population of landless laborers who must sell their labor power to survive only came about as a result of capitalist development. Similarly, there were rich people before capitalism, but not a class of people who sought to extract profits from this free labor power. The conflict is the system, the system the conflict. Class struggle is important for iek because it produces two completely incompatible and conflictual views of the world the difference between the exploited and the exploiter is more than a difference of opinion, it is a completely different framework. Reasonable people from both sides cannot come together and hash out a compromise that takes everyones interests into account. The middle ground is an unbridgeable chasm, and ideology represents our attempts to paper over and ignore that chasm. So when people in the U.S. produce the vision of the Mexican immigrant as the workaholic welfare queen, what is really at stake cant be a conflict between cultures, because for iek that would imply pre-existing, more or less stable or homogeneous cultures that first exist and then subsequently happen to come into conflict. Nor can it be about the Mexicans who come to America and disturb the balance of our local culture, because that balance didnt exist in the first place. No, the conflict is inherent in capitalist exploitation. The Mexicans arent taking our jobs the owners are doing whatever they can to suppress wages, with no interest in who they pay.
II.

The example of immigration demonstrates that conflict is never truly eliminated, but can be shifted. The task of the critic is to shift the conflict back to its proper place. Since straightforward argument presupposes a shared frame of reference, it is not a suitable tool for carrying out the kind of frame-shifting that iek is trying to achieve. More indirect methods are necessary. One of ieks primary tactics for shifting the frame of reference is overidentification. This strategy grows out of his experience under the Communist regime in Yugoslavia. Observing his countrys political life, iek came to a paradoxical realization: the fact that no one really bought into the official socialist ideology was not an obstacle for the rulers cynical distance was part of their strategy for maintaining control. In this situation, iek proposed, the best way to resist was to take the ruling ideology at its word, navely demanding that the leaders fulfill the promise of their ideals. The political situation in the contemporary West is not as straightforward, but iek continues to carry out a version of this strategy of overidentification in his political writings. His diagnosis of the basic political situation is found in his 1993 book Tarrying With the Negative, where he claims that mainstream liberal political leaders are fundamentally complicit with right-wing

nationalism, using it as a tool in their attempt to maintain the capitalist status quo. On the one hand, right-wing outbursts and movements serve as helpful distractions, diverting peoples energy away from the real problem (people who might otherwise be rioting against bank bailouts are demanding to see Obamas birth certificate, or arguing that birthers are crazy). On the other hand, they serve as an ever-present threat, as in the demands for the Greek electorate to approve of the E.U.-I.M.F. program, lest fascism overrun the land. One can see both sides of this dynamic in the Democratic Partys political strategy: on the one hand, they must continually make unfortunate concessions to the political right out of a supposed realism, but on the other hand, they present themselves as the only thing standing between us and the unmitigated horror of a Tea Party government. In this situation, where liberals are continually conceding that the right wing is expressing legitimate concerns, iek says essentially: yes, they are expressing legitimate concerns, but not the ones they think theyre expressing. To return to the immigration example, iek would proceed by agreeing that right-wing outbursts should be taken seriously not as signs of the need for a more homogeneous culture, or for preserving American jobs, or for keeping foreigners from overwhelming the welfare state, but as symptoms of the disruptive contradictions of capitalism. Similarly, when liberals acknowledge that conservatives have a point about the need to preserve the European tradition or the Christian heritage, iek agrees that they do indeed have a point: we absolutely need to preserve the European tradition of radical revolution and the Christian heritage of radical equality! He shifts the conflict from one between liberals and conservatives to the one at the heart of the cultural tradition itself. This strategy of overidentification which can be summarized in the vertiginous formula, Yes, of course I agree completely, but arent you actually completely wrong?! may be difficult to follow, but it produces jolting shifts that could not easily be produced any other way.
III.

