Monthly Archives: September 2014

(Draft of a paper for an upcoming conference)

“We are expected, in the name of Deleuzoguattarian anti-fascism, to embrace capitalism as nihilist machine that has no ‘purpose’, because ‘purpose’=fascism, while forgetting that neoliberalism appeared in Germany as the form of governmentality that would immunize us against fascism by trading the political for the economic”

– Benjamin Noys, ‘A Grammar of Neoliberalism’

“Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process’, as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.”

– Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

The recent publication of the accelerationist reader (#Accelerate) begins with Marx’s so-called ‘Fragment on Machines’ and builds toward the more recent writings on various accelerationisms (Land, MAP, Brassier, Negarestani, etc.). Between the two moments of accelerationism appears various thinkers who have been inserted into the genealogical account of a politics aimed at “unleashing latent productive forces”(MAP) of contemporary capitalism. Here, I would like to briefly touch on a passing remark made by Deleuze and Guattari, who thematized the idea that, perhaps, the political task today is “Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process’, as Nietzsche put it…” Why? For the simple reason that in order to understand the differences and stakes of a ‘conservative’ and leftist accelerationist politics requires, in some sense, an understanding of why and how Deleuze and Guattari invoke Nietzsche in regards to accelerating the process of capital as such. The Nietzschean influence on Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia comes from Deleuze’s explicit relationship to Nietzsche’s work. However, when invoked in the previously mentioned passage, Nietzsche’s name is relegated to a secondary character in a chapter devoted entirely to Deleuze and Guattari’s own version of historical materialism. Thus, it is Marx which takes on a primary role, while Nietzschean concepts function as further elaborations of an explicitly Marxist theme. However, and this is the claim guiding this analysis, when Nietzsche is invoked in order to “accelerate the process,” we should seek not in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the function of the concept of acceleration, but rather in Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy. Thus I want to offer a treatment of Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s concepts of the will to power and the will to nothingness, provide a brief sketch on how these concepts are understood to be correlates to concepts in Marx’s work, and finally end by addressing Benjamin Noys’ insightful criticism regarding the Deleuze-Guattari influence on accelerationism as a whole.

Nietzschean Injunctions: Between The Will to Power and Will to Nothingness

In Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze makes it a point to highlight the nuances of Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power and this concepts inherent productivist quality. In opposition to the will to nothingness, the will to power is understood as denoting a purely expressive, completely affirmative, and a necessarily creative process – where in Nietzsche’s corpus the will to power is understood to be the fundamental metaphysical principle akin to Becoming. As Deleuze writes, “it does not aspire, it does not seek, it does not desire, above all it does not desire power. It gives: power is something inexpressible in the will…power is in the will as “the bestowing virtue”, through power the will itself bestows sense and value”(NP, 85). On Deleuze’s reading, the will to power does not designate the idea of a will seeking its own power, but rather signifies creativity and production as such. “The will to power is the element from which derive both the quantitative difference of related forces and the quality that devolves into each force in this relation…The will to power is, indeed, never separable from particular determined forces, from their quantities, qualities and directions. It is never superior to the ways that it determines a relation between forces, it is always plastic and changing”(NP, 50).

What is fundamental for Deleuze is the formulation of “willing=creating” (NP, 84). That is to say, prior to any further determination as to what organization of society is expressed through the process of production, the grounding principle for any understanding of society is what and how it creates and produces both forms of life and society itself. The moment of denial, the moment of ressentiment, that comes to figure as the will to nothingness is the negative quality of the ‘one who wills in the will.’ In other words, the will to nothingness is also productive and creative. However, what is found to be reprehensible in the existence of a will to nothingness, in the embodiment of ressentiment, is that this kind of will finds its source of both hatred and piety in a static totality (its creative deed is the repetition of sameness and not difference). The concept of the will to nothingness diagnoses the feeble attempt to understand the world and human relations according to ‘metaphors which we have forgotten were metaphors’ and have ‘mistaken for truth.’

Additionally, the will to nothingness serves as one antipode in Nietzsche’s ‘play of forces.’ If the will to power is expressive, creative, plastic, and productive, the will to nothingness designates what Deleuze will call the betrayal of the will to power as such. The will to nothingness cannot be confused with the will to power even though the will to nothingness is a quality of the will to power which expresses and signifies the nihilism of a social body (NP, 64). Thus, writing against nihilism, Nietzsche’s disdain for and attempts to dispense with, the will to nothingness is founded on the idea of the will to power as both process of creation and productive of the qualities of the relations of force – where one possible quality of the will to power is nihilism itself.

