I’m remiss to make another pessimistic blog post about reading seminal French theory of the 20th century two generations later. Yet, as with Althusser, it is difficult to read Foucault’s work without a sense of foreclosure. In both Society Must be Defended and The History of Sexuality we see critical interventions around power that operate on the basis of a reversal that has reached the limit of its dynamic and reincorporated the prior form. The former piece ends with Foucault questioning “How can the power of death, the function of death, be exercised in a political system centered on biopower?” (1450) While sovereignty may have moved from the body to the population and “the right to take life or let live” to “making life and letting die”(1441).  Since the piece was authored in 1979 history has offered a ghoulish answer to the question– the endless  “war on terror”, mass incarceration and ongoing genocide in Gaza show us how biopolitics can be subsumed by necropolitics. The arbitrary categories of “criminal” or “terrorist” can be applied by the state to mark populations which exist outside the mandate of biopolitics and must be handled with a prior logic of sovereign violence—the technology of power is applied along familiar lines of racist and imperialist subjugation. Even for those not in targeted populations, the mandates of biopower is increasingly recentered on the individual. Although the centering of health Foucault describes persist, we have reached a maximum of disciplinary apparatus in which the role of traditional state power grows more and more necrotic (austerity, the collapse of public health in favor of internet discourses of longevity). Surveillance and punishment remains but the relation of power and populations seems to turn away from the model Foucault describes in favor of something new and ugly.

The thesis of The History of Sexuality seems more clearly borne out, and like with Ideological State Apparatuses, the internet serves as gas on the fire of contemporary capitalist ideology. The mandate for disclosure, the function of discourse as a means for power to “catch hold, only to spread elsewhere” (1440) is evident in the limitless vocabulary of categorization and taxonomy around sex—inscribing on the body as identity the diffuse realm of sexual desires, practices and embodiment. However, the power of discourse has limits, though the mandates of discourse described are in overdrive, the conditions of austerity and social alienation manifest in a proliferation of discourses about sexuality while the frequency of sex as embodied practice between subjects declines. This, of course, becomes a site for yet more discourse. Does this suggest some return of the repressive hypothesis reformulated through a Foucauldian discursive genealogy, or does it merely indicate that the material base remains deterministic?

As Simon’s blog post notes, regardless of any epistemological validity of Foucault’s method, we hit a dead end in terms of praxis and are left with a dispiriting fatalism. At least in terms of the diffuse nature of discursive power and its ability to restructure the subject while reproducing material relations, how do we write or think against imperialist violence when mass death has been made into an opportunity to surveil and contest discourse? Can state transphobia and heteronormative reactionary power in the US be countered through more disclosure, discourse and visibility, without feeding this vicious example of biopower? While Foucault’s archival method and illumination of the shifting constructions of sexuality, sanity, and state power remain intellectually useful, what political or scholarly method do they suggest for our times? The archive used to understand our discursive episteme is no longer constrained to records and writings materially available. Instead, we have to wade our way through the often disappearing deluge of digital communications, a world historical production of discourse that has reproduced madness and civilization alike. Death remains deritualized and verboten, yet digital representations of violence proliferate. The violence of the defense remains, but what remains of society?

Reading Althusser and Gramsci this week, it was impossible not to drift into the murky realm of contemporary news. Indeed, both Gramsci’s notion of the intellectual’s role in class reproduction and Althusser’s formulation of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) and their role in hegemonic assimilation evoke the same weary response: “You don’t know how bad things can really get.”

Taking as a jumping off point Gramsci’s argument that the intellectual role operates to produce “the ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population” (935) and Althusser’s emphasis on education as the preeminent ISA, we can already see the heightened context of our present situation: a recent newsletter by our institution proudly cites a ‘scorecard’ created to encourage repression of campus discourse on Palestine by a nominally anti-discriminatory organization which ran cover for Elon Musk’s fascist salute before a roaring crowd. Indeed, this policing of ideological boundaries is evident in the Norton anthology itself, where the introduction to Karl Marx speculates that after the fall of the USSR it may seem “perverse to study Marxist theory” and accuses a work of economics of “dehumanizing tendencies” best corrected by reading Dickens and Balzac (652-655). Regardless of the validity of such a reading of Marx, the ideological underpinnings here become more self evident with the inclusion of neo-liberal economist Friedrich Hayek, whose relevance to theory and criticism is decidedly more tenuous than Marx’s and whose introduction is notably silent on the catastrophic human consequences of his thought for Chile under Pinochet, the UK under Thatcher, or the United States’ own slow decline into austerity from Reagan to the non-agency known as “DOGE”. Not to mention Hayek’s exceedingly dehumanizing supposition that poverty is an acceptable market outcome created by the choices of the individuals who suffer in it. This criticism is not to impugn the individual scholars who edited this generally excellent volume, but to demonstrate Gramsci’s argument that the relation of the intellectual class to production is not direct, but performs functions “justified by the political necessities of the dominant fundamental group” (935). The competition created by the mass formation of the intellectual position in Gramsci operates in a manner similar to Althusser’s ISA: hurt people hurt people, and interpellated subjects interpellate subjects. Even potentially dissident speech/action/ritual giving voice to class conflict operates from within ideology, and can always be reassimilated by ISAs and the everpresent commodity form. Che Guevara T-shirts and “Leninade” abound as consumer choices signalling a subject’s ironic and iconoclastic relation to hegemony without challenging the ritual practice of dominant ideology which Althusser foregrounds (1304).

