I.
Renaming the Cosmos
No longer shall
your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the
ancestor of a multitude of nations. – NRSV
The
names we call the cosmos are given in the wrong time. Today the name
“neoliberal” rolls across snarled lips, lips hateful of the state of the world,
yet worldly wise. Yet the word speaks strangely little to those who use it:
university graduates who never much knew the big state nor full employment. The
name which once described how the world would work as that big state was
dismantled and sold off points only to the status of its speaker. Its utterance
is the call of a jargonistic password to a specific social stratum. But as the
word points back towards the babbling speakers they fail also to notice that
even the name has become corrupt in the wrongness of its time. Despite its
prefix, what it described by neoliberalism is no forty years old, and what was
“neo” about this liberalism was always questionable. It differentiated itself
from the old, progressive classical liberalism not by its novelty but by its
demand for a certain type of return to old ways, back beyond the aberration of
the state monopolies into which classical liberalism had been transformed by
war, crisis, and reaction.
To gloss the pathetic expository
power of the term “neoliberal” has been done too often already, but the history
of another name is not normally considered. It was a century after the
beginning of the industrial revolution that the word “capitalism” would gain
popularity as the name for the social organisation of the epoch. This was in no
small measure the result of the work of the first generation of german
sociologists working at the turn of the century, and in particular the writings
of Werner Sombart and Max Weber. By the mid-1920s, amid German hyperinflation,
Sombart would describe his present as “late capitalism.” This cosmos whose name
was still so young, was itself aged. It seemed to be a social system in its senility.
Decrepit, demented, and losing control of itself it had spawned a world war,
revolution, and crisis.
Before the name “capitalism”
became popular the preferred term was “bourgeois society.” In the untimeliness
of the names we use for the organization of the world certain forces can be read. While some
of these forces might be jargonistic, defining admission to a social group, other
forces are historical. Even as the word “capitalism” came to become an
all-encompassing term everything that existed – just at the moment it seemed to be collapsing
– for that wave of German sociologists the term “bourgeois society” was still
charged. For them its force was not the quality of jargon, but the weight of
critique – albeit a reformist one. It
was perhaps less a weight than a recognition of distance: to this German
bourgeoisie society appeared as something strangely alien, to be studied like
nature. And only with study, and reasoned reform, might it be brought
appropriately close again to its bourgeois interpreters.
This transformation from
“bourgeois society” to “capitalism”, with its force of untimely names might
speak of its own history, and the breakdown of the myths of the first
liberalism in the 19th century. It speaks of a transformation of a
world apparently run by people, the bourgeoisie, to a world defined by their
products, capital. It was in the work of Marx, during that century of
transformation, that this was most precisely diagnosed. At the very core of
Marx’s analysis lies a claim about universality. The universality of the
bourgeois class proclaimed in its revolutions was false: it was not the case
that all people would have a say, and that equality would prevail. Instead
there were always the excluded: the landless and propertiless, women, slaves,
convicts and debtors. And those excluded would turn out to be the majority. But
the claim to universality made by the revolutionary bourgeoisie was not just a
piece of rhetorical bravura: there had been a new universality established, but
it was one of capital and not of the bourgeois class, who merely owned this
universal medium. Not only those excluded from owning it would be subject to
the domination of capital; even the bourgeois class itself would discover
itself subject to its movements, as an alien social force, as alien as
industrialism had made nature.
The now old words “capitalism”
and “society” seem not so exciting any more. They hum along with a tone of
“that’s just the way of the world.” No-one would even think of them with names
of a cosmos. And so the force with which they are used ebbs away quietly, as
endless new names proliferate. It was in the pages of Women’s Own, the
churn of the dentist’s waiting room, that exactly a hundred years after Tönnies
inaugurated the new science of sociology with his investigation into this alien
realm of reality – society – its end would be declared. “There is no such thing
as society”, said Thatcher. Instead, for her, there existed just isolated
individuals, families, small people with small interests. Tönnies other term,
“community” could come to the fore. No more society, just advertising, as the
theorists of the time would claim. But society had not disappeared, instead the
historical force of its distance had become so depleted that it was just to be
accepted, becoming once again unconscious.
II. Brexit dominus domino meo
The little man in me aspires to
win you over, as you are ordinarily won over with the tom-tom of leadership. I
am afraid of you when the little man in me dreams of “leading you to freedom.”
You might discover yourself in me and me in yourself, take fright, and murder
yourself in me.