In his more academic texts, iek rarely states his own view directly, but routes it through the great thinkers of contradiction: above all, the German Idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan two thinkers who proceed through dialogue and whose own views are notoriously difficult to decipher. This coupling of Lacan and Hegel is absolutely crucial for him. In fact, in the introduction to his latest major work, Less Than Nothing, he claims that for him and his close intellectual comrades, whatever we were doing, the underlying axiom was that reading Hegel through Lacan (and vice versa) was our unsurpassable horizon. Other thinkers are also extremely important to him most notably Marx, another great thinker of contradiction who worked primarily in the mode of critique but none so much as these two. Yet it should be emphasized that this combination is in many ways counterintuitive, if only because Lacan is himself very distrustful of Hegels philosophy, and most so in the very works that are central for iek. This is far from the only example of a counterintuitive pairing in ieks work one of his earliest books is entitled Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Lacan: But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, dedicated to explaining Lacans psychoanalytic concepts through Hitchcocks films. Similarly, he can pair Kant with Blade Runner or Schelling with Lassie Come Home. He can explain Hegel by means of an obscene joke, and he can end a book on the subversive potential of Christianity with a meditation on a cheap candy with a toy in

the middle (the Kinder Egg). He calls these short-circuits, unexpected pairings that produce striking insights. The goal is not to show how the two fields are actually connected in a previously unseen way. The reader should not simply have learned something new, he says. The point is, rather, to make him or her aware of another disturbing side of something he or she knew all the time. The same could be said of ieks work as a whole: the point isnt so much to learn about a topic as to be jolted into a new (and yes, disturbing) perspective on the familiar.
IV.

Like Marxs, ieks ruthless critique of everything existing doesnt critique both sides in a conflict equally. Contradictions are always asymmetrical. In the conflict between the capitalists and the workers, for example, it isnt a matter of two different, equally limited viewpoints. In the ultimate short-circuit, the particular position of the workers represents the truth of the entire situation the worker embodies the contradiction of capitalism. Similarly, the relationship between men and women in our male-dominated society cannot be accounted for in terms of stable complementary roles for the two sexes in another short-circuit, the womans position directly reveals the central contradiction around which the entire society is structured. In short, for iek, one must take sides in order to have access to the truth. Truth is not universal in the traditional sense of applying equally in every situation each situation has its own truth. In Less Than Nothing, iek explains this dynamic in terms of the relationship between the universal and the particular, a topic that has bedeviled philosophers for centuries. Whereas we might normally view a universal as an unattainable ideal like justice or democracy that we must always strive to approximate in our particular circumstances, iek takes the opposite view: particular societies arent inadequate compared to the universal, but rather the very idea of the universal arises out of the inherent inadequacies of every particular system. In other words, the truly universal dimension is not the noble ideal, but the complaint what unites us is not our devotion to high ideals and deep human values, but the fact that the world sucks, everywhere. iek does not hold out the utopian hope of eliminating all conflict in fact, he believes our supposedly post-ideological era is blinded by the truly utopian hope that all genuine conflicts might be resolved, allowing the system of liberal-democratic capitalism to go on more or less forever. What iek hopes for, in tracking down the contradiction at the heart of our society and identifying with the class that embodies it, is not that the world will no longer suck, but that it will no longer suck in this particular way, that we will no longer be stuck in this particular vicious cycle, that we can somehow find a way to stop frantically grasping at rationalizations for our self-destructive fixations and do something else in short, to jolt us into the realization that there is an alternative.

How To Read Agamben by Adam Kotsko

June 4th, 2013 FOR SOMEONE WHO HAS BEEN following the career of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben from the beginning perhaps even including his cameo appearance in Pier Paolo

