b2o: boundary 2 online

  • b2@PITT boundary 2’s Spring 2019 Conference

    b2@PITT boundary 2’s Spring 2019 Conference

    The spring 2019 conference will be at the University of Pittsburgh, from April 5-6.

    The event schedule is listed below. Events are free to the public and in the Cathedral of Learning at the Humanities Center (Room 602).

    Friday, April 5, 2019

    1 – 1:50 PM, Jason Fitzgerald, University of Pittsburgh, “Making Humans, Making Humanism: History and Universalism on Amiri Baraka’s Black Nationalist Stage”

    2 – 2:50 PM, Nancy Condee, University of Pittsburgh, “Wishful Thinking: The End of Sovereignty”

    3 – 3:50 PM, Gavin Steingo, Princeton University, “Reinterpreting Culture with Hildred Geertz”

    4 – 4:50 PM, Margaret Ferguson, UC Davis, “Unquenchable Myths of Hymen in Hymenoplasty Surgery, Crowd Virginity Testing, and Other Social Sites Present and Past”

    5 – 5:50 PM, Annette Damayanti Lienau, Harvard University, “Islamic Egalitarianism and (French) Orientalism: Re-reading the ‘Margins’ of the ‘Muslim World’”

    Saturday, April 6

    9 – 9:50 AM, Bruce Robbins, Columbia University,  “Single? Great? Collective? Frederic Jameson’s World History”

    10 – 10:50 AM, Piotr Gwiazda, University of Pittsburgh, “Ghosts and Anchors: Translingualism in Contemporary US Poetry”

    11 – 11:50 AM, Bécquer Seguin, The Johns Hopkins University, “Imagination Burning: On Lorca’s Anti-Colonialism”

    1 – 1:50 PM, Kara Keeling, University of Chicago, “Queer Times, Black Futures”

    2 – 2:50 PM, Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College, “Indigeneity, ‘Americanity, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Romance with Settler-Colonial Capitalism”

    3 – 3:50 PM, Reading by Dawn Lundy Martin, University of Pittsburgh

    4 – 4:50 PM, In Memoriam, Joseph A. Buttigieg

  • Peter Gratton — Neoliberalism’s Appeal: Crime, Punishment, and the State on Trial (Review of Geoffrey de Lagasnerie’s Judge and Punish)

    Peter Gratton — Neoliberalism’s Appeal: Crime, Punishment, and the State on Trial (Review of Geoffrey de Lagasnerie’s Judge and Punish)

    by Peter Gratton

    Review of: Geoffrey de Lagasnerie’s Judge and Punish: The Penal State on Trial, trans. Lara Vergnaud (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). Originally published in French as Juger: L’État pénal face à la sociologie (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2016).

    Geoffrey de Lagasnerie’s Judge and Punish: The Penal State on Trial, first published in French as L’État pénal face à la sociologie (The Penal State Confronts Sociology, Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2016) and translated well by Lara Vergnaud, is an at times brilliantly written polemic, decoding the ways in which we take our systems of judging and punishing as an ever-existing part of our background. This book is not a genealogy of the jurisprudential models used in the West and so is not akin to Michel Foucault’s history of the prison in Discipline and Punish (1975). Nor is it a long history of the birth of punishment as in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (1887). Nor is it is call for prison abolitionism à la Angela Davis. But it is a searing and necessary brief against how we judge guilt and innocence in criminal trials that provide entree to the state networks of systemic violence against the poor, those of color, and the marginalized in general. De Lagasnerie proves an ample prosecutor of the current French system—the book is replete with memorable lines that will stick with any jury of his peers reading along—and his suit is one that can and should be brought in different jurisdictions across the West.

    Yet his case all but falls apart as he comes to his summation. There, in the final chapters, after so many allegations that he is undertaking a “radical” critique of these systems, he argues for a neoliberal response to crime and justice that he argues has not yet occurred in practice.  “If modern transformations of the state had truly been driven by a neoliberal logic,” he writes, “they wouldn’t have taken the form of a strengthening of the penal state,” he states as if it were a matter of fact (180). This left neoliberalism, he stipulates, would privatize much of the criminal justice system (175-6). He leaves unexplained the rapid increases in the prison population of the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and his home country of France, those places where fiscal austerity and neoliberalism have been strongest even as crime rates have decreased often to their historically weakest. How to explain this correlation between neoliberal governance and the steroidal increase in the rise of our prison populations if it’s not in fact a relation of causation? He offers no exculpatory evidence. His amicus curiae for neoliberalism—the idealist route when facts are not in evidence—is to say neoliberalism hasn’t been taken far enough: its hyper-individualism provides another “conception of judgment and law” (79) that has been ignored by a dépassé but still remnant state authoritarianism that neoliberalism has yet to conquer (62). Once this occurs, there will be a privatization of criminality, creating a “horizontal” relation between victimizer and victimized, with minimal intervention by the state, whose sovereign, top-down relation to those rendered guilty of crimes would all but disappear (183).

    De Lagasnerie thus joins other followers of Foucault in recent memory who have taken a neoliberal turn, especially after the publication a decade ago of Foucault’s investigations of the incipient neoliberalism of the late 1970s in his 1978-9 lecture course, The Birth of Biopolitics. Based on a misreading of these lectures, those friendly to Foucault’s work like de Lagasnerie and Foucault’s Marxist critics both argue he welcomed neoliberalism’s critique of the totalizing, bureaucratic state as a means for countering state power. About this as a political strategy or even as a reading of the later Foucault, I have more than a reasonable doubt, but let me first let de Lagasnerie make his case before rendering a verdict at the end of this essay.

    De Lagasnerie opens the book with his own reporting on many scenes of trials in Parisian courts. His method is sociological but not the kind of empirical sociology that merely describes what is underway. That, nevertheless, he does well: de Lagasnerie details the quotidian, mechanical way in which defendant after defendant is processed, with the high stakes matched only by the manifest boredom (malaise) of the trials themselves (9). Prosecutors and defendants alike use the same arguments over and over, and the system itself turns on such iteration or repetition. This is what makes the structure look as natural and inevitable as the Earth’s revolution around the sun. Everyone appears to be treated the same even as defendants of color, for example, are more likely to face graver sentences and are far more likely to be found guilty (201-2). “The very repetition” of the trials, de Lagasnerie writes, “immunizes the penal apparatus [le dispositif pénal] from criticism” (8). Every step in the process, from the arrest to pre-trial hearings to the trial to the judgment and sentencing, “operates,” he notes, “within the comfort of habit, an obvious and automatic way of reacting to illegal activity, unhindered by the need or desire to question what is happening” (8).

    One shouldn’t for a moment diminish the vast asymmetry between the trauma for those involved and the almost nonchalant bureaucratic manner at play. The only questioning of the system occurs when this system fails to function, e.g., when a crime goes unpunished, when the lawyers don’t follow the procedure, and so on, but never concerns the system itself. Any discussion of factors beyond the facts and persons of the case are a priori and legally inadmissable. Even the most progressive of trial observers may say, sure, there is systemic racism, the police are corrupt, and so on, but he pulled the trigger, he is the guilty party, and despite it all, he  is responsible and so he—not some system, not some history of racism, not someone or something outside the courtroom walls—must be punished. How, after all, does one put a system, let alone the state, on trial?

    De Lagasnerie argues we continually fail to take the lessons of sociology into account–hence the subtitle of the French edition. We focus on the procedures of these trials—they are an object of endless fascination for viewers of films and television and readers of detective novels—but we invariably leave out the wider social context in which these trials take place. Against this manner of investigation, de Lagasnerie is attuned to how each case, despite its repetitiveness, individualizes the defendant: witnesses, supposedly expert or otherwise, are put on the stand to sketch out a character who would commit such an alleged crime. But these depictions invariably leave out any social context. Even the “slightest attempt to comprehend the cause of their actions,” he argues, “is deemed irrelevant to the point that when certain mechanisms or variables—gender, race, class, age—are mentioned, notably by defense lawyers, their importance is dismissed” (4). Even in the country that gave us structuralism, “the consequences of structural and collective forces are [left] absent, even as, a few inches away, on the other side of the [court] wall, their impact is visible for all to see” (5).

    The book, then, operates also as an appeal for sociology, a discipline understood here as unveiling those very structures that create subjects, including the subjects of the law that we are from the very beginning. This sociological approach would “de-individualize” the trial system. Nevertheless, despite devoting his last chapter to “rethinking sociology,” Lagasnerie is unclear about just what his method is. Like a detective, one has to collect clues here and there throughout the book to attempt to solve the mystery oneself. At points he describes the juridical system as “unconscious” and at others says that sociology aims to “deconstruct” the processes of crime and punishment (e.g., 9, 35, 36, 62, 63, 137-8), while also saying that we should follow the insights of Pierre Bourdieu (e.g., 21, 40-41, 53-4, 63, 92-3, 197), or even the utilitarianism of the economist Gary Becker (188), providing even more confusion, since one can’t just pick and choose from these authors like an à la carte menu. In any event, here is one of his better explanations of what he overindulgently calls a  “renewed method for philosophy and the social sciences” (206):

    Questioning the criminal justice system requires unearthing the reasons why, when confronted by an event or act, we feel the need to identify, singularize, and judge rather than understand, generalize, and politicize: what purpose is served by an individualizing perception of events and the attribution of responsibility to singular subjects? Why create guilty subjects? What is the meaning of the system of judgment and of responsibility? (89)

    To answer these questions, we need a “sociological perspective,” which

    allow[s] us to become aware of everything that we implicitly assume and suppress in the act of judging. A social critique of the logic of the penal state allows for an understanding of the system of judgment in terms of its positivity, foundations, and functions; therefore, it allows us to see how it belongs to a more general economy of power. (99)

    This reference to a “general economy of power” is reminiscent of Foucault, who argued that all forms of knowledge, including even the science of sociology itself, are implicated in movements of power. Despite relatively minor criticisms of Foucault at several points (e.g., 16-17), de Lagasnerie seems to agree with him, for example, when he describes the role of prosecution experts who use pseudo-concepts borrowed from psychiatry and criminology as working hand in glove with state power (110). Rather than taking the trial system as a matter of course, de Lagasnerie’s sociological approach would “artificialize reality” (83) and “denaturaliz[e] or rende[r] artificial the apparatus [dispositif] of responsibility,” that is, the trial system. This would have the effect of undoing our “mechanisms of denial” (6) by which we disavow the “repressive nature” (18) of the state as it acts—and it acts par excellence through the criminal justice system.