Although education is still central to the “reproduction of the relations of production” (1295), our advanced stage of capitalism has given rise to an ISA which exceeds Althusser’s wildest nightmares. The internet, particularly in its dominant forms of “social media” and “content” (creation/consumption) operates today as a machine for the inscription of ideology on subjects, continuously reinforced through ritual and practice. Althusser argues that ideology does not operate through “ideas” but through ‘subjects’, whose ‘beliefs’ are inscribed through “practices, rituals, ideological apparatus” (1304). The earliest and most rigorous ideological formation occurs not at the schoolhouse but in front of the iPad screen. A young person is faced with a deluge, first with algorithmically generated videos in which The Joker, Elsa from Frozen and Spiderman act out base parodies of nursery rhymes, with this stage rapidly replaced by the realm of “influencers” whose studious documentation of their own rituals is reinscribed on the viewer in mimetic form (“the phone eats first”, “get ready with me”, “day in my life”). A feedback loop between our consumption and production (viewing and posting) allows for algorithms to guide us through the process of subject formation. Google AdSense ‘knows’ us in a vaguely psychoanalytic composite, driven by clicks, which leads to the (relatively well founded concern) that these algorithms drive extremism. As the primitive accumulation and productive forces which allowed capitalist rule for centuries, slow and reach their absolute limits, the system is strained. We see rising precarity and financialization (Klarna, sports-betting, quantitative trading) in the material economy we see a similar escalation and obfuscation in ISAs function. The task of submerging latent class conflict requires escalating means and internet culture promotes an alienating hierarchical individuation and typification— are you a “cracked coder”, “hustle-grindset crypto bro”, “trad-wife”, or are you cast outside of the realm of signification by the increasingly right leaning culture which inculcates us all, especially the young? 

“All that is solid melts into thin air, all that is holy is profaned” -Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“I am become meme”- Elon Musk 🤮

Alpha x Thomas Shelby🔥

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

In “Melville’s Fist”, Barbara Johnson takes Billy Budd and the subsequent body of criticism as a point of departure to make a series of arguments about reading as judgement and the irresolvable ambiguities inherent in language which reading navigates. Removed from plot, the characters appear like Barthes’ wrestlers, a series of ideal types and perfect signs whose physical qualities map their character. Billy appears to be innocence and truth embodied in a good natured soldier, while Claggart’s untrustworthiness is literally written in his descriptive traits (or lack thereof) . The moment of intersection that reverses these roles and leads Johnson to describe the plot as a chiasmus or “cruci-fiction” occurs when Billy is accused of ‘plotting’ mutiny and strikes Claggart, unintentionally killing him. Captain Vere, “the third reader” of the plot, must make a judgement which goes against his sentiment. He feels that Billy is innocent of wrongdoing, but must be put to death in light of recent history and possible futures resounding from his ‘reading’ or judgement of Billy’s act. In the criticism Johnson surveys, this apparent “gap between being and doing” has been read in two main ways: “the ‘testament of acceptance’ school on the one hand and the ‘testament of resistance’ or ‘irony’ school on the other” (2330). Johnson notes the way in which these camps mirror the reading style of Budd and Claggart in the text, either refusing to see any disjunction between signifier and signified, or reading all signs as arbitrary, with an ironic chasm between signifier and signified.

For Johnson, Captain Vere’s mode of reading is distinct in the way that it is determined not by a characteristic attitude towards signs as motivated or arbitrary, but through his understanding and direct reference to social/martial structure, his role in said structure, recent events, and textual allusion. For Johnson, as for Vere, “arbitrariness and motivation, irony and literality, are parameters between which language constantly fluctuates, but only historical context determines which proportion of each is perceptible to each reader” (2332). Vere is not ex-culpated from his role in the plot’s crucible though, bringing together Budd and Claggart before the blow which makes Vere take on his role as “a reader who kills… precisely by means of speaking” (2333), seeking to bring ambiguity out only to reduce it back into a polarized, and deathly definitive, judgement. 