– WR
This
setting out of sociological theory and the historical shifts of names can help
in a particular problem that permeated the referendum. For months the left (and
the left is taken broadly here) has fought over positions: does it side with a
“working class” – many of whom no longer work, or are un- or under-employed – that
expresses racist and xenophobic attitudes, and which behaves en masse in perpetual
fear of invasion by foreigners; or does it stand against the attitudes of that
class, and against its oppressive demands?
Here the resurrection of old
names might be made useful. Many have claimed that the vote to leave the EU was
founded on “legitimate grievances”. And under this rubric stands a claim to
identification of a genuinely popular position, or of real interests. More than
this, it is claimed that this popular position is an authentically working
class one. But this claim rests on a highly impoverished account of class.
Class here is not a relation, but a thing. It is not something that moves, but
something held fast under the gazes of the demographers. Today, though, it may
not be as it was for the first sociologists, that society has to be held fast
in order to be examined. Instead society may, in its own history, have become
something utterly static and frozen.
Yet the attempt to
find the attitudes of the class as a thing, as opposed to the dynamics
of class politics is hopeless. Beneath the confusions of a “working class”
position is a lack of thinking about domination. At all points the mode of
relation between the classes is considered as one of playful antagonism. The
classes appear in the reports wholly independent of each other, as though they
were absolutely free wills attempting to outwit each other on a battlefield. It
seems to have long been forgotten that the relations in which they engage are
relations of domination. Indeed, if the bourgeois character of society was once
proclaimed, it has today been entirely forgotten or silenced. It is forgotten
that even if the bourgeoisie are not truly the universal subject of society,
they remain the dominant class, the owners of capital, and the purchasers of
labour. And while, as individuals they might not wholly consciously determine
what is produced (insofar as what is produced must be profitable as opposed to
being entirely arbitrary, and not all investments will pay off), the form
of what is produced is founded on the dominant relations of bourgeoisie and
capital. Proletarian production, indeed all production remains enslaved to
these relations. All proletarian production and all proletarian expression is forced
through them. Enslavement and obedience to them is the very condition of survival
in this world. Meanwhile the use of what is produced in our society
perpetually advances this domination.
There is no such thing
as proletarian culture; only bourgeois culture with which, in utter terror,
proletarians are compelled to identify. Even the meagre products of the most
oppressed are barely culture proper. The cry of the oppressed that calls out is
still animalistic, its demand no more than one of self-preservation and
survival. Similarly there is no such thing as bourgeois culture that has not
been produced by the dominated labour of proletarians. There is no bourgeois
culture that does not cry out, in yet unheard glory, against the oppression in
its creation, and against the oppression it will further commit.
The search for some
“authentic working class” position, opinion, or idea in this world will forever
be futile. The views of the working class always appear as distorted
expressions, in the most useless moment of what is produced. The working class is
compelled to speak in bourgeois form. This does not merely mean, though, that
the voice is distorted, but more that it is compelled to speak in precisely the
tones of domination that cause its own distortion.
III.
Mass and Class
The sympathies of the masses,
tempered anew by a system of terror, are reawakening more lively than
ever. –
AB
In
the immediate aftermath of the referendum results a race took place to
establish a putative class analysis of what had happened. Sociologists dusted
off their old ABC1C2DEs in order to establish firmly that “the working class”
had done something. More like
Linnaeus or Cuvier studying the plants and animals they offered up a taxonomy
of social divisions and stratifications in order to deliver an explanation. In
the moment of action the population had been held fast like a pinned out
specimen. There was, it turned out, no movement, but only demography. This was
not surprising insofar as no class action had taken place, or at least no
disruption of the class system. Referenda are archetypes of a purely bourgeois
politics, in which the polity is allowed to decide as apparently equal and
isolated individuals, each treated as bourgeois subjects par excellence. If the
class analysis offered was one of frozen classes, this is because of the class
nature of this form of political expression.
But the rush towards a class
analysis masks another more prominent aspect of the politics that have
surrounded the referendum: a silenced, or repressed mass politics. “The masses
are stupid/barbarous/violent/brainwashed/inert” are the old slogans. To the
bourgeoisie the image of the masses has always been not only detestible but
terrifying. And most terrifying is the idea that it might find itself amid its
pulsating throngs, discovering its own movements as contingent on the enormous,
yet bound, gestures of the crowd. It has for centuries attempted to give
expression to its fear in a comparison between its own apparently refined
sensibilities (the mask of dominating violence with which they truly govern the
masses) and the charged action of the masses. Meanwhile the mass has come to
know this, and in a bourgeois society forever is forced deny its mass-character
in order to claim for itself refined sensibilities, hoping, like the
bourgeoisie, to disguise its own barbarised and barbarous state.
