Seven Red

It’s getting kinda heavy around here, what with all the variable capital and whatnot. Let’s draw it back a bit with what we really do on Saturdays. Today we took a trip down to Millenium and Grant Parks for the Taste of Chicago Festival, a giant, week-long food and entertainment party courtesy of Richard Daley. Yum yums.

The day started with some quiet time on the back deck. Actually, it started with babygirl waking our asses up at 5:45, but you wouldn’t want to see pictures of that even if we had them.

Been down so long it looks like up to me…

We finally got it together and jumped on the Brown Line, arriving in time to catch a Wiggleworms set at the Child Pavilion, or whatever. babygirl did some dancing, some gettin’ down to the flo’, and some dual-instrumentation with maraca and tambourine. Roll, yo.

Because we were downtown, we had to pretend we were tourists and take all the standard tourist pics, again. In this picture of the bean, you might even catch sight of the whole Seven Red family if you look closely enough. Spladow.

But the real meat of the Taste of Chicago is the eatin’, and was there plenty. The basic set up is this: you buy tickets (12 for $8), and get either a meal size portion or a “taste” portion at one of a hundred restaurant booths. They also have multiple stages, beer and wine, cooking classes, and all manner of other activities. It’s pretty great. The meal portions’ll run you 8-10 tickets, while the taste portions are generally 3-4 tickets. A beer is 8-10 tickets, as is wine, etc. So, you expect the tasting portions to be relatively small, but they’re not. I think three tasting portions, depending on the vendor, should hold off most people as a lunch. I had a taco, a meatball sandwich, an empanada, catfish fritters, barbecue pulled turkey, lemon ice, and vanilla ice cream. In any case, here’s babygirl eating a tasting portion of ice cream.

But, finally, it was time to leave. Believe it or not, we did all this before 1:20, when we arrived back home just in time for babygirl’s nap time – really a miracle, considering.

Signs everywhere: the reign of the signifier (and the sans serif font). With the Art Institute in the background.

I read with interest Booga Face’s analysis of The Pursuit of Happyness, a film I haven’t seen, and actually actively avoided. One of the themes that came up in the analysis was the strange placement of efficiency and innovation, and I want to comment on that a bit here. Specifically, BF demonstrates that TPOH expends considerable ideological effort to locate efficiency and innovation as qualities of the entrepreneur rather than complex social networks (on which any autonomy is built). This is certainly the neoliberal doxa, and it saturates the discourse even where it would seem least likely (such as, for example, in the discourse of micro-finance and the like). But I’m more interested in the transposition of efficiency into a quality of the multitude.

Efficiency has always occupied a strange position in Left theory, which is not surprising given that efficiency was usually encountered, concretely, as intensification of exploitative relationships.  Even where efficiency became the watchword of the hilariously named “really existing socialism” (in the awful, if remarkably effective, five year plans and rapid industrialization schemes), it subsequently became precisely the point of attack for those identifying real socialism with its capitalist twin. When efficiency is grouped under the broader category of instrumental reason, it becomes the hinge that allows a whole range of mid-twentieth century thinkers to identify the two while also drawing both into a more general destiny of practice. When Ellul says technics, for example, he almost always means efficiency rather than any concrete technology; it is a mode of encountering the world shared by both capitalist and “real socialist” forms of production. And Ellul is only the most obvious case. You could run the gamut of thinkers who focused their energies on instrumental reason – you pick ‘em: Arendt, Adorno, Habermas – and see the horror of efficiency played out again and again, not, of course, efficiency in itself (as it operates in Ellul), but efficiency as the primary concern of praxis rather than one form of approach among others. One need not invoke Bataille’s fascination with productive excess and waste or Heidegger’s “creation of a standing reserve” to see how else this discourse plays out.

