Seven Red

Booga Face’s larger project in his analysis of The Pursuit of Happyness has to do with single parenting, and the peculiar location of single parenting in cultural production. BF explains in a comment below:

Or, if one wanted to continue to rip on Habermas, this is the scene of the private sphere and autonomous, pastoral family time which is perhaps the most public moment in the movie. What seems important here in this social economy is the necessity of privation (or deprivation) in order to be a good networker — the logic of the college frat — which is why the single parent is the perfect image of the new “network-from-home” economic order.

And he further notes on his own page that he’s really trying to get at “the ways identity gets linked to performances of independency and stigmatizations of dependency.” The Pursuit of Happyness thus links these themes: labor as a public act; the family as a private act; performance of autonomy (from the social), together with a corresponding (constituent?) devaluation of social ties. The single parent is a particularly good site for these themes because there’s already an assumed loss of autonomy that would have been provided by the dual parent household (i.e., the caretaking that “frees up” action of the other parent). Barring this classical structure of autonomy (the oikos always holds up the action in the polis), the single parent must combine spheres of activity (political, social, economic, familial) more intensely. And, of course, reach out to social support networks in order to simulate the autonomy created in the dual-parent household. From the perspective of autonomy, these two aspects—intensity of multiple activities (creative autonomy) and dependence on social support networks (simulated or outsourced autonomy)—determine the scene of single parenting, so it would seem strange that cultural productions of the single parent tend to celebrate the first while devaluing the second.

It’s a good place to pick up on the discussion of our Italian Ideologists, and particularly their multiple readings of Hannah Arendt, who was, of course, keyed in precisely on the relationship between the household (reproduction), the social and economic (production), and politics (action). Without rehearsing the details or numerous qualifications, Arendt saw authentic politics (freedom and action) exemplified in the Greek polis, and particularly in its supposedly strict division from the scene of production and reproduction (the household, or oikos). The household/economy is the realm of necessity, the needs of the body, biological life. The agora is the realm of freedom from precisely biological necessity. If the household is structured around the preservation of life as it encounters privation, in other words, the agora is constituted through putting oneself at public risk to create a dynamic and differentiated common. The first is concerned with mortality, while the second is concerned with immortality. But “immortality,” for Arendt, cannot mean simply “fame,” in the way the kiddies say that they want to be famous so that their “name will live on long after they’re gone.” Rather, fame, as a supposed species of immortality, is quite rightly subtitled “I wanna live forever,” which is to say, it is actually a species of the concern for mortality. For Arendt, the immortaliy that becomes the object in the authentic polis is not the immortality of the person (through the name or otherwise), but rather of common structures and affects that can be abstracted from the individual, like, say, democracy or Law. It is in only through their departure from the biological needs of individuals that they become “common” in a political sense. And it is through the reintegration of biology and political action that an authentic common space disintegrates.

(Manifesto Note: Needless to say, Seven Red disagrees with all of this, which is why we don’t have one blog for “academic” writing, another for “politics,” and another for babygirl pictures: it’s all of a piece, playa. We dislike the blogosphere’s silly celebration of the amateur, and the professionals‘ equally silly defense of professionalism. We want “Mommy blogs” that also do vicious takedowns of the culture of childhood! We want foreign policy analysis next to descriptions of last night’s Dora the Explorer episode! We spit at internet marketing advice that insists your blog have a “theme” in order to get more hits and links! Fuck hits. We don’t want a public. We want tempos that twist privatization!)

With the emergence of a particular form of individualism through Christian dogma, this division begins to degrade: the preservation of life (and its attendant efficiencies) spread into the political. The Middle Ages see entire societies governed as if they were households: the pater familias model of the monarchical “state.” In the modern era, the function of the pater familias is distributed in vast administrative bureaucracies; as Foucault would say, the exercise of (bio)power gets lighter, more efficient. But the distance from authentic politics is still there, since the function of the administrative apparatus is increasingly the “care” of the population. While this process is most clearly drawn out in The Human Condition, it runs through all of her works, the stakes of which, of course, are the analysis of totalitarianism.

So, to take the most well-known example, Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann is bound up in the distinction between “pure” politics as distinct from life and a political apparatus that administers life (biopolitics could just as easily administer death, flip over into what Esposito and Negri call thanatopolitics, is the point). That Eichmann struck Arendt as a sad little accountant rather than as a sovereign monster—the” banality of evil” thesis—isn’t a biographical point about Eichmann (one suspects that more hair and less horn-rimmed glasses would have pushed up Eichmann’s exceptional evil ratio); rather, it is simply evidence for the degradation of political action once the preservation of life—at one time the domain of oikos alone—infests and infects and invests the political sphere. Indeed, it would seem that exceptionality could not be evil, strictly speaking, in the same way Nietzsche says you cannot reproach the bird of prey for being a bird of prey. Evil is a quality of the bleating lambs; it emerges only when life infects action.

What Booga Face calls the “most public moment” in The Pursuit of Happyness, the networking at the football game, would not be public at all for Arendt, since it is economic activity, idion, idiocy. For Arendt, there is no “political economy,” or rather, it is a contradiction in terms. Similarly, there is no biopolitics; bios cannot qualify (authentic) politics, and vice versa. Our Italian friends find value, problems, and opportunities for strange reversals in this account, but we’ll have to pick that up next time, cuz this body’s shutting down for the night…