For Deleuze, the will to nothingness as nihilism is expressive of fundamental social relations:”the imputation of wrongs and responsibilities, the bitter recrimination, the perpetual accusation, the ressentiment”(NP, 21) which characterizes the organization of society. Moreover-and this is what brings Nietzsche in close proximity with Marx and legitimates Deleuze and Guattari’s attempt at bringing Nietzsche and Marx into conjunction-nihilism isn’t simply a psychological phenomena. Nihilism, in its most profound sense, refers to the “fundamental categories…of our way of thinking and interpreting existence in general” (NP, 21). It is because nihilism expresses this fundamental quality of social relations, and not merely personal orientations in the world, that Deleuze and Guattari will invoke Nietzsche’s principle of the will to power as a critique of Capital.

Thus, the gains made by Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari, by the concept of the will to power are due to the fact that the will to power is the abstraction necessary to grasp the full weight of Nietzsche’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of capital and nihilism. Not only does the will to nothingness err in terms of misunderstanding the historical place of human beings (e.g., science, Christianity); it is through this error that the social manifestations of nihilism are made actual (which is not to say that Nietzsche argues that merely correcting our thoughts will lead to the right type of action, but that the will to nothingness is grounded in both ideas and desires which have led to this confusion between the will to power and will to nothingness).

Deleuze, Guattari, & The Accelerationists

Given the preceding remarks on the difference between the will to power and the will to nothingness (nihilism), the philosophical purchase made on the part of Deleuze and Guattari by taking up a Nietzschean theme in Anti-Oedipus must be understood through its conjunction with their reading of Marx. If the concept of nihilism corresponds to fundamental categories of experience grounded in social relations, Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Marx seeks to connect this idea with the concept of the relations of production. As Marx himself writes in an often cited passage,

“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)

It is due to the conceptual link between the concepts of the will to power and the will to nothingness on the one hand, and Marx’s concept of the relations of production on the other, that we can begin to see the necessary differences between those who claim to be ‘Left accelerationists’ or ‘ultra-Left/Right accelerationists.’ That is to say, if the task is to ‘accelerate the process,’ the obviously critical question which arises is which process exactly?

To start, what both the concept of the will to power and the ‘left accelerationists’ affirm is the idea of the ontological indeterminacy of the elements of society. For both D&G and Srnicek and Williams, there is no a priori reason to disavow or remain skeptical of the use of technology for leftist politics since each set of thinkers begins from the context of real subsumption. This stands perfectly in line with Marx’s claim that “while capital gives itself its adequate form as use value within the production process only in the form of machinery and other material manifestations of fixed capital, such as railways…this in no way means that this use value – machinery as such – is capital, or that its existence as machinery is identical with its existence as capital; any more than gold would cease to have use value as gold if it were no longer money. Machinery does not lose its use value as soon as it ceases to be capital” (Grundrisse, 699, my emphasis).

While this ontological indeterminacy is affirmed by accelerationists, both on the Right and the Left, the differences emerge when we consider what exactly is affirmed, or what exactly is thought to be the seed of radical change. The seeds of radical change for someone like Land lie in the inherent character of capitalisms innovative, productive, and deterritorializing process. That is to say, for Land, emancipatory change and a political project adequate for its realization ought to develop the currently existing relations of production to their conclusion. On his account, this is the meaning of D&G’s statement that “the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.” Contrary to Land, Srnicek and Williams begin their accelerationist politics with a break from the Landian position:

“However Landian neoliberalism confuses speed with acceleration. We may be moving fast, but only within a strictly defined set of capitalist parameters that themselves never waver. We experience only the increasing speed of a local horizon, a simple brain-dead onrush rather than an acceleration which is also navigational, an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility.”

Regarding the philosophical register of Land’s accelerationism, the error and untenability of his project, not only stems from the conflation of capitalism as a process of deterritorialization, axiomatics, and creative destruction on the one hand, and a more general process of becoming and production underscored by Deleuze and Guattari. Land also misunderstands the very relationship between the absorption of technological innovation into Capital and technological innovation itself as it exists within specific domains of society. On the relation between the innovation of technology and capitalism Deleuze and Guattari themselves claim that “An innovation is adopted only from the perspective of the rate of profit its investment will offer by the lowering of production costs; without this prospect, the capitalist will keep the existing equipment…”(AO). It is in this sense that there is a break between Land’s accelerationism and the accelerationism proposed by Williams and Srnicek. Thus, to confuse speed with acceleration means a specific vision of an accelerationism that has not escaped the universal axiom of capital (overall profitability of industry in relation to the market), and insofar as Land bases his politics in the acceleration of the existing relations of production, his thought can only conceptualize the reproduction of greater crises and further displacements of capital as its own limit. In short, to valorize the kind of creativity realized by capital as such is to perpetuate an understanding of creativity under the concept of the will to nothingness. Without this distinction, accelerationism would fall back into, as Marx wrote, “the accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain” only for it to be “absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital…in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper” (G, 694).

