Tomba, Berlant and the Inconvenience of Revolution

20 Saturday Dec 2025

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affect, Tomba, Berlant, philosophy, history, writing, revolution, Inconvenience, politics, books

Last weekend I joined a group of delightful young scholars to discuss Massimiliano Tomba’s recent book, Revolution and Restoration: The Politics of Anachronism. I have followed Tomba’s work for years. This new book builds on his analyses in Marx’s Temporalities (Brill, 2012) and Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity (Oxford, 2019) by tackling another temporal dimension of social change, that of reaching into the deep past for alternate conceptualizations of property relations (ch. 2), democratic political relations (ch. 3), and sanctuary relations against the State (ch. 4). The text is short and Tomba’s argument is more like a topography of political problematizations than the thick argumentation found in his previous two monographs. I would apply to his entire book what he notes in regard to movements to eradicate or hamstring the hegemony of private property, namely, that his argument offers “not ready-made solutions but rather experiments to learn from and build on with other experiments” (72).

I remain intrigued by Tomba’s focus on conceptualization as social forms that are temporally complex, and on his claim that practice is “theory in action.” Putting conceptualization together with practice as enacted theory, Tomba writes on page viii that his book is

…about extracting normativity from practices understood as theory in action. It involves a kind of exemplary or epistemic normativity that emerges in social and political practices. These constitute the living archive of an alternative path to the exhausted one of today’s political and critical theory. (p. viii)

He notes that because of the temporally complexity of concepts, and because the possible strata of theory in concepts are enacted as different practices at different moments, concepts cannot not be polemical (15). Rather, “concepts themselves become heralds of historical trends. It’s no exaggeration to say that this conceptualization, as it operates behind the back of the historian and theorist, is a form of unconscious ideology” (11, my emphasis to which I will return later). He is careful to note that his understanding of temporally complex concepts means we should grasp them, “not as RR cars running along the rails of time but rather as forms traversed by time,” meaning that “concepts contain historical-temporal sedimentations that can be reordered in particular historical moments marked by social and political tensions” (16)

Further, Tomba realizes that for concepts and practice to function this way, they “can only arise out of the energy that flows from real tensions between incompatible systems” (21) That is, the reach for what are dismissed as anachronistic concepts like communal property or the imperative mandate are not consciously-built strategies but must be seen, themselves, as kinds of temporal insurgencies, moments when the historical pasts that are embedded in a concept break into the present and find new salience in practices that materially enact their theoretical alternative. This para-conscious work of anachrony is why Tomba repeatedly cautions that “new concepts are not neologisms” (21).

Tomba’s refusal of conscious conceptual directives (equally a refusal of Party-like politics and of Conservative movements that sacralize the never-existed form of a never-existing past) clarifies how leveraging conceptual anachrony avoids conservatism and dogmatism. To tease out the Biblical injunctions to Jubilee, for example, as Thomas Münzer did, is not to express a desire to return to the oppressive social relations of fifteenth-century Europe, nor is it to claim to know the true truth of Christian scripture. Rather, for Tomba, such a practice destabilizes and fragilizes so-called common sense around private property by leveraging scriptural authority against the socio-political authority of the Roman Catholic church (for other examples see the discussion around p. 36). Tomba is concerned to illuminate historical struggles that forwarded dying, oppressed, or repressed relations of reciprocity and mutual obligation, over against the tyrannical sovereignty of the individual and of private property, both of which reflect and ballast the tyrannical sovereignty of the State. Tomba points to “the duty to take care of what is common” as a critique of extractive capitalism and as the driving force of contemporary movements of insurgency against economic and other forms of colonization.

This ‘duty to take care’ must operate as something like a lived or inherited obligation, though, since Tomba’s revolutionary restoration of ancient concepts works, as I’ve noted, behind the backs of practitioners. This phrase is well-known from Hegel and Marx; it ably acknowledges the limited and embodied character of all life while also asserting that each life is caught up in dynamics (Zeitgeist, capitalism) that they cannot fully grasp, even though those same dynamics rely on each life’s active participation. The phrase and the theories embedded in it square the analytical circle that seeks to analyze persons one-by-one and also seeks to map out a social-global structure that is larger than any one person. One’s back becomes the point of intersection.

This line of thought takes me to a very odd moment in Tomba’s chapter on sanctuary where something like conscious choice intrudes onto our nicely squared circle. Tomba is discussing the inevitable emergence of persons who fundamentally disagree with the State and work against it directly. Sounding a bit like Judith Butler’s work on the non-decision of sharing space, Tomba notes that we cannot choose our neighbors or, really, even the state under which we live. But then he pivots:

Disagreement and conflict are always possible–we only need to learn how to handle them in a mature way. This is perhaps the most important task of sanctuaries as practice: the coincidence between changes in external circumstances and human activity as self-education for self-transformation. (p. 110)

The paragraph continues, but Tomba does not really unpack what this “maturity” and “self-education” entail, nor what happens to the shared project of social transformation when certain persons (always there are some) excuse themselves grumbly or cynically from, uh, self “education.” When movements lose members–for whatever reasons–the intensity of affect and practice suffer. Reading this part of Tomba made me aware of how much more theorization is needed around the singular poles of structural politics.

All of which brings me to Lauren Berlant’s posthumously published book, On the Inconvenience of Other People (Duke, 2022). Inconvenience, Berlant writes, is “the affective sense of the familiar friction of being in relation” (2). Crucially, this friction may have nothing to do with intellectual resonance or conceptual persuasion. Consider the smart young person I know who recently moved to a new city and looked up the local DSA in hopes of finding folks who share their political savvy, despair, and sense of urgency. After attending a couple of meetings, they told me they’d stopped going. Why? I asked. People say the stupidest things, they replied. By intellectual and habitual practices, this person and the DSA are an obvious pairing. But the young person left, and that DSA chapter is much the weaker for it.

What I take away from this scenario is that even though members of the academy have spent the better part of two generations flaying Reason and demonstrating the logical and practical impossibilities of Individuality, politics on the left still appeals mostly to Reason and to the task of persuading Individuals. Berlant comments on this by noting that interpersonal “adjustment” has nothing to do with reason or persuasion:

Adjustment is a constant action: the grinding of the wheels of awkwardness and the bargaining with life’s infrastructures. This is why the dominant tone of ambivalence tends to be negative. It take work to live on the arch from minor irritation to threat–and too often people try to resolve the difficulty of being inconvenienced by the world by becoming depleted, cynical, or dramatic fronts of blame. (9)

Indeed. So many persons who might agree intellectually that the world needs to change simply cannot join the protest or make the phone calls or cajole themselves into believing in a cause. This, too, is part of our “situation”. This too needs to be conceptualized and practiced as theory in action, as much as the anachronistic concepts that are slingshotted into our present.

“Capitalism fracks the sensorium,” Berlant writes (26). And unlike Tomba’s casual call for “mature” handling of conflict, Berlant fills in their claim:

“There can be no change w/o revisceralization….The transition [to another social arrangement] requires reconditioning what pass as instincts, triggers, gut feelings, true feelings, presumptive ties, the whole default world of emotional and affective expectation. In the affective common, that reconditioning is often what gets in the way of staying with who you’re with while also nursing many small and large scars. (106)

The whole default world. That’s it. Berlant tags this process as an “unlearning,” and this need for unlearning is as revolutionary as anything Tomba considers. My wish would be for Tomba to read Berlant, and for those who follow in the wake of Berlant to read Tomba. Such intellectual and practical cross-fertilization might materialize “the sensuality of learning in the middle of the dehiscence of unlearning” (Berlant, 107).