    Here, though, he takes leave of Foucault, for whom power is not “repressive” or top-down. “We must cut off the king’s head” in political theory, Foucault famously said, not because there are never “vertical” forms of power, but because these result from lateral movements of disciplining and normalization. The state, then, is not the starting point for Foucault, which would make it an ahistorical and static entity from which power emanates, but is rather the result of movements “from below” that crystallize into this or that site in which the state is said to operate: the governmental psychiatric hospital, the prison, the military barracks, and so on. To say that the state is repressive misses the implication of each of us within the very systems of power he was attempting to outline. In this way, any libertarianism or anarchism, left or right, would fall to a Foucaultian critique: there is, as de Lagasnerie admits, always power that operates at a distance from the state (20)—the processes that normalize each and every one of us (think of mass conformism)—such that even if the state were to disappear altogether, power would still wind its way through each of us within a given society. This is why Foucault derided the idea that one could speak objectively about any given state of affairs: power operates through us, even in our most personal affairs, such in acts of sex, and our existence is the effect of contingent, historical, and, as de Lagasnerie puts it, “artificial” movements of power (8). In this way, we are subjectivized, not subjects freely choosing who we are to be. Thus, we are not subjects who choose to enter into the law but are rather “a subject of the law” that is “subjected to and confronted by the state’s construction of reality and having to live with it” (15-16). That is to say, the state’s vision of reality could not exist without docile subjects who answer to the law as a matter of course.

    For Foucault, this does not mean we can simply exit from that reality to a vision of another, since we are the creation of our particular historical milieu and the matrices of power within it. There is no God’s eye view or objective place from which to judge this reality as better or worse than any other: the point of his genealogies of the prison, sexuality, biopower, and so on, was not to make normative or ethical claims. To do so requires thinking of knowledge without power, a disinterested power, which Foucault denied throughout his work. This is not to say, for example, that Foucault did not engage in political activism when it related to the French prison system, which he did. This didn’t mean that he didn’t look for counter-forms of power on the margins of society that could perhaps provides practices of freedom not overdetermined by our disciplinary relationships, which he did. But this also meant that any work by Foucault the author had an interest and was invested in how that knowledge could be used strategically within the games of power at play as he was writing in the 1970s. To put it another way, there is not, for Foucault, an “outside” of power.

    This problem is not just one for Foucault: Marx argued he could not envision a communist society because he was produced within a capitalist system and any such vision would be idealist, even as he never tired of categorizing all the ways in which workers within a capitalist system were alienated from the products of their labor. The same goes for Jacques Derrida, whose deconstruction always noted the ways in which we speak borrows from the very systems we would wish to critique, or for decolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, who set out to show the ways in which the colonized interiorized the means for their own exploitation and domination, or for feminists whom snarky conservatives believe ought not to wear dresses and so on—as if they, too, could leave the choices on offer within intertwining systems of patriarchy at home, at work, and within what we call politics in the limited sense of state governance. De Lagasnerie at times seems to get this point, describing well that the nature of subjectivity is not some metaphysical problem afar from our juridical and judicial systems:

    The justice system functions as an objective possibility in our lives that each of us must take into account and that shapes each one of us as a result (my emphasis). …None of us is sure to escape justice either; indeed, none of us do. It is a part of our everyday lives. Rare are those individuals who will never find themselves facing a judge or lawyer, the threat of a prison sentence or damages, or the eventuality of pressing charges or being sued. But even those who never have any direct contact with the justice system will have been nonetheless unavoidably forced to take into account its existence and demands—the potential to be accused and/or convicted of a crime—if only precisely to avoid it, either by respecting the law or by adopting strategies of concealment. (7)

    The violence of this system is not “intermittent,” but “underlies the very nature of the legal order” (38). De Lagasnerie justifiably argues that political theorists too often focus on tidying up the procedures of governance, while ignoring the violence that underlies them (42). In sum, while political theorists are happy to describe the violence that pre-existed the political, or the chaos that would ensue without a given political system, they are loathe to deal with the consequences of their theories for those judged guilty of not following the social contract. As de Lagasnerie puts it, “the task that political philosophy has assigned itself can be defined as follows: imagine a way to describe the state without mentioning violence; ensure that our relationship to the law is neutralized; and offer a depoliticized perception of politics” (42). For these theorists, the rule of law has been one of the greatest advances of Western civilization: all fall under the law and the subjectification mentioned above makes us responsible to the whole of society: when we break the law, it is not a lateral trauma against another individual, but against the state. Hence, in the United States, for example, cases are brought by the “people” of such and such jurisdiction against a defendant, as represented by a district attorney or other prosecutor. “Modern justice is a system in which interindividual actions,” as he puts it, “are reshaped by the state into actions against ‘society’” (154).

    Political theorists thus disavow the bloody products of their own thinking. There is no law without its enforcement, as Immanuel Kant once put it, and de Lagasnerie pulls no punches in describing just who should be brought into the dock: “[W]hat the judge does, objectively, is harm. To judge is to inflict violence. All legal interpretations inflict suffering on the individuals to whom they’re applied, whether it be by imprisoning them, taking away their property, or killing them” (37). Where dominant narratives depicts a neutral site in which justice is blind and any punishments are meted out neutrally, for de Lagasnerie, the “courtroom becomes the scene of an assault” (38, his emphasis). He writes:

    Living under the rule of law means living in a context in which the state has the right to dispose of us. Contrary to what a large proportion of political theory maintains,  being a subject of the law does not mean, first of all, being a protected and secure subject. We are first and foremost subjects who can be judged—that is, imprisoned, arrested, and convicted. We are vulnerable subjects, dispossessed in relation to the logic of the state. (40, original italics removed)

    Here, de Lagasnerie offers an advance over Foucault, who often underplayed  “juridical” power—the stuff of the entire legal apparatus—in his considerations of how we are normalized as subjects. De Lagasnerie suggests, rightly, though, that it is through the criminal justice system that these norms are enforced in the most vicious terms; it is this that makes us precarious subjects. Anyone who has been poor, of color, or on the margins of our societies knows deep within their bones this precarity. We need only think of the gruesome and grueling ways those in African American communities of the U.S. are under constant police surveillance or how one is punished for being poor: a unpayable fine for a broken tail light on the car needed to get to work becomes a bench warrant, which in turn becomes time in jail, which means the loss of that job and a criminal record denying one future employment—and the state is not done with its work yet. The uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, five years ago were sparked by the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police, but it was already a community under siege, like so many other minority communities across the U.S., U.K., and in France: the average household in Ferguson had three arrest warrants each, a later U.S. Department of Justice report found, with 16,000 out of 21,000 people in the community, largely African American, wanted by the law. This is the rule of law as it functions outside of theory and even if de Lagasnerie is vague about just what structural factors are in play (for a sociologist, he has an annoying tick in his books of merely mentioning “structures” and “systems” but never identifying them in any particularity), the problem of recidivism among the so-called criminal population is but another way to say that from within the legal system, there is no exit: voting rights are often taken away, future employment is limited largely to manual and impermanent labor, and merely being in one’s backyard becomes a killable offense. The criminal justice system is at once individualizing (you failed to show up for that warrant) and yet is also aimed at entire classes of people always already deemed a “criminal element.” It is in this context that de Lagasnerie is right to say, “Rather than saying that the state ‘sentences to death,’ we must say that it kills [assassine]; that it doesn’t arrest individuals but ‘abducts’ [enlève] them; that it doesn’t imprison people but ‘wrongfully detains’ [séquestre] them; that it doesn’t force them to pay fines but ‘robs’ [dépouille] them” (60).

    De Lagasnerie insightfully notes that the French criminal justice system defines responsibility, as in the U.S. and elsewhere, negatively: the law only lists when one is not responsible for given crimes, but generally not what responsibility positively means. Hence, there is a veritable right, especially for agents of the state and those aligned with it, to irresponsibility, a right to impunity. There are those who are held responsible—and then are all those who have the right to irresponsibility, not just people with the wealth to avoid the criminal justice system altogether but first and foremost agents acting in the name of the state. What then is to be done? He writes:

    Our challenge then becomes to reflect on the possibility of creating new narratives. That means reformulating what happens in order to develop a new awareness of reality that will prompt us to assign the cause of events not to individual agents but rather to collective logics rooted in concrete situations. We must question our urge to judge and orient our energy toward transforming political totalities rather than toward punishing individual actions, which are merely the occasional and local manifestations of those totalities. (132)

    Surely this chafes at our very understanding of ourselves and others: to live is to judge, it seems. We measure our personal lives in terms of small writs of wrongs righted through micro punishments: the cheating partner is given time in the clichéd dog house, the wayward employee is reprimanded and faces loss of work, the perpetually late student is given marks off her participation grade, the sloppy waiter is punished with a bad tip, a recent book out receives, ahem, its deserved review. The list is endless. We don’t do these things, we tell ourselves, because it is in our interest or because we like it. Every parent says this: it hurts me more than it hurts you, the child I am punishing; it is what everyone would do in our place when we punish you. In the courts, this is obvious: the judge shouldn’t have an interest in who wins. He or she is merely to decide based upon the evidence before her and not take the first or second side: she sits literally above the prosecutor and defendant, the first and second parties. This is key today: at some point in Western history, we invented what is called the third party, an objective position where we pretend we don’t have an interest or desire in the results, a point Foucault takes up in his 1970-1 Lectures on the Will to Know when he studies ther advent of the rule of law and “objective” forms of judging in ancient Greece. But I don’t need to tell you how this story ends: study after study shows, whatever the intent of the judge, an interest is served: those who are white and/or wealthy face far fewer penalties in our criminal justice systems. But we couldn’t have knowledge as we understand it—that is, philosophy, history, and sociology—without this objective, third-party stance either: we are judging objectively what is metaphysical, what happened in history, and so on, or those disciplines wouldn’t exist. You can see, then, what Foucault means by power/knowledge: power operates in our courts and uses models of knowledge, while those models of knowledge themselves are a form of power. After all, the courts are nothing but knowledge producing places: endless files line the offices of our courthouses, all in rendering the power of the state based on criminological and other theories.