But I think that Booga Face is quite right that efficiency suddenly takes on a positive value in what I’ll repeat – tongue in cheek – as the Italian Ideology, or at least in Negri. Which is an interesting reversal. On the one hand, from the perspective of Marxist theory, it’s quite clear why the category of efficiency escapes the logic of exploitation within this discourse. In traditional Marxist theory, you find two primary forms of capital: constant capital and variable capital, where constant capital is (and this is a very simplified, blogified version) the “means of production,” such as factories and machines, while variable capital is (simplified again) living labor, or the potential of workers to produce. In a nutshell, barring innovation, you can’t squeeze any more “value” (which is to say, profit) out of constant capital: it actually degrades, of course, as Marx describes in some of his funnier passages. But you can squeeze more out of variable capital, it being, well, variable. Concretely, this is the horror of efficiency from the perspective of the worker: increased quotas, extension of the working day, maximum use of every available second of work time, etc. In terms of experience, this is the process through which capital attacks the body (or better, life) most viciously, as even a cursory reading of Taylor’s “experiments” would show you. It’s also the site around which class struggle organized itself from the industrial revolution onward (work slow downs, sabotage, agitation for the eight-hour day, etc.). If variable capital is the site of exploitation, then  efficiency is nothing but the techniques of extruding ever more value from variable capital. That it also requires a particular subjectivity that forgets the Being of beings (or whatever) is only gravy for critique after that. So, this is an old story, and hardly worth this oversimplified retelling at this point.

But the story is necessary to grasp the reversal proposed by the notion of the General Intellect, a concept that serves as the real engine for Negri, Virno, and others. If production has become primarily “immaterial,” which is to say, cognitive, communicative, and affective, then – and this is the strong claim from Negri, as I take it – living labor is transposed with constant capital, because what is constant is the not a factory or a machine, but the totality of cognitive, communicative, and affective practice. It’s not a mistake, in this sense, that the very concept of the General Intellect is taken from Marx’s “Fragment on Machines.” If, for Marx, the machine (that is, constant capital) was a concretized instance of general social knowledge for industrial production (in other words, any given technology is a materialization of the whole of technoscientific knowledge), the emergence of immaterial labor simply bypasses the “material” of the machine. But when it does so, nobody really owns the (non)machine of the General Intellect any more. In effect, capital, in its development, gives away the means of production - in that “constant capital” is no longer materialized in an “ownable” machine,” but distributed to the entirety of the social field. This is why capital, for Negri, becomes absolutely parasitical when it comes to immaterial labor: it is not simply relatively parasitical anymore (Marx’s vampire), since it doesn’t even provide production with a set of means or organizational techniques.

Of course, this is a fiction to some extent; it’s a fiction that does a better job of explaining the frenetic insistence on intellectual property rights over the last 30 years than any liberal explanation I’ve seen. Even, however, if we grant that what immaterial labor really means is that capital overtakes the whole of social life (i.e., that real subsumption doesn’t structurally empower anybody, or that play becomes work rather than the reverse), Negri is still correct that work in such an arrangement is immeasurable from the perspective of surplus value, or that variable capital becomes an extremely troubled category, since production occupies a different “temporality.” The only time of innovation (or of comforting, caring for, and other affective labor) is the time of kairos, which lacks the quantitative dimension that would allow measure. And if variable capital no longer maintains a body-time consistency that can be worked on by the industrial engineer or the mid-level manager, then you need something else to ground value. How about a ridiculous “retreat” to pump up your subjective enthusiasm for the work process? It’s as reasonable and impotent a response as any other (and maybe as terrible as the Taylorist subdivision of the worker’s body). Better yet, how about an entire discipline devoted to teaching workers the subjective experience of kairos as a means of training for the (new) immaterial work process.  Something else to measure value, see?

For Negri, this something else is the financial markets; he’s also correct that finance is a laughable substitute as a measuring device, as the recent confusion relating to the “sub-prime” or “credit crisis” amply demonstrates. Everytime Citigroup or some other bank writes down another $8 billion in CDO losses, they proclaim again that the financial markets have no idea how to measure value – they literally don’t know the value of the assets they even hold. But the other result is that efficiency, which was constituted concretely by techniques of extruding surplus value from variable capital, fails to hit the same object: the body and life of the worker. Certainly, there are no shortage of contemporary organizational theories that promote messy inefficiency as a management strategy; as Virno notes, the old factories used to say “Quiet! Men Working,” while today the mantra is “Network! Talk! You’re at Work!” (The worries that employees in information sectors waste too much time surfing the Internet and IM’ing always seem decidedly half-hearted). But this just indicates a slackening of efficiency as it is classically understood. What’s more interesting is whether efficiency itself is transformed in this process (in its operation and concept) to lose the character that actuated so much critique in modernity. To get to this, I want to work through why Hannah Arendt’s work becomes so central in the “Italian Ideology.” Maybe tomorrow…

So she related my deeply conflicted answer to babygirl’s question “Daddy, what’s police?”I was able to manage only “Er, they’re people who…er…um…help you when you’re in trouble?” I felt like Mr. Rogers. Lying ass Mr. Rogers.