Frédéric Gros, SHAME

08 Monday Dec 2025

Posted by mghamner in Uncategorized

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affect theory, frederic-gros, revolution, shame, silvan-tompkins

“Though terror speaks to life and death and distress makes of the world a vale of tears, yet shame strikes deepest into the heart of man.” (Silvan Tompkins in Sedgwick/Frank, Shame and its Sisters, 133)

I know Prof. Gros’s works on Foucault well, but this is the first of his monograph I’ve read. The text is short, beautifully written, and theoretically subtle. I’ve seen reviews, for instance, that suggest that this book is basically a typology of shame as this sentiment or feeling is referenced at different historical moments (Greece, Late Ancient Mediterranean, early Modernity, contemporary society), kinds of cultures (aristocratic, honor, bourgeois, neoliberal) and modes of analytical methods (ethics, theology, psychology). The book is this, but not merely this. Bracketing the book at its beginning and end is a line from Primo Levi’s last book, The Drowned and the Saved (1989) (I sommersi e i salvati, 1986): “the shame of the world.” Playing on the double genitive, the phrase means both the world’s collective (human) shame at being what it is, and a person’s shame for the world, or shame in the face of the world. Bridging his previous monograph, Disobey (Désobéir), Gros notes

“What gives us the strength to disobey, to refuse to resign ourselves to this sorry and seemingly inevitable state of affairs and to keep intact our capacity for revolt is, in Primo Levi’s phrase, the ‘shame of the world’. Shame is an amalgam of sadness and rage.” (Foreword, penultimate paragraph)

Following the first reference to this shame of the world, Gros provides chapters that categorize historical, social and psychological types of shame, but, first of all, the typology is not perfectly linear; Gros disturbs historical progression with spiraling discussions of films, novels, court cases, and philosophical dialogues. The effect is so quiet that I may be wrong about this, but I sense Gros working dialectically: at once satisfying our readerly desire (in this short, accessible book) for concrete take-aways about shame, and interrupting that desire with shifts that show the steady inter-relational dynamic of shame, regardless of century or social norm. Shame, I might add to his words, is the double-edged sword sadness and rage, aimed at the core of oneself and at the status quo of society.

It is the inextricably–even chiasmic–relational dynamic of shame that grounds its revolutionary possibilities. To make this revolutionary shame tangible, Gros cites two 19th century sources, Karl Marx and Émile Zola. In an 1844 letter to his editor and friend, Arnold Ruge, Marx anticipates Ruge’s refusal to view shame as revolutionary. He responds:

And my answer is that shame is a revolution in itself; it really is the victory of the French Revolution over that German patriotism which defeated it in 1813. Shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_03-alt.htm)

Zola’s reference is embedded in the 19th of his 20 volume series on the Rougon-Macquart family, The Debacle (La Débâcle, 1892). The sentiment is that of Maurice Levasseur, the young, bourgeois soldier:

The Commune appeared to him as an avenger of the shame he had endured, as a liberator bringing the iron that amputates, the fire that purifies.

La Commune lui apparaissait comme une vengeresse des hontes endurées, comme une libératrice apportant le fer qui ampute, le feu qui purifie. (Toward the end of chapter VII).

It’s not surprising that Gros conjoins “shame of the world” with a failed or failing patriotism, since love for one’s country is a complex phenomenological state that is neither in oneself (since it is always performed and externally symbolized) nor not in oneself (since patriotic identity is felt deeply as fully part of oneself).

In citing but not analyzing this singular-universal, Gros harmonizes with psychologist and affect theorist Silvan Tompkins. In a strikingly social passage for a psychologist who cared for so many troubled souls, one by one, in his office, Tompkins writes (in contrasting shame with contempt, which latter fills the ellipses below):

“by virtue of the readiness with which one individual responds with shame to the shame of another, the sources of shame are radically multiplied. The individual can now be shamed by whatever shames another. This one in turn will have transmitted a shame he may have learned from someone else’s shame response to him.

When these three actors are child, parent, and grandparent, this mechanism provides a perfect vehicle for the transmission and preservation of social norms from generation to generation. …

Further, the fact that the other identifies sufficiently with others to be ashamed rather than to show contempt strengthens any social group and its sense of community. …[S]hame is a prime instrument for strengthening the sense of mutuality and community, whether it be between parent and child, friend and friend, or citizen and citizen.” Sedgwick/Frank 154.

Tompkins clarifies how shame that can feel quite alienating and personal is actually, as Gros also conveys, a social level either for the successful maintenance of social norms across generations, or for solidarity, the “strengthening sense of mutuality and community”.

This ambivalence in shame, this either-or dynamic is the heart of its revolutionary dynamic, because to revolt against “the shame of the world” by proffering an entirely new or foreign ethico-political matrix would not feel as revolutionary as–and here is what I’ve learned most from Gros’s text–imagining how the norms that worked in the past must be reworked in order to overcome or evade their contemporary corruption.

Gros speaks directly to imagination twice. First is in chapter 8, “Aidos“, in which he delineates three critiques of shame-based ethics: the conformist dimension, in which I’m obsessed with what others will think; the aesthetic dimension, in which I’m obsessed with doing what makes me look good; and the pedagogical dimension, in which I’m obsessed with the (justified) humiliation that will be exacted on me should I act shamefully. Gros notes that, “the criticisms miss what is most essential about these moral propositions: the imaginative dynamic and the appeal to meaningful witnesses.” It is not just any other whose projected judgment obsesses me, but only witnesses who mean the world to me, who are the world to me, who are my world, my relational matrix.

To turn this insight around: it is because we are affectively bonded to those we love that our imagination of possible (bad) actions can generate such shame, just as it’s because we are always-already in love with our country, maybe especially if we critique it ruthlessly (a love that plays out unconsciously from years of sedimented learning and experience and into habitual practices that are now second nature to us) that our imagination and visualization of the actual, horrific actions of our political leaders can generate such shame and anguish. Gros tells us a bit later in chapter 13, riffing on Hannah Arendt, that “The root of the banality of evil is a lack of imagination,” because imagination is the affecognitive channel for visceralizing our material relations with our lived relational matrix.

As such, the take-away from Gros’s text is not the neat summary he gives us in the second paragraph of chapter 13, “Revolutionary Shame”:

“There are various strategies for turning things around, which we could group together under four headings: inversion, projection, subversion and purification.”

Rather, Gros gives us the ethical take-away at the end of chapter 4, but leaves it to our imaginations to make the links. Commenting on the end of Kafka’s The Trial, Gros writes,

“An entire existence, right up to the last second, dominated by a fear of ridicule and pathetic strategies to win the favour of other people who actually could not care less, so preoccupied are they by their own efforts to come across well.
But that is how it is: We spend an entire lifetime asking ourselves how we should live, talk, love and die. We are forever striving to make the grade, but in relation to what and to whom? Nobody has the faintest idea.”

This is not a question but a charge, a challenge. In relation to what and to whom does your, does my, imagination blush? We do have a clear idea. But instead of living out this shame in solidarity, we often veil it in feints of propriety.

Unaccountably Queer: differences v. 35:3 (December 2024)

10 Sunday Aug 2025

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“We try to give a story, only to find that the story does not exactly capture the experience we seek to relay. Repeatedly, we are confounded by the means we use to make ourselves known” (Judith Butler, differences 35:3, p. 224).

“Unaccountably Queer,” v. 35:3 (December 2024) of differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies, sets out to honor and reflect on Judith Butler’s 2004 text, Giving an Account of Oneself. The editor, Teagan Bradley introduces the volume by referring to queerness as “metarelationality”, that is, as the tasks of living and pondering the relationality of relationality, with all the opacity, incoherence, exhaustion, excitement, resonance, and openness this double chiasm entails. It is a term that usefully frames the essays Bradley has gathered for this volume, since all of them do reflect on the relationality of relation, and most do so from the “scene of address” that Butler posits between an “I” and a “you” that emerge and modulate within various linguistic, temporal, and power differentials of giving—or failing to give—an account of oneself, whatever and whoever that means.