    The “fantasy” of the objective third party position thus removes our own implication in the micro-punishments we mete out, a point ignored by de Lagasnerie, but one that is crucial to the apparatus he describes. After all, by “putting the state on trial,” de Lagasnerie repeats the very logic his work should be undermining. He maintains that his own “scientific approach” can “produce knowledge” that allows us to “step back from ourselves,” even as he had described earlier in the book the ways in which who we are allows no such “step back” outside the subject of the law (210), indeed going so far as to say that these structures are “unconscious” (7), though one wonders just how one steps back from what cannot by definition be brought to conscious awareness. De Lagasnerie thus will want two things at the same time: “sociology would force us to break with that inclination in order to experience what we might call an immediately political relationship to the world” (132) and that we take a “critical distance…from the system of judgment” (11). But if we are formed in and through being a subject to the law, how is such a critical distance possible? And isn’t any notion of a critical distance an intellectual mirror of the judging we see in criminal trials, that is, that we as scientists, sociologists, or philosophers can sit above the fray and pass judgment, even as de Lagasnerie sentences us to take “an immediately political relationship to the world”? In any event, we are to pass judgment over this system of judging by to compare it to a reality beyond or beneath these power relations:

    Part of the violence of the justice system comes from the fact that the penal state governs us by forcing us to correspond to an image of the subject that is at odds with our true mode of existence. It is this disconnect that causes and encapsulates the violence of the juridical order. In fact, that disconnect is itself violent. Being a subject of the law means being subjected to and confronted by the state’s construction of reality and having to live with it. As a result the legal subject experiences a certain amount of dispossession and vulnerability. …The interesting question here is not our creation as subjects of the law but precisely the fact that we are not, in reality, subjects of the law. (15-16)

    Here, we could raise various ontological questions of just how, as subjects to the law, we are to discern such a reality, or whether what “we” are and how we view ourselves is always politicized, always within formations of power, and therefore, not in some nature or existence elsewhere.

    At this point, de Lagasnerie, to correct this violence, suggests two different tactics at once: first, we must begin to think responsibility as “collective” and within “systems of relationships within which individual agents exist” (93). This means, in a sense, suspending individual judgments: “We must question our urge to judge and orient our energy toward transforming political totalities rather than toward punishing individual actions, which are merely the occasional and local manifestations of those totalities” (131-2). No doubt, then, this means a complete transformation of everything we think of under crime and punishment: a truly radical move, it would be a legal theory without precedent but one that is necessary for thinking another future not imprisoned in the systems of the now. And yet, this “ethical task” of “reconstituting collective logics” (132) is to be supplemented by a neoliberal approach that de Lagasnerie valorizes as well, one that re-individualizes us outside such collective logics so-called criminality. Here he supports Becker’s approach:

    If we read, for example, economist Gary Becker’s seminal texts on crime and punishment, it’s clear that their underlying objective is to reject the relevance of transcendent totalities (“public order,” “state,” “society”) that undergird the repressive use of the law and to restore actions and their consequences to what they really are (my emphasis), meaning singular events or facts: a criminal act is an interpersonal interaction in which one individual wrongs another. A crime is a lateral and local matter that brings together victims and guilty parties, not, as modern law would have us believe, individuals and the state, individuals and society, or individuals and the law….Ultimately, claims Becker, we could say that victims are nothing more than involuntary creditors. … Damages therefore become the favored “punishment.” (173-4)

    This is not quite an adequate reading of Becker, who is more than happy to describe crimes as a cost to “society,” but nevertheless let’s see where de Lagasnerie wants to take neoliberalism:

    Neoliberal rationality is based on a refusal to accept the validity of a plane of reality higher than the discordant multiplicity of individuals and the relations between them. From this perspective there are only individuals and individual relationships. (175)

    If this is the case, then what to make of his brief for sociology with which the book begins and ends? By way of an answer, he notes later in the book:

    Because the penal state individualizes causes in order to judge, critiquing the workings of the law requires us to reflect on the violent effects produced by that concealment of social forces. But because the state socializes interindividual actions and their effects in order to punish, we must contrast it with a vision that dismantles the perceptions established by totalizing concepts such as society, collective consciousness, and the like. So, on the one hand, we are dealing with an opposition between a sociological vision and an individualizing one and, on the other, with a left-libertarian vision and a socializing one. (181)

    In short, we are to replace thinking of judging criminality in terms of crimes against the state or the nation, one takes it, and more in terms of how they are “private singular matters … lived in a specific manner by the agents involved” (175), presumably in the shadow of the societal structures that de Lagasnerie describes. At no point does de Lagasnerie recognize the neoliberal view of the subject as antithetical to the sociological approach that he champions from the beginning to the end of the book. Each is to be a rational agent where all forms of interpersonal violence is to be perceived economically and privately. No doubt, de Lagasnerie is right to suggest that this would denude, in theory, the state of much of its power, but in practice it’s all-too-clear what would continue to occur, given that the state would linger in these affairs, as he notes, to make sure justice is served: those with money can simply pay off their “debts” while those who are poor won’t. And what will happen to them? The backstop answer is clear.

    Neoliberal rationality, and all the more so libertarianism, is individualizing. It perceives rape, theft, injury, and attack for what they are: private, singular matters that, each time they occur, are invariably lived in a specific manner by the agents involved. The function of the law should therefore be to institute sanctions and compensation for the injury inflicted. The notion of horizontal, compensatory, or reconstructive law replaces criminal and vertical law. We have here a complete rejection of the idea, so essential to the state apparatus, that rape, theft, injury, and aggression constitute, above all else, disruptions of the public order, that they are acts contrary to society’s interests and should be punished for that very reason. (175-6)

    The invention of crimes to mete out punishments, as Nietzsche argued, has a long history in the West, and the punitive society, as Foucault called it, is not undone by privatizing these affairs. Here the problem is not just philosophical but historical: we have seen this manner of justice before, and de Lagasnerie never takes up this history or the great inequalities of wealth in the present day. The history of the Greek city-states is one of ridding them of private suits on behalf of oligarchs. So too in ancient Rome, where there is a lesson: when the famous XII tables were published, the poor who had access to those who could read did not accede to the law; they revolted now knowing what the law was. Born in 1981, de Lagasnerie has grown up as political options were limited to variants of neoliberalism, where the state could seen as a “robber” through taxes and during which one could write texts calling for both a sociological approach and one that denies it at the same time—he never brings his own subjectification into account here. Hence, as he suggests we do for so-called “criminals,” I would want to put his own work into a context, a history, and a milieu where neoliberalism seems to be the only option. For a future worthy of the name, I hope it isn’t. I join him in wanting to condemn to death the system of judgement and punishing that exists today in France and elsewhere. Justice calls for nothing less, even as it is invented everyday, here and there, answering to the singular trauma of victim and victimizer, a trauma that can’t be accounted for or counted in dollars and cents.

     

    Peter Gratton is a professor philosophy in the department of history and political science at Southeastern Louisiana University. He has written extensively on political and critical theory. He is currently writing a book that in part takes up the kinds of judgment used in the prison industrial complex.

  • Tyler M. Williams — Following Catherine Malabou (Review of Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller’s “Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou”)

    Tyler M. Williams — Following Catherine Malabou (Review of Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller’s “Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou”)

    by Tyler M. Williams

    Review of Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou (Durham: Duke UP, 2015)

    Catherine Malabou’s pioneering philosophical conceptualization of plasticity has attracted a recent surge of critical attention, yet she rejects any suggestion that plasticity is her own, signature idea.[1] Malabou instead argues that plasticity, unattached to the singular identity of an author, circulates dynamically within the history of philosophy and gains its conceptual shape from the rich heritage that has unwittingly played host to it. Plasticity, Malabou says, is “trapped within the movement of contemporary philosophy itself” (Malabou and Williams 2012: 4). Although the vast majority of Malabou’s work since the publication of her first book, The Future of Hegel, highlights the debt that key philosophical periods and figures owe to plasticity’s power (a quiet tradition that spans from antiquity through poststructuralism and into the current vogue of new materialism), she consistently adds that plasticity also exceeds any strict disciplinary circumscription. Indebted as much to biology as to philosophy, and then onward to psychoanalysis, gender studies, literature, and anthropology, to name a few, plasticity by Malabou’s account always pushes at philosophy’s limit as philosophy’s unassimilated, supple remainder. Equally at home inside and outside philosophy, giving philosophy its shape while simultaneously exposing it to adaptation and change, plasticity challenges the very possibility of a rigid distinction between conventional notions of “inside” and “outside.”

    Derived etymologically from the Greek plassein, meaning both “to give” and “to receive” form, plasticity expresses the malleable condition of anything subjected to changes in form. Critics have often misconstrued Malabou’s understanding of plasticity’s transformability by treating it as a nihilistic ceaselessness or “perpetual change” that never stays in one place long enough to stand for anything.[2] This misreading reduces plasticity to an infinite production of the new by synonymizing plasticity and elasticity, two terms Malabou repeatedly distinguishes from each other—particularly in What Should We Do With Our Brain? but also in Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing and Ontology of the Accident, to say nothing of her many essays and interviews. Although elasticity and plasticity both give and receive form, elasticity retains the ability to return to a form prior to its transformation. Elasticity’s polymorphism thus amounts to a state of infinite variability and ceaseless change, but plasticity “cannot return to its initial form after undergoing deformation” (Malabou 2008: 15). Plasticity envelops the capacity for transformation and the rigid solidity of “a certain determination of form” (15).

    Almost paradoxically, then, plasticity’s resistance to elasticity comprises its most dynamic aspect. As much as plasticity changes form, it also preserves a shape, marks a point of resistant stability, and concretizes itself while retaining the mobility that threatens the concrete with destruction, which is why Malabou describes plasticity as terroristic in Ontology of the Accident (5). Taken as a whole, Malabou’s work shows that the philosophical tradition operates according to this dialectic. When she writes in Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing that plasticity’s “range of meanings” continues “to evolve with and in language” so much that “the very significance of plasticity itself appears to be plastic,” Malabou suggests that plasticity is doubly responsible for solidifying tradition and for maintaining that tradition’s suppleness (2010: 67). Its “significance” forms and reforms itself into the future like a type of auto-inheritance that shapes and preserves the legacy through the dynamic processes of heredity itself. The “significance” of plasticity therefore cannot be confined to the specific domains of Malabou’s study. Similar to Derrida’s insistence that deconstruction is “at work in the work” (1986: 124), plasticity for Malabou names a general logic that remains irreducible to any particular discourse, which is why she rejects a proprietary claim on the concept.