The refined bourgeois individual
and the mass are the conjoined twins of capitalism, the struggling progeny of
bourgeois history. Just as the bourgeois was displaced by capital at the centre
of the cosmos, so at the periphery grows another power. If the particularity of
the autonomy of the individual, still dominated by the contingency of capital,
still only able to desire freedom in the form of profit, stands at one pole,
then at the other stands the mass, as the cultic structure of the people as a
whole conjured by the universality of the commodity. Along the axis between
these poles – of bourgeois individual and mass – vibrate the egos of this
world. At one end they are strong and yet incapable of effecting historical
change, their desires attached only to profit, while their strength is expended
on resignation to the endurance of the present state of things; at the other
end they are weak: the powerful erotics of the mass capable of changing the
world are bound and perverted into servitude. One can read these figures in
terms of how the referendum has played out as well: on one side are the
Guardian-reading critics of ideology who believe they can never be convinced by
the lies of the mass media. They gaze disdainfully of at the mass who are taken
in and act upon what they are told; yet the guardian readers are fundamentally
powerless, condemned only to ever interpret the world, to wistfully sneer, and
never to change it.
In the commentary around the
referendum this division has been prominent. Every turn has centred on the
“patronising” or “belittling” of the mass of the population by a “political,
metropolitan establishment.” If once upon a time the bourgeoisie would bear its
terror at the mass in public, now any commentary at all is forbidden. This is
the result of an attempt to separate these conjoined aspects of the bourgeois
world into separate spheres of life. In politics one must act like the
bourgeois subject, but in the spheres of culture, of production, of media, of
consumption, one must behave like a mass. The great frictions of the last weeks
in British politics has been less about some “working class anger” than the
antagonisms of these two aspects of capitalist society – the bourgeois
individual and the mass – and their cross-contamination in the referendum. The
refined bourgeois character hates the fact that the result was governed by the
movements of mass culture and media. The accusations that the masses brutal,
racist, and xenophobic are just post hoc moralising bywords for this hatred,
from a class that has already long proven its brutality, racism, and xenophobia.
The bourgeois individuals clean up their own image for a moment and say, “if
only you were just like us,” but fail to notice that the dominating force the
mass employed was just that. Nonetheless the mass follows suit and says, “we
thought about this really hard, we’re not racist.” The
mass postulates some “beyond” in thinking for the radio vox pop,
giving the assurance that it wasn’t just voting out of totally base, xenophobic
fears. Yet they never get there. They try to say “I saw the other side but
reasoned it was wrong because of this and this and this” without ever
getting to what the “this and this and this” is. And so once again the
mass is suppressed, or repressed, and a ban is placed over discussing its
behaviour.
To address the erotics of the
mass, or the erotics of the masses, might seem undignified. But it remains the
only means of putting the argument in a way that does not either scream in
terror like the refined bourgeois, nor forbid any discussion. Only in the
examination of the mass’s indignity might its dignity be returned to it.
If the structure of the mass has
been forced into silence during the course of discussion, if bourgeois
repulsion and terror has been hissed only where politeness can be safely
abandoned, it has reasserted itself in the wake of the mass’s decision During
the days after the referendum calls have come from all quarters not for a new
and different politics, but for “better leadership”. The old leaders have been
deposed not because they failed to reconcile the divided polity, failed to
mediate between individual and society, or between the part and the whole,
between the bourgeois individual and the strenuous cultural demands of mass
deindividuation, but because they simply weren’t truly of the people, and could
not bind and unify them correctly. The raging demand for endless new leaders is
the hideous expression left of a muted and perverted mass politics.
The demand for leadership, and of
leadership by one of its own, is the classical condition of the mass. In its
forlorn and barbarised condition, the mass has been well trained to despise own
headlessness, for in its missing head is the promise of the ever transferable
mask of bourgeois refinement that conceals the force it knows so well. The good
leader of the mass is one the binds the community, that imagines and enforces
its limits. As Freud notes in his little book on mass psychology, “the group still wishes to be governed by unrestricted
force; it has an extreme passion for authority; in Le Bon’s phrase, it has a
thirst for obedience.”