I don’t usually purchase and read through an entire volume of a journal, but Butler’s text was and remains important to me and to so many of us who think about the core falseness of “individualism.” Plus, I already know and adore the work of half the contributors: Sara Ahmed, Lynne Huffer, Amber Jamilla Musser, Michael D. Snediker, and Jules Gill-Peterson. From the other contributors—Teagan Bradway, Cassius Adair, Gila Ashtor, Leigh Gilmore, and Megan Cole Paustian—I learned a font of different questions and compelling concerns about how to analyze complex scenes of address. The analyses suggest, in a wealth of different ways, palimpsestic layers of personal memory, family and community diaspora, infant development, unstable and impossible racialized encounters, and—as Adair puts it—the way transness “both unsettles what gender is, and also names gender as the force that has harmed us” (88).

Huffer’s essay lovingly turns over and over a phrase from Foucault that is cited in Butler. Huffer offers a model of a drilling down into a close reading of a text but in a way, in a care-with-words, that feels more like a tender encounter than an excavation. Her essay is like a collaged poem that evokes through shadow play, not assertion, through a lurking kind of ‘maybe’, not decisive effect. Consider part of Huffer’s Coda (p. 55):

For Foucault, to read is to interrupt the continuity of normalization’s all-inclusive norm. This continuity is derived from an immanently self-referential, asocial norm that compares each to each and each to all. In modernity, that continuity becomes life itself. To read, for Foucault, is to introduce discontinuity into life’s continuum. It puts life itself into question .

As we’ve seen, such an act is unbearable—insupportable.It is to cut up the fact and rearrange it: collage.

I could cite more, but to read these lines is to enter into a flow of words that changes the shape of what we are reading about, like a kaleidoscope, just as it heightens awareness of our own perceptual twists (on that kaleidoscope) that affect the relation to the relation under investigation.

Huffer and Snediker are perhaps the most brilliant at this writerly practice, but the lesson is offered in nearly every essay.

Amber Jamilla Musser brilliantly approaches the impossibility of cross-racial “recognition” through a detailed and attentive reading of Wilmer Wilson IV’s work, END, an artwork of which I wish differences had included a color plate. What Wilson’s END clarifies for Musser is that “through the lens of racial capitalism, this mutuality [of egalitarian recognition] is impossible, but END brings us away from recognition toward coexistence. Recognition is not the primary mode of interaction; instead, we reside in the multiplicities of the emergent” (75).

Each essay is worthy of commentary. I do not wish to turn this short blog post into a full review of the issue, however, so I will close with a gesture to Megan Cole Paustian’s essay “Giving a Global Account of Oneself: Narratives of the Humanitarian Atlantic.” To me, Paustian’s analysis of Violet Bulawayo’s 2013 novel, We Need New Names, draws together Huffer’s analysis of the temporal contradictions of discourse and life and Musser’s analysis of the spatio-temporal coincidence, within global racial capitalism, of the impossibilities of recognition and necessities of coexistence. I read Bulawayo’s novel when it came out and was deeply moved by its startling patience with the dense complexities of scenes of address between various denizens of Zimbabwe and—later—of Detroit. Paustian’s contribution teases out these complexities through an incisive reading that demonstrates how “a” scene of address is never singular and always remains partially, structurally, opaque.

Kudos to Teagan Bradway and the staff at differences for putting together a brilliant volume.

The Order of Things: The difference of the Analysis of Wealth

10 Thursday Jul 2025

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analysis-of-wealth, Foucault

In chapter six of The Order of Things/Les mots et les choses, Michel Foucault marks, twice, a difference between the analysis of wealth and both general grammar and natural history (the three intellectual pursuits that shift in the 19th century, with the rise of the human sciences, to political economy, linguistics, and biology). The first marking of difference notes that the analysis of wealth is attached to “a practice and to institutions” (English text 168). The second differentiation seems rather to emphasize the different–that is, slower–temporality involved in the “emergence of a domain of ‘wealth’ than that involved in the emergence of natural history and general grammar, a slowness that yields “a much higher degree of historic viscosity” (English text 180). Here are the two quotations in full:

It is true that the analysis of wealth is not constituted according to the same curves or in obedience to the same rhythm as general grammar or natural history. This is because reflection upon money, trade, and exchange is linked to a practice and to institutions. And though practice and pure speculation may be placed in opposition to one another, they nevertheless rest upon one and the same fundamental ground of knowledge. A money reform, a banking custom, a trade practice can all be rationalized, can all develop, maintain themselves or disappear according to appropriate forms; they are all based upon a certain ground of knowledge: an obscure knowledge that does not manifest itself for its own sake in a discourse, but whose necessities are exactly the same as for abstract theories or speculations without apparent relation to reality. (168)*

Whatever its economic determinations and consequences, mercantilism, when questioned at the level of the episteme, appears as the slow long effort to bring reflection upon prices and money into alignment with the analysis of representations. It was responsible for the emergence of a domain of ‘wealth’ connected to that which, at about the same time, was opened up to natural history, and likewise to that which unfolded before general grammar. But whereas in these last two cases the mutation came about abruptly ( a certain mode of being emerging suddenly for language in the Grammaire de Port-Royal, a certain mode of being for individuals in nature manifesting itself almost simultaneously with Jonston and Tournefort), the mode of being for money and wealth, on the other hand, because it was linked to an entire praxis, to a whole institutional complex, had a much higher degree of historic viscosity. Neither natural beings nor language needed the equivalent of the long mercantilist process in order to enter the domain of representation, subject themselves to its laws, and receive from it their signs and their principles of order. (180)**

Aside from whether these claims are true or not–a question that does not interest me very much–I am unclear what point Foucault is driving at by marking this difference. Surely grammar and natural history, too, are practices? Surely they, too, are attached to various academic and non-academic institutions? What is Foucault suggesting about economic practices that differs from the obscure and historically dense practices of speaking and writing, or from the even more obscure evolutionary relations found (or not found but hypothesized) in the fossil record and in living organisms?

Looking at the second quotation from p. 180 Eng/192 French, perhaps Foucault is suggesting that the analysis of wealth does not emerge out of a defined intellectual practice (or denominated practitioners) but rather out mercantilism itself as a complex–perhaps ultimately intangible or unknowable–set of constantly unfurling practices, reflections, analyses, and policies. I might be convinced that this demarcates wealth from natural history, but I’m still skeptical that language is not itself even more complex than economic factors.

What does Foucault gain by insisting that general grammar and natural history emerge “abruptly”, while the analysis of wealth is a slow burbling ooze into the light of knowledge?

The question is not rhetorical. I am stumped. If I were pressed to speculate, without sufficient evidence, I would start with Foucault’s ~mid-1970s (?) theorization of dispositif. In “The Confession of the Flesh” in Power/Knowledge (1977), he defines the dispositif as “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid.” The analysis of wealth, then, emerges from this apparatus or dispositif in ways unlike the emergence of General Grammar or Natural History–perhaps because unlike the historical dimensions of the study of language (“the possibility of writing a history of freedom and slavery, not through content but through the evidence of the words themselves,” as Foucault notes on p. 88/102), the historical dimensions of the study of wealth include the formation of the dimensions of the dispositif itself.

Considering, too, that his Collège de France lectures theorized the formation and rationality of the State in the mid-1970s, this earlier nod in The Order of Things to the difference mercantilism makes to the science of wealth might, perhaps, have something to do with the connections between State power and economic power, including their eventual inversion under neoliberalism (when the State exists for the economy, not the economy for the State).

I am not sure and I would welcome any insights or leads to studies on these questions.