    The practical question of what to “do” with plasticity is thus both urgent and irresolvable. Urgent because, in addition to mobilizing innovations within neurobiology and epigenetics, plasticity’s dialectic of change and resistance constitutes, according to Malabou, the most adequate model for democratic opposition to hegemonic structures of global power. Irresolvable because plasticity is not an abstract transcendental concept, so the “doing” of plasticity will always be a matter of plastic materialities—of the brain (What Should We Do with Our Brain?), of gender (Changing Difference), of the subject (Self and Emotional Life), of trauma (The New Wounded), and so on. Yet, when following Malabou, a major interpretive error is to mistake the forest for the trees, as it were, and to restrict plasticity’s general movement to the specific contexts via which Malabou happens to articulate it. Plasticity is itself plastic and thus constitutes a generalizable “motor scheme,” a “metamorphic structure,” rather than a given technique, tool, or circumscribed topic (2010: 12, 27). As an interdisciplinary project, Malabou’s work demands a disciplinary responsibility to the intractably philosophical “motor” of plasticity’s “structure.”[3]

    Highlighting plasticity’s transformational role at the heart of the philosophical tradition, but paying particular attention to the interdisciplinarity Malabou draws from philosophy’s mutability and variability, Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller present Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, the first book of collected essays to be devoted entirely to Malabou’s growing oeuvre.[4] The volume includes three previously unpublished or thoroughly revised essays by Malabou herself, a brief interview conducted with her by Bhandar and Goldberg-Hiller, and nine critical essays that address Malabou’s work from a variety of disciplines including psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies, aesthetics, epigenetics, Marxism, biopolitics, critical race theory, entomology, and war studies.

    Plastic Materialities commendably demonstrates the vast applicability of Malabou’s thought. Unsurprisingly, the distinction between the volume’s stronger and weaker essays falls along lines of interdisciplinary responsibility. Chapters that remain attentive to the disciplined stakes of Malabou’s interdisciplinarity are most at home in a book of this sort, since they avoid the aforementioned trap of essentializing the scientific contexts in which Malabou articulates plasticity’s general “scheme.” Weaker chapters commit this essentialist error by ignoring the philosophical discipline of Malabou’s project, treating it instead as an easily transplantable index of interdisciplinary terms.[5] Rather than catalogue these merits and shortcomings in each chapter, what follows is a general account of how this distinction relates this volume to Malabou’s project as a whole.

    As the editors remark in their introduction, Plastic Materialities wants to identify how plasticity shapes a political itinerary (15). The volume thus addresses directly a debate that has trailed Malabou at least since the arrival of What Should We Do with Our Brain? in English translation in 2008: whether her account of plasticity necessarily entails the inherent political resistance she identifies with it. Much of Malabou’s short book argues for this necessity by calling for a shift in our “neuronal consciousness,” a shift that amounts to recognizing the brain as plastically adaptable to environmental input rather than conventionally programmatic and mechanical. She argues that a major consequence of this shift from neural preformationism to adaptability includes the abandonment of corporate, imperial, social, economic, and biopolitical structures of sovereignty predicated on neuronal ideologies of a rigidly centralized brain. Moreover, if many structures of power today already appear to work plastically, then, like its biological counterpart, this plasticity logically includes within it a foundational and unassailable resistance. Precisely what this resistance entails remains mostly unclear in Malabou’s work. The task of this volume therefore seeks to clarify the stakes of this resistance. In light of global neoliberalism’s wholesale reliance on corporate-capitalist models of flexibility and elasticity, for example, the editors, following Malabou both to the letter and toward new horizons, target the implications of plasticity’s “use” to “disrupt these structures” (2).

    At least two major considerations follow from the project Plastic Materialities sets for itself. The first, which Alberto Toscano most directly articulates in his chapter, concerns this fundamental question about the adequacy of plasticity with politics. Toscano argues that Malabou’s use of plasticity to “rethink the dialectical character of contemporary social forms,” particularly the “neoliberal formatting of change under the imperatives of flexibility, adaptability, and employability,” remains too philosophical (91, 97). He claims that Malabou’s philosophical recourse to neurobiology preserves the traditional image of philosophy as a discipline responsible for “providing a conceptual synthesis for other disciplines and practices” (93). As a result, this traditionalism only enables Malabou to link neuroplasticity and political resistance analogically: the brain is like the social, biological resistance to neural order is like political resistance to hegemony, plastic matter works like philosophical critique, and so on. Yet, Toscano concludes, “To think the social is like the brain is no more enlightening today than to think that the economy was like a large organism in the nineteenth century or like a hydraulic machine in the twentieth” (105). Unlike some essays in Plastic Materialities that uncritically accept and then reapply Malabou’s politics elsewhere (those by Carotenuto, Shapiro, Grove, Bhandar and Goldberg-Hiller all trend in this direction), Toscano’s essay remains skeptical of whether Malabou’s politicization of plasticity is sufficiently—or even necessarily—political.

    The second consideration concerns the volume’s isolation of “destructive plasticity” as a privileged concept. According to Malabou, “destructive plasticity” coincides with the productive work of “positive” plasticity. For example, in a synthesis of production and destruction, the brain abandons unused synaptic connections to build ones that are more efficacious. The priority Plastic Materialities places on “destructive plasticity” removes it from the broader context of Malabou’s work, thereby reducing it to a simple synonym for “resistance” and thus to some sort of tool or “resource” that can be “used” in the process of realizing some sort of intentional outcome (2, 20). However, as she makes clear in her own contributions to this volume, Malabou expressly rejects this teleology. Characterizing “destructive plasticity” as an apparatus that can be applied to whatever disciplinary field skews the dialectical symmetry of Malabou’s work and overlooks the contexts in metaphysics and ontology in which Malabou first formulates this concept. Moreover, insofar as Malabou’s later work radicalizes destructive plasticity beyond the productive/destructive binary, the very possibility of destructive negativity remains for her an ongoing question.

    In the paragraph that opens the final chapter to Ontology of the Accident, her “essay on destructive plasticity,” Malabou is still asking if “destructive plasticity is possible” (2012c: 73). Although the untitled preface to this short book clearly asserts that, yes, destructive plasticity is indeed possible and this possibility is evident biologically, the type of destruction that interests neurobiologists is ultimately productive. This productive destruction works as a “sculptural power that produces form though the annihilation of form” (Malabou 2012b: 49). (To reuse the example provided earlier, a process of “cellular annihilation” destroys certain components of an organism to enable that organism to grow, develop, and survive.)[6] However, although current biological discourses recognize the productive work of destructive negativity, Malabou’s interest in the possibility of a more radical destructibility in Ontology of the Accident and The New Wounded goes beyond this productive, positive function. Malabou wants to think the possibility of a negativity that remains exclusively or absolutely negative. A negativity unadorned, as it were, with a complimentary, positive, or redeeming teleological function.

    Of course, one could suggest (as Malabou does) that this questioning of possibility already assumes a position of affirmation, since possibility “designates what one is capable of” or “what may come into being” (2012c: 73). To question the possibility of anything asks for the affirmation of that thing’s production. In this sense, questioning the possibility of destructive plasticity’s negativity finds itself wrapped tightly in contradiction; the premise of the question compromises the possibility of a non-productive negativity from the start. From the metaphysical tradition that positively binds possibility to actuality, the possibility of an unproductive negativity would seem logically impossible. Malabou therefore demands a new understanding of possibility as such, an ontology that could account for a possible negativity that is not already affirmative. In other words, unlike Hegel’s dialectically productive negativity, Malabou seeks a possibility that would not be possible, a no that refuses a silent yes, a possibility that would not be tethered to the affirmation of a creativity. The most destructive force in Malabou’s renegotiation of possibility is its impossible demand, or rather its demand for impossibility. The “ontology of the accident” thus names the impossible possibility of the absolutely impossible.

    Malabou’s own contributions to Plastic Materialities address these two considerations together—as if the two are actually one. Across her three essays, Malabou argues that attention to the ontology of plasticity demands a specific politics. Her contributions to this volume investigate the chance of this onto-political relation and the (im)possibility of its future shape. Plastic Materialities makes an impactful contribution to the growing field of interest in Malabou’s work precisely because Malabou here provides perhaps her most thorough account of the relationship between plasticity’s ontological critique and its political import.

    In “From the Overman to the Posthuman: How Many Ends?” Malabou revisits the conclusion Derrida reaches in his famous essay “The Ends of Man.” There, Derrida remarks that the history of nonhumanist philosophy—including Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger—ultimately reconstitutes an essentialist concept of the human. Derrida argues that a grand repetition is at stake, since early attempts outside humanism retain and repeat the premises of that same humanism. The “end” (closure) of humanism carries an essentialist “end” (telos) of the human. And yet, at the end of Derrida’s text, which Malabou argues is a sort of beginning, a passing reference to Nietzsche leaves open an opportunity to rethink repetition and, thus, to renew a thinking of the possibilities and impossibilities of humanism. Is there a chance for nonhumanist thought, Malabou asks, that does not fall victim to this essentialist repetition?

    Malabou points out that Nietzsche’s sense of repetition is related directly to revenge, since “revenge” names the memory (what Nietzsche calls the “inability to forget”) essential both to the human and to the structure of temporal succession. Redemption from the repetitions of humanism would thus be tantamount to a redemption from revenge, a yes-saying that can embrace repetition without relying on the retention of a pre-constituted essence. To account for this refined sense of repetition, Malabou turns to recent biological research into reparative stem-cells, which can renew (i.e. repeat) themselves and thus forge new bodies or parts of bodies without recourse to a structure of “revenge.” A repetition that does not simply fulfil a program but produces itself from out of itself. The possibility of the non-human, or of “the non-humanist tradition,” for Malabou amounts to thinking repetition beyond the vicissitudes of this essentialist revenge. Here and in her other two contributions to Plastic Materialities, Malabou argues that these innovations in biological research create new philosophical horizons—not simply within the applicative domains of “philosophy of science” or “bio-philosophy” but, more specifically and significantly, within the traditions of metaphysics and humanism writ large.

    By thinking plasticity as both a thing and a process, that is, as an object of scientific research and as the transformation of philosophical concepts of essence, life, being, the human, etc., Malabou identifies an impasse at the heart of biopolitical and poststructuralist confrontations with “science.” In her essay, “Will Sovereignty Ever Be Deconstructed?” she specifically targets the tendency for thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and Agamben to regard science as a rigidly mechanical counterpart to the critical dynamism of the humanities.[7] (Here, one might think of Heidegger’s famous statement that science does not think, although Malabou does not include Heidegger in her list of interlocutors in this particular essay.) Philosophy’s rigid characterization of science, Malabou argues, commits biopolitics to an unwitting preservation of the very structure of sovereignty it claims to deconstruct.