Pasolinis The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) his current notoriety as a political thinker might seem surprising and even baffling. A good portion of Agambens early work focuses on questions of aesthetics, and much of the rest is devoted to careful and idiosyncratic readings of major figures in the history of philosophy. Familiarity with his most recent writing would likely increase that puzzlement. In addition to the ongoing, overtly political Homo Sacer series which so far includes Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995; translated 1998), State of Exception (2003; translated 2005), and Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1998; translated 2002) he has turned his attention to a commentary on St. Pauls Epistle to the Romans, an enigmatic and fragmentary study of the relationship between the human and the animal, and a series of investigations into the history of Christian theology. None of this sounds particularly timely or trendy. During the Bush years, however, Agambens investigations of sovereign authority, the state of emergency (or exception), and the concept of bare life seemed to speak directly to the most immediate and pressing political concerns of the day: the emergency powers claimed in the War on Terror, the fate of the detainees kept in the lawless zone of Guantnamo Bay, and the general reassertion of the kind of state sovereignty that globalization was supposed to be rendering irrelevant. Despite being coincidentally topical, however, there is still much that is puzzling about the political works themselves. Homo Sacer, which infamously claims that the paradigm of all modern politics is the concentration camp, proceeds by way of an investigation of an obscure figure in Roman law the homo sacer (sacred man) who could be killed with impunity but not sacrificed and stops to deal with Pindar, Hlderlin, and many other unexpected figures along the way. (There are also werewolves.) Remnants of Auschwitz focuses on the Muselmnner, the most degraded and hopeless victims of the Shoah, but spends a surprising amount of space dealing with questions of structural linguistics. State of Exception, in many ways the most straightforward of the three Homo Sacer books, provides a history of emergency powers in the Roman and modern world. But instead of making the seemingly obvious claim that we should stop relying on emergency powers and stick with normal legal structures, Agamben hints at a radically different solution that he believes to be implicit in a Kafka story in which Alexander the Greats horse Bucephalus becomes a lawyer. What is going on here? That was certainly my question when I first read Homo Sacer, and in my stubborn determination to figure out the answer, I wound up reading the majority of Agambens works, and even translating some of them. Its on the occasion of the publication of two of my translations The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, and Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty (Stanford UP, 2013) that I wrote this essay, which shares some of the patterns I picked up along the way.
I.

A striking feature of Agambens work is its tendency to leap immediately from the tiniest detail to the broadest possible generalization. In Homo Sacer, for instance, we learn that the entire history of Western political thought was always heading toward the horrors of totalitarianism, as we can tell by taking a look at an obscure corner of ancient Roman law. Similarly, while his late works boast increasingly large-scale ambitions, they are nonetheless written in a fragmentary

form and always make room for digressions and asides (often in the form of notes inserted right into the middle of the text, introduced by the Hebrew letter "aleph"). These idiosyncratic traits can, I believe, be traced back to Agambens two most significant influences: Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger. Agamben served as editor of the Italian edition of Benjamins complete works, which consist primarily of dense essays and cryptic fragments, the majority of them not published during Benjamins lifetime. Its clear that Agamben admires the compression and vast interdisciplinary range of Benjamins work and aspires to similar effects in his own writing. The link to Heidegger is perhaps even closer: as a student in one of Heideggers postwar seminars, Agamben picked up the great philosophers ambition to provide an overarching account of the history of the West, and use that history to shed light on the contemporary world. From both Heidegger and Benjamin, Agamben inherits, on the one hand, a careful attention to philological detail and questions of translation, and, on the other, a marked tendency toward conceptual abstraction. (Heidegger, for instance, spent his entire career investigating the concept of Being, while some of Benjamins most famous essays are devoted to the broadest possible topics, such as violence, language, or history.) It is not only Agambens methods that stem from these two thinkers, but often his path of investigation as well. The entire Homo Sacer series can be read as a follow-up on Benjamins suggestion, in his Critique of Violence (1921), that someone really ought to look into the origin of the concept of the sacredness of human life. His study of animality in The Open is, by contrast, centered on one of Heideggers writings on that question, and many of the chapters expand on Heideggers own key references. Agambens work can be read in part as a series of footnotes to the two great thinkers who have most inspired him, even if very few of his writings presuppose detailed knowledge of either.
II.