The merits of the ‘left accelerationist’ approach, and their critique of Land, is in their aim to make the conceptual distinction between productivity, creativity, and innovation as it is absorbed into Capital and the potential for the fruits of capital to benefit a politics which seeks to return these gains to Labor. Hence the statement from the MAP: “Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces…It needs to be repurposed towards common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch toward post-capitalism” (MAP, 03.5). As Brassier already stated, “Perhaps the real import of the accelerationism defended by Srnicek and Williams is as an intervention into the politics of abstraction” (‘Wandering Abstraction’). This intervention into the politics of abstraction can be gleaned from the three concrete goals of the MAP: establishing an intellectual platform for accelerationism, media reform to intervene in the construction of public narratives, and the reconstitution of class power.

Accelerationism and Its Critics: Preliminary Conclusion

Perhaps the most salient critique of this emphasis of D&G’s use of Nietzsche and its influence on accelerationism comes from Benjamin Noys’ illuminating essay ‘A Grammar of Neoliberalism.’ In that essay Noys’ takes issue with the facile equation of capitalism=nihilism. After providing a lucid sketch of the rise of neoliberalism via Foucault, Noys’ returns to the question of accelerationism in order to highlight the potential danger of accelerationism as such: “it seems to me accelerationism, and the critical and theoretical resources it draws upon, fundamentally misunderstands neoliberalism, as a particular form of capitalist governmentality, and capitalism itself, as a social form, and so reproduces them (or their own idealized image)” (Dark Trajectories, 47). The danger, then, for any accelerationist politics is the possibility of doing the work for neoliberal capital itself. The merits of Noys’ criticisms stem from his identification of neoliberalism as concerned with the structural restraints and limits of the market as such, and not an economic ideology directed toward commodities. Noys’ critique should be read alongside Zizek’s weaker and straw man argument: “And what about the so-called Transformer or Animorph toys, a car or a plane that can be transformed into a humanoid robot, an animal that can be morphed into a human or robot-is this not Deleuzian? There are no “metaphorics” here: the point is not that the machinic or animal form is revealed as a mask containing a human shape but, rather, as the “becoming-machine” or “becoming-animal”of the human” (Bodies without Organs 184) In this way, Noys’ is a better critic of the accelerationists and their indebtedness to thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari.

Noys writes further on that “We are expected, in the name of Deleuzoguattarian anti-fascism, to embrace capitalism as nihilist machine that has no ‘purpose’, because ‘purpose’=fascism, while forgetting that neoliberalism appeared in Germany as the form of governmentality that would immunize us against fascism by trading the political for the economic” (DT, 51). And it is here where the use and criticisms of the concept of nihilism regarding accelerationisms comes into high relief. As previously mentioned, the conceptual distinction between a will to power and a will to nothingness gains importance in D&G’s project of diagnosing the organization of society under capital. In this way, we are not told by D&G to embrace capitalism as nihilism simply because ‘purpose,’ or purposive social action is a priori reprehensible. Rather, and by way of conclusion, we are told to embrace capitalism as nihilism because nihilism designates the way in which subjects are constituted as subjects under capitalism, while simultaneously drawing our attention to the fact that the processes of socialization/subjectification present under capitalism only make possible forms of life which are nihilistic through and through.

Towards a Feminist “Axiomatics”

September 1, 2014

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The title of this post, Feminist ‘Axiomatics,’ is a term I will use to explain and articulate a specific gesture within feminist theory – mainly found in the work of Elizabeth Grosz and Sara Ahmed. This gesture consists in this: to understand that there is something specific and distinct about feminist theory – where for Grosz it is understanding the historical specificity of feminist theory as a body of work that stands apart from other competing theories (Marxism, structuralism, etc.), and for Ahmed it is a certain preoccupation with the future and the attempt to not repeat the past. Based on this initial claim, Grosz and Ahmed then make the following move: feminist theory takes as its object of critique every theoretical project claiming for itself the path toward emancipation in order to understand and deconstruct every patriarchal, sexist, and misogynistic assumption which help found the very project in question. It is in the combination of these two claims that we can come to understand the axiomatic quality of feminist theory and its relationship with other, and sometimes seen as competing, thinkers and ideas.