    Malabou analyzes previous attempts to deconstruct sovereignty’s relation to biology by claiming that for Foucault, Agamben, and Derrida, “even in different ways, biology is always presented as intimately linked with sovereignty in its traditional figure” (38). That is, even Foucault’s famous theorization of “biopower” beyond or outside the specter of monarchical structures of state sovereignty, preserves a rigidified notion of biology as a “regulatory law” that operates teleologically within an organism. From this perspective, the organism will have always retained “the form of a micro-Leviathan” and will thus never be distinguishable from more traditionally minded and monarchically guised structures of power. Unsurprisingly, for Malabou, Foucault typically regards biology as “the ally of sovereignty” (42) and biopolitics generally treats the biological as that which legitimizes the transformation of the “floating signifier” into a fixed, rigid, and centralized motif (e.g. “blood and sex”). Lastly, Malabou claims, “biology always appears, for philosophers, as an instrument of power, never as an emancipatory field or tool” because the biological is always treated as a “secondary phenomenon” to the primacy of “the symbolic” (38, 42).

    In short, Malabou’s critique is that these thinkers too often treat biology as a rigid mechanism that simply services the whims of biopower. Not only does this mechanization preserve traditional models of centralized authority and sovereignty, it also denies any “biological resistance” to this mechanization. Ultimately, Malabou wants to argue that plasticity constitutes this biological resistance from within the confines of sovereign mechanization. Put otherwise, plasticity transgresses restrictive understandings of “biology” as a “political force” (40). The motor behind this plastic capacity is epigenetics, which accounts for either the activation or inhibition of certain genetic factors in an individual’s biological makeup. This process is significant for Malabou because it describes a transformability that is itself non-genetic. For example, within the genetic determination of the brain, the synaptic formation of neural connections depend upon a constellation of non-genetic—yet nonetheless determinative, that is, epigenetic—influences such as experience, learning, and environment:

    Plasticity is in a way genetically programmed to develop and operate without program, plan, determinism, schedule, design, or preschematization. Neural plasticity allows the shaping, repairing, and remodeling of connections and in consequence a certain amount of self-transformation of the living being. (Malabou 2015: 43-44)

    This epigenetic structure signals for Malabou the “becoming obsolete of the notion of program in biology,” an obsolescence that “opens new conditions of experience, new thresholds of rationality, as well as new philosophical and theoretical paradigms” (44). For example, according to Malabou, epigenetics allow us to think “history” and “biology” as a “dialectical couple within biological life itself,” which allows us in turn to abandon the classic desire to “survey the biological from an overarching structural point of view” (44). Plasticity would thus name the role that “the symbolic” (the empty signifier devoid of meaning and thus capable of renegotiating its meaning ad infinitum) traditionally plays, except now this “symbolic” resides within the plastic formation of the biological itself: the ability of life to transform itself “without separating itself from itself” (45).

    Malabou concludes that any discourse founded upon this reliance on the “symbolic”—as a “surplus or excess over the real”—ought to be renegotiated via this plastic transformation of the empirical/transcendental relation that epigenetics calls into question.[8] Entirely opposed to transcendental structures of meaning, Malabou claims that it is now no longer the case that a “gap between the structural and the material” is required to “render the material meaningful” (45).

    Both Alain Pottage and Fred Moten offer captivating challenges to Malabou’s conclusions. Pottage claims that the role “environment” plays in biological discourses highlights the “autoplastic” process of a structure that structures itself, a “system that is its own product,” a self that produces itself by fashioning the equipment that mobilizes itself (89). Recognizing that this auto-generative capability is central to Malabou’s own thinking of plasticity, Pottage also notes that this process is exactly what Foucault describes as “ethopoiesis.” Foucault is actually a thinker of plasticity, Pottage argues, despite Malabou’s dismissal of him. Similarly, Moten takes issue with Malabou’s insistent need to “deconstruct biopolitical deconstruction,” a gesture that, he argues, ultimately reconstitutes very thing it claims to deconstruct. Doesn’t locating sovereignty within the materiality of the brain just relocate in tact what had previously been confined to symbolic life? And doesn’t this relocation ultimately just make the brain a new version of the old sovereignty (283)? Contrary to Pottage’s reliance on the autopoiesis of an internally self-transformative and auto-corrective system, Moten wants to preserve the possibility of a rupture from outside, a rupture that might critique sovereignty beyond a simple relocation.

    Although Pottage and Moten both contest the impetus for Malabou’s investigation into plasticity’s politics, they do not challenge the ontological foundation for her investment in this materialism or the currency this ontology has within the sciences (not just neurosciences). This relation between ontology, politics, and science comes into full focus in Malabou’s essay, “Whither Materialism? Althusser/Darwin.” Here, Malabou argues for an intractably political understanding of how Darwinism collapses transcendence into a strict materialism.

    If “materialism” is understood simply as the “name for the nontranscendental status of form,” where “matter” is understood as a self-formation that produces “the conditions of possibility of this formation itself,” then any materialism worthy of the name cannot legitimately be considered transcendental, since “transcendental” indicates “a position of exteriority in relation to that which it organizes” (48). As a result, following Althusser, Malabou claims that the history of philosophy has described this relationship between materialism and transcendence in two main ways.

    The first is “dialectical teleology,” which describes an internal tension toward a telos governs “the formation of forms.” Althusser and Malabou both reject this form of materialism because it ultimately abides a fundamentally transcendental structure. In this configuration, an anterior structure of meaning precedes form and governs its formation.

    The second is “materialism of the encounter,” which regards form as being governed by “the non-anteriority of Meaning.” According to this configuration, form is “form” only as the result of an “encounter.” As Malabou puts it: “forms are encounters that have taken form” (49). According to Althusser, this “materialism of the encounter” entails a rethinking of “necessity.” For him, necessity ought to be thought “as the becoming-necessary of the encounter of contingencies” (qtd. by Malabou 2015: 49). One cannot conceive “necessity” as a rigid, transcendental priority if meaning is not anterior to the formation of forms and if form is the result of an encounter. “Necessity” would be a formation itself, a “becoming-necessity” formed by the encounter between contingencies whose meaning is constituted ex post facto rather than being transcendentally anterior to it. For Althusser, this formation works biologically just as much as it does historically and politically: a species, a people, or a historical movement “gels at certain felicitous moments” and means what it means because of this gelling.

    Malabou’s essay calls into question the legitimacy of Althusser’s homogenization of the political, historical, and biological into a single, unifying process of plastic formation. She asks, “Can we transpose what happens at the level of nature to that of the political and of history?” Is the “encounter” of natural selection in biology comparable to socio-political encounters? To address these questions, Malabou uses Darwin as a route back to Althusser by noting that plasticity “constitutes one of the central motifs of Darwin’s thought” and situates itself “effectively at the heart of the theory of evolution” (50). As Malabou sees it, Darwin describes the evolutionary idea of natural selection precisely as “plastic,” specifically in terms of the relationship between the “variability of individuals within the same species and the natural selection between these same individuals” (50).

    As a thinker of the formation of form, Darwin notes that, to use Althusserian language, variability comprises the “void” or “nothing” from out of which form forms. The possibility of variation is nothing other than the potential within a species for transformation: “the quasi-infinite possibility of changes of structure authorized by the living structure itself” (50). More specifically, this variability is “quasi-infinite,” Malabou claims, again in Althusserian language, because the possibility of variability does not depend on the rigidity of a predetermined, “anterior” criteria or “meaning.” Instead, form is formed “when variability encounters natural selection,” when selection renders the contingency of variability into a necessity. As such, Malabou concludes, “the materialism of the encounter thus pertains to a natural process that assures the permanent selection and crystallization of variations” (51). In this sense, the structure of the encounter Althusser describes has a clear biological component to it since the process of Darwinian natural selection occurs ateleologically, without intention, as a promise, to-come.

    It would therefore be misleading to think of “evolution” as a linear sense of progress and perfectibility. Even though Darwin would use language of “improvement” and “betterment” to describe the adaptability of a species via the processes of natural selection, Malabou cautions that one should not mistake this sense of perfectibility as a teleological “finalism” (52). Instead, thinking natural selection as plastic highlights that the “survival of the fittest” is not a simple elimination of the quantitatively weak in favor of the endurable strong. It is instead a dynamic process of openness to possibility, to adaptability, to complexification, a horizon of potential devoid of predetermination, intent, criteria, and linearity.

    Since “social selection” appears to be precisely the opposite of this unintentional (or non-intentional) structure of natural selection, it would seem as though social and natural selection have no significant overlap. One works automatically, absent of predefined criteria, while the other is a social decision intentionally made according to precise, predefined criteria. Furthermore, given the devastating history of ascribing social functions to natural selection in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (under the guise of so-called “Social Darwinism”), Malabou notes the sensitive need to proceed with caution when claiming that natural processes might possibly undergird social processes. However, she also notes that the ateleological plasticity of natural selection undermines Social Darwinism’s conflation of natural selection with social selection from the start. Precisely because natural selection is not a rigid sorting of weak versus strong traits according to an intentional and decisive rubric, the racist and supremacist taxonomies of Social Darwinism have no justifiable basis in biology whatsoever. The biological dynamism of natural selection—and of plasticity more generally—demonstrates from all sides the restrictive and repressive outcomes inherent in any attempt to assert “Social Darwinism” as the “social destiny” of biology.[9]

    Yet, the possibility of locating a more authentic connection between natural and social selection, between the biological and the political, will require that the same “void” that constitutes the ateleological structure of biological formation also operates politically. Malabou locates this social plasticity in Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli, who describes the Prince’s virtue according to “his ability to select the best possibilities fortune [contingency] offers, yet a selection made with no intention to do so” (53). How could something like this work, and what could possibly account for the “void” from out of which the encounter forms? “There seems to be no void in our societies,” Malabou states, since, everywhere around us, processes of social selection of aptitudes ultimately select according to a candidate’s conformity to the selective criteria rather than exceptional distinction/difference from them, thus “ensuring the perpetuation and renewability of the identical […], never the emergence of singularities out of nothing” (54).

    From a Marxist perspective, this emphasis on the functionary’s conformity and obedience seems to account for the closure of the possibility of a plastic social selection. From a Bourdieusian perspective, this same degree of acquiescence to the norm precludes the dynamism of plasticity’s social selection—except this time in the name of “privilege,” which, Malabou notes, is “the most predetermined selective criterion ever” (55). The outcome is the same from either perspective: “social selection has the goal of reproducing order, privilege, or the dominant ideology.” It praises conformity, obedience, compliance, and acquiescence to the dominance of the selective criteria. “Who has never had the feeling,” Malabou asks, “that social selection was, in effect, a program and never a promise and that the morphological transformations of society were, deep down, only agents of conservation” (55)?