At this point, one could rightly ask what in Agambens work is his own aside, of course, from the aleph-notes. Some of his originality can be traced to the way he brings together Heidegger and Benjamin, along with other major figures such as Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and Aristotle. Leaving aside questions of intellectual genealogy, however, much of what is most distinctive about Agambens style of thought comes from his love of paradox and contradiction. For instance, following up Benjamins research agenda, he traces the notion of the sacredness of human life back to the homo sacer an origin that, far from indicating that human life has exceptional and unconditional value, actually refers to a form of human life that has been deprived of all legal protection. And instead of marveling at how much our concept of the sacredness of human life has changed, he argues that the old meaning still stands: the state that respects the sacredness of human life is actually a machine that threatens to turn every one of us into a defenseless homo sacer. This love of paradox is not simply a rhetorical tic. It deeply shapes Agambens political analysis, which seeks out places where our accustomed categories begin to overlap and break down. For example, he is fascinated with the figure of the sovereign ruler who can suspend the law, because of what he calls the paradox of sovereignty, namely the fact that the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order. On the one hand, the sovereign who declares a state

of emergency can freely violate the letter of the law; on the other, his actions are legitimated by reference to the law and (at least ideally) aim to restore the normal conditions for the rule of law. Sovereign action in the state of emergency is thus a strange kind of legal illegality or is it illegal legality? A related dynamic is at work with the figure of the homo sacer, who stands as a kind of metaphor for all people excluded from official legal protection and reduced to a state of bare life, such as refugees, enemy combatants, and concentration camp victims. On the one hand, they are excluded from the realm of law, but this very exclusion is itself a legal act, indeed one of the most forceful and decisive of legal acts. Thus the person reduced to bare life is excluded in, or included out. The greatest contradiction of all, however, is the way that the sovereign and the homo sacers respective relationships to the law relationships of exclusive inclusion or inclusive exclusion overlap. On a purely formal level, the same paradoxical and contradictory relationship to the law holds equally for the mightiest ruler as for the most desperate victim. Indeed, these two paradoxes begin to become mirror images of each other: At the extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns. Agamben believes that our political system is increasingly breaking down and that extra-legal but legally validated emergency power is no longer the exception, but the rule. Here we might think of the ways in which the supposed emergency of the War on Terror, which has now dragged on for well over 10 years and shows no sign of ending, is used to legitimate increasingly extreme executive powers (including, most recently, President Obamas claim that he has the right to assassinate US citizens suspected of terrorism without trial and on US soil). This breakdown in legal procedure is not a moment of weakness, however, but the moment when the law displays its power in its rawest and most deadly form. As Agamben puts it in State of Exception, when the state of exception [] becomes the rule, then the juridico-political system transforms itself into a killing machine.
III.

Many critics of the War on Terror, including Judith Butler, have used Agambens terminology to mount a kind of moral critique of American foreign policy. One might say, for instance, that the US government is wrong to create a kind of exceptional law-free zone in Guantnamo Bay, because that results in turning the detainees into bare life which is bad. And certainly it is; yet Agambens political work is a little too complex to fit easily into this kind of moralizing discourse. For Agamben, the answer to the problem posed by sovereign power cannot be to return to the normal conditions of the rule of law, because Western political systems have always contained in their very structure the seeds that would grow into our universalized exception. It cant be a matter of refraining from reducing people to bare life, because that is just what Western legal structures do. The extreme, destructive conjunction of sovereign authority and bare life is not a catastrophe that we could have somehow avoided: for Agamben, it represents the deepest and truest structure of the law.