Indeed the mass in capitalist
society is obsessed with its limits. Its identity is its self-bondage, founded
on the exclusion of the other. The identification of the mass with the leader
is grounded in their shared approach to domination, and conceals the fact that
in the love of the leader the mass wants to know treated by him just as he (and
they) would treat their enemies. It is archetypal of mass politics and mass
psychology that it would take as the moment of its self-bondage to be the
exclusion of the foreigner, alien, immigrant or refugee. In this sense the
politics of the relationship to migration at stake in the referendum needs to
be understood doubly: it is not merely the case that the exclusion of the
foreigner fulfills an economic role, enriching each member of the mass on the
basis of a model of a resource- or job scarcity; but also the exclusion of the
foreigner plays an erotic role, in defining the bounds of the mass, and erotogenically
binding together its members. The strength of the erotic bonds of the mass are
founded on the strength of its collective exclusionary violence; the erotic
identification with the mass is founded on the strength of violent
disidentification from the other. There is no such thing as society; instead
only community a community of little men. The national family, with Nigel
Farage or Boris Johnson sat at the head of table, their voices the blend of
every bad joke a father ever told. Love him dearly. The figures of Farage and Johnson
are those of perverse leaders who reconcile the mass structure of the leader
with the individuality of the bourgeois, who reconcile the mass media with
individualised bourgeois politics.
In these gestures of self-binding
and domination, the mass comes to know not just Johnson or Farage’s body, but
also its own body. It finds itself incorporated, ennervated, and excited. It
discovers both the pleasures of domination and the discomforts of submission.
But more importantly it discovers their inversion: the discomfort of
recognising ones own guilt without ever having the capacity to right wrongs,
and the pleasure of submitting willingly to authority who, as long as you are
obedient, will forgive you. It makes of them a perverse erotics, with capital
at its centre. Traditionally the body of this perverse erotics, capable of
stimulating and sublating these contradictory excitations, has been known as
the nation state.
In a video a woman from Burnley
says “I voted leave to stop the immigrants and to save the NHS.” Quickly the
country’s biggest employer is transformed from the guarantor of life through
the provision of healthcare into the dream of the perverted mass that sees in
it a national corporation: a machinery that might adequately foster their
erotic energy. And all the better if it serves the lives only of the British.
The NHS, in her dream – although she may
not notice it – guarantees the health of
the Brit insofar as it denies health to the immigrant. She probably calls this
“economics.”
IV.
Catastrophe’s horizon
The Messiah comes not only as the
redeemer, he comes also as the vanquisher of the Antichrist. – WB
On
all sides the prospect of a catastrophic end of the world is drastically
downplayed. There is no thought yet of a short and terrible reign of the
Antichrist, based on fear and self-interest, that could obliterate the world.
But his first words have already been uttered. If the belief in progress of
those who rule is impervious to real crisis upon crisis, then it finds its
mirror image in the zealots and dogmatists of the far left that see in every
crisis the movements of revolution. It is clear that the result of the
referendum stands against the interests of all of the European governments, and
large portions of British, European, and American capital. The progressives and
the far left zealots are too quick to form out of the scenario inversions of
manichaeism. For one side any movement against capital must be a good sign, for
the other it is evil. Neither suspects that a horizon of action has arrived
that may do away with the laissez-faire order, only to replace it with a
bolstered corporate, national one, that brings about not revolution but pure
administered cruelty in the name of security, defense, and self-interest. Both
sides, blinded by wishful thinking, see only the frozen classes and not the
moving mass. Neither sees the danger of the formation of a social body that
absolutely combines domination and self-domination with pleasure. The dark
scene of the end of the world is a society collectively practicing auto-erotic
asphyxiation, wrapping its borders ever tighter around itself. It doesn’t even
know the day it accidentally goes too far.
For capital the referendum result
is just a mistake, not a shifting of history. For the social democrats there
remains faith in the national provision of services. Yet dark spectres of
fascism are rising across Europe, in Austria, Hungary, Poland, Germany, France,
the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. This spectre draws strength not only from the
productivity of capital, but from a perverse erotics of the mass that might at
times subvert capital as it is forced into the mould of bourgeois politics. Both
sides willfully ignore wild fantasies of domination harboured by the terrified
and dominated. It is likely that in this case the cause will be averted, or
subverted by the strength of centrist politicians. But it is unlikely that this
will be the last we hear of it. Meanwhile, exhausted and impoverished, we can
barely afford to take a liberal view of the end of things.