    Does this mark a limit of social selection? Since social selection always seems to retain this intentional sense of sorting desirable traits, will social selection always lack plasticity? Will “the materialism of the encounter always [be] doomed to be repressed by that of teleology, anteriority of meaning, presuppositions, predeterminations” (52)? Will social selection always be the rigidity that undermines the plasticity of natural selection? Can there be a formative plasticity of social selection? In short, Malabou wants to know if social selection can “join in any way the natural plastic condition,” understood specifically as “the promise of unexpected forms” (55).

    The only way to account for this encounter between the social and the biological would be to recover a “plastic” condition in which both regimes operate according to “criteria that do not preexist selection itself” (56). Here, Malabou is not too far from her earlier desire to uncover a repetition without revenge in her reading of Nietzsche, or her general project of thinking “possibility” beyond the positivity of a preconstituted affirmation. Such a thinking must avoid insisting too soon on difference, since “selection in the order is always an act that confers value and therefore creates hierarchies and norms” (56). Malabou here describes an anarchic ontology, a structure of difference that forms itself and its meaning from an encounter that itself has no predetermined, anterior “meaning.” In Deleuzian language, Malabou summarizes this anarchy as a “selection that produces its own criteria as it operates” (56).

    The void from out of which selection and its criteria form themselves constitutes the possibility of the promise. It is from out of this void (which Malabou also calls an “anonymity”) that “new forms can emerge” as “singular, unpredictable, unseen, regenerating” (57). In a slightly different language, Malabou calls this void “the originary deprivation of ontological wealth” (59). This elegant description highlights the core political thrust of how Malabou envisions plasticity’s radicalism, contrary to Toscano’s earlier accusation that Malabou’s politicization of plasticity proceeds only analogically. To think this “void” emptied of teleological determination and constriction, to uphold a commitment to the “non-anteriority” of its meaning from out of which the formation of form emerges via the materiality of the encounter, is “the most urgent ethical and political task” for a “global world” in which “every place is assigned,” regulated, owned, accounted for (58). This commitment would amount to a renewed call to the subversion of capitalist ideology and to the promise of politics.

     

    Tyler M. Williams is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Midwestern State University.

     

    References

    Boever, Arne De. 2016. Plastic Sovereignties: Agamben and the Politics of Aesthetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

    Burdman, Javier. 2016. “Necessity, Contingency, and the Future of Kant.” Diacritics 44, no. 1: 6-25.

    Derrida, Jacques. 1986. Memoires: For Paul de Man. Translated by Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Galloway, Alexander. 2010. “Catherine Malabou, or The Commerce in Being.” French Theory Today: An Introduction to Possible Futures Pamphlet 1. New York: TSPY/Erudio Editions.

    Malabou, Catherine. 2008. What Should We Do With Our Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham University Press.

    — — —. 2010. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing. Translated by Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia University Press.

    — — —. 2012a. “Following Generation.” Trans. Simon Porzak. Qui Parle 20, no. 2: 19-33.

    — — —. 2012b. The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. Trans. Steven Miller. New York: Fordham University Press.

    — — —. 2012c. Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Malden, MA: Polity.

    Malabou, Catherine and Tyler M. Williams. 2012. “How Are You Yourself? Answering to Derrida, Heidegger, and the Real.” theory@buffalo 16: 1-22.

    Schwartz, Jeffrey and Sharon Begley. 2002. The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. New York: Harper Perennial.

    Williams, Tyler M. 2013. “Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of the Humanities.” Diacritics 41, no. 1: 6-25.

    Notes

    [1] In his preface to Malabou’s Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, Clayton Crockett suggests that “the concept of plasticity” comprises Malabou’s “original, signature idea” (2010, xi). Malabou disputes this claim in an interview by suggesting that plasticity does not belong to her as some sort of proprietary concept; it exists within the circuitry of philosophy’s relation to itself and to others (Malabou and Williams 2012, 4).

    [2] For an example of this misrepresentation of Malabou’s plasticity, particularly its misconstruction as a type of elastic flexibility, see Galloway 2010, 15.

    [3] For more on the relationship between disciplinary rigor and interdisciplinary range in Malabou’s work, particularly regarding the long history of exchange and dissociation between the humanities and the sciences, see Williams 2013, 10-13.

    [4] The second book, published just this past year, is Thinking Catherine Malabou: Passionate Detachments, ed. Thomas Wormald and Isabell Dahms (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

    [5] In similar terms, though admittedly in an entirely different context, Michael Clune has recently characterized this distinction as “good” versus “bad interdisciplinarity.” See Clune 2018.

    [6] Two examples of this positive role that destruction plays biologically ought to suffice. First, Malabou cites Jean Claude Ameisen: “the sculpting of the self assumes cellular annihilation or apoptosis, the phenomena of programmed cellular suicide: in order for fingers to form, a separation between the fingers must also form. It is apoptosis that produces the interstitial void that enables fingers to detach themselves from one another” (2012c, 4-5). A second example, given by Jeffrey Schwartz, explains how the brain modifies itself in response to either the lack or the abundance of external stimuli, particularly regarding the loss of synaptic efficacy that allows unused neural functions to ‘make room’ for the growth of highly used functions. In this example, the unused visual cortex of a blind person’s brain is recruited for tasks typically resigned solely to the somatosensory cortex. Schwartz describes how the visual cortex of blind patients’ brains activates while reading Braille, to suggest that the visual cortex, receiving no visual stimuli, destroys its previous function to adopt a new one (2002, 198).

    [7] For more on this distinction and Malabou’s critique of it, particularly with regard to the role the sciences play within the humanities, see Williams 2013. Additionally, for a thorough discussion of Malabou’s relation to the tradition of what she calls “biopolitical deconstruction,” particularly at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, see De Boever (2016).

    [8] For a thorough reading of Malabou’s treatment of transcendence and materialism, particularly in her readings of Kant and her engagement with Meillassoux, see Burdman (2016).

    [9] “Social destiny” is a phrase Malabou uses in an earlier version of this essay, which was published in theory@buffalo in 2012 as “Darwin and the Social Destiny of Natural Selection.” In fact, pages 50-56 of Plastic Materialities previously appeared as pages 144-147, 149-151, and 151-153 of theory@buffalo vol. 16 (2012), having been translated from the original French by Lena Taub and Tyler M. Williams.

  • Rob Wilson, Stubborn Resistance: Juliana Spahr’s Auto-ethnography in the U.S. Poetic Undercommons

    Rob Wilson, Stubborn Resistance: Juliana Spahr’s Auto-ethnography in the U.S. Poetic Undercommons

    by Rob Wilson

    a review of Julianna Spahr’s DuBois’s Telegram (Harvard University Press, 2018)

    He called his doctor and joked to him that he was ill with late capitalism.  His doctor did not laugh…

    –Juliana Spahr and David Buuck, “The Side Effect,” An Army of Lovers.[1]

    Change is quick but revolution

    will take a while.

    America has not even begun as yet.

    –Diane di Prima, “Revolutionary Letter # 10”[2]

    Amid atrophied hopes for a literature effectively ‘revolutionary’ in a precarious time of post-Occupy, authoritarian revanchism, the far-flung ills and blockages of Late Capitalism, and what she tracks as returns of “stubborn nationalism,” Juliana Spahr stakes her claim for U.S. poetry with a bleakly Adorno-esque refusal she aims to conjure into new millennial credibility: “’this is not a time for political works of art.’”[3]  The three postwar U.S. literary movements she tracks in Du Bois’s Telegram:  Literary Resistance and State Containment – turn-of-the-new-century alter Englishes, avant-garde modernism, and movement literatures of resistance since the mid-1960s– will offer an emplotted “slide from [Audré] Lorde to Adorno” (15).  This means the shift from claims of poetic activism in writing as such, back to negation, irony, or qualification of such immediate claims for transformative resistance.  All this movement is figured under the pervasiveness of capitalist structures and presumes what Spahr calls literature’s semi-autonomous or “half-in and half-out relationship with capitalism” (16) and so many varied refusals of “complicit nationalism” (53).  To phrase this in the book’s overall analytical trajectory, Spahr tracks how “movement literature with its ties to militant resistance [across the late 60s and early 70s] morphed into multicultural literature” across later decades that instead seek to represent national inclusion and canonical assimilation of diversity (127).

    Spahr’s much-needed lyric/critical jeremiad, putting the micro-literary (poetics) and the macro-political (structured relations) together where they belong, tracks an under-recognized trajectory of state interference in literary figurations and more sublimated avowals into the turn of the twenty-first century as immersive poet-scholar subject.  Spahr complicates and renews “the vexed and uneven relationship between literature and politics,” challenging the all too literary avowal that “literature has a role to play in the political sphere, that it can provoke and resist” (4); that writing (especially “language writing”) as such comprises a politics of resistance in its negations, fragments, non-linearity, and deconstructions.  Framing structural issues and social relations between literature and the state as well as alternative forms of what literature might do politically, Spahr deepens the grasp between such historical ties and private foundations, sites of higher education, as well as publishing outlets both multinational and “a localized, decentralized small press culture” (5) in localities like Honolulu, Oakland and Buffalo.  The book is ‘auto-ethnographic” of Spahr’s own entanglements, complicities, and refusals of American literary-national culture and its university programs and funding structures that sustain it short of revolution and resistance as nourished in the coalitional social “undercommons.”[4]

    Writing on the side of alternative languages and social forms, language becoming minor and de-Anglicized, Spahr embraces the micropolitical flux of what M. M. Bakhtin called the “heteroglossia” within the dialogics of the sign.[5] She yet warns that “there is no robust counter” as alternative to state funding forms and modes of liberal domination, “with a politics that is anything more contestatory than liberal” (26).  Her heart, as poet, editor, publisher, and teacher, remains tied to alternative production and circulation sites in communities of resistance from subpress collective in Honolulu and Chain in Philadelphia to Commune Editions in Oakland. Even as she elaborates multiple forms (experimental, multicultural, neo-formal modernist or worse) for containing, manipulating, acculturating, and restricting “literary resistance” by the American state, still somehow, this study remains hopeful of “antistate” (53) as well as “other-than-national” (53) poetics in form, substance, and social relation.