Now may be the time to return to that Kafka story about Alexander the Greats horse Bucephalus, entitled The New Attorney. (The text is available here. I recommend you take a moment to read it its very short, and quite interesting.) In this brief fragment, we learn that Bucephalus has changed careers: he is no longer a warhorse, but a lawyer. What strikes Agamben about this story is that the steed of the greatest sovereign conqueror in the ancient world has taken up the study of the law. For Agamben, this provides an image of what it might look like not to go back to a previous, less destructive form of law, but to get free of law altogether: One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamins posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical. The law will not be simply done away with, but it is used in a fundamentally different way. In place of enforcement, we have study, and in place of solemn reverence, play. Agamben believes that the new attorney is going the state of emergency one better: his activity not only suspends the letter of the law, but, more importantly, suspends its force, its dominating power. Agambens critical work always aims toward these kinds of strange, evocative recommendations. Again and again, we find that the goal of tracking down the paradoxes and contradictions in the law is not to fix it or provide cautionary tales of what to avoid, but to push the paradox even further. Agamben often uses the theological term messianic to describe his argumentative strategy, because messianic movements throughout history and here Agamben would include certain forms of Christianity have often had an antagonistic relationship to the law (primarily, but not solely, the Jewish law, or Torah). Accordingly, he frequently draws on messianic texts from the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions for inspiration in his attempt to find a way out of the destructive paradoxes of Western legal thought. In his most recent book to appear in English, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-ofLife (2011; 2013), Agamben conducts a detailed study of Christian monasticism, which he believes to be essentially a messianic movement. Not only was the movement founded and renewed by people who were unsatisfied with mainstream institutions claiming to represent a historical claimant to the title of messiah (namely Jesus), but they also display a particularly paradoxical relationship to the law. On the one hand, the monastic life is regulated down to the smallest detail, creating the impression that it represents the strictest possible form of law (an impression that is reinforced by the existence of detailed lists of punishments for infractions). On the other hand, monastic thinkers have always insisted that their rules are something other than laws. Where secular law aims to provide boundaries to life through the imposition of prohibitions and punishments, monastic rules aim to positively shape the life of the monks. What is at stake in monasticism is thus not the enforcement of norms, but the very form of the monks life. Agamben believes that this blurring of the boundary between rule and life, to the point where they become indistinguishable, is a concrete historical attempt to achieve something like the state of study or play that he recommends in State of Exception. He finds the

Franciscan movement to be particularly radical in this regard, and much of The Highest Poverty takes up the task of analyzing how the Franciscans were ultimately brought into the mainstream of Christianity, so that we can avoid the same pitfalls in our contemporary efforts to find some way to escape the destructive killing machine we call the law.
IV.

Based on what Ive said so far, Agambens work may appear to be very systematic and he reinforces that impression by elaborately dividing the project that began with Homo Sacer into various volumes and sub-volumes. What is most appealing about Agambens work to me, though, is not its systematicity but its open-ended and exploratory nature. For instance, in State of Exception, he notes how frequently modern governments have declared a state of emergency due to economic conditions, and that ultimately led him into his vast exploration of the concept of economy in The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (2007; 2011). That book, surprisingly, wound up encompassing the history of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity (and included a particularly satisfying chapter that presents the angels as Gods bureaucrats). In The Highest Poverty, Agamben notes that the monks seem to be continually tempted to turn their entire life into a continual act of worship which led him to conduct a study of liturgy and its influence on contemporary concepts of ethical duty. (That book is forthcoming later this year, under the title Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty.) For this reason, I think that the best way into Agambens work may not be his better-known political writings, but the short and fragmentary book The Open: Man and Animal (2002; 2004). It contains several unforgettable passages perhaps most notable is the story of an unfortunate tick that was deprived of all sensory input by researchers and persisted in this state for nearly two decades. This leads Agamben to ask a series of probing questions that have implications far beyond the fate of a tick: But what becomes of the tick and its world in this state of suspension that lasts eighteen years? How is it possible for a living being that consists entirely in its relationship with the environment to survive in absolute deprivation of that environment? And what sense does it make to speak of waiting without time and without world? I expect that The Open will challenge almost everyones preconceptions about animals in some way. Its not clear how all the pieces of Agambens argument fit together, but this only increases the books effectiveness for me: its not a definitive answer to the question of how humans and animals relate, but a book to think with. Reading The Open or other Agamben books in a similar vein, such as The Coming Community (1990; 1993) or Nudities (2009; 2010) before coming to the more imposing political works may be useful, as they help to clarify the way Agamben thinks before one is faced with the issue of what he thinks. For all their sweeping ambition and programmatic claims, the political works fundamentally represent the same fragmentary and improvisational style of intellectual exploration as the more miscellaneous entries in Agambens canon; in all his writings, he exemplifies the study or play with the Western cultural and political tradition that

he advocates. Whatever else Agambens works manage to achieve, they may ultimately be most successful when they serve to invite us to join him in the serious pursuit of study as play. Adam Kotsko is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Shimer College in Chicago and the translator of Giorgio Agambens Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, and Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty. His other books include iekand Theology, The Politics of Redemption: The Social Logic of Salvation, Awkwardness, and Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television.