But it’s a good goddamn question, actually. In Virno’s latest book, he sets up the classic formulation from Carl Schmitt: those who oppose the State form believe that human nature is fundamentally “good” (which is to say, it tends toward community and cooperation); those who support the State form, from conservatives, to liberals, to authoritarians, believe that human nature is fundamentally evil (that is, it tends toward conflict that must be resolved at the level of the State). From the former perspective, “police” is an unnecessary appendage that serves to protect a privileged class; from the latter, it is the “thin blue line” that separates us from the bellum omnium contra omnes, or, at the very least, the serial killers and other “predators.” The unmistakable ideological work of all those “detective” shows clearly resides in their characterization of human “evil,” and the “natural” justification of police and the State form. (On a side note, why is it that every murder show involves the line “Even these seasoned detectives were shocked by the grisly scene!” Just once, I want the detectives to say “The scene, while awful, was fairly banal and run-of-the-mill, as far as multiple stabbings deaths go…” And don’t even get me started on the total bullshit that is the “science” of sociopathology, with its laughable “brain scan” evidence that has about as much legitimacy as phrenology, or Lombroso’s taxonomy of the criminl face. In any case…)

One could imagine other relationships between politics and nature: first, support for the State form that begins with an assumption of fundamental good. If cooperation and community inhere in something like a “state of nature,” however, the State form becomes superfluous, like hatching an escape from a prison that you’re not in. This is not to say that something like this isn’t what actually happens: it’s easy enough to imagine a prison and an escape, and that might be precisely what happens. But Virno sets up his question around the last of the possible permutations: can there be an opposition to the State form that begins from the assumption of evil, or an ontology of the human that tends toward what he calls intra-species aggression? To put it another way, must acknowledgement of fundamental conflict end in the establishment of the State and the police. This is, indeed, the question for any serious anarchism (it’s also why “love” is off the table), and it’s actually what never really gets answered in Hardt and Negri’s work, which tends toward a belief in fundamental goodness of “the monstrous flesh” of the Multitude, all creativity and love – if it weren’t for those damn capitalists! If anything, only libertarianism really takes a crack at the problem, however inadequate and incoherent its solution: it retains a sad but productive confusion between conflict and community, and thus imagines a non-state community that must, nevertheless, be mediated through a (fundamentally coherent and efficient) market. Neither position really tackles the problem of conflict without the State.

So, what’s police? It depends. It may have to be invented. In any case, at least part of the very complicated answer that I’ll have to work out with babygirl over the years must involve the images in this video, and not only because I have an almost irrational attraction to the image of a tear gas canister being heaved back at the police line from whence it came, no matter how theoretically or practically “inept” that might be. Two images, then: first, the crowd scattering from a tear gas canister, then its emergence back into the air, smoking; second, the heroic individual standing down the tanks in Tiananmen Square. As a figure for something like “resistance,” I’ll take the first over the second every day of the week. They share a lot in common, to be sure (that is, dialectics). But at least the first doesn’t reproduce the individual as the main site of power. Every time I see it, I fall in love. A different kind of love. Plus, I really dig the song.

I had to, of course, check out the Euro Cup semis this afternoon, and was treated to another round of the awful Forza Azzurri football. The Italians lost to the Spaniards on penalty kicks, as was well deserved given their slow, defensive play. Now, the defense was incredible, shutting down a brilliant Spanish attack for 120 minutes, but it is excruciating television. It’s almost as if they play for penalty kicks; somebody should tell them that it’s perfectly acceptable to win a game by scoring during the actual fucking game. While I’m sure the Brooklyn Famiglia is in mourning for the fall of the Blues, I’m actually a German soccer supporter, so my squad’s still in, and looking very good. They play Turkey on Wednesday for a spot in the finals, and seemingly the entire Turkish A-team is injured or on suspension. I do admit that there would be something quite wonderful – given the situation of current and former Gastarbeiter in Germany – in seeing a depleted Turkish team defeat the mighty German soccer juggernaut, but I’d still like to see the Germans in the finals. In any case, the Germans, unlike the Italians, seem to have this strange pre-occupation with scoring actual fucking goals, which – in practical terms – means they play the ball toward the goal of the opposing team, so I tend to enjoy their play much more. It’s also true, on a side note, that the Italians play a dirty game, holding, hacking, diving, and fouling as brutally as I’ve seen. In the funniest comment of yesterday’s ESPN coverage, Luca Toni, who was barely touched, practically jumps to a horizontal in the air before crashing down gently in faux pain. The Scottish announcer deadpans, as the replay goes to slow motion on Luca Toni’s expression of absolute agony: “He looks like he’s been hit by a sniper.”