    This is no melancholic rear-view mirror, but a proleptic movement forward as such into and beyond the contemporary. The sustained argument or, better said, way of reading this poetry is finely scaled at critical-creative levels of macro and micro intervention that may just carry the new millennial day (“it survives”), even if as W. H. Auden demurred in the radical thirties of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and Rukeyser,

    For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

    In the valley of its making where executives</p

    From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

    Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

    A way of happening, a mouth.[6]

    Making unexpected linkages from Paris and NYC to Africa and the Pacific, Spahr’s study shows that American liberal-literary culture (not just amid well-studied Cold War antagonisms and cooptation but into the blockages of the present moment), was never that free or autonomous.  It was never under-determined or “apolitical” in poetry’s homespun global diplomatic role to shape the world into an American telos figured as freedom, liberation, and self-determination, especially in the global wake of World War II and rise of English. 

    “Relentless monitoring” and co-optation of literary sites, outlets, and works became the US state-funded norm to counter, mollify, moderate, neutralize, and defuse resistance and thus keep any form of “armed militancy” (especially black or Third-World affiliated) at foreign bay (130-131). Networks of foundation funding and State Department support provided the capillary flow of power and capital, covertly and more openly so at times across the sixties and seventies if still “under recognized” (141) in its pervasive impact and consequences as Spahr claims.  At the university level, this meant “an institutionalization of these culturalist movements that would sever them from more insurgent and militant possibilities as they were located within the university” (139).  Such networks of biopower helped to produce and contain racialized resistance, as Roderick Ferguson, Eric Bennett, and Jodi Melamed et al have noted, as recuperated within if not beyond the Cold War academy.[7] 

    Challenging her own immersion in lyric ideologies of First World privilege and a university literary culture aligned with US “imperial globalization,” Spahr exposes claims, taking academic dominion as absorbed in her “avoidance” training at SUNY Buffalo,  that “the modernist tradition excluded [valuing] writing that had direct connection to thriving culturalist and anticolonialist movements of the time” (8).  “I was thinking,” Spahr admits while tracking her own counterconversion to “poetry’s [subaltern] socialities and prosovereignty literatures” in counter-nationalist Hawai’i in the 1990s and the alter- or other-than-Englishes then emerging, “in the way the State Department and the liberal foundations that worked with the State Department wanted me to think” (10).[8]  As Spahr will admit later in chapter three reflecting on another wave of stubborn nationalism, “in many ways this book is an autobiography about how my education [at Bard and Buffalo] told me that certain forms of literature were autonomous when they were not and how long it took me to realize this” (110). Still, Spahr’s will to cultivate resistance remains no less stubborn, no less deeply affiliated as material and literary intervention.

    We need a larger context for mapping strategies of liberal containment, then and now, as in the global critical visions of Aamir Mufti and Stathis Gourgouris working against the unity of the Anglo-global norm and residual claims of Bandung humanism.[9]  For this Spahr deftly turns back to a Cold War moment of resistance in an uncanny trans-Atlantic sign.  The Congress of Black Writers and Artists was planned, for Paris 1956, to serve as “a second Bandung” to help promote the production of literature by black writers, in effect aiming at a kind of literary self-determination beyond colonial interference or world-systemic alignment (1) by the US or USSR.  W.E.B. Du Bois, whose passport had been revoked by the US government the year before, sent a telegraph explaining his non-attendance and refusing acquiescence to the state:  “Any Negro-American who travels abroad today,” Du Bois wrote, “must either not discuss the conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our state department wishes the world to believe.”[10]  He further explained his action in terms of political refusal and social re-alignment:  “The government especially objects to me because I am a socialist and because I believe in peace with Communist states like the Soviet Union and their right to exist in security” (2). 

    Indeed, as Spahr elaborates this longer duration, CIA front groups would fund Americans attending as writers and expected ideological acquiescence in return for such support:  “In addition, all [writers, such as Richard Wright, Mercer Cook, and Horace Mann Bond et al] had agreed to file reports to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, another CIA front group created to covertly launder funds from the CIA into various cultural diplomacy projects, when they returned” (2).  In this particular Paris conference forum, the US state department wanted to assure that voices of anti-colonialism would not carry the agenda and that systemic critiques tying US racism to such figurations in Europe and the Caribbean would be diminished.  Here Richard Wright played anti-communist informant, assuring that figures such as Duke Ellington would attend the congress rather than the antinomian Paul Robeson whom James Baldwin, by contrast, had long defended as figure of radical black critique from Harlem to Paris to Moscow. 

    Bandung in 1955 had awoken this US apparatus to African literature as a site of decolonization struggle (93), even as embraced through quasi-blackface figures like Uli Beier funded from Nigeria to Papua New Guinea.[11] “The combination of cultural center and [literary] journal was a classic CIA pattern at the time,” meaning post-Bandung as Spahr explains (96). The CIA works with private US foundations to support postcolonial English writing in Africa and the Boom in Latin America as literary freedom beyond ordinary realism at best or some version of “apolitical’ influencing the transnational imaginary and containing the literature of decolonization. Not as Aime Cesaire advocated for Martinique, revolution in the name of bread, fresh air, and poetry.  All literature is embedded in social relations, struggles, and wars of position however sublimated.  Spahr rather jarringly supports Pascale Casanova’s all-too-Francocentric assumption of aesthetic experimentation that literature is created via “incessant struggle and competition over the very nature of literature itself—an endless succession of literary manifestos, movements, assaults and revolutions,” both at the world and national level.[12]  This agonistic struggle to define and canonize American poetry, Spahr shows, had the manipulation of the nation-state as long shadow to its formally “autonomous” achievements.

    Spahr presumes, with the world republic of letters model of Casanova she invokes, that there is an inherent conservation function to “literature that is written in the language of the state, the standard language” (12).  But such writing is always being opposed, denaturalized, and denationalized from various angles, as in the poetry of Myung Mi Kim et al.  Such resistance is read at best as partial or transient or, by now, “rare.”  Spahr views such resistance as “supplementary” to more radical claims.  She notes how literary ties to social movements of resistance “so often fail to be revolutionary for long, fail to grow, or merely maintain [community] solidarity” (14). 

    In chapter one, Spahr assumes that a poetics in by-now-dominant English that includes “languages other than English” might offer “a possible literature of resistance,” at least to “linguistic curtailment” or death of minor or other languages (29), linguicide-via-global-hegemony.[13]  Given the threat of monolingual nationalism cum globalization, other languages from Polish to Thai heritages et al begin to manifest in American English poetry, but hardly marked as “a language of liberation” (33).  Pidgin appears besides colonial languages and is used as investigative medium for global routes and colonial crossings that lead to the present settler-colonial layering:  as in the exemplary transpacific Korean/American work of Myung Mi Kim in Dura and Commons, read by Spahr as situating “the 38th Parallel [tied] to her personal narrative to be understood as a larger historical narrative, as the result of globalizing capitalism” (39). 

    Spahr rightly argues, in such contexts of language mixtures, language politics, and entangled resistances to state-sponsored English anguish in dominated spaces, that “Hawai’i provides an unusually succinct example here of both the importance of literature to [Hawaiian] nationalism and of resistance to [US] nationalism at the turn of the twenty-first century (41-42).  Her reading of these tensions in an array of contexts and struggles from the 1970s to the present is convincing.  Hawaiian language becomes imprisoned yet flourishing, Pidgin English both inflated into anticolonial tactic and accommodated into tourist functioning, as is her related reading of the ambivalent Narragansett language use in experimental texts in Rhode Island in the early 1990s and Nahuatl language use in Francisco X. Alarcon.  Nevertheless, as a force of resistance to dominant-state nationalism and the capitalist dynamics of globalization, Spahr invokes David Graeber on the militant anti-globalization movements from Seattle to Chiapas, assuring that for the state “it is puppets, not literature that police fear at this time” (55).[14]

    In chapter two, Spahr queries how much of an “other than national” challenge literary modernism was as an internationalism of resistance to any such U.S. “literary nationalism,” as she was taught at Buffalo.  Such a poetics embraced “syntactically atypical grammars” and dialectics of idiolects as in “smashing and crashing” (76) prosody of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons that (in its “bourgeois interior” as “imperial space” [74]) yet challenged official verse culture in the New Critical mode (57).  “Nashville, not Paris, was the center” of this official American-verse culture refusal to be sure (57):  “I carried this division in my suitcase with me to my first job at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa” (58) she admits of her pre-conversion model opposing lyric quietude to post-language traditions. Stein’s works need to be read, as she learned in Hawaii, as a response to colonialism and imposed languages (61), “very aware of language politics” (61) in such sites of linguistic and cultural domination and shifting hierarchies. 

    Literary movements towards aesthetic revolution, even in the ferment of little magazines like Transition that played such a crucial role in fomenting international modernism, as Spahr will summarize, “are poked and prodded into existence by social forces and influences”(63).  This occurs even in sublimating modernists like Woof, Eliot and Stein, here read as writing “in a world changed by colonialism” (68). Even Stein, as Spahr tracks her modernist experimental movements into and out of abstractionism, becomes a “cringe-inducing” jingoist (77) and stubborn nationalist Example One.  As “national governments [began to] manipulate, cultivate, and fund what [Casanova] calls ‘autonomous’ literature to instrumentalized it as nationalist” (77).  Spahr rehearses how (ironically in a “Casanova-style rhetoric” [82] embracing aesthetic autonomy) the postwar CIA became increasingly interested in promoting “abstract and avant-garde art forms” as signals of American freedom, ideological transcendence, and anti-communist play via state-sponsored cultural diplomacy to rival that of the Soviet Union.

    Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess would be funded, spread, performed, and highlighted internationally as American works “to instrumentalize blackness in cultural diplomacy” via state or private sponsorship (83). Fending off critiques of the USA became a mid-century literary goal, funded, sponsored, nourished at home and distributed abroad in a nexus of state and private sponsorship. This infrastructure makes this “world republic of letters” as Spahr rehearses in compelling scope and detail, wobble with capitalist distortion at the Cold War core of this emergent American-global nexus. Moreover, this core, on the American front from Richard Wright to James Baldwin and William Faulkner et al, took thick-cultural dominion in anthology and university study, as “writers amplified by these networks are disproportionally [still] represented in the canon of American literature” (89).  This cultural diplomacy and funding produced and contained resistance on the home front.  It became, in effect a capillary version of Foucault’s liberal nexus of power and resistance:  “It might be that at the end of the twentieth century one could not become a successfully resistant writer,” Spahr argues, “without having at some moment been supported or amplified by the publication and distribution technologies of these [state-sponsored] networks” (90-1).[15]

    Even in a seemingly post-national or multinational publishing era of the global novel, “the role the Standard English realist novel has in upholding U.S. nationalism” is not abolished especially as it can absorb other national forms and cultural modes, and even as “state sponsored multiculturalism” continues (146-147) through tactics of cultural diplomacy enduringly global. Resistance in the new millennium grows ever more atrophied. Mainstream American poetry, in the wake of programs like Poetry for Bush, becomes gleefully accommodationist, “conventional and outmoded” as in business-value poetic works of Kooser, Keillor, Barr, Gioia et al (157). Such literature produces a faux populism and apolitical muse of cheery pluralism, as in the nationalist inaugural poems (here read as multicultural “strawpoem[s]”) performed by Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander and Richard Blanco. Spahr goes against the grain of this naturalized claim to ratify social diversity as achieved via American literary inclusion: “How to understand this insistence by institutions that U.S. literary production is diverse, is a sort of social justice program [justifying the nation], when it is not in the aggregate is something I am attempting to puzzle through” (182). All this is taking place at a time when the literary vocation has become increasingly professionalized and, at the core, tied to academic legitimation.