Julia Lupton on Blog Theory

Whatever Being
August 13th, 2012 reset - +

DO YOU REMEMBER STARTING your first blog (or maybe it was your mothers, or your girlfriends, or your dogs)? Were you hawking a hobby, angling for authorship, or looking for love? In choosing a platform, did you tarry with Xanga or settle for Blogger? How did you manage the temptations and letdowns of vanity-Googling? Did blogging ameliorate your loneliness, or amplify it? And, when the end finally came, did Ye Old Blogge dwindle away from malnutrition and amnesia, or did you finish it off with a swift and deliberate declaration of disengagement? In Blog Theory, political scientist and media critic Jodi Dean argues that reports of the death of blogging have been greatly exaggerated. When personal web logs failed to deliver love, fame, and reliable income streams, blogging didnt disappear so much as migrate into newer social media and information technologies such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and word clouds. Although the word blogging has begun to be eclipsed by new brands, platforms, and assorted neologisms, Dean notes that blogs have regrouped as marketing tools on corporate sites, in the form of both user-generated content streams and editorial boosterism. On the home front, mommy-bloggers and teen fashion consultants use WordPress and YouTube to rezone their kitchens and closets into intimate retail showrooms, adapting the mass media techniques of product placement and celebrity endorsement to the theater of daily life and the cultivation of niche communities. Dean analyzes blogging as a feature of communicative capitalism, a term she develops from thinkers associated with the Autonomia movement, like Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Tiziana Terranova. The Autonomists, whose origins date to the late 1960s, were Italian Marxists who wanted to disassociate social transformation from official organs like trade unions and political parties in order to grant more agency and inventiveness to informally organized workers, artists, and unpaid laborers. Heirs of and respondants to the Autonomists, including Jodi Dean, use the term communicative capitalism, to designate the replacement of industrial labor by service economies that manufacture experience, trade in entertainment, and thrive on data (examples include theme parks, brand hubs, and junk bonds). But while Autonomistinspired thinkers like Terranova see at least some locally transformative (or autonomist) potential in internet communication, Dean argues that our online activity almost always ends up

sustaining an information and marketing network. Communicative capitalism, she writes, is that economic-ideological form wherein reflexivity captures creativity and resistance so as to enrich the few as it placates and diverts the many. In Deans account, the internet is an affect machine that feeds on both the steady pulse and the emotional spikes of our online fidelities. With every digital communication we offer ourselves up to the web-crawling, content-scraping marketing gods. Our search is their find. Dean calls the world created by all this communicative chatter a blogipelago, a term she prefers to the more widespread blogosphere: Blogipelago, like archipelago, reminds us of separateness, disconnection, and the immense effort it can take to move from one island or network to another. In Deans blogipelago, writing, reading, not-reading, and shopping have become indistinguishable actions in an endless loop of reflexivity. The landscape of Twitter, she notes, is dominated not by 140-character poets of daily life but by automated bots and social media marketers. Dean dubs the inhabitants of this distracted globe whatever beings, creatures of indifference who enjoy communication for its own sake, without caring too much about what is actually being said. Although Dean borrows the term whatever being from another Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben (who speaks of lessere qualunque in his book The Coming Community), she grafts his more affirmative account of the sheer generic potentiality of being onto the flippantly adolescent (and very American) Whaaaat-ever. Dean features teen entrepreneur and self-taught graphic designer Ashley Qualls, whose free MySpace layouts have generated millions of ad revenue at her website Whateverlife.com. The whatever blogger just wants to get something up there, to connect, to be counted, to leave her mark, to start a meme. Dean calls this reflexive communication: communication caught up in its own excited loops of chat. Personalization, she argues, shapes and neutralizes every act of participation by putting the focus not on a sustainable collective identity but on the giddy look at me moment of the Instagram and the status line. The whatever blogger is, like, fifteen, forever. Like everyone else, I am exposed every day of my life to the whatever being that Dean diagnoses. My three teen-aged daughters are most certainly situated in a rich communicative habitat consisting of multiple platforms and applications (mobile phones, social network sites, video, music, and photo sharing sites). Meanwhile, my students have trouble making it through a fifty-minute lecture without fondling a touch screen. I can see them struggling, wavering, and then finally succumbing, like Weight Watchers in a food court, as I gamely barrel through Power Points and YouTube clips in search of new ways to hold a candle to the worlds they cradle in their laps. Everyone in the room is busy trying to keep up with the cheerful demands of communicative capitalism (connect! join! rank! vote! comment!) as the terms for educational engagement shift beneath our TOMS shoes.