*Sans doute l’analyse des richesses ne s’est pas constituée selon les mêmes détours, ni sur le même rythme que la grammaire générale ou l’histoire naturelle. C’est que la réflexion sur la monnaie, le commerce et les échanges est liée à une pratique et à des institutions. Mais si on peut opposer la pratique à la spéculation pure, l’une et l’autre, de toute façon, reposent sur un seul et même savoir fondamental. Une réforme de la monnaie, un usage bancaire, une pratique commerciale peuvent bien se rationaliser, se développer, se maintenir ou disparaître selon des formes propres; ils sont toujours fondés
sur un certain savoir : savoir obscur qui ne se manifeste pas pour lui-même en un discours, mais dont les nécessités sont identiquement les mêmes que pour les théories abstraites ou les spéculations sans rapport apparent à la réalité. (179)

**Quelles qu’en aient été les déterminations et les conséquences économiques, le mercantilisme, si on l’interroge au niveau de l’épistémě, apparaît comme le lent, le long effort pour mettre la réflexion sur les prix et la monnaie dans le droit fil de l’analyse des représentations. Il a fait surgir un domaine des «richesses » qui est connexe de celui qui, vers la même époque, s’est ouvert devant l’histoire naturelle, de celui également qui s’est déployé devant la grammaire générale. Mais alors que dans ces deux derniers cas, la mutation s’est faite brusquement (un certain mode d’être du langage se dresse soudain dans la Grammaire de Port-Royal, un certain mode d’être des individus naturels se manifeste presque d’un coup avec Jonston et Tournefort), -en revanche le mode d’être de la monnaie et de la richesse, parce qu’il était lié à toute une praxis, à tout un ensemble institutionnel, avait un indice de viscosité historique beaucoup plus élevé. Les êtres naturels et le langage n’ont pas eu besoin de l’équivalent de
la longue opération mercantiliste pour entrer dans le domaine de la représentation, se soumettre à ses lois, recevoir d’elle ses signes et ses principes d’ordre. (192)

Archiving Eve

18 Tuesday Mar 2025

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affect, archive, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

An “Open Mesh of Possibilities”: Thinking Queerness with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Archive,” a recent, day-long event at Duke University was bookended with excellent addresses by senior scholars Adam Frank and Cindy Patton. The bulk of the day, however, was given over to equally excellent remarks from current doctoral students and newly-minted PhD’s. The organizers’ decision to center contemporary engagements with Sedgwick’s archive through the work of current students and young scholars felt pitch-perfect. It demonstrated and encouraged the “openness” of Sedgwick’s “Open Mesh of Possibilities,” a phrase that articulates not only Eve’s most famous description of queer life, but also her entire enfleshed intellectual-aesthetic-activist life, a life that, through her writing, moved endlessly in and out of figurations that were not representations, in and out of readings that were queer-affirming over-readings, readings of nuanced affective texture, and readings that sliced up the normative assumptions around (in, through, as) categorization.

I admit, somewhat sheepishly, that I had expected and wanted more head-on theorization of ‘the’ archive, or ‘archiving.’ Perhaps I wanted a how-to on the task of archiving ‘a life’ (a person and their works), with the task’s attendant meanings and feelings, as opposed to entering with swagger or trepidation into archives already formed and being hit, as scholars from Derrida to Saidiya Hartman to Ariella Aïsha Azoulay have been hit, with the archive’s writhing violence, usurpation, pain, loss, and scandal.

Why did Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wish to archive her life and works, she who wrote beside, out of, or away from identity? I ask this not to repudiate her request or cast aspersions on the arduous labor undertaken to fulfill it. Not at all. I ask out of the intellectual and aesthetic questions raised by the archival capturing of what was lived (written) as a non-capturable mesh of open possibilities.

For me, as I expect for so many, to read Sedgwick was/is to fall in love with her. She wrote personally, affectively, with seducing intimacy. Her writing draws me in, slows me down and pushes me to peer more closely at her words and sentences (a process Jane Hu and Katherine Carithers beautifully performed for us in their presentations). I never met Prof. Sedgwick and yet presumptively I want to call her Eve, simply because her work opens (me) up to friendship, connection, shared interests and concerns.

In his address, Adam Frank reminded us that Sedgwick’s use of personal narrative was a kind of “inverted rescue,” a phrase I did not really understand during his address but which now I think might point to a particular writerly gambit, namely, Sedgwick’s use of the personal to throw readers back to/on our own desires, to open us (permit us? encourage us? dare us?) to feeling and touching the weirdness and flowing unknowableness of our selves. Frank quoted “Axiom 7” from Epistemologies of the Closet: “The paths of allo-identification are likely to be strange and recalcitrant. So are the paths of auto-identification” (EC 59). I take this axiom to suggest (at least today, for this post) that it is probably more interesting to query the words and habits I use to reflexively (reactively) identify myself than to query who I am in nuce; it is likely more politically galvanizing to embrace and creatively express my own desires, than it is to blame others for desiring wrongly; it perhaps more generative to emulate Eve’s nourishing of her sexual, intellectual and aesthetic desires than to think it’s possible for me to emulate Eve.

All these thoughts were swirling around me when Elizabeth Wilson, from the audience, noted that, “there’s something about the archive that’s murdering the wish to die.” True. But murdering the wish to die is not the same as knowing who and what live in the desire not to die. Cindy Patton, reflecting on Sedgwick’s obsessions with Proust and his attunement to interruptive memory, ended her address with a gesture to Lyotard: “remember to forget less often.”

Sliced up pieces of remembrance of things past: this is literally the constitution of some of Sedgwick’s art pieces. It is also Patton’s conclusion to the fact and practice of archiving. And it is one label to attach to these two red etchings that grabbed my heart and my attention, that drew me in but told me nothing. they tell me nothing even as they spark, nudge, pulse, and glow.

Eve Sedgwick, “Nude. Etching. No date.” Photographed by the author at the exhibit, “Open Mesh of Possibilities”: Thinking Queerness with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Archive,” Duke University, February 26, 2025. Also found online.

Kornbluh’s Immediacy or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism

02 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by mghamner in Uncategorized

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affect, kornbluh, mediation, writing

Verso Press listed Anna Kornbluh’s 2024 text as one of its must-read publications of 2024, and I heartily concur. To me, the experience of reading the book was watching like videos of Jackson Pollock painting, tossing splatters here and here and here across a canvas. It feels as if Kornbluh said to herself, “look at the gajillion iterations of today’s cultural production that all pursue profit through the profitable norms of immediacy and transparency–let me throw some critique here, here, here, and here to induce (p. 129) the feeling of connection between all these iterations.”

Kornbluh does not argue that any of these cultural productions actually are without mediation (language, and embodied experience are clearly mediated entities), only that the promise or illusion of immediacy is what is driving the pursuit of profit, from emojis, listicles, and athleisure (38), to the speed of social media and its concomitant hyper-visibility (56), to auto-fiction and passive fiction (70) that she links to “oceanic prosaicism” (109), or the desire for immediate affective connection with the immediate (lived) experiences of others (and also the casualization of the academy), to instant-access streaming services (124), ambient tv (136), and the flattening of plot for the experiential spike in gore, spectacle, and broken-4th-wall address (144).

Is she glib? You betcha; that’s the point. Is she too glib? Some think so, but I’m willing to take the ride and imbibe the aesthetic. For a Marxist publishing with Verso press, Kornbluh’s goal of conveying the relentless and profitable pursuit of immediacy as the style of “too late capitalism” seems both on target and appropriate. And, of course, her final take-away is that mediation is crucial for critique, a necessary tool for exposing and rescinding the exigencies of too-late capitalism that hold us all enthralled.

In my view, everyone should read this book.