    Nowadays, across the new century signified by the neoliberal MFA industry, “literature has been sequestered into [American] irrelevance” (184),  Spahr concludes. This is a poetics shorn of ties to movements of social resistance, militant or antifascist dissent.[16]  More literature is produced but less is read, or read by smaller literary-supporting and reviewing communities, becoming inconsequential, sustained by those with a professional stake in literary production and consumption or its sheer continuation, limited in political efficacy by such “structural conditions” as she elaborates them in this study.

     

    “If I was a poet,” as the auto-fiction narrator in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) confesses, “I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgement of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.”[17] This is one of many deconstructive feedback loops of self-irony undermining the postmodernist will to literary activism via formalist experimentation. Drifting into and out of “the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it,” Lerner’s hyper-reflective expatriate poet (funded by a Fulbright fellowship) is haunted by dope-addled inaction, museum going, urban drifting, and North American privilege as well as what he calls “bad faith” leftist claims to overcome the political-literary divide running from the Spanish Civil War to 9/11 and the US War in Iraq.  “I could lie about my interest in the literary response to the war because by making a mockery of the notion that literature could be commensurate with mass murder I was not defaming the latter,” Lerner admits of his picaresque literary protagonist, “but the dilettantes of the former, rejecting the political claims repeatedly made by the so-called left for a poetry radical only in its unpopularity” (101).  The Fulbright director in Madrid is only too happy when the Spanish Civil War-researching American expatriate poet finally gives a talk on a “literature now” panel (as Spahr’s study would have predicted) disavowing the political efficacy of literature to alter history, in the tortured self-ironizing claim that “literature reflects politics more than it affects it, an important distinction” (175).

    Leaving behind the 2004 terrorist bombing of Madrid’s Atocha Station if not ironically abiding in deferral tactics of virtuality mimed in the John Ashbery poem of the novel’s very title, Lerner undermines more extremist claims (contra Du Bois, di Prima et al) that “poems [function] as machines to make things happen” (52) in history or society, then or now.[18]  By novel’s end, Lerner’s writer-hero gnostically abides in scare-quotes of irony (as in “the so-called left” or, later, “when history came alive, I was sleeping at the Ritz” [158]) and a future-perfect virtuality. Lerner’s novel is riddled with affects that Benjamin had called at the dawn of European literary modernism the “left-wing melancholy” of idealized attachments to the past, defeated causes, bad poetry, and failed revolutionary dreams.[19]  It is this sense of perpetual poetic self-irony that Spahr herself (as does Lerner’s persona by contemporary analogy) battles against by affirming (against neoliberal odds) the will to break through forever signifying utopic virtuality and backward-focused defeat or compulsion into stronger, transformative, and abiding forms of “resistance.”[20]

    In the face of stubborn nationalism, professionalized academia, white privilege, and multicultural accommodation, Spahr’s Du Bois’s Telegram (like a message blasted from future movements) refuses perpetual self-irony, left melancholy, and pessimism of the defeated will:  “We are for sure not there, yet.  But one can always hope” (194).  That is, to align with insurgent forces of the undercommons to manifest modes of “stubborn resistance” in poetry and other works and sites, as in an emergent subterranean nexus of social domains and labor.[21]

    [1] Juliana Spahr and David Buuck, “The Side Effect,” An Army of Lovers (San Francisco, CA:  City Lights Press, 2013), 101.

    [2] Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters (San Francisco, CA:  Last Gasp, 2007), 20.

    [3] Juliana Spahr, Du Bois’s Telegram:  Literary Resistance and State Containment (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 2018), 15.  Spahr is quoting from Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, vol. 2 (New York:  Columbia University Press, 1992), 93-94.  Further references to Du Bois’ Telegram will occur parenthetically.

    [4] In defense of revolutionary energies and tactics surging up in the present moment of neo-liberal blockage, Spahr credibly invokes Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, (Brooklyn, New York: Minor Compositions, 2013).

    [5] See The Dialogic Imagination:  Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin:  University of Texas, 1981) on literary language as “ideologically saturated” with contestation and subversion, 171.

    [6] W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York:  Random House, 1976), 197.

    [7] At varying levels of racial and class containment as well as productive proliferation across university culture, see Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things:  The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy:  Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2011); and Eric Bennet, Workshops of Empire:  Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War (Iowa City:  University of Iowa Press, 2015).

    [8] On counter-conversions taking place across the decolonizing Pacific at the time Spahr was teaching in Hawai’i during the 1990s, see Rob Wilson, Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press,  2009), especially chapter four on the world vision of Epeli Hau’ofa’s polytheistic Oceania, 119-142.

    [9] See Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English!:  Orientalisms and World Literature (Cambridge, Mass:  Harvard University Press, 2016) and Stathis Gourgourias, The Perils of the One (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2019).

    [10] The FBI file of state surveillance on James Baldwin contains some 1884 pages of documents, becoming a kind of “fiction produced by the state” about the writer’s ties to the Communist party, the Black Panthers, and other radical movements, and his Paris ties:  see Hannah K. Gold, “Why Did the FBI Spy on James Baldwin?”, The Intercept, August 15, 2015):  https://theintercept.com/2015/08/15/fbi-spy-james-baldwin/.  Gold quotes Baldwin’s scathing insight that J. Edgar Hoover is “history’s most highly paid (and most utterly useless) voyeur.”

    [11] For global political contexts within and beyond anti-colonial claims at Bandung, see Aamir Mufti, “The Late Style of Bandung Humanism,” boundary 2 conference on February 12, 2013:  https://www.boundary2.org/2013/02/aamir-mufti-the-late-style-of-bandung-humanism/.

    [12] Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004), 12.

    [13] Even in the US, Spahr observes in her capaciously empirical first chapter, there are still 169 languages indigenous to this mongrel polity and 430 languages spoken across it, reflecting and refracting varied reactions to the rise of global English, Du Bois’s Telegram, 30. 

    [14] David Graeber, Possibilities:  Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire (Oakland, CA:  AK Press, 2007).

    [15] Although Foucault is not invoked in Spahr’s study, the problematic of state power not merely repressing but actually aiding, informing, producing, and abetting certain forms of resistance and dissent, would be compatible with his thickly elaborated model of neoliberal governmentality as an ‘agonism’ of reciprocal incitation, discipline, and struggle across social fields:  see Michel Foucault, The Foucault Effect:  Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1991), 4-5, 141.

    [16] For the longer duration of poetry valued as a site of cultural production and imagination opposed to forms of state domination, tyranny, and terror, see Paul Bové, Poetry Against Torture:  Criticism, History, and the Human (Hong Kong:  Hong Kong University Press, 2010).

    [17] Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (Minneapolis, Minnesota:  Coffee House Press, 2011), 101.  Further references to this work will occur parenthetically.

    [18] For a far-ranging intertextual reading of the relationship between Lerner’s two novels and his own hyper-reflective poetics signifying claims of ”virtuality” as contemporary American poet, in the postmodern wake of John Ashbery, Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley et al, see Daniel Katz, “’I did not walk here all the way from prose’:  Ben Lerner’s Virtual Poetics,” Textual Practice 31 (2017):  315-337.  Lerner’s post-Ashbery poetics, self-referentially cited by the novel’s Lerner-like protagonist Adam Gordon in To the Atocha Station, (pp. 90-91), had first been published as “The Future Continuous:  Ashbery’s Lyric Mediacy,” in boundary 2 37 (2010):  201-213.  See also Ben Lerner, “Of Accumulation:  The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley,” boundary 2 35 (2008): 251-262, as particularly relevant to the Marfa chapter of Lerner’s second novel, 10:04 (New York:  Faber and Faber, 2014) set “at the house where Creeley began to die” (167).

    [19] Walter Benjamin, “Left-Wing Melancholy,” republished in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited A. Kaes, M. Jay, and E. Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994),  305.  See also Wendy Brown’s focus on Stuart Hall’s overcoming this attachment to lost objects and idealizations of some quasi-Marxist revolutionary past, “Resisting Left Melancholia,” Verso Books blog (February 12, 2017):  https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3092-resisting-left-melancholia.  Brown’s influential essay had first appeared in boundary 2 26 (1999):  19-27.

    [20] “Resistance” can seem an antiquated slogan.  In a neo-liberal capitalist regime assuming self-surveillance and self-exploiting labor and consumption, as Byung-Chul Han grimly argues, wherein “auto-exploitation” of the achievement-driven subject has become everyday norm, “People who fail in the achievement-society see themselves as responsible for their lot and feel shame instead of questioning society and the system…no resistance to the [neoliberal] system can emerge in the first place”  See Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics:  Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler (London and New York:  Verso, 2017), 6; and (by contrast) the heretical tactics of “Idiotism” in Chapter 13.  Hence, “depressive” affects and the “psychopolitical” ills and compulsions of Late Capitalism are tracked in Spahr and Buuck, An Army of Lovers (see footnote one above).  Writing becomes less the resistance than the insistence of such psychosomatic and systemic ills.

    [21] I still admire the subterranean and quasi-messianic force of Bob Kaufman’s absurd/communist (Abomunist) demand from the undercommons of Cold War San Francisco, as first articulated in his Beatitude mimeograph journal (1959):  “Abomunists demand statehood for North Beach.”  See Bob Kaufman, “Abomunist Manifesto,” Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New York:  New Directions, 1965), 81. Kaufman’s “black Jesus” tactics of silence, flight, self-martyrdom, and absurdity seem close to what Byung-Chul Han calls (after Deleuze) the immanent beatitude of “Idiotism,” Psychopolitics, 86-87.