From Equality to Autonomy

For Grosz, this move begins in the 1960’s; specifically with the rise of Feminist Theory in universities as distinct from Feminism as a political movement. “In the sixties, feminists began to question various images, representations, ideas, and presumptions traditional theories developed about women and the feminine” (Grosz, 1986). Given the already established presence of the struggle for women’s emancipation, what was specific about this time period was the rise of what Grosz calls a ‘politics of autonomy’ as opposed to a ‘politics of equality.’ A politics of equality was based on two basic ideas: the inclusion of women into the intellectual concerns of theorists and the intellectual treatment of women as legitimate objects of inquiry as being equal to the way in which intellectuals have long since treated men as objects of study. Against these two claims, a politics of autonomy understood that equality does not go far enough since equality would only grant women and the feminine equal treatment insofar as certain aspects of the lives of women and feminine lives were like the lives of men: “The project of women’s equal inclusion meant that only women’s sameness to men, only women’s humanity and not their womanliness could be discussed” (Grosz, 1986).
The politics of autonomy, means not undertaking an emancipatory project on the basis of women’s sameness to men. Rather, “struggle for autonomy…imply the right to reject such standards and create new ones”(Grosz, 1986). It is this politics of autonomy that constituted the heart of Feminist Theory as a distinct and specific intellectual movement. By understanding that equality is the attempt to grant women the privileges enjoyed by men as long as they emulated men/masculine lives, the politics of autonomy attempt to not only reject this move but also posit the idea that the dogmatic assumption of the equivalence of maleness with rationality and womanliness with irrationality was too a bankrupt framework. Feminist Theory, understood through the lens of autonomy, then means 4 things:

1). Women are both the subjects and objects of knowledge – they ought to be granted the same standing as men and the lives of men in terms of theoretical inquiry as well as granting the idea that one cannot easily separate reason from desire.
2). Due to the first point, there is undertaken by Feminist Theorists a radical questioning of all methods, theory’s, and ideas in the attempt to bring under critical analysis each of their main axioms and tenants. This critical attitude which constitutes the heart of Feminist Theory brings under close scrutiny commonly held beliefs of intellectual’s of the left in order to show how even the most liberatory projects can still reinforce and perpetuate anti-feminist ideas and practices.
3). The politics of autonomy feminists ‘work through’ all objects of study, sometimes in order to subvert and detourn them.
4). All of this, plus the alternatives developed through Feminist analysis, constitutes what Grosz calls Feminist Theory.

Thus, as Grosz says, the goal of Feminist Theory is to render patriarchical theories and institutions incapable of exercising domination and power over women and the feminine. Ultimately, for Grosz, Feminist Theory as a politics of autonomy is an attempt to counter patriarchical paradigms as well as establish alternative theories and institutions based on the principles of Feminist Theory itself.

Feeling Differently

Extending Grosz’s insights into the question ‘What is Feminist Theory?’ and concluding with a politics of autonomy that takes up a critical attitude toward all ideas, theories, and intellectual projects which present themselves as emancipatory, Ahmed’s essay ‘Feminist Futures’ acts as a further reflection on the status of Feminist Theory itself. For Ahmed, writing after Butler’s Gender Trouble which brought to the attention of Feminist Theory the crisis in the category of Woman, acknowledges the differences which separate feminists of all stripes while also acknowledging that what all feminists share is a “concern with the future; that is, a desire that the future should not simply be a repetition of the past, given that feminism comes into being as a critique of, and resistance to, the ways in which the world has already taken shape” (Ahmed, 2008).

To be concerned with the future and to avoid repeating the past, Ahmed highlights the way in which she, as a feminist, can write her coming into being a feminist through various emotions: anger, pain, love, joy, wonder, and hope. Briefly, in this section, I want to reconstruct Ahmed’s main argument regarding the relationship between emotion and feminist theory/politics since I believe it is an extension of Grosz’s prior claims about the emergence and foundation of Feminist Theory as a theory in its own right. Ahmed’s main argument is as follows:

1). Gender permeates all aspects of social life, hence it is constitutive of our being-in-the-world in a fundamental way.
2). Feminist anger is directed towards an object that has gone by various names (patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, sexual division of labor) but shares the same quality of pain and oppression constituting women’s everyday lives.
3). Anger already implies a reading of the world, thus it begins with a reading of a specific object and moves on toward the world itself (due to point 1).
4). When Feminist anger becomes a critique of “what is,” it becomes “a critique that loses an object.” Through this loss of an object, Feminism opens up the potentials that are not found in the present organization of society.