I say this, even though Kornbluh does poke some of my own sacred cows, especially in the chapter on writing. Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson, and MacKenzie Wark seem, to me, difficult to equate with splatter films or Dr. Phil. Perhaps because reading itself is a slower enterprise than film, video, television, texting, instagram, or other social media, I hope (I can still hope) that Kornbluh will offer a follow-up book that approaches the style of immediacy (at least in writing) from the dialectical negative of what she’s presented here, that is, a meditation on the affective mediations that are crafted in writing, not to hastily establish an affective, non-narrative bridge between author and reader, and not to reduce “theory” to an occasional, splattering dot of reference, but as a thought-full awareness of the violent logics of sexism and racism embedded in language itself (see Wynters, Ferreira da Silva, Glissant, none of whom is immediately digestible) and a patient, slow crafting of modes of communication, of connection, of alternative, of solidarity that each differently sidesteps dominant modes of thinking and writing.

My limited desire, in other words, is to ponder desire–consumer desire–and to wonder how the bird’s eye view of hegemonic immediacy, so brilliantly depicted by Kornbluh, is inevitably compromised, disrupted, or otherwise refused in the micro-topographies of consumer experiences. I want, in short, to think more about the kind of consumers (as opposed to cultural productions) that are produced by too-late capitalism and where and how this normed production is (because it always is) resisted. What, to use Foucault’s lexicon, are today’s forces of subjectivation and what technologies (including writing certain kinds of texts, perhaps?) can be honed toward the goal of becoming other than the self normed by too-late capitalsim.

Kornbluh compellingly discusses U.S. creative writing programs that have become vehicles for self-therapy in a culture in which “over 40% of Americans are suffering from anxiety and depression” (47), though, of course, far short of that 40% can actually afford long-term mental health therapy (87), while far more than that 40% feel the neoliberal pressure to entrepreneuralize themselves hourly, if not more frequently (Lazzarato, Foucault). These are data points that, to me, evoke as much the gaps between self, words, writing, and others as to their overlap or compression.

Could it not be the case that, to cite Kornbluh’s citing of a leader of a writing convention, students’ endeavor to find “braver and more forgiving versions of themselves” (87) is not easily or merely egological but requires all sorts of mediated poking and prodding around the limits of language, the excesses of feeling, the untranslatability of experience (especially gendered and racial trauma), the inexplicable ballast of certain objects or relations with non-human beings, and, through it all, the “right to opacity” (Glissant) of others’s feelings and experiences? Some of us do read autofictions greedily, not for the immediate access to transparency that they seem to promise but more as field guides to getting lost in worlds that overlook us (Solnit), or as filaments of solidarity that cannot be woven into a life-coached strategy but might, at least, assure us that we are, truly and materially, not alone in what culture mandates we feel as utter isolation, if not alienation.

Is it possible that too-late capitalism has rendered all of us attention deficit to some degree? Is it possible that one remedy for this cognitive capture (Marazzi) is not heavier conceptual mediations but more robust emotional mediations, ones that do not trust the sedimentations of our cognitive apparatuses and so aim at circumventing them, splitting them, or floating menacingly beneath them, all while still functioning as mediations that do change us and that seek to strengthen us for survivance? Because to change the world, it still is necessary to survive this one.

Why is Sloth Bad but Leisure Good?

24 Friday Jan 2025

Posted by mghamner in Uncategorized

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affective economies, book-review, Christianity, Cressida Heyes, faith, Foucault, Jenny O'Dell, leisure, Marx, philosophy, Sara Ahmed, sloth

Historically, laziness, or sloth (as my Puritan ancestors might call it) counts as one of the “seven deadly sins,” meaning it is a vice, or a behavior perverted (turned away from) the good. My question is this: When we think about behaviors in our culture that are valuated (that is, desired or rewarded), how is it that the behavior of doing nothing can be valuated as both laziness and leisure? What are the embodied and discursive vectors of expectation, entitlement and normalization that render sloth bad and leisure good? What is the affective economy of laziness?

My hypothesis is two-fold. First, I am convinced that the affects and comportments of what used to be called the seven deadly sins still play out in U.S. society, though in an oblique and distorted manner, such that disincentivized behaviors are still articulated through the vocabulary, but not the doctrine, of Christian sin. Second, the social positioning of disapprobation is less a perpetuation of Weber’s Puritan ethic-turned-iron-cage than a translation and intensification of his rationalized cage into a necropolitics that exhorts the subjection of workers either to extraction or to criminalization.

Perhaps I can get at the problematic of capitalist productivity from its absence, that is, from persons who refuse it. In his lectures of 1972-1973, The Punitive Society,Michel Foucault discusses the criminalization of vagrants, roamers, and the unemployed. In the 16^th century, thousands of Europeans were rounded up and forced to work or be killed. Foucault’s lectures deepen the grain of Marx’s critique of the liberal labor market, which presents itself as “free” and “equal” to both the one hiring and the ones hired. One is free for the capitalist labor market, Marx insists, because one has already been freed from property. Deprived of property or “one’s means of subsistence,” by long, complex, and bloody histories of dispossession, the poor must work.

Today’s normative pressure to work elides the deprivation that is its historical condition of possibility. Italian Marxists Maurizio Lazzarato, Christian Marazzi, and others have expanded Foucault’s quip that the neoliberal worker must be an “entrepreneur of himself” by analyzing how global capitalism enacts a near-complete capture of space, time, and cognitive power. Every waking moment, society’s dominant norms and habits actively demand and passively assume that we produce ourselves, our lives, and our employer’s mandates. To refuse these norms is to be seen as choosing to be slothful, to be an enemy of the state, to be, in short un-American. As Foucault repeats in Punitive Society, “The time of life is the time of labor.”

More recently, philosopher Cressida Heyes in The Anaesthetics of Existence and artist and media theorist Jenny Odell in How to do Nothing have turned acute theoretical attention to non-productivity. Heyes writes as a feminist invested in the methods of critical phenomenology and questions of agency. With attention to experiences often deemed unavailable to rational consciousness, and hence unchosen and non-agential, such as anaesthetized surgeries, being raped while unconscious, sleep, and the pain of giving birth, Heyes makes a case for fully including non-action and non-consciousness in accounts of human subjectivity. What we know and do—our conscious agency and conscious productivity—are not the whole story. Odell, for her part, gingerly reflects on the addictive qualities of social media. She asks us to resist the attention economy (better termed the economy that steals our attention), not as a Luddite rejection of internet culture but as a thoughtful argument for putting our media lives in context, specifically in the local, live, floral and faunal contexts of wherever you happen to be now. Odell gives us theoretical permission to be seen as non-productive—lazing in parks, ambling beaches, poking our noses in shrubs and flowers, taking time to identify bugs and lichens—as one vital plank in the ethical task of discerning who we are, what we value, and why we attend to the social media pressures we do.

One might sum this up by saying that while neoliberalist working conditions pressure us to produce more and more value, they cannot give value for our lives. We are surrounded by value and valuation—Heyes and Odell make this crystal clear. Their work toggles away from the social matrices of valuation pressured by productivity, and in doing so they illuminate what José Muñoz terms the “protocols” or “codes of conduct that structure public emotion” (The Sense of Brown, 50). I wish to consider these social matrices of valuation as dense and decontextualized (or de-doctrinized) sediments of Christian morality, as this morality is strategically and negatively evoked by the so-called “seven deadly sins.” This negative morality is a sediment or scaffolding that articulates what I think of as capitalism’s affective dynamism, that is, the protocols that trigger shame, contempt, disgust and other dynamics of disapprobation that efficiently shunt non-cooperative bodies down the social tracks of criminalization.