Talk about an identity crisis! Just a little something for a Saturday night. First, Ray Gelato doing the Renato Carosone classic. You may remember it from the classic scene in The Talented Mr. Ripley, below. The Italian Ideology, indeed. Enjoy.

As I’ve already written about elsewhere, I consider the summer of 1994 something like the high water mark of my New Yawkahness. It was the summer the Rangers won the Stanley Cup, and also the summer that the “broken windows” policing of the Giuliani administration really started making itself felt in the everyday life of the Outer Boros. Around our way in Queens, we had two young ballbuster cops, named Brockman and Malone, who replaced a small middle-aged patrolman we called Officer Turtle, who used to sit down with us while we were drinking beer and ask us about the neighborhood, a real 1950′s model. As of June 1994, that was all over. Brockman and Malone handed out desk appearance tickets for just about anything, and threatened us with far worse for even minor infractions (“in the park after dark” and other such nonsense violations). They were notorious; my friend V. made a techno song about them.

This change really resulted in a kind of general euphoria, an early fin-de-siecle, wherein everything sort of felt like it was coming to an end. You also had the birth of new hip hop behind Biggie and the Wu; the soundtrack to that summer was nothing if not 36 Chambers and Ready to Die, thumping out of every car and inundating every keg party, sometimes competing with the awful “Far Behind” by Candlebox. And, of course, it culminated in Woodstock 94, a fucking mess, like a hazy question mark on the whole thing. Whenever I go home and hang out with guys I grew up with, talk always turns to that summer; it struck us all, I think, as a real transition moment, from one kind of life to the next (indeed, I never lived at home another summer after that…)

So, now, I see the buzz all over for The Wackness, a new comedy that’s doing its best to hype itself as “the new Juno.” Of course, I must add to this buzz in order to discuss it – this is the condition of speech in what a professor I know likes to call just-in-time capitalism. In any case, The Wackness is set in New York in the summer of 1994, and features the travails of a teenage drug dealer and his therapist (who he pays with pot, I take it). I guess I’m not the only one with the nostalgia. The marketing material has an obvious graffiti aesthetic (although they really could have got somebody to do some better graffiti, I think), and a top-notch soundtrack that gets a particular version of 90′s New York just about right. I guess I’ll have to see it when it comes out, but I suspect the Manhattan version of that summer (a fucking therapist?) is a bit different than what we were seeing in Queens and Brooklyn. See trailer here…

On the contrary, the impression is that the domain of law is gaining terrain both domestically and internationally; the process of normativization is investing increasingly wider spaces. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that juridical language per se reveals itself to be incapable of illuminating the profound logic of such change. When one speaks of “human rights,” for example, rather than referring to established juridical subjects, one refers to individuals defined by nothing other than the simple fact of being alive. Something analogous can be said of the dispositif of sovereignty. Anything but destined to weaken as some had rashly forecast (at least with regard to the world’s greatest power) sovereignty seems to have extended and intensified its range of action – beyond a repertoire that for centuries had characterized its relation to both citizens and state structures. – Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy

On the day that we learn Berlusconi will deploy 2,500 troops from the Italian Army to “supplement” the police and carabinieri in an “anti-crime” effort, I finished another of the spate of fascinating philosophical texts coming out of Italy, Roberto Esposito’s Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Last week, I finished Paolo Virno’s latest, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, which I pre-ordered like a pathetic teenage fan anticipating the new album of my favorite band. Ah well. We all have our things, I guess. Perhaps the best result of Hardt and Negri’s Empire is the renewed interest and subsequent translation of a whole body of Italian thought – thought, to be somewhat melodramatic, forged in the crucible of the 1970′s, the student and worker struggles, the Legge Reale, the Movement of ’77, the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, the crackdown of 1979, and prison, always the shadow of the prison experience.

Much of this emerging work is, of course, responding to H&N; Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude is certainly much darker in its assessments of the “constitutive power of the Multitude,” or at least the version of “love” (or affirmative biopower) that it leaves us with. Not darker in the sense of retreating from such an affirmative power ( a move generally left to the truly gloomy Agamben), but a much more frightening framework for the way the affirmations are turned against themselves, particularly when it comes to labor. In his previous work, particularly the essay “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment” (in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics), Virno usually ends with a decidedly half-hearted notion that the same forms of subjectivity and action he just outlined as particularly brutal can themselves be affirmed otherwise. But it has seemed rather like a theoretical dogma: to suggest otherwise would be nostalgia. But you can see how the real peddlers of nostalgic politics get to slap Multitude around, and establish their resentful purchase. Where nostalgia always has a programmatic response ready to hand (called “yesterday”), the affirmative politics of what’s been called, snarkily enough for Left polemics, “The Italian Ideology” always seems to end on a fuzzy note, especially where Francis of Assisi makes his appearance.