Nor am I myself immune from the pleasures of whatever being: before I dip into my daily share of media experts and design mavens, I skim ads from stores that know my cup size, pleas from political groups whose petitions moved me for a minute, and newsletters from a myriad museums and service organizations I must have visited once with an open heart or open pocket. In this daily encounter with past purchases and abandoned commitments, deleting becomes a new form of memory: Sustainability? Cruelty-free chocolate? Child sex workers? Survey Monkey? Anthropologie? Whatever. Dean helpfully traces the current compact between blogging, consumerism and agitated apathy to The Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968 by Stewart Brand, a charismatic hipster who promoted psychedelic drugs, communal living, sustainability, and most presciently personal computing. Grouping together consumer items and information resources as seemingly incongruous as mystical fiction and geodesic domes, The Whole Earth Catalog, Dean argues, suggested a vision of life that combined nomadic tribes and high-tech electronics in a frontier fantasy of do-it-yourself American freedom. In Deans account, Stewart Brands libertarianism disavowed its dependence on capitalist institutions, leading to the easy cooption of Whole Earth grooviness by corporate and military-industrial interests. Working these same fields, the hipster giants of Silicon Valley, including Google, Facebook, and Apple, have promulgated a work-asplay philosophy while delivering new lows in American-dream basics like job security and retirement benefits. Geeks, she writes, may be about equality, fairness, and justice among each other (or, as is more likely, they may be about competition and glory, killer apps and venture capital.) Whatever the professed values of the new communicative capitalists, the results of their innovate-or-die ethos, Dean argues, is the most extreme economic inequality the world has ever known. You might gather from the foregoing that Jodi Dean is a technophobe. Not so. She is in fact an active blogger herself (jdeanicite.typepad.com). But Dean rejects enthusiastic appreciations of the internet as a democratizing and experimental force. Instead, she insists that blogging stimulates consumerism and strengthens surveillance while chillaxing our capacities for collective action. In the blogipelago, words are no longer subjectivized insofar as they fail to induce the subject to stand by them Since exit is an option with nearly no costs, subjects lose the incentive for their word to be their bond. Far from politicizing its participants, internet exchange breeds restlessness, irritability, and rage (as well as randomized spelling and a mounting crisis in comma abuse). If you think that crowds are smart and information will make you free, Dean is here to remind you that communicative capitalism actually weakens judgment and concentrates wealth. Considered by the standards of the emancipatory, transformative project proposed by the Autonomia movement or even the tech worlds own utopian visions the rise of whatever being can only be regarded as an Epic Fail. Although many of Deans arguments resonate with earlier critiques of blogging, especially Geert Lovinks magnificent Zero Comments (2007), it is her recourse to psychoanalysis in this context that makes her account distinctive. The internet, Dean argues, is one symptom of a general decline of the symbolic, in which the secular authority once invested in law, the state, and accredited institutions of higher learning has dissipated into shapeless crowds that form and

dissolve around quixotic waves of viral rumor, toxic trending, and morning-after pop culture recaps. In this world, Dean writes, we become mesmerized by our own looking. Not only has the Primal Father long since been shorn of his vital parts, but even the bureaucratic bands of brothers who killed him (think of the trade unions and political parties opposed by the Autonomists) have been laid off, dispersed, and rehired on short-term contracts. In the age of symbolic decline, online degree mills, talk radio, and DIY everything characterize a culture in which expertise has been eclipsed by a militant amateurism: the despotism of the gut reaction and the hegemony of the blank stare. Dean associates this pink slime of emotion, data, and cant with what Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan called the drives. Often translated as instincts, Lacan insisted that Freuds original German term Trieb is more mechanistic and less biological than the English or French word instinct implies. Lacan insisted that the oral, anal, and scopic drives trace involuntary, repetitive movements towards and around partial objects. The jump-start actions of the drives produce momentary bursts of enjoyment without ever actually reaching their destination. Whereas Lacan sees desire as linguistic and symbolic, organized by a series of substitutions that enable the higher cognitive functions of metaphor and analogy, he associates the drives with the stream of inchoate and mesmerizing images cast up by bodily processes en route to discharge. Desire begins with castration and ends with money, language, law, and thought; the drives begin with milk and shit and remain forever mired in the sludge of objects, affects, and images associated with consumption and its waste products. Like the psychological drives, whatever being is defined by its intensities of feeling (horror, panic, glee, pique), rapid, montage-like jumps between disparate images (pudgy Pomeranians, naked children with lipstick, tsunami survivors, artisanal gummy bears, duct tape prom dresses), and a restless, roving rhythm (one more click, link, image, deal, friend). Blogging, she argues, is drive-like in its movement without message, movement with intensity, movement outward and back Drive circulates, round and round, producing satisfaction even as it misses its aim, even as it emerges in the plastic network of the decline of symbolic efficiency. In the world of the drive, affect and image trump ideas, while tweeting bots, mutant memes and roving splogs (spam blogs) prey on authorship in order to destroy authority. Deans turn to the drive illuminates the giddy circuit-happy formalism of life online, but, from a psychoanalytic point of view, she may be too pessimistic about its consequences. For Lacan, both desire and drive have a necessary place in any social and mental world; both are equally subject to pathology and enervation as well as to ethical exercise and subjective blossoming. If Dean aptly diagnoses the phatic emptiness of contemporary communication as a manifestation of the drive, that doesnt necessarily mean that whatever being bears no relationship at all to the symbolic order. I would suggest that internet-inspired enterprises as diverse as fan fiction, slow food, community-supported agriculture, vintage clothing swaps, and craftivism may assemble new values and styles of organization that do not simply evaporate into the fetid, self-reflexive burp of capitalist communication for its own sake. It becomes clear that Dean is at war with affect, which she defines as a movement which estranges the subject from its experience. The manic cooing triggered by viewing The Worlds Cutest Dog (http://www.facebook.com/Boo) jetpacks the subject out of herself, in a feeling rush

that circumvents genuine human contact, self-knowledge, or political connection. But do all affects sap agency in this way? Perhaps curiosity, wonder, satiety, consternation, solicitude, bewilderment, or love also launch movements that estrange, but in ways that might clear room for more efficacious forms of thought, action, and affiliation? Although Dean develops the idea of communicative capitalism from the work of Autonomists like Hardt and Negri, she rejects the Autonomists positive valuation of affective labor: that is, forms of work that both require emotional expenditure and sustain the emotional lives of others. (Forms of affective labor might include changing diapers, making dinner, tending the sick, and writing a screenplay.) Although the arousal and servicing of emotions feeds communicative capital, Hardt has argued that affective labor can also support alternative forms of life outside or at the edges of the capitalist grid. Blogging and social media have an organizational role to play here, as we see in the fair trade and urban farming movements, or (in the period since Deans book appeared in 2010) the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. Certainly Dean is asking the right questions about online life, even if her answers seem excessively doomy. How can our daily acts help shape the new digital environments that so relentlessly shape us? Earlier forms of mass-mediated expression certainly floated their own versions of whatever being. The idle novel reader or the frivolous novelist frittering away her time on meaningless trivialities was a staple stereotype of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And before the novel, there was theater: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the new secular drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries was perceived to participate in a dangerous medium of empty signs. Plays, novels, and cinema may indeed have distracted their early audiences, but they also assembled alternative spaces for imagining other worlds, sharing new kinds of relationships, and recording variant forms of speech. We certainly need vigilance and critique to help us resist dotcom charisma, and no one is fiercer or smarter than Dean on this front. But that doesnt mean we cant keep scanning our digital worlds for glimpses of the good life.