It is from these four main claims, and read in relation to Elizabeth Grosz’s definition of Feminist Theory, that we come to understand the concept of a Feminist Axiomatics. Through the reading of Grosz and Ahmed, we can come to a set of conclusions as to what constitutes Feminist Theory as Theory and why is Feminist Theory, in this line of thinking, understood to be “axiomatic.” Simply stated: when Feminism becomes a critique without an object, a critique waged against the world as such, it becomes once again a Theory a la Grosz; that is to say, when one aims at a critique of the world as such, the task is not to name, describe, and diagnose the world (although this may be done along the way). Rather, the project of a feminist axiomatics becomes the creation and establishment of a world where gender and sexuality no longer operate as oppressive relations, no longer perpetuate and continuously solidify stratified and socialized inequality, where this project is founded on the principles of Feminist Theory itself.

Towards a Feminist Axiomatics

So, what is ‘axiomatic’ about this understanding of Feminist Theory and “Feminist” about ‘axiomatics’? The term axiomatics, indebted to the concept of the axiom, is borrowed from Alain Badiou’s own understanding of the relationship between politics and justice – where politics is the collective and voluntaristic decision making of the body politic and justice does not signify a unity or stability, but an instability, a rupture, with the current state of affairs. For Badiou, the status of the axiom in his ontology, just as it is with the status of choice in politics and metapolitics, is not something taken for granted or assumed to be true prior to investigation. Rather, axioms are only ‘true,’ or gain the status of intelligible through their application in the process of which they are a part. That is to say, the intelligibility of an axiom cannot be separated from the demonstration of its Truth: “choice has its intelligibility neither in the objective collective nor in a subjectivity of opinion. Its intelligibility is internal, in the sequential process of action, just as an axiom is intelligible only through the application of the theory that it supports” (Badiou, 2005).

In regards to Feminism and Feminist Theory, what makes Grosz’s and Ahmed’s feminism a feminist axiomatics is due to their shared investment in the idea that what is axiomatic and foundational for theory and politics does precede the process of politics itself. As Grosz writes, a feminist axiomatics is not simply one method among others. It is the search for a new method where theory is sexual, political, gender infused, and understood as historically and politically produced – that there is, at bottom, not simply truth but a ‘politics of truth:’ “feminist theory is involved in continuing explorations of and experimentation with new forms of writing, new methods of analysis, new positions of enunciation, new kinds of discourse…Instead of attempting to establish a new theoretical norm, feminist theory seeks a new discursive space, a space where women can write, read and think as women” (Grosz, 1986). In a similar sentiment, Ahmed writes at the end of her essay: “And so, everyday, we might be compelled to declare “I am/we are feminists,’ even when the meaning of the word is not decided in advance, indeed because it is not decided and because it has effects that are, as yet, not lived. So we say it, and we say it with a certain kind of love, a love that is impure, and not easy, but one that might give us life, a life that has all the vitality of the living, even if it is a life that has yet to take form” (Ahmed, 2008).

It is this idea, of a feminism that remains faithful to all the ways in which it is yet to be decided what it means to be a feminist at this specific historical, political, social, and economic situation that constitutes the axiomatics of Grosz’s and Ahmed’s feminism. For each show us, in their own way, that what is most important about “being a feminist” is the relationship between the lived experience of women and the feminine and the coupling of that experience with intellectual work. To be clear, feminists (political and/or intellectual) do not need Badiou to educate them on the various ways being a feminist constitutes a yet to be decided position with regards to the world as such. The bringing together of Badiou and Feminist Theory is an attempt to show how a thinker such as Badiou has the potential to be brought into conversation with feminist intellectuals and activists, and for this reason, must take into account the claims and method of feminist theory itself. Hence the “towards” in the title of this post: bringing together Badiou with Grosz and Ahmed is a first attempt to move toward a conversation where each can benefit, intellectually and politically, from their shared commitments to the axiomatic quality of their thought. Each thinker, in their own way, is a subject of a truth (where they are faithful to an Event – be it May ’68, the birth of Feminist Theory as a necessary counter part to feminist politics, or the commitment to a future that does not replicate the past) that aims to derive its Truth, as a subject, immanently from the situation itself. Thus, we say once more and along with Ahmed: “And so, everyday, we might be compelled to declare “I am/we are feminists,” even when it has effects that are, as yet, not lived” (Ahmed, 2008).