Heyes and Odell acknowledge the power of this affective dynamism vis-à-vis productivity (in particular) by attempting to work to the side of it. One problem with their arguments, which they both acknowledge, is the legitimate charge that their critiques privilege privilege. Who can be non-productive? Who has the time to discern the values that capture their lives, who can form a plan of resistance? Affect theorist Sara Ahmed has theorized the formation of “affective economies” that “stick” individuals together through the circulation of certain emotions (“Affective Economies,” Social Text). I am curious, though, how certain subjectivities become aligned with some emotions and not with others. Ahmed suggests that this alignment occurs in the embodied sedimentations of history, which are often unavailable to consciousness. That is, fear or disgust of another person is not in the feeling or in the person who is the object of that feeling, but is a matter of how the two have come into contact in non-conscious bodily memory. “This contact,” Ahmed writes, “is shaped by past histories of contact, unavailable in the present” (CPE 7). Put crassly: The leisure class cannot be lazy because they have the capital to deploy and manage workers, who work for the leisured rich and thereby mark their leisure as always already productive. Workers, however, live only to work; they have no capital to deploy other workers toward productivity and, therefore, when they are not working, they are lazy.

My research right now aims to track the “past history” of Christian morality that continues to shape bodily contact and assessment.* The slow formation of social matrices of valuation enables stable affective economies to form and function around identities that continue to be unstable. Put differently, I hope to elicit and analyze the expectations and entitlements of labor that crystallize the social subjectivation of moral character out of available and more fluid affective economies. I want to delimit how lived experiences of the pressure to work, to school and train for work, to sleep for work, to prepare every day for work, accrue as the formation of virtue or vice from out of this backgrounded—and genealogically Christian—calculation.

The affective dynamism of capitalism draws on the refracted sins of a sedimented Christian morality to subjectivate and circulate the premium value of productivity and to penalize and criminalize bodies, attitudes, practices, and relationships that criticize, resist, or refuse it.

In the aftermath of COVID, some of us sensed a dent in this dynamism, an exhausted but hopeful voice of partial resistance. That opening seems bolted shut now, but the closure does not erase the critique, nor the felt and shared sensibility that our culture and world could, quite easily, be organized around different values.**

*In the USA, this backgrounded Christian quality of dominant morality can be registered as a residual formation (as per Raymond Williams). Globally, this quality would likely fall into something like the coloniality of morality (à la Quijano).
**This post is a reworking of two drafts of a 2021 paper delivered at the American Academy of Religion. My thanks to discussions with Douglas Boyce, who prompted me to return to this work.

Fine China and the Future of Thought

12 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by mghamner in Uncategorized

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fine-china, slow-thought

On this past New Year’s Eve (2024), The New York Times published Rukmini Callimachi’s article, “One Set of China. Five Generations.” The story tracks the emergence and decline of fine china as a perceived necessity for married couples—or at least married couples of a certain class. For centuries, possessing any implements at all for serving and eating food demarcated families of means from families of the masses who often ate with their hands or shared a single bowl and knife or spoon. This divide was partially sutured by the mass-production capacities of 19^th century industrial revolution. Owning “fine” china came no longer to signal aristocracy, but to mark civilization more broadly as whiteness, bourgeois status, and the expectation of hosting dinners that mattered, dinners that provided not merely food for the body, but that displayed and performed aesthetic, intellectual, social, and political clout.

When I visited the Panama City museum on the construction of the Canal last winter, I saw its photos of the small, rustic cabins provided for white laborers: tiny two room cabins with hardly any accoutrements at all, except there it was: the china cabinet, set up against a wall and proudly displaying its complete dinner sets. The contrast between the sparse wooden cabin and this casual display of wealth and class privilege—a contrast which was not at all the point of the photographs—was so stark to me that it felt like a trumpet fanfare defensively announcing that the people who lived there were not Panamanian but American and European—white, clean, Christian, and ready to serve a truly proper dinner.

But these days, Callimachi writes,

“Walk into a thrift shop, and invariably you’ll find that the shelves are lined with fine china — saucers rising like miniature towers, gravy boats and platters crowding shelves and dainty teacups cradling dust.

Some antique dealers say that they don’t accept china anymore — it just doesn’t sell. The dishes are frequently one of the items left over at estate sales. Storage units and landfills are brimming with it.”

The kids don’t want these beautiful, cherished family heirlooms.

This is Callimachi’s point and I have lived it myself.

My sister and I cleaned out my mother’s home last summer. Mom was an only child who inherited not only her mother’s china and crystal, but those of both grandmothers and her mother-in-law. I do not have words for the compounding feelings of aesthetic awe before these gorgeous pieces of china and crystal, the weight of history and of my family’s history in particular, and my absolute despair at stewarding these sets to another generation. It was, and is, sheer anguish.

On the one hand, and despite the anguish, it is a humorous and satisfying irony that my sister and I packed up fine china for my niece to take to her Catholic Worker community in Pennsylvania. Let the poor and unhoused eat off the wealth rejected by the wealthy’s descendants! On the other hand, and in the spirit of Marx’s warning that capitalism is not just the worst thing that has happened to humanity but also the best thing, some painful loss is wrapped immaterially in the material rejection of the trappings of inconvenience that scaffolded class status: some painful loss that concerns an insistence on threading slowness and beauty and ritual around the very basic material need to feed our bodies, an insistence that this is not only class arrogance but also a performance of care for those who sit at our tables, for the thoughts they have and share, for the human urge to weave the genius of craft and art into the very texture of life.

Do these have to take the shape of bone china and Waterford crystal? No, of course not. But material entities do not emerge and persist without circuits of institutions and practices to support them. And this is a bridge to the university system that I have just left.

We do not need the Humanities in the world today (or ever). We do not need to fight the inevitability of AI, which indeed can be very useful. We do not need to mourn the loss of students (even at elite universities) who no longer read or want to read entire books but outmaneuver each other to extract the content, the “five important take-aways”, the point, without slogging through the full word count. We can toss all of this into the thrift stores and landfills of history.

And admittedly, my own feelings and thoughts about these changes—and those of others who have written on these changes—can be rightly judged reactionary. They hold onto values and priorities that no longer fit the dominant cultural and socio-political landscapes of the world. They resemble, to put it bluntly, those china cabinets along the walls of rustic two-room cabins in Panama.

And yet. To think structurally is to avoid assessing this or that object or person or need. It is to attempt to put all of these into a larger, less obvious but fully felt context. It is to ask not only what has changed, but how, with what losses and gains, to what intended futures. In short, to think structurally is to articulate the loss felt by one generation as the changing dynamics of subjectivation that shape the worlds of the next.

We* do not need a world with china and crystal any more than we need a world in which students buy and read eight books for each class, and value their Humanities major (or minor, or second major), and write long, robust doctoral dissertations that require years learning languages and digging about in archives (and are funded to do so). We do not need these things. But a world without them both indexes and mirrors a world that I do not want to support. A world of increasing social isolation, of broken communities, of time-starved lives that rely on fast food or frozen meals, of projects that are only funded if they can be completed quickly and profitably. It is a world in which institutions support only rapid, quickly completed thought. It is a world that cannot afford slow thought when its thinkers face the dire need simply to survive.

*My dear friend, Jill Ehnenn, rightly resisted my use of this “we.” Every Humanities professor knows that the world does indeed NEED Humanities. Here, my use of “we” is a refraction of the hegemonic subject formed by the intense and rapid networks of the profit motive.

What is Critique today? –reflections from the 2024 Society for the Study of Affect conference, PITS

10 Sunday Nov 2024

Posted by mghamner in Uncategorized

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affecognitive, autocritique, critique, society-for-the-study-of-affect, subjugated-knowledges

Before the arc of injustice settled resolutely over the US last week, I attended the SSA’s 2024 conference in Lancaster, PA over Yom Kippur and Indigenous People’s Day weekend (a holy day and a holiday which each inhere an ocean of potent affects). The conference organizers (Greg, Wendy, Matt) were übermenschen (und überdame?)! They arranged our flows, detours, and opportunities such that everyone who attended had a wild, wonderful, and intellectually flailing time of stupendous semi-productivity (which, let’s face it, is the actual phenomenology of most excellent conferences), despite the fact that the conference thematic was the PITS (promises, impasses, threats, settlings). I cannot lie–I did not attend every session. But from the greater than 75% that I did attend, one persistent reaction kept gelling for me. What seemed to be going on there has something to do with the changing topography and footpaths of critique.

Classically, critique concerns the intellectual practice of assessment and judgment. The term itself arises from a Greek term meaning to separate or divide. Critique, then, is not neutral; it makes a cut and stands on one side.

For Kant, critique is a mode of rationality that seeks the conditions of possibility of x or y. Critique deploys reason as a tool for seeking the limits of thought and carefully keeping the project of philosophy on the hither side of that limit-line. For Marx, critique is a ruthless theoretical task that intersects with contemporary modes of practice and asks how both theory and practice are galvanized by both the material weight of past and the power-laden material actualities of the present. Marx deploys reason to examine reason’s attachments to class power, and he undercuts the sovereignty of reason by hitching its legitimacy to the practices of those without power (the proletariat). For Foucault, critique does not seek to understand conditions of possibility but to analyze the contingency of power-knowledge formations, within which truth, rule, norm, and subjectivity emerge. Critique cuts into dominant flows of power-knowledge by pinpointing nodal points and emerging practices of resistance.

Foucault’s art of critique (if we can call it that) differs from Kant and Marx in its focus on historically changing modes of rationality and in its attention to the shifting relations among institutions, discourses, and bodies (practices), that is, to those small, intimate, and often ignored gestures that ‘blob up’ to visible bodily comportments, discursive regulations, and institutional norms.

What I sensed from the SSA conference is that perhaps the task of critique today is akin to following Foucault in examining the micro-scales of power, but with a different emphasis. The task of critique today is perhaps to attend to tiny gestures, oblique attitudes, and insignificant daily habits for how they scaffold affective economies more than modes of rationality. Affect, as I have theorized for some years now, is always an affecognitive arrangement; it never pulses aside from its cognitive supports. But to invert the analytical emphasis from cognitive structures that ballast modes of rationality to affective economies that scaffold the felt textures of daily life significantly modulates the method and effects of critique. The way I heard this at the conference settled into two broad categories: The occult (or “alternative epistemologies”) and something like autocritique.

What Foucault once termed subjugated knowledges are coming to the foreground again in affect studies. I can’t say I know much about these practices, but I heard specific questions about how to reanimate these knowledges in ways that do not repeat past violences of appropriation: who are the reanimators, what authority do they have to resurrect these former ways of knowing the world, and what ethics does this revitalization demand? I also heard the need for methodological curiosity and care in this endeavor to use (how? for what ends?) these epistemologies that have been violently invisibilized.

Autocritique is my rather inept categorization of a range of studies that use the self or subject as a channel for wading through affective matrices or economies that, of course, supersede the self. The aim of autocritique is clearly not to recenter the subject but something more like making tangible the circuits of obligation, presentation, representation, access and visibility that constitute selves, or render selves inept, abnormal, unprofessional or otherwise lacking. I was struck by Hayun Cho’s reference to Trinh T. Min-ha’s finger pointing at herself–the reflexivity of critique is complicated by and through the mediation of film[1]. Karen Engle’s paper inspired me to think of autocritique as something like the need to analyze the self juxtasubjectively (riffing off of Lauren Berlant’s “juxtapolitical”), that is, through non-linear and unexpected geologies and temporalities, if we can put it that way.

Neither of these affect-theoretical orientations is set or sure–which is what makes them useful and exciting. They each, differently, seem to mold “critique” for a time that, as Jack Bratich reminded us, is like Gramsci’s interregnum: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” If for Marx, as for Foucault, critique squeezes the past lying in the present for the sake of the future, this is no longer true for us. In Gramsci’s time, the old world of the democratic nation, of pluralism, of rational debate was dying and the new world of the autocratic state, of ethnic purity, of angry, ugly debate was being born from monsters (what goes around, comes around). We don’t want these monsters, but we also don’t want that old world of an impotent democratic nationality and the illusions of rationality.[2] Can we instead extend Omar Kasmani’s lesson that dreams are about “disinheriting the present” to the temporality of critique today? Such disinheritance would not concern a different possible future or even a means of ‘dog-paddling in the present’ but would instead suggest that critique must out the monsters (call them out, outrun them) without this ‘outing’ slotting into the usual progress narrative or any expected lines of temporality.

How can critique aim at difference that isn’t progress?

As the scholars of this SSA conference modeled for me, critique evidences a curious and caring attention to alternative epistemologies and to modalities of the self that do not seek revolution or even hope for a viable future. Instead, critique grasps at affecognitive formations within which pulses of resistance, strategies of survivance, and diffuse affective economies of care hesitantly take root in shallow soils of vulnerability. These are affective pulses, strategies, and diffuse economies that loop persons immanently and imminently into fragile, temporary resonances that are valuable even though, or precisely because, they do not last and are not driven by any larger telos. Critique not only feels out contingency and resistance; it also tracks how the microfibers of affect blob up to lived textures: thick, gurgling, irrepressible, and always collective.

This is what I learned. Please tell me what I missed!

[1] “Criticism is not a mere matter of judging or of pointing, from a safe place, at what is right and what is wrong. The finger pointing out is bound to point back in. In telling, one is told. The reflexive dimension of film practice, for example, could be extensive and indefinite. It is not a mere matter of self-criticism, for what is at stake could be much larger than the self and the human. In the politics of representation, it is not enough to come up with a narrative of self-location as a solution (by showing oneself on camera or by revealing one’s attributes, background, and conditions of research for example), just so as to give oneself the license to go on with the business of representing others as usual. This was how certain cultures’ observers conveniently reduce the question of reflexivity—to a question of fieldwork technique and method—in their attempts at “correcting” or “improving” their politics.” (In conversation with Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa and Patricia Alvarez in Independent Female Filmmakers: A Chronicle through Interviews, Profiles, and Manifestos, ed. Michele Meek, Routledge, 2019, 240-253)

[2] See Andrea Muehelbach, “The Time of Monsters,” and “Inquisitorial Reason”.

Why Study Marx in a Religion Department

07 Monday Oct 2024

Posted by mghamner in Uncategorized

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history, karl-marx, Marx, marxism, philosophy, religion

Let’s start at my local level. The Syracuse Religion department I was hired into back in 1998 had a long-standing reputation as a ‘theory’ department. It is a strange term, ‘theory’. At that time, it tended to refer to a loose constellation of twentieth-century French, German and Italian philosophy and socio-political criticism, developed as Marxist or Marxian, or in response to the Marx/Hegel dyad.

In his 1960 Critique of Dialectical Reason, for instance, Sartre called Marxism “l’indépassable horizon” (the untranscendable horizon). In his 1969 inaugural lecture to the Collège de France, Foucault noted that “Our age, whether through logic or epistemology, whether through Marx or through Nietzsche, is attempting to flee Hegel.” He credited his teacher, Jean Hyppolite, for showing his generation “the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us.” It would seem that the only feasible way to flee Hegel is to engage him in proper dialectical fashion. If Marx is untranscendable, this only ups the ante of our encounters with him.

And so scholars have done. Scholars of subaltern studies, post- and de-colonial studies, and indigenous studies, from Fanon through Chatterjee, from Spivak to Linda Tuhiwai Smith, all work beyond Marx by going through him, not by ignoring him. Ditto for newer iterations of “theory,” such as critical race scholars Cedric Robinson, Frank Wilderson, Sylvia Wynter, and Fred Moten; and also for critical gender/sexuality studies scholars such as Luce Irigaray, Donna Haraway, Sara Ahmed, and Clare Hemmings.

These are not religion scholars, it is true. But religion scholars engage a startling range of European philosophy and critical theory and I have trouble naming a social theorist who does not engage Marx in some rather explicit way. Bataille, Adorno, Benjamin, Weber, Blanchot, Habermas, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Fanon, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Irigaray, Edward Said, Bourdieu, CLR James, Jacqueline Rose, Juliet Mitchell, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, Rey Chow, Angela Davis, Donna Haraway, Wendy Brown, Fred Jameson, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Badiou, Ranciere, Nancy, Agamben, Zizek, Cornell West, Chandra Mohanty, Linda Alcoff, Kevin Floyd, Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed —all of these thinkers, and so many more, have written overtly on Marx.

To understand Marx, I submit, is to understand better the labor and stakes of these texts, work that ranges from Bataille’s Theory of Religion to the foundational texts of the Frankfurt School, from Irigaray’s feminist critique of Marx in “Woman on the Market,” to the sometimes overlapping dynamics of postcolonial theory, poststructuralism, and deconstruction, from Deleuze’s nomadology and his assertion, in the Cinema books, that humans need reasons to believe in the world, to recent work in gender and queer theory, from theories of cosmopolitanism and globalization, to José Carlos Mariátegui, Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Gloira Anzaldua, Chela Sandoval, and María Lugones: Marx is referenced, embraced, pushed against, and reworked.

In Robert Tucker’s 1970-something preface to the Marx-Engels reader he notes that “A knowledge of the writings of Marx and Engels is virtually indispensable to an educated person in our time, whatever his political position or social philosophy. For classical Marxism…has profoundly affected ideas about history, society, economics, ideology, culture and politics; indeed, about the nature of social inquiry itself.” I agree with Tucker. I also with the late Fredric Jameson when he writes in Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume 1 that “it should not be surprising that Marx remains as inexhaustible as capital itself, and that with every adaptation or mutation of the latter his texts and his thought resonate in new ways and with fresh accents.” As Jameson’s cadence evokes so well, Marx’s historical materialism is an approach to life, time, and space that challenges us to grasp the root of ideas, of imagination itself, in material relations, and to seek in history the changing relationships between material things, bodies of ideas and norms of practice.

For Syracuse’s former iteration of its “theories and methods” course, I used to do a unit on Marx from the perspective of his position as one of the so-called “master narratives” that the past fifty years of social criticism has rejected. And yet, Marx is a master who puts his own mastery under erasure. He grants himself and us no stability, no static essence, no present certainty. Sometimes, yes (he was, as Foucault says, a fish who had no choice but to swim in the waters of the nineteenth-century) Marx does ooze lingering presumptions of Enlightenment rationality, historical progressivism, racism, heteronormative patriarchal elitism… These are sticky strands that pull like bubblegum on the shoes of his texts.

In light of his radical upsetting of the presumptions of research and philosophy—the way he turns tenets into questions, and values into vices—Marx stands as one of the three big “hermeneuts of suspicion” (Ricœur), along with Nietzsche and Freud. For Marx/Nietzsche/Freud, all description is also evaluation (yes, that includes their own). Or as Donna Haraway puts it so succinctly, “facts are theory-laden, theories are value-laden, and values are history-laden.” What we call a fact is an effect of a certain theoretical perspective that is itself imbued with particular cultural values that are embedded in the contingencies of history. What we call consciousness (and hence reason) is the epiphenomenon of our physical life context (“Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life”—The German Ideology).

Marx writes with raw frustration against persons whose privilege it is to take for granted the way things are, and his sharp passion pushes us to demand to know why things are the way they are—what Sara Ahmed famously describes as the queer phenomenology of “bringing what is behind to the front.”

Marx’s materialist reworking of the dialectic forces us to ponder capitalism as the best thing that has ever happened to humanity, and the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity—both to acknowledge what the status quo makes possible for human being and to critique “ruthlessly” the particular modes by which the-way-things-are limits and forbids the fullness and richness of life and thought. Marx is a thinker, then, who crumbles the ground we walk on.

Marx offers his readers crucial, compelling theorizations of power, material practice, and interpersonal struggle. Since, in my view, scholarship is lacking if it doesn’t somehow address the social location of its own conceptualization, and the basic and usually widening inequalities between persons and peoples, scholarship with a conscience requires—historically, discursively—some engagement with Marxian thinking.

I would submit that even if Marx were not as profoundly intercalated into the theoretical quilts we drag about us for warmth and comfort, he is a thinker worthy of a scholar’s, yes a religion scholar’s, attention in his own right. I say this because of what Marx sees, says, and queries about key concepts that return over and again in the study of religion: what is a thing, what is a person, what is activity? What is society, what is social structure, what is cooperation, do we need competition? How best can we understand our relationships to non-human nature, to our own human embodiment, to our (physical, intellectual, aesthetic) labor, to the consequences or products of our labor? What is most valued in being human, and in being human community?

Finally, I present Marx to you as a religious thinker, though he is clearly not a theologian and he scorned both his own Jewish heritage and the organized Christianities of Europe and England. Yes, Marx said religion (i.e., Prussian Christianity and Anglican Christianity) is the opium of the people. He also said it is a drug taken against a heartless, soulless world. To ruthlessly critique this religion is not to say that the social function, rituals, and affects of a religion will not be part of a communist world. It is to open up thinking and acting toward a world that is so heartful, so soulful, that no opiate of deadening diffusion will be necessary. It is both to keep such possibility of religion on the horizon (as Marx said communism is on the horizon of history, not its end, just the “next thing”) and to make religion a verb, a moving (as Marx said communism is “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”, The German Ideology). Religion is what we do in the very thinking and acting toward a heartful, soulful world that needs no consoling opioids.

Marx is also a religious thinker because he refuses to separate fact from value and, indeed, foregrounds the affects and valuations that subtend and justify both the making of facts and the facts we daily, habitually take for granted. He offers an ontology of “material sensuous activity,” that is, he says we are matter or nature that acts, that acts on ourselves, on the world around us, and on one another. The questions in his work that I find most persistent, and most intriguing are questions shared by many scholars of religious traditions: How do we talk about and pursue life’s purposes? In a world that builds up “behind our backs” (hinter dem Rücken), that traps us always-already into the sacredness of money, property, and the false aspirations of autonomy, how can we create space for talking about what a good life together is? What may humans hope for that we can and should work toward actualizing? What is justice and why does its rhetoric always ring hollow? What is this appeal to peace, to freedom that glazes over the perpetual bloody violences of the world? How do, how can we press theoretical insight into material social change? When we are faced with oppression (and when are we not), what is possible? Whom do you serve? What do you value, and why? Whose power do you represent and wield, and toward what end(s)?

With these questions in his arsenal, Marx turns his gaze (and his extensive use of religious metaphors) to the fetishistic, spectacular, monstrous, and grotesque qualities of capitalism, which have now penetrated the microfibers of our planet’s many cultures. His theories provide a classical articulation of how epistemology becomes naturalized normativity–that is, how humans take material reality and necessarily abstract and displace it into symbolic expressions that become more real than reality–and he graces us with poignant language about how the abstractions and displacements of capitalism generate and invisibilize millions of lives that are lived, at best, in resignation and quiet desperation, and at worst, in the mangled miseries of abject existence—what Agamben terms ‘bare life,’ what Neferti Tadiar terms ‘remaindered life.’

Marx may not talk about charity or religious community, he may not focus on personal devotion or community rituals, but he insists that we are all related, every single one of us, through actual material systems, institutions, structures, and relationships that bind us one to the other across our one, single planet. This is not pie-in-the-sky religion, it is an on the ground praxis of envisioning and urging the best of what humans can do, produce, and be together. As Ernst Bloch puts it in regard to the “Theses on Feuerbach,” Marx’s aim is to galvanize “socialized humanity, allied with a nature that is mediated with it, [for] the reconstruction of the world into homeland.” Amen.

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