I’m particularly interested in the way in which Johnson plays these polarities of character and critic to bring out the role of history in ‘reading’ (which may take the form of more ideological criticism, legal judgement, “playing the text” à la Barthes, adaptation, etc.) It seems that these histories can be equally personal or social, with great impact on any interpretive act. A reader familiar with Melville’s earlier work Benito Cereno (which also deals with mis-/reading, mutiny and murder through law) will note that Billy Budd opens with the “handsome sailor” archetype introduced anecdotally through an African sailor the narrator saw fifty years prior, before this archetype is transferred to Budd himself. This reader might reasonably take that as a sign to carry a certain reading through the course of the text simply by virtue of foreknowledge and a reasonable invocation in the opening pages.

*spoiler alert for the excellent film Beau Travail (1999) below*

Similarly, in reading Johnson this week, I found it hard not to wonder if Claire Denis had read the piece prior to writing her film Beau Travail, which is loosely adapted from Billy Budd. Denis’ film reads the text for ambiguity. Set in a French Foreign Legion outpost in Djibouti and presented with minimal dialogue, the plot is reduced in concrete facts if not in intensity (the Claggart figure does not die when struck, the Billy figure likely survives his punishment). While the film raises queer and post-colonial aspects latent in Melville to the fore, they are presented without marshaling us towards a singular reading. The film achingly depicts these gaps and ambiguities, which Johnson describes in BB as “…that which, within cognition, functions as an act; it is that which, within action, prevents us from ever knowing whether what we hit coincides with what we understand.” (2337)

In the film’s final scene, the Claggart figure, Galoup, has been removed from his post due to his actions, he makes his bed and lays in it, clutching a pistol to his chest, a closeup of his twitching bicep cuts to black as “The Rhythm of the Night” by Corona begins. Galoup dances beautifully, violently and ecstatically in an empty night club, in a sequence that could be a dream, a recollection, or an experience of death. The viewer is left with no conclusive ‘blow’ to close the gaps within cognition as act and cognizance in action, instead we are thrown into the space between as the credits roll.

Beau Travail (1999) – Ending

The famous dance scene from Claire Denis’s movie Beau Travail (1999)

In “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” Nietzsche’s project is alternately a negative critical intervention toward German Idealism and Christian morals and an attempt to lay out new terms for understanding the functions of language as a parallel metaphorical construction apart from the material world. In a tone at turns Biblical, polemical, ironic, and pompous, he attacks the notion that language is precisely representative, deploying examples that might strike a contemporary reader as commonplace dorm room musings, “if one of us were to see a stimulus as red, a second person were to see the same stimulus as blue” (758). This effect is in part historical, as thought experiments which went to the heart of epistemology at the turn of the 20th century now strike us as bordering on the banal. The critique of truth as a useful category is the groundwork for a more subtle ideological argument presented at the close of the piece. Although Nietzsche attacks the notion that language can express truth, arguing that language itself is a process of deception, dissimulation and creativity which should not be morally evaluated, it seems evident that he does not feel that all use of language is created equal, favoring some deception outside the causal and utilitarian “fleeing from… the harm from being tricked” he describes (754). 

The historical argument early in the piece sets some of the confused terms which develop into his ideological archetypes of man at the close. Language emerges as a “peace treaty” to leave a Hobbesian state of nature for “herds and society”, which humanity seeks out of “boredom and necessity” (753). Truth in language is a “A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration” which calcifies over time into a ‘truth’ which operates as mass deception (756). For Nietzsche, the ordinal difference between types of deception seems to be the ability for a subject to be cognizant and participatory in this project of dissimulation. Implicitly pitying those who meekly accept what society constructs as truth, contrasting “the man of reason and the man of intuition” (761) and valorizing human subjectivity in Greek antiquity as an example of constructive dissimulation, “at no time is [human intellect] richer, more luxuriant, more proud, skilful, and bold (760”). 

Of course, this valorized “unreason” of the intuitive intellect is not coming about in an autarchic state of nature, and is reliant both upon prior dissimulating language as well as the labor of others. Nietzsche seems to hold the archetype of the researcher with some disdain, for the air of certainty, the bent toward the practical, and the uncreative application of the intellect. The intuitive, architectural and creative type (which Nietzsche seems to emulate in his style and argument) is worthy of veneration, perhaps, only to the degree in which his deception is successful in structuring the world around him, not only for himself but for others. 

In focusing on the impossibility of veracity in language, Nietzsche smuggles in a clear awareness of language as an expression of power. His anti-moralism is ultimately secondary to a disdain for society, not on the basis of class consciousness or concern for the oppressed, but rather for the way society conceals and limits the free expression of an ‘intuitive’, almost ecstatic understanding of power through language which Nietzsche himself conceals in his final argument. Throughout the rhetorical turns and elaborated metaphors deployed, there is no mention of human labor, power relations, or the capacity of language to cohere for the purposes of domination and subjugation. Nietzsche is certainly sincere about the universal untruth of language, but occupies his ‘intuitive’ mode of intellect to covertly naturalize what strikes me as an insidious notion of power relations and human inequality.