This “love” business always bothered me, not least because the swerve around sovereignty and the state of exception – now returned rapidly in the lawless Bush regime and their torture apparatus, and in the blithe manner in which Berlusconi deploys the military to combat supposed street crime – the swerve, to repeat, always seems rather insufficient. Both Esposito and Virno tackle this problem directly, focusing explicitly on the state of exception, and the relationship between the “norm” and what it seeks to normalize (which is to say, the relationship between what we used to call, in the key of liberalism, politics and nature). I’m waiting for Negri’s The Porcelain Workshop, at which point I think I’ll produce a review essay on the three books. For now, though, I’d say that the Esposito should be required reading, and the Virno I’ll have to think about more (Virno’s prose tends to be so simple that his ideas need to rest a bit before they flower).

As I’m doing the dishes or some other housework in the kitchen I overhear babygirl and topspun talking about her new toys. I bought her a set of wooden emergency vehicles including two fire trucks, an ambulance, a boat, a helicopter and a police car.  They are discussing the different sounds the different vehicles make. An ambulance goes nee-na nee-na, a boat goes aawoogaa and such.

“Babygirl, what does a police car sound like?”

“I don’t know”

“Woop-Woop”

“Daddy, what’s police?”

“They’re um… people who… uh ‘help’ you when you’re… um uh… ‘in trouble’.”

“No”

“You’re right babygirl, they’re not, but that’s the best I can do at your age”

The first time I taught first-year composition I was completely perplexed by the way the students used the words “plethora” and “myriad.” I’m not alone in this; these are two words that writing teachers usually invoke when they’re ranting about students. I don’t often rant about students, and I won’t here. But I did, at some point, ban the use of those words in my first-year comp classes. I’d write them on the board and say “No.” No plethora. No myriad. You just mean “a lot,” or maybe “a variety.” Of course, the larger point is about inflated prose, on the one hand, and rhetorical appropriateness, on the other. So I didn’t really ban them. Rather, students would have to explain why their use was appropriate for a given piece of writing, etc. I wanted to hear a reason that extended beyond the Microsoft thesaurus, or some strange striving for variety that they learned in high school (I say “a lot” a lot…). But this amounts to a de facto prohibition.

Now for the payback. I think all the students who really loved the look of the word “plethora” on the page, and all the students who felt a jolt of pride at having used “myriad” in a sentence. Some probably even really liked it; it gave them joy and confidence, even if it was awkward and turgid. They’d get their papers back only to see the word circled with the obnoxious margin comment “INFLATED” scribbled next to it. Use a lot, I’d write. Must have crushed some of them. And so, the payback, in the form of babygirl’s “favorite song.”

I said a while back that I really dug The New Pornographers album released last year, and that I had it on a poppy loop for a little while. It ended up in the CD player in our car. I guess it was playing one afternoon when I picked babygirl up from daycare, because she took a liking to it, too. Actually, not to the whole album. Just to one song. Her “fave-it song.” Myriad Harbour.

Me: “Hey, babygirl. What’s your favorite song?”
babygirl: “Mee-iad Hawbuh!”

So, cute, right? My two-year old says myriad, pretty much every day. But this means we also have to play the damn song for her every day. She gets out of daycare and on the way to the car starts asking “Fave-it song? Fave-it song?” When we get in the car, it’s “Fave-it song?” If you try to put on NPR, it’s a tantrum: FAVE-IT SONG!!! If you try to put on any other song whatsoever, it’s all “NO! I no like that! FAVE-IT SONG!!!!” And, to make it even more delicious, as soon as the song ends, she asks, as two year olds are wont to do, “Again?” The cosmic payback. For every student who ever cursed under his or her breath, “My stupid comp teacher thought I had ‘inflated prose’ because I used myriad;” for every student crushed by my sarcastic margin comments on myriad, for every peer review that had students acting as proxy dictators for my little preferences (“he doesn’t like that word…”), I now have to listen to word myriad 40, 50, 60 times a day. You never get away with anything. So, without further ado: