Infant Sex

‘when I hear the word culture, that’s when I reach for my revolver’ -Hanns Johst

Let‘s begin by recalling an idea from psychoanalysis, that infant sex is at stake in culture. This term ‘infant sex’ refers to the rawest germs of life, the ‘polymorphous perversity’ which is not submitted to social norms. Enculturation would be the process where this elementary life force is quarantined, repressed and yoked into the service of society. This is how Freud understood the Oedipus complex, a process of maturation whereby a person assumes a social position. To put this very simply, the identification with the adult male makes the early relation with the mother illicit. This incest ban provides a pretext for the rejection of all infant sex. Adult sex then operates according to a code of exogamy, but there is always some residue of infant sex left over after the process of enculturation.

The key to the criticism of culture seems to lie in considering what happens to infant sex in this process. Where does infant sex end up in the age of adulthood? I want to propose the hypothesis that infant sex gets deposited in symbols of transcendence. When infant sex is rejected, it gets deposited in the beyond of a transcendent other. Society rejects this vital germ which is chaotic and undisciplined, and whose disinhibition implies that it is inherently powerful. Culture is the sublimation where adult sexuality is separated from this germ, so that it can take on stable identities. In order for social representation to take place, the germ has to be trapped in symbolic transcendence. Adulthood is only possible once it is relieved from the dynamic force of this germ， which is then identified with higher powers to which the adult submits. These higher powers can be symbolized as good (divinity, benign sovereignty), evil (oppressive leaders), or neutral (laws of nature). Adult neurotics distance themselves from infant sex through the creation of symbolic superegos.

This is how culture anchors subjectivity in a transcendent other. Elaborate processes of enculturation are devised for this purpose, and the Oedipus complex is just one example. But the revolutionary process of modernity tends to disrupt these cultural arrangements. This occurs through the spread of liberal politics and the associated technologies, which break up the traditional configurations of authority. This releases the infant sex which was deposited in those symbols. Adults lose their neurotic identities, their relations with these transcendent others, and the raw forces of infant sex get released which can throw representation into turmoil.

Following from this, one might consider modernization an anti-cultural process, but it remains caught up with the cultural tendencies that it opposes. Modernization remains cultural in that it still requires a transcendent other in which to deposit infant sex. It may change the symbols into more universal and seemingly rational ideals, but they are still symbols of a transcendent other. This is how we can interpret the phenomena of troubled youth, as a situation where infant sex has escaped from its repression under traditional authority, and yet it is displaced and excluded from the new ideals of liberal adulthood. Modernization is ambivalent or hypocritical in that it opposes culture and yet it remains cultural. It still remains a program whereby neurotic adults preserve their identities through the ban on infant sex, although the rising forces of chaos make those identities ever more precarious.

This is where we raise the question of what develops beyond modernity, such as what used to be called postmodernity. The unavoidable problem here concerns how infant sex can be retained at the level of immanence. Whereas in the age of culture the problem is about how this vital germ can be sublimated into symbols of transcendence, the next problem concerns how this same vital germ can be metabolized onto a plane of immanence.

Metabolizing infant sex within immanence requires that it doesn’t jump back into transcendence. The vital germ can be uncanny and monstrous, a material force that does not submit to linguistic representation. Retaining these forces within immanence requires strategies which go beyond language. One of the keys to this metabolism is the experience of mystery, which concerns a disruption of the phenomenal by the non-phenomenal.

Because it provokes such anxiety, there is temptation to deposit infant sex back in transcendent symbols. This reaction involves a cutting sensation, and this is a sense of the term ‘sacred’, where something is separated off onto another realm, where the germ escapes back into a superegoic beyond. This way the burden is relieved at the cost of a new cultural subjugation. However, through the course of modernity this transcendence becomes precarious and less plausible. Traditional sublimation becomes tenuous as the arrangements and mechanisms that support this process deteriorate. This would mean that we are drifting in a threshold where some kind of ‘postmodernity’ is increasingly being forced upon us as a necessity.

The burden of the immanence of infant sex is what French psychoanalysts called jouissance. and at an aesthetic level this registers as intensities of color, heat, speed, distance, pain, pleasure… it is like a prism from which all possible affects are distilled. The issue that will concern us going forward is how this substance can be separated and combined on different ontological registers.  

Perhaps the greatest problem we face concerns the excessive power of this germ of infant sex. How can such power be reserved at the level of immanence? The only adequate approaches to this would seem to involve dividing it from itself, or separating it into various component aspects. The danger arises where it contracts together into an aggregate of affect that jumps to higher valences of intensity, and where we react to this overwhelming intensity by disavowing or repressing it back into the realm of the transcendent other.

It seems that it is only by keeping infant sex adequately partitioned that it can be retained at the level of immanence. But partitioning can lead to another mistake, which is to evacuate the germ from immanence by representation. If it is partitioned inappropriately, then the beast will also withdraw into transcendence. Here we encounter some inevitable ambivalence. It would seem that plane of immanence itself cannot be partitioned, and that the vital germ can only exist immanently where it is free of representation. The germ does not submit to representation, and cannot itself be partitioned, and yet we must still devise partitions so that consciousness can relate to it without getting drawn into the totality of all affect. This means that consciousness can only relate to the free univocity of the germ negatively, through a detached abstraction of conceptual knowledge. Partitioning is an artifice that allows consciousness to protect itself from an affected relation with the univocity of infant sex. This way consciousness is affected by the germ only through the screening of the partitions. Consciousness can resist the seduction of the totality of the infinite through partitioning.

This partitioning is spatial and temporal. The germ gets divided into phases which correspond with zones on the body and with geographical sites or regions. Each phase has a distinct mediation where the power of the germ disturbs words and images with shudders of solecism. Physiological circuits are formed through a series of partitions, so that consciousness shifts around in its relation with the germ in order to metabolize it through a series of phases. This serious of dispositions corresponds with what chemists would call a reaction mechanism. In each phase there is a particular conflicted manner. And this reaction has a circular form, so that it ends up roughly where it begins, although the course has to be at least slightly different each time around. This circle could be more or less vicious. It is important that this circle does not become a developmental spiral, as in the maturation processes of culture and modernity, which would imply the restoration of infant sex to the level of transcendence.

This is an art of resistance that moves in three directions: 1. resistance to the urge to invest infant sex in the symbols of a transcendent other 2. resistance to the seduction of the totality of infant sex 3. resistance to evacuating infant sex through representation  

The sense of mystery is decisive in this art of resistance. This mystery proceeds as a series of limited experiences of infant sex. The finitude of each phase is the partiality or incompleteness of our experience of the germ. At different phases the germ gets manifest, conceptualized and indicated.

This immanent mystery is opposed to the cultural mystery of the transcendent other. Most of the art and literature from the past is caught up in cultural dialectics of transcendence. The problem is to absolve these cultural mysteries onto planes of immanence. As we shall see, the distinction between culture and the simulacra of culture becomes critical.

What can be said about the mysteries of immanence? These mysteries concern the limits of perception, cognition, utterability, awareness, attention… this effect is what artists refer to as trompe l’oeil, where what is available refers to what is unavailable. Mystery is produced at the singular limits of availability. These limits are actively assumed and self-imposed: they are limits to what we are inclined to explore presently. They may reflect the limits of our time and energy. More precisely, they reflect the conditions of composition within a certain phase-partition. Each phase has its own limitations on availability, where infant sex is experienced only in some particular ontological aspect. These are the conditions upon which consciousness is able to pursue its serial metabolization of infant sex.

The composition of a phase depends on knowing what not to know, perceive, say, and remember. These limits of availability, or conditions of secrecy, are tested through hospitality relations with friends and strangers. A cultured person relates to infinity as a transcendent other, and the prospect of the immanence of infinity disturbs them. They seek a mirror symmetry, so their interlocutors also appear cultured: they want their guest to deposit infinity in symbols of transcendence. If they feel their interlocutor is contaminated with an immanent infinity, then they may identify them as damned or holy. This identification is dangerous, because it posits infant sex as a totality, and shifts it back into transcendence. This is how those who resist culture risk falling into the trap of culture, where they are hurled into the overwhelming power of a totalized transcendence.  

By assuming the transcendence of infant sex, culture configures the noetic faculty, with its processes of sense-making, directing, and evaluation. Maintaining the transcendence of infant sex allows for stable identities, rankings and comparisons. The game of culture involves a dramatic psychology of progress and regress. This sort of drama becomes more important in competitive and meritocratic societies, where the sense of competition is maintained through transcendent ideals. Those who don’t pay homage to these ideals threaten to confuse the market. Markets are cultural institutions structured by the transcendence of infant sex, and immanence is like a crime of treason against this order of the market.

This leads to the necessity of cultural simulacra, where one feigns veneration for infant sex as a transcendent symbol. In this way immanence becomes a secret crime committed against modernity, culture and markets, which are complicit in their insistence on transcendence. These systems are immunized against the immanence of infant sex. In order to resist them, it is necessary to trick their immunity by feigning simulacra of cultural transcendence. This would explain the more daring varieties of Hegelianism from Pierre Klossowski to Slavoj Zizek, the thinkers who have understood that truly subverting transcendence requires dancing with the devil.  

Developing Eric Santner

What follows are some proposals addressed to the readers of Eric Santner. This is a community of those drawn into the folds of his argument, and who are thereby affected with a new intellectual disposition. His discourse interpolates us into a ‘call for work’, such as what Freud referred to as an Arbeitsanforderung. Our community is not concerned with repeating the transparent aspects of Santner’s discussion. We are all initiates of his discourse, and this is not a cult of the master. Rather, we are called to work on its darker, undeveloped corners, for the delivery of a new kind of philosophy.

Let us begin by qualifying Santner’s discourse as aleatory. This is to emphasize his way of taking chances, how he makes wagers or gambits at every turn. Such a discursive mode of theory is articulated in the way an options trader builds a portfolio, placing bets in hopes of catching a rare event. This financial mediation – or perhaps we could say allegory – can guide our reading. This pushes philosophy to participate in speculative capitalism, by staking positions in an uncertain course of development. This opens a direction along which can be delivered a bastard child of Santner’s, and this shall necessitate some negotiation of a very complex paternity.

The wider development of industrial society sits in the background of Santner’s discussion, and our departure will proceed by emphasizing this developmental orientation. This topic registers most directly in what he terms ‘ontological vulnerability’, which can be considered a feature of life in capitalism. This is a concept for the sensitivity and exposure to the uncertainty of the future which arises due to the enterprising proclivities of modern society. This vulnerability can stand for both our highest potentials, as well as our greatest dangers, and it riddles our lives with tensions and impasses. This opening resists representation because this is where representation fails due to uncertainty and indeterminacy. This point is sensitive because it is ontologically critical, as our self-representations are destined to fail at this point of uncertainty. It seems that representation itself can turn around this sensitive unrepresentability. Santner offers us a constellation of figures which can mediate our relations with this unrepresentable opening.

Next let us note how certain terms in his theory are charged with temporal significance. Most prevalent in this regard is how the term ‘kingship’ is coded as chronologically past. According to his theory, kingship can provide a shield from ontological vulnerability because it stabilizes representation around a master signifier. It reduces indeterminacy through the reference to divine agency, so that our own indeterminacy is accounted for through the reference to a higher power. But this arrangement declines with the advent of capitalism which leaves populations exposed to the non-existence of the symbolic Other.

The issue that concerns us here is how this contrast between kingship and capital implies historical genealogy, and our initial guiding question would be like this: what would become of this theory if this historical dimension were subtracted? What might become of his theory if it lost this historical mooring, and shifted towards some other sense of history. Our problem, more specifically, is to subtract bourgeois history from Santner’s theory, and then explore what possibilities might remain.

Our suspicion is that the theory employs kingship as a kind of historical fetish that serves to limit its exposure to the non-existence of the Other.  

Santner’s theory would seem to rely on a history of secularization. It would have us assume a direction of modernization, where there is a progressive decline in the ideal symbols of sovereign power. This implies a contradiction which is precisely deconstructive. The decline of ideality itself implies its own ideality – where historicism acts as a kind of fetish – and so it seems that this liberal history has a way of abolishing itself through the course of its own movement. So our problem is to draw Santner’s theory into a threshold where this bourgeois history collapses through the course of its own progress.

Santner himself is perhaps already touching on this point, but we shall be taking this further. As proceed to go further, there looms an obvious paradox, which would concern the oxymoronic term post-historical. A condition where history was abolished would be implicitly historical. To avoid this rather uninteresting logical pitfall, it’s worth emphasizing again that this proposal is just to abolish certain particular historical relations, and not to permanently exorcise all of history from the theory tout court. The point is to develop the theory towards another (non-bourgeois) historical condition, and this transition seems to require a temporary eclipse of all history.

This subtraction of history from his argument would involve a shift from chronology to circularity, and then back to another chronology. Santner’s discussion already involves a lot of circularity, which it seems to adopt from Lacanian discourse theory. The historical transition from kingship to capital corresponds with the transition from Master to University discourse in Lacan’s theory. The four discourses of psychoanalysis form a transitional circuit, but this model remains in an equivocal relation with liberal history. So this proposed subtraction may require dispensing with the Lacanian discourses, or at least adjusting their circuitry.

The history of secularization, this de-idealization of the symbolic master, can imply a passage into materiality. This process could be the dialectics of the Enlightenment as described by Adorno, but Santner has highlighted an important corrective for that discourse. There is a psychoanalytic amendment for that theory whereby we are forced to accept that there is always some remainder, that Enlightenment can never be absolute because human sexuality inevitably implies some ‘infantile idealism’. So let us suggest that the historical fetish in question could be considered a receptacle for infantile sexuality. Then there arises the question of what becomes of infantile sexuality when it is de-historicized and then re-historicized otherwise.  So in this transition from one history to another, the decisive question perhaps concerns how this elusive infantile sexuality is shifted around.  

Let us be more specific about the sort of history which is being subtracted from Santner’s theory. This requires some insinuations on the conditions under which he is working. There is a kind of bourgeois historicity which can be implicated with professional offices and with the disciplinary framing of intellectual work in a university. This has to do with the way a liberal scholar orients themselves in their busy-body activity. The articulation of academic work as an historical discourse facilitates the way that colleagues are able to make sense of it. In this sense, history can provide a protocol or heuristic for what counts as work. A busy-body’s need for work might be related to a theoreticians need for history, or otherwise we could say this work might be counting itself as work by how far it develops history forward. Here we can see how a reflexive labour accounting might be coupled together with progressive politics. An exemplary case for this sort of assembly would be freelance activism, where people feel called to work independently on the progress of history.  

There is no need for us to discredit Santner’s orientation within European history, but just to consider what could happen to his theory if it were unfixed from such mediation. Near the end of his latest book, Santner suggests that what he has written so far is merely provisional, and announces that he is planning to further his study of Rilke. This comment could be read as tongue-in-cheek. This supposed provisionality might only be a pretext for the continuation of busy-body scholarship. This is like how the producers of a soap opera are always seeking new plot turns to create more seasons, to keep the entertainment machinery rolling.  

This leads towards some questions concerning how work in the humanities is conceptualized. Perhaps he is planning to develop this argument further so that it will be more convincing, or more accessible to readers with less erudition. If it were more clearly laid out, then his thinking could become established as a school with courses offered by specialists around the world. Maybe he wants to develop his theory into a stable institution, where its limits would be secured by his name as a master signifier. This wouldn’t necessarily be such a bad idea, but it’s just that our direction proposed here is to develop this doctrine to a point where it transforms into something else. Of course Santner and his colleagues may not be too thrilled about this, as it could disrupt the customary patterns of their discussion.

Santner’s historicality is enigmatic like Benjamin’s, because his writing invokes a spectral temporality where time is disjointed. So someone might assume that he has already dispensed with chronology. Or rather perhaps he is already subtracting the fetish of chronological liberal history. But then the question is about how this kind of work might be still getting inscribed back within said history. The aim of Santner’s work might just be to hystericize his readers, to put it in the terms of Lacanian therapy. But pushing aside this sort of psychoanalytic pretence, it is possible to pursue a more Benjaminian line of interpretation. Then this becomes a more opaque sort of practice, where some relics are gathered and arranged into constellations, and then some new images emerge. So we are trying to move the theory towards a point where a new image of history could emerge. And as Benjamin’s biography demonstrates, this kind of work is difficult to value, as it cannot rely on the value-forms which are accounted for as the progress of bourgeois history.  

This proposal certainly doesn’t involve dispensing with the past, nor throwing away any particular authors, such as Rilke for instance. It should become clear in what follows that Rilke is very much implicated in where this is going. The issue is about subtracting the relevance of bourgeois history as an ordering schema. The problem is to move the theory to a threshold where this chronological fixation is absolved or becomes reversible.

Is it possible to reach a phase of absolute secularity where terms like kingship or religion no longer have any special association with the past? Can we reach a point where kingship might just as easily refer to something of the present or future?

Bourgeois history gets implicated with an affective orientation where linear chronology anchors symbolic time. This might be the liberal fixation on the joy of some spectacular events, such as the abolition of slavery. This is a sense of time where that infantile idealism is projected into an undeveloped past, but where this very projection is also a disavowal of the projector’s own infantile idealism. What we are talking about could amount to overcoming a particular professional bias.

Now let us move on to consider this momentary eclipse of bourgeois history more directly. When bourgeois history is lost, we enter a condition where development is alienated and multiplied, in that it is no longer ours but only the development of others. Alternate developmental lines confront us living relics, where vectors continue to circulate and spiral in multiple directions. In this phase, taking certain events as “historical” just means adopting a certain bias, where we assume a particular direction to this spiralling. Absolute secularity would be a phase of neutrality with regard to all possible directions of development. This could be called a phase of absolute transitionality where there is no sense of subjective development.

This point of absolute ontological uncertainty might only by hypothetical, or something that we could approach but never actually reach. So our problem is to draw Santner’s theory closer to this point and perhaps even to pass through it. This point would be the zenith of the relativity which is the bane of conservatism. This point might correspond with Alenka Zupancic’s interpretation of Noontide, as a kind of maximum uncertainty where the hole at the heart of the Other is left most open. Another literary trope for this moment would be Blanchot’s hole opening in the sky, which he recalls as a childhood reverie. This moment would be where history loses all chronological ideality, where time becomes perfectly unsymbolic, and this would leave a multi-valent spiralling of different developmental trajectories in all directions. Another relevant term here is what Nietzsche referred to as Augenblickt, which would be like an instant of exposure to the Other’s non-existence where some absolutely secular condition is realized.

This point of maximum contingency is related with Santner’s discussion of Franz Rosenzweig, and especially where he discusses something like a Neoplatonic soul. This would be like a sort of kernel of the ego (A) that exists independently from any enveloping external condition (B). Absolute secularism would be the point where that kernel (A) is not enveloped in any external situation, and where it enters into (entertains?) a pure self-relation. History in this sense would be the external situation that must be absolved in order that this pure self-relation may take place. This Noontide would be a point of neutrality with regard to all possible developmental spirals. Once this self-relation is established then it may become possible to enter into a new historical condition.

This self-relation resonates with the discourses of Johann Fichte, in that this moment of noontide would be a kind of Sabbath where the operation of subjectivity is suspended. It’s worth noting that Fichte was a man of plebeian origins who was never properly trained as a philosopher, but rather as a pastor. This background positioned him to shift the Kantian philosophy towards the aporias of Semitic scripture, so that historical subjectivity would be suspended as it is deposited into the not-I of the mysterious Hebrew Other. A key Ficthean term for this suspension is Anstossen, a kind of alien phantasm that will be discussed further below.

This relativizing of development poses the danger of dissolution – an entropy of the naked ego confronted with alien symbols of development – but the gambit here is that one might traverse this void through an intimate self-relation. The problem arises here of how an ego could remain constituted without a symbolic situation, thereby allowing for a transition between symbolic situations. This Sabbath of the naked ego would be a suspension of linear development, where its flesh (?) is exposed to the alien tension of multiple interfering spirals of development. I would suggest that here the ego can still find itself within a situation, but one that is not symbolic in the Lacanian sense. A symbolic situation would have the sense of a before and after, a more developed and a less developed – such as the parent-child relation – whereas at Noontide there is just the tension between multiple conflicting developmental orientations which are attributed to small others. So this is a moment of exposure to alternate senses of time.

Next let us review an inventory for an archive of important texts concerning the discourse on Noontide. The earlier edition of Freud’s ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’, and the way that text is studied by Philippe van Haute, provides a field of reference points in psychoanalytic discourse. This has to do with the alienation of the parent-child relation as described in Laplanche. This kind of alienation can be associated with an aesthetic of vertigo and spiral figures in the writing of Kafka and Borges, as well as W.B. Sebald. This can be considered an aesthetic figuration of the wandering Jew. Noontide would be an exilic agony or orphan-condition where the ego is bereft of its own symbolic time, and where it endures the indifferent lacerations of the symbolic time of others. Pierre Klossowski used the term ‘ascesis of affect’ for the kind of Stoicness that is involved here. Somewhere Zizek suggests that artists are more objective than scientists, because their objectivity penetrates through into their subjectivity.

We shall need to focus a discussion on the sort of work which could be done within this eclipse of the symbolic Other. Taking up the Blanchovian trope of the sky-hole, we might consider the possibility that this ego could somehow create or discover an original developmental spiral that turns around that cosmic hole. This way it might be able to somehow tame or subjugate the pre-existing developmental lines, so that a new original spiral would bring them under another power. This way a new situation could imply a new direction of developmental history. This way someone or anyone could be reborn to another history, where various developmental spirals would congeal into a new……style?

Now that we have outlined a conception of Noontide, next let us consider what lies beyond. It seems we must perform a kind of ‘salto mortale’ leap into a symbolic situation of the future. Santner’s writing gets reified within a certain division of labour, or maybe this is a division of idleness, or entertainment, and that this reification appears in his theory as an historical fetish. This is where bourgeois gentlemen entertain themselves by playing around with fantasies of liberal history.  But it seems this work would take on gravitas if it were moving towards the absolution of this bourgeois history and the initiation of another history. And this other history might not be so historical. It might be historical only in this limited sense of a play between alternate chronologies. So what sort of history are we talking about here? I want to propose that such a play could be subsumed into a larger system of geography. This way we could imagine that what lies beyond Noontide is a broader kind of subjective situation which is symbolized geographically.   

This future geographical subject would be a praxical orientation that relies heavily on fixed territorial positions. The prevailing ethos of unlimited global circulation would have to be abolished because it falls back onto bourgeois history. Globalization is an aspect of the bourgeois historical fetish that we are attempting to abolish here. There seems to be a trade-off between fixations in geography and history, so that there a choice between fixating on one or the other level. So what I am suggesting here is a liberation of history from Eurocentrism and its chronology, and this liberation can be afforded at the cost of new geographical fixations. These geographical fixations would not necessarily imply nationalism or even localism. Rather these would be migrations between territorial relays where exchanges take place. The alien developmental trajectories would intersect at these points, where they put pressure on each other. The new geographical subjects would be anchored at precise points of their contact.

Santner often describes a busy-body who is afflicted with a surplus flux, and I want to propose that this flux can be recaptured through market exchange. These would be instances of codification where surplus fluxes are absorbed, or metabolized, into symbolic representation. This way unemployed vitality gets represented (employed) through the process of exchange. A market then is defined as a site for an exchange of representational codes. I am unsure whether Santner himself has gone so far as to make this argument, but I think it at least connects closely to what he says, if it doesn’t follow directly from the overall inclinations of his theory.

This shift towards market-praxis would adjust the mood of Santner’s theory. It is difficult to decide whether his writing candidly expresses authentic historical crises, or whether this sensation should be interpreted more as a staged or mediate literary effect. Whichever way his theory is interpreted, the proposal here would aim to abrogate the romantic sense of history where ‘the desert is growing’, or where life is somehow becoming barer, or where we await the absence of gods to save us (Holderlin). The point of market exchange is where a broad normalization takes place that puts these romantic affections out of service. This way the baring of life is no longer a one-way street, but rather a quest for market exchanges where life is redressed for marriage. It’s only where suitable folds are believed to be eternally unavailable that life feels anxious about its permanent ineligibility, or perhaps we could say damnation. As long as it is possible to work towards a new market exchange, then life is never bare.

This step into marketization won’t be an easy sell at the university. The greatest resistance to this step will come from the quarters which we might refer to as Romanticism. There is a romantic inclination to hystericize, and this effort is continued in Lacanian therapeutic practice. To move Santner’s theory into a market-praxis would involve a broad normalization of conditions which runs against this inclination. The hysterical tendency is like what modernists called de-familiarization, and this has become part of the everyday attention-grabbing of our panic-stricken entertainment culture. This kind of modernist avante-gaard shock-aesthetics is antiquated under our contemporary circumstances. This relates to the way that markets are oscillating, for instance between boredom and fascination. The move to marketization of philosophy could be described as one of profanation, but this would not just imply a profanation of the sacred, but something broader that would involve de-hysterization, de-eroticization, and de-alienation.

This normalization can be related back to Santner’s

theory. He describes an incongruence between the normative and the somatic, but his theory would seem to have a weakness in that it is only able to describe this gap. There is an insinuation that this is a horrific conundrum which can only be approached through some elaborate theoretical means. Where he has described this gap as an insurmountable difficulty, we propose that there are solutions more readily at hand. Philosophy can aim at solutions to this problem, and that this requires fundamental adjustments in its mode of operation. And perhaps the issue of whether this operation would remain identifiable as philosophy is not so important.

The solution to this gap could be allegorized as a matter of finding suitable clothing for the flesh. If priestly gowns and kingly crowns don’t fit us anymore, if our flesh is leaking out from under them, then what we require is a superior tailor.

There are certainly reasons why Santner would present this “gap” as a profoundly terrible historical problem. For one thing, there is the way that history can involve trauma, especially surrounding extreme events like imperialism, the Shoah or allegedly man-made environmental disasters. If this gap is somehow related these events, then it is easy to see why it would be charged with such passion. These just happen to be sensitive spots. But even if we disregard these disasters, then there is still the potential for trauma associated with ontological vulnerability, which can be like a trauma of how the uncertainty of the future unhinges the present. This would be a trauma which is inevitable during the course of intellectual maturation.

So is the gap between the normative and the somatic necessarily traumatic? I propose to wager that it is not, and that this trauma is more likely a symptom associated with the bleeding-heartedness of liberal culture and its hysteria, nihilism, and existential masochism.  So I suggest that the gap between the normative and the somatic becomes traumatic due to a pathological romantic heritage. Our wager is that this ontological vulnerability can be resolved through the marketization of philosophy.   

At this point I would like to bring up again those Fichtean Anstossen, those bits of resistant nothingness, those not-Is which the Is come up against. Those things might be considered remains of romantic sacredness – remains of remains – which seem to have a complex social-regulative function which is excremental. These would be the things which fix the romantics in the affects and passions of their history. It would seem that these obstacles somehow get charged through the exaltation of certain forms of communal life. This would be a kind of paralysis that is secreted through the sanctification of vitality.

There may indeed be some inevitable disjunction between the normative and the somatic, but perhaps this only becomes so problematic due to poor choices regarding what to revere. My suggestion here is that populations succumb to ontological vulnerability due to spiritual misguidance. The legacy of romanticism seems to be a labyrinth of pathological imbalances, where xenophobia is the flipside of xenophilia, prudishness is the flipside of hedonism, and belligerence is the flipside of pacifism. The most prevalent expression of this madness today would seem to be the environmentalist attitude of fear/hatred towards capitalism. This attitude may be well founded, but that does not change the fact that it is apparently pathological.

This romantic heritage has to do with Heideggerian authenticity as anxious finitude – this would be like the epitome of pathological romantic historicity. This kind of thinking falls into a trap by assuming that finitude is reducible to mortality. Peter Sloterdijk recently offered a description of Heidegger in his rustic village, wearing a peasant cloak which he tried to adapt for the look of a worldly scholar. This is maybe reminiscent of Rousseau in his sheepskin. These images can be connected with the scene from the Notebooks of Malte Brigges of the vagrant hopping down the street and flipping his collar. This gesture of circular ‘turn-coating’ was noted by Pierre Klossowski in his book Nietzsche’s Vicious Circle. These are images of a vertigo that afflicts people unable to dress themselves.

The alternative to romantic history would be an eternal Baroque or Neoplatonic condition. To make this fit together, it may be possible to stitch Santner’s theory together with Deleuze’s, so that the A->B relation in Rosenzweig corresponds with the two stories of Leibniz’s Baroque house. An important reference for fitting this together will be Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency, which has just appeared for the first time in English translation. Much of this theory would hinge on the interpretation of Neoplatonism as an alternative to bourgeois history, which would be a hinge for the new geography that I am proposing. I won’t go into any detail on this topic here, but only shall say that this is where a finer articulation between rationality and esotericism (i.e. infantile sexuality) can be worked through.  

Our broader argument here is that Santner’s theory can be developed into a geographically oriented market praxis. This would not be a financial praxis, but rather what we might call a dressing-praxis, or a dramaturgy where anxious flesh is dressed in suitable clothing. The symbolic time of employment would be the clothing that makes our essential unemployment bearable. The symbols of employment are what captures the flux of bare life into representation. A market is the geographical site where the naked unemployed enter the folds of symbolic repose.

This theory has a providential coloring, but it’s important to emphasize that this effect results only from the cunning of reason. Through the ongoing intellectual work of stage management, roles and costumes are constructed to fit the contingencies of naked vibrations. This cunning only comes into play through the longue duree of fixation at geographical sites. Only through experimenting with the repetitions of flesh at a particularly site can a confluence between interfering spirals be forged, and representation can begin a new rotation around the absence of the Other. The event of market exchange would occur through a staging of the relations between conflicting developmental fantasies. So this staging would be a redoubling of flesh with its symbolic that only becomes possible through this detached experimental duration.

I would like to conclude this proposal with some suggestions about the sort of social role that this sort of philosophy would play. In the book Infinite Conversation, Blanchot describes how philosophy has adopted different roles. He gives the examples of Einstein and Freud for the philosopher-as-researcher, de Sade and Nietzsche for the philosopher-as-writer, and Hegel for the philosopher-as-educator. Compared with these illustrious figures, the kind of philosophy we are proposing here would be something monstrous, because it implies a higher order of hybridization of the roles. This hybridization of roles is a response to the greater complication of social conditions. Whereas these famous figures were cast into social prominence, this philosophy would have to remain relatively marginal. This could mean essentially that philosophy would have to be done under disguise, or that it’s public role would be limited to making occasional interventions on a dramaturgical level. But for its own self-understanding, the closest analogy would perhaps be the Hegelian philosopher-as-educator. It is in the field of education that philosophy can play a role within market development.

This way philosophical education would be involved in the delivery of the flesh to the market. To put this in overblown hysterical terms, someone might say that pedagogy participates in the political-economy of human trafficking. Of course this prospect of flesh trafficking would make some people very uncomfortable. But it would seem that this sort of praxis may be a repressed truth of the liberal arts, or else we might say that this is the inevitable capture of the humanities into the singularity of capital. We need to seriously consider what humanities departments are already doing. This relates to the problems of normalization and market participation, and the overcoming of romantic hysteria.

Finally, I would like to name two philosophers whose work could be especially important for arranging these sorts of market performances. Some of the particularly dangerous problems can be metabolized through dialogue with Pierre Klossowski, who we might refer to as Rilke’s enfant terrible. He seems to approach the most dangerous aspects of romanticism most directly, although his directness is tempered with subtle equivocities. And at the ultra-normative end of the spectrum of there is Peter Sloterdijk, another Rilkean thinker who becomes important because of how his work is moving towards the renormalization of philosophy within capitalism. He adopts a benign liberal posture, which is perhaps not so benign as it appears. Between the extremes of these two thinkers – the somatic Klossowski and the normative Sloterdijk – it may be possible to construct a circuit of discourse that communicates through the sensitive core of ontological vulnerability, and sets representation twisting again around that exposure to the void. God help us!

Pity the Ocean

Some colleagues around the office tend to seek my pity. They complain about their bitter plight as poor Chinese caught in the fetters of outrageous demographics, and ground by the gears of mindless institutions, and I’ve been struggling with how to respond to this. In the common liberal ethics that turns around care, pity can be a sort of benevolent compromise, which is a last resort for a humane relation. It arises at a point where there could have been meanness, like disgust or offence or mockery, or else just cold indifference. Someone looking for pity is like a beggar seeking a morsel of dignity. They want a low-grade substitute to compensate for an unsatisfied need for representation.

I think pity is insidious because of how avoids pathos. You might say it robs pathos of its propriety. By the rules of politeness we get caught into an alternative between pity and meanness, and I consider this alternative as a kind of wall against pathos. My problem is how to maintain an authentic access to pathos, and for this it is necessary to avoid both pity and meanness.

What I mean by pathos here is a dimension of sovereign affect. This is life abandoned in the real, where we all exist in this anonymous, a-personhood beyond any possible experience.

Besides abjection, pathos also implies a kind of objectivity. This is a person as they are objectively, as they are subjected to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Charlie Chaplin in Modern Life provides a model for this kind of subjection, as he moves through the levels of failure. At first he desperately tries to succeed as a factory worker, and then when failure becomes certain, he tries to fail by getting himself arrested. And then eventually he fails at failure, and this second order of failure brings us to a dimension of absolute pathos. Where a successful failure would add some bit of dignity, a chance for some representation, this second failure nullifies that possibility. This is how I understand Samuel Beckett when he said “fail better”. So I want to help my colleagues fail better, so they can reach the level of absolute pathos.

Absolute pathos corresponds with the dimension of instinct, where populations are tossed around by raw material forces. In the domain of symbolic representation, these forces are valued as power, which means they are both terrible and majestic. In the doxological sphere of civility this absolute pathos cannot be presented, and so we get caught in this frustrating alternative between pity and meanness.

Our public sphere is somehow grounded in pity. There is an incessant concern with who deserves it, which is not unrelated to who deserves mourning. In its flight from absolute pathos, liberal politics maintains its façade.

So this is a way of interpreting the contemporary aesthetic-political situation, where the public is this dimension of false politics, where everyone succumbs to this timid prissiness. There is the occasional appearance of a monster like Steve Bannon, who is a returning shard of repressed pathos.

If we choose to not participate in this false politics, then we must get ourselves abandoned into the turbulence of sovereignty. One must discover a margin of exile from which society can be transformed once again.

This ethical attitude is summarized in the old expression “resignation ad infernum”. Falling under the spell of an absolute pathos is so contrary to common etiquette because it inverts the vertical values of goodness. Charles Darwin titled his book The Descent of Man, and there is an evolutionary problem concerning how man descends into terrible majesty. The problem arises of how to bear the friendship of the abject pitilessly.

I want to break with liberal doxology at certain decisive points. Jacques Derrida claimed that justice was undeconstructable, and I feel it is necessary to interject on this point. Derrida made the irrepressibility of the demand for justice into a kind of religiosity, and this sort of zealotry leaves liberalism with its heavy emphasis on how sovereignty should be answerable to justice. The neo-religious modality of this “should” tends to possess liberalism in a way that is blinding, and it’s at this blind spot that I think ethics could depart again for something else.

The blind trance of liberal idealism can be interrupted by a realism of the Pindarian maxim “It is good to follow the just, it is necessary to follow the strong.” This “necessary” can be interpreted so that it is not so much a logical or legal necessity, as in “if you don’t follow the strong, then they will punish you”, but something more profoundly existential. This can be read as a transcendental, apriori necessity, in that forces of the strong were responsible for our own constitution, and these forces condition us with limits which we are constitutively incapable of crossing. So in this way of thinking, strength has an ontological primacy over justice, as our ideals of justice would be a secondary result of how we were constituted by strength, and so the neo-religious idealists are out of touch with the conditions of their existence. From this transcendental-existential realist perspective, this priority of strength is beyond moral or ethical values because it concerns the power that constitutes us. Liberalism becomes hypocritical in a very naïve way when it disregards these forces behind its own subjective constitution.

So the prevailing political doxology in its neo-religious idealism is infected with pity because it refuses to consider real conditions of power.

The dimension of absolute pathos has some reference points in the classical texts. It was pointed out recently by Roberto Esposito that Freud’s discussion of the primal horde is profoundly Hobbessian. It is not that there is anything correct about this particular model, but just that it provides a common description of the dimension of sovereign abjection. Much of the humanities discourse starting with Rousseau can be read as a liberal disavowal of this realm of the dark precursor, regardless of whether we think Hobbes and Freud got it right.

When Parisian philosophy was introduced into North American universities in the later 20th century, it was marketed as a form of leftist zealotry spiced up with disco lights and celebrity cults. Conservative aspects of the avant garde were obscured in order to create an easily digestible version of political history, where progress was conceived as a continuation of leftist resistance against the Nazis. A French poodle was sent strutting down the catwalk as an ideal of righteousness and benevolence. The conservative or aristocratic side of Parisian philosophy was still there, but its sovereign abjection was neutralized into the masochistic sexuality of whips and leather.

It is difficult to speak of the dark precursor, because doxologists are always waiting to exclude anything so intensive from the domain of politeness. The term “fascist” is used for anything remotely dangerous, which means anything remotely consequential in terms political aesthetics.

The humanities were blinded to the aristocratic side of aesthetic philosophy. This is a dimension which offends liberal sensibilities, and yet has nothing whatsoever to do with leftism. This is a non-Jacobin radicalism that runs through Hugo, the French Realists and Symbolists, Apollinaire, Cocteau, Blanchot, Klossowski… and links up with  the discussions of German conservatives like Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. From this angle, I believe we can reinterpret monumental breaches in liberal etiquette, such as the anti-Semiticism of Ezra Pound, the Nazism of Martin Heidegger, and the ideas of the discredited Paul de Mann. The point is not to embrace right-wing ideas, but just to reinterpret them from a less moralistic perspective.

The poet Anne Carson is a more contemporary reference point for this discussion, if we consider how her Homeric interests raise the question of violence and literature. It has been suggested that she “sublimates” the violence of the Homeric poetry, and I want to consider the interpretation of this word “sublimate”. Liberal doxologists want to establish the value of sublimation as a movement that is vertical in a trivial sense, where something old and evil magically becomes something new and good. This is a sloppy heuristic that wants to quickly cash in an aesthetics of violence for the coin of a universally exchangeable virtue ethics. Instead of this vertical movement, I would emphasize a more horizontal process of awakening, where a subject is coming into existence through the realization that they are already subjugated by some obscure ancient conditions. So the poetry does not change the ancient violent forces themselves, and all it changes is our awareness of them. A civilized person in this sense is someone who is learning to experiment with how they are disposed of by violence. Carson’s poetry awakens us to the reality of this violent disposal. But poetry considered as such an awakening force can easily become indistinguishable from violence itself. Here are some violent lines from Carson’s 1996 collection Decreation:

Here we go mother on a shipless ocean.
Pity us. Pity the Ocean. Here we go.

It has been suggested that all avante gaarde aesthetics can be read as a perverse assault on the maternal body. These are perverts getting away with touching their mother/matter in ways that no one had previously dared. They are “ahead” in their exhilarating transgression of the maternal body. When we read the line “here we go mother”, we need to consider the physics of this movement. What forces are carrying this movement along? Is her mother being coaxed or pulled? Is there perhaps a shade of adolescent vindictiveness here, in that maybe mother is being taken in a direction which she had feared all along. Maybe now she has grown too old and cannot resist any longer. Shipless ocean can be an allegory for sovereign abjection, or our exposure to the objective dimension of forces that subjectify us, and constitutes us as abandoned subjects. The “here we go…” has a sense of destiny, as if this “going” had been an imminent danger all along. Realizing the power of the dark precursor will ruin dignity, representation, reputation… this descent into abjection is allegorized as the psychopompic voyage to Hades. Pity is a last resort for a living relation – the last chance to recognize members of a human community. But then this line “pity the ocean” disfigures the sense of pity. We might say it sacrifices pity. If being pitiable is a failure of humanity, then throwing pity to the ocean is like the failure of failure, and the movement beyond pity into the dimension of absolute pathos where there is no one left to pity.

Pity is in the threshold at the limit of symbolic relations, along with other affects such as hame, disgust and fear. These relations emerge when more virtuous relations are impossible, and whatever lies beyond these might be called anxiety. But the important question is whether there is something else besides anxiety which can exist in the dimension of sovereign abandonment. It seems that overcoming the anxiety of this dimension might require a transposition of liminal symbolic affects, as if pity could somehow be translated beyond the customary thresholds of representation and become something else. If “pity us” is a kind of symbolic failure, then “pity the ocean” could be an aufebung that translates this threshold relation into the abandoned currents of the beyond, as if pity removed its doxological mask to reveal a strange indigenous relation from the zone of absolute pathos… crowned anarchy?

Leaky Empire

Belgian waffles are popular in China, but here in Jiangxi they are usually made with rice flour. So these waffles are only “Belgian” in their visible appearance, but not in their substance or taste. This disjunction is an allegory of modern times, when appearances are spilling and getting displaced from their substances. For instance, consider how China itself is a supposedly 5000-year-old country which was created in 1911. Layers of material get decoupled and spill out of joint, so there is a series of cascading displacements which reaches ever greater magnitudes. This is the infinite riddle of symbolic excess, that golden apple that Eris hurled up onto Mt. Olympus. When history is seen like this, then leftism appears as a kind of Sunday School that emphasizes the deadly sins of greed and vanity, and since its currency is morality it ignores the deeper processes of destabilization. The sensational drama of sin identifies capitalism with exploitation, and the question of whether there is something more essential never arises. It seems only secularism can abolish this moral drama. By our initiation into material modernity advances beyond good and evil, then we discover a physics of displacement which constitutes the underlying process. One can only be dumbfounded by the immutability of this process, as well as its ambivalence, in that it is both deadly and miraculous. The poverty of the homeless may be terrible, but it is also undeniably a nest of majesty, and modernity is an initiation into the practice of stepping from the abject to the majestic. Empty blocks of luxury apartments may once have riled our Celtic blood, but then eventually the plastic rubble of antiquity becomes an anointing grove-balm. This terrible movement of creation is one of excarnation or excription, where the interior self-reference is endlessly driven outside of itself. Here in China, the practitioners of advanced modernity are tracking the leaking of this empire, as it proceeds under the pressures of ancestral modernity. This tracking practice links to various global topics such as real estate, currencies, credit instruments, education, entertainment, transportation, and tourism. This process of excription, where China is continually driven outside, tends to be a sneaky process, because it threatens to ruin the domestic markets. The entire domestic market could be considered a huge bait-and-switch trap, in that it’s a distraction arranged to facilitate the escape of the elites. Most notorious here are the “loose officials” who gradually excribe themselves by taking on foreign media, spouses, education… and drifting towards a final move abroad, which is a sort of mirage of ultimate ethnic betrayal that hovers eternally on the horizon. They arrange a domestic market of Belgian waffles made with rice flour, in order that they may eat waffles in Belgium. The leftist inclination is to construe this as a moral story about outrageous injustice which must be stopped. But this moralizing gets tiring, and seems rather futile. The drama that we call capitalism is only a superficial reflection of a deeper material process of displacement, where populations are subjected to an exogenous pressure for escape. The critical sensations are not deadly sins, but rather an anonymous suffocation, or strangulation, or a double-bind that forces the violation of an incest taboo, so that something foreign is desperately needed. So the term “capitalism” refers to something much stranger than the Sunday school drama of leftism wants to consider, and perhaps this is what Rilke complained about when he wrote obscurely in the Notebooks of Malte Brigge: “…now it was growing from within me like a tumor, like a second head… and it was part of me, though it surely could not be mine because it was so big… the blood was loth to pass it… its margin cast a shadow on my remaining eye.” This is an ancestral pressure which drives the Chinese into a pageantry of alter-Sinification, to sacrifice their ethnicity for success, and the most notoriously leaky areas in this respect are along the southern coast of Guangdong and Fujian. A trans-ethnic intercourse is performed spectacularly by Cantonese stars like Jackie Chan. His latest film Kung-Fu Yoga is set in India and Dubai, and he plays a history professor investigating jewelry theft. This is monstrous allegory, where the action hero is an intellectual who investigates jewelry theft. Open Sesame? Hong Kong jewelers are a conspicuous aspect of the Chinese city. There is an unusual practice of selling diamonds for Thanksgiving (sic), as though that were a normal practice abroad, which is a form of theft faster than Jackie Chan. But “theft” is one of those humanistic moral terms that we use in the Sunday school dramas of heroism, with their tests of sin and suffering. An adult sermon should discuss realistic problems, like how the ancestors secretly threaten to force the blood from our veins if we don’t continually change places.

Economics of the Future

What Money Wants: An Economy of Desire (2014) by Noam Yuran is an intriguing work on the philosophy of economics. What follows is one of my typically adventurous book reviews. This will attempt to situate the theory within a broader discursive problematic, and consider how such a philosophy might support the development of a future economics.

This is a mysterious book, and perhaps it is even mystical. The development of something original is underway here. A new conception of economy seems to be emerging. Distinct patterns are appearing, though there is much uncertainty concerning how this might proceed. So readers of such a book are implicated in a sort of midwifery, and here I want to engage in some hermeneutic reflection on the process that is underway.

Orthodox economics assumes a common sense rationality of the everyman. By assuming people are rational in some obvious way, it aligns itself with popular modernization ideologies related to liberal democracies and positivist sciences like evolutionary biology. Economic behavior is assumed to be rational, whether as a result of education or evolution. And this refers to a particular form of rationality, where subjects behave like English shopkeepers, as Marx once quipped. This rationality can be invoked as a dignifying quality that separates civilized men from the savages.

But we know there is something awry with this model of Homo Economicus, and a future economics has the problem of  conceiving economic behavior otherwise. It would have to introduce some dimension of subjectivity that goes beyond this superficially rational actor. Yuran’s book suggests how economic behavior might be understood otherwise. It proposes some conceptual shifts in how we understand market behavior in relation with money. These shifts could have profound consequences. And the conception of economic rationality is not just a concern for economists, because these models are at the core of social relations, where they affect how people communicate and interpret behavior.

This book’s innovation is to introduce the sublime into economic theory. The sublime is normally considered an aesthetic dimension, and there is a problematic about the relationship between economics and aesthetics. This area of theory is something of a polemical minefield. There is a legacy of animosity between bourgeois positivism and romantic aestheticism, and the move of introducing an economic sublime could easily be interpreted as another episode in the age-old logos-mythos debate. It seems we need to steer this discussion beyond obsolete cold war polemics.

For negotiating through this terrain, it seems important to hold close to the practical problem of a future economics. Any viable economics ultimately can only succeed as a boring, mundane activity, and there is a danger that literary aesthetics could distract from its properly quotidian concerns. This is not to detract from Yuran’s lucid discussion of Dickens, but only to suggest perhaps a Platonistic distinction between a mathematical sublime and an aesthetic sublime, where the stakes must be carefully distributed between them.

The sublime dimension that Yuran proposes is analogous to Lacanian extimacy, and Heideggerian ecstasis. But this is a philosophy of the economic, so we are not talking about Dasein, or an a clinical analysand, but rather the prospect of a new form of economic behavior. The book often uses the terms “subject” and “object”, though we should be very careful with these terms. These terms can have a wide range of connotations, and they are only going to be useful if their sense is precise.

In this book, a “subject” or a “persona” is identified by certain gestures, or traits, or manners, or values. This book is about a subject that it empties itself, that is a zealous attitude of self-sacrifice. And the operative question that guides most of the discussion is why this subject empties itself. I would suggest that in reading we consider this “why” as a primary question, and that further questions – such as what is it emptying itself of, how does it empty itself, where are its contents emptied too, who does it become once it is emptied – can follow later. This why points to ancient mysteries of sacrifice which are associated with the praxis of capital accumulation.

This emptying is presented as an ancient habit. The term “personae” is the Latin word for mask, and we can imagine that a certain form of emptying is a mask that covers earlier forms of emptying. Though the book does not include much discussion on the longer history of this trait. To access some primordial sense of emptying, one section discusses a theory of excretion and anal behavior proposed by the psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi. This reference seems to have been carefully chosen from possible psychoanalytic material that could have been discussed. Topics like anorexia or depression, or perhaps masochism, might be suitable here. And in terms of ancient civilization, this trait of emptying is associated with religious asceticism. So there is a background on this emptying gesture, where there might be some link between religious asceticism and certain forms of psychopathology.

This subject empties itself for the sake of objective processes, so this could be described as a gesture of self-sacrifice. We might think of Abraham falling on his face and uttering “Before you I am ashes.” This irrational gesture is a point from which we can start to conceive the sublime as a dimension of subjectivity which an economics of the future would have to take for granted. This all comes from an elegant point: how can economics account for capitalism? How can we interpret how the capitalist gives up everything for the sake of money? The liberal doxologists have avoided this question, but saying the capitalist wants other things that money can buy. But instead we can consided him as one who negates themself for the pure sake of financial accumulation.

One of the remarkable features of this book is its rigorous textual methodology. It focuses on an intersection between three theorists: Karl Marx, Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen. George Simmel is in the back ground. Slavoj Zizek is mediating the discussion. In what follows here, I am not going to retrace this textual conversation. Though I should emphasize that the method is quite effective. He manages to express some of Zizek’s ideas more effectively and efficiently than Zizek has ever done. I think this is partly because Zizek himself gets distracted with convoluted legacy concerns (he is an “old-style Marxist”, whatever that means), whereas Yuran moves deftly after an economics of the future.

Near the beginning of this book, there appears the expression “veil of neutrality”. This term struck me as something mystical, and it piqued my curiosity about its origin. I was impressed to discover that the expression actually comes from…. neoclassical economics! As Keith Hart underlines in his preface, Yuran is not just importing theory from elsewhere to criticize economic orthodoxy. Instead he finds the terms for his criticism within the orthodox economic texts themselves. So this book is, among other things, a work of deconstruction.

The issue of neutrality is a flash-point in discussions of economic philosophy. A few years ago, a renegade options trader named Ellie Ayache published a book titled The Blank Swan, and it shares some overlapping concerns with Economy of Desire, such as mediation, contingency and singularity. On this issue, the author deftly refers to Marshall McLuhan, in his discussion of how economists treat money as a “mere medium”, where in media studies the medium is anything but mere. In overlooking money, the economists have ignored the contingency of the medium. Then there are problems of how the contingency of a medium can be presented or represented within the medium.

The literary critic Maurice Blanchot distinguished the neuter and the neutral. This has to do with the legacy of Platonism in France, and the controversy surrounding the question of univocity. It’s said that Cartesian dualism emerged from a truncated univocity that was invented by Francisco Suarez. So there is this criticism that distinguishes true univocity from the false univocities that disintegrate into dualism. This area of onto-metaphysics and aesthetics could be critical background for a philosophy of economics. A future economics may end up oriented between ontologies of univocity, equivocity, and duality.

Much of the philosophical difficulty concerning the development of a future economics will probably hinge on the problem of immanence. Immanence is exposed to chaos, and so any immanent development always implies risks. So in speculating on the development of a future economics, perhaps we should consider what sorts of disagreements arise surrounding the problem of immanence.

While reading this book, it crossed my mind several times that the author is apparently an Israeli. This occurred when he cited another Israeli named Eva Illouz, and so I considered the possibility of an emerging Israeli school of economics. Another time the author’s ethnicity crossed my mind was when he cited an apparently anti-semitic statement by john Maynard Keynes.

To orient the discussion at an immanent level, it may be important to reflect on a writer’s symbolic representation. Terms such as “Protestant” or “Chinese” can have an ethnographic sense, but these terms can also be ascribed to participants in a discussion. This way these symbols can be embodied or manifest immanently within a discussion, and the discussion may involve antagonism over the inscription of values and commodity relations. The future of economics might hinge on how this sort of singular manifestation becomes reflexive, and how it gets expressed in writing. Where orthodoxies have assumed the cloak of crude universality, heterodoxy would have to express authentic singularity.

Immanence exposes theory to the risk of getting drawn into obscure conflicts. By hiding behind a veil of crudely rationalistic neutrality, orthodoxy has been able to maintain a position of aloof hegemony. But when a heterodoxy starts to expose the contingent, then the theory is likely to be imperiled by the conflicted complexities of the real.

Having said this, the theory articulated in Economy of Desire seems like a robust point of departure. It has integrity in that it adheres to its own conditions. Or we could say that its expression does not contradict its content. Considering the book itself as a commodity, it would seem to be the sort of commodity that its own theory might recommend. One does not detect much irony in these pages. But going forward, the question of where irony arises may become important, because irony can provide an index of false neutrality. There needs to be a sensitivity to subtle ironies which are sure to arise.

For an example of what I am talking about here, consider Pierre Klossowsski’s last published work, a bizarre treatise titled Living Money (1972), which is an ironic tract of heterodox neo-Thomastic economics. Klossowki explores a kind of zealot manner that he called an ascesis of affect. Living Money shares its core problem with Yuran’s book, in trying to conceive the essence of money, though the works share no textual references. I think Yuran’s book succeeds in taking a non-ironic step into heterodox monetary theory. The problem is to discover a path for economics that leads beyond the exhaustion of the Last Man, or beyond the fraying of ontology into the equivocal.

Willam Stanely Jevons was a Victorian economist whose theory figures prominently in the book, though his name isn’t mentioned. Jevons is credited with inventing the marginal utility models that characterize neoclassical economics. That was the theory which mathematicized economics in the way that it is today. The sort of artificial rationality that this discipline propounds is incessantly ironic, in that it is a supposed rationality that is in fact a madness. It is a hyper-rationalism that ends up being completely irrational, staging these drama’s of arbitrary choices between… say manicures and chocolates.

One of the advantages of Economy if Desire is its narrow focus. It accomplishes a precise mission, and doesn’t get distracted. But for an erudite reader, the pages refer us to other unwritten pages. Economics was involved in a mimicry where Victorian disciplines attempted to imitate the respectability of Newtonian physics. Yuran doesn’t mention scientificism, but one can see how the apple that hit Newton on the head was a scientific incarnation of a sublime object. The scientist empties themself in a manner which is akin to the capitalist and the religious ascetic. And Newton himself was involved with gold minting, and so we can see that scientificism is implicated in the sublime object of money.

So the issue of economics’s own scientificity is related to this gesture of emptying before an objective process. Jevons emptied himself to create an automatic model of economic behavior. If we consider how the so-called “invisible hand” has been used as a rhetorical trope, then we can see how a larger problematic fits together. The invisible hand is a pseudo-religious idea that economies run automatically, or we could say objectively. It is the secular economists way of saying “leave it to God”, or like the amor fati of stoicism.

From a broader perspective, there is obviously a link between irony and automatism. There is a condition where society has been reduced to these automated roles, yet everyone must create the illusion that this is not the case. Zizek talks about how waiters in France behave like robots, in order to differentiate themselves from their roles, while waiters in America behave in a way that is unnaturally human, to somehow accomplish the same differentiation. So it is not simply that we must play these roles, but that we are forced to also pretend that we are not playing these roles. Objectivity in this sense can be something excruciating painful, and a heterodox economics could adopt the mission of bringing this kind of objectivity to an end.

Gilles Deleuze took an interest in Jevons, commenting that his marginal utility theory was awful for an economics, but could be interesting for metaphysics. Deleuze was interested in thresholds, the point where an arrangement or exchange terminates, and some other arrangement replaces it, and perhaps he was electing Jevons as a theorist of the end of the Last Man. This would be a terminal irony of neoclassical economics. This would be a point where the rational actor realizes his own irrationality.

The Last Man is a theme in philosophy that often involves irony and humor. There are cynical jikes  this joke: Child: “I hope Donald Trump blows up the world.” Old man: “it wouldn’t matter, because life would just evolve back again. It always does.” Beyond the humor of last man, it seems heterodox economics should posit the question of a new rationality. So I am suggesting an ethics of non-irony in economics. The old economic orthodoxy has tried to remain serious about some things, even when colored with cynicism. It tries to be serious about its liberal political ideas like democracy and human rights. At the center of its doctrines, there are serious concerns with growth, inflation and sometimes employment. But what might a heterodox economics take seriously? Which concerns might it inherit from orthodoxy?

Economy of Desire emphasizes historical ontology, and here I want to make a critical intervention. This historical focus strikes me as a peculiar 19th century German preoccupation. Yuran places an historical absence at the heart of desire, but history is only one modality of absence. When he talks about the persistence of institutions, that persistence does not seem necessarily historical. Or we could say the term “history” limits the discussion in a way that might be unfortunate. Historicization is suspicious because it is a political reaction to the anti-historical attitude of liberalism. So the invocation of history seems like a reflex that is repeating some traumatic cold war antagonism. History is the sort of baggage which is most difficult to carry. So my point is that our conception of the absence of desire should broaden our relations to the past and memory, like in the ontology of Bergsonian Platonism.

It seems the absence of desire in a future economics would be more of a geographical absence, in that it concerns more distance rather than the past. Yuran’s discussion about institutional persistence is interesting, but the next point would be that institutions are situated geographically. David Harvey has said interesting things about the space-time dialectics of capital, but no one seems to be picking up on that. This is the point where we should discuss the concept of Parallax, the Zizekian concept which Yuran has adopted as a methodology. Zizek took this (Kantian) expression from the Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani, who is interested in geographical relations. This problem of history and memory versus geography and distance is going to be critical for the development of future economics, and it seems that a heterodox economics could greatly benefit from the ability to think about desire geographically.

There is a point I want to mention about the contingency of desire, namely that it might be considered a uniquely French institution. In 1948, George Bataille published an article on the origins of chivalry. According to him, chivalry emerged from the encounter of Roman Catholic imperialism with the tribes of northern Europe. He characterizes the tribes as having a “shamanic” culture, and says their relation to the sublime was one of immanence. The sublime for them was not something otherworldly, but something they encountered directly, whether as threatening or invigorating. But as they came under the power of the church, they were brought under the influence of a transcendent, sacerdotal relation with the sublime. They were supposedly distanced from their shamanic sublime. So desire is this institution where Teutonic spirituality is distanced from itself. Lacan emphasized the troubadour ethic, and Deleuze was interested in Gothic architecture.

For Yuran’s discussion of the institutionalization of desire, it is interesting to consider the legacy of Catholic imperialism and its ethnic connotations. The popular association of luxury brands with “French romance” demonstrates the sort of geo-economic contingencies associated with the institution of money. Europe is the most popular tourist destination in the world, and the monetary desire which drives that industry is losing its historical codification.  The switch from history to geography is disruptive for the habits of socialist intellectuals, because their idealism tends to be anchored in historical relationships. Geographical thinking will ultimately prevail, because it is more pragmatic and realistic, but this requires transformations in political codes.

Cultural Education

‘from the perspective of difference, your liver and your gall bladder are like Chu (a country to the north) and Yue (a country to the south), but from the perspective of sameness, the ten thousand things are like one.’          Zhuangzi, Daoist Sage

I’ve been thinking about how to resist multiculturalism as a system of doxology or clichés. For this, I want to propose a new conception of ‘culture’ that can parasite off this doxology. A return of culture could perhaps relieve the tired concerns of political-economy, whether liberal or radical.

Let’s begin from how culture is truncated under regimes of identity. Nationalism assigns populations simplistic identities, so that a nationality can imply a race, ancestry, language, religion, history, tastes, family-structures, arts, world-views, politics and beliefs. I propose another conception of culture that could engages vigorously with this kind of hegemonic national identity. These hegemonic identities often serve as loci for information processing, for instance in how events are reported by news services, and so this proposed break could drastically alter representation.

Of course this break with nationality would not be advisable for everyone. People are habituated to their positions in multiculturalism, especially as they are coded into markets, and the danger of losing those positions might be frightening. Breaking the spell of cultural identity opens margins of uncertainty and complexity which are likely to provoke anxiety. So the movement I am suggesting here is something definitely minoritarian, and would have to include recodifications or renormalizations. And again, the key is to remain closely engaged with the majoritarian clichés.

Multiculturalism can be considered a form of consciousness and perception. More specifically, it is a way of distinguishing the habitual from the non-habitual or the native from the foreign. It expresses identities in order to segregate the same from the other. And it usually seeks the most convenient ways to posit these identities, which often means basing them on the perception of skin complexion, dress, or manner of speech. This way identities are decided on the basis of appearance.

The idea of culture gets abused when deployed for this purpose of distinguishing nationalities. This denigrates culture by trapping it in the field of perception. And this tendency can be insidious, as identification impulses often get denied and buried, as there is awareness that they are in poor taste, especially in liberal circles. National identities persist as an economic imperative. Exchanges are programmed to take place on the basis of these identities, and so they get reasserted against better judgement. As I shall suggest, this problematic ultimately comes down to the symbolic matrix of exchange – that is what must be altered necessarily.

The break I propose would reorient culture away from perception and into the realm of memory. Where multiculturalism identifies objects of perception according to their familiarity and foreignness, I suggest that culture should be reconceived more abstractly as impersonal memory processes. These would be the processes where presence arrives from and disappears into the past and the distance. Thus there is no need to challenge multicultural identities, because it would is effective to subvert the entire identity-based conception of culture.

National identities are transmitted through ancestry, and this model of transmission must be broken. We need to reconceive culture as something transmitted through education alone. So education works as the dialectical opposite of ancestry, which it must obliterate. Education in this sense would be an alternate way of orienting populations in space-time, or in dynamic relation to the past and the distant. Where multicultural ancestry captures populations within a spectacle of presence, barring them from realms of absence, education would experiment with transitions between absence and presence, or between language and intimacy. This is the logistical programs that alternate between symbolic idealizations and concrete intimacies.

An educator would have to position themselves at a juncture within the matrix of multicultural exchange. Education in this sense has to be a localized process, and this whole proposed re-conception of culture can only be discussed if we are ready to translate between local conditions. So it is relevant to mention that I am teaching in a foreign languages department at a small university in Jiangxi Province, People’s Republic of China.

There is a commercial maxim in Chinese, 出口转内销, which means something like ‘exports turn into imports’. Things that were sent out to be sold in other countries return repackaged in altered forms and get sold on the domestic market. I want to suggest a kind of cultural education that would be a matter of orienting populations within this kind of circulation. Cultural would be conceived as a hypothetical noumenal substance that circulates at varying speeds, and education would be a technique for modelling those circulations. Through this sort of education, populations are alienated from their identities in a way that sets symbolic generation into motion. Culture would be a moving relational form which energizes populations in an alienating way, and this alienation sets symbolic relations off-kilter for the sake of expression.

There is an activity I have my students perform, where they must group the seven billion people in this world into identities. They attempt to use concepts of nationality, race, gender, language, profession and region. In the course of this activity they run into messy set paradoxes, where each identity they propose runs into various problems. This on-going muddle reminds me of Plato’s Parmenides where they get all confused in a messy dialectic of the one and the many which Hegel found so disagreeable. What most interests me is how the students feel comfortable with some identities, and not with others. They are usually comfortable identifying themselves as Chinese, Asians, men or women, students, or youth. But interestingly, they are not so comfortable identifying themselves as ‘east Asian’.

This I find is remarkable, because ‘east Asian’ is a relatively coherent and functional cultural identity. It denotes a group of roughly 1.6 billion people who share a definable region, and a set of practices: they are chopstick-using, rice-eating, celebrate their new years on the second new moon after the solstice etc. But this identity of ‘east Asian’ makes my students uncomfortable because it conflicts with their nationality, because it lumps them together with Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese, groups who they consider as foreign nationalities. So their ancestral nationalism is incongruent with the cultural archives associated with their everyday behavior. Their Han ancestry is represented these days through cartoonish images (such as the ‘Chinese Dream’ sequence) which are divorced from the historical circulation and development of culture in east Asia.

My next point concerns how this cartoonish stereotype of nationality relates to what we might call culture markets. It is well known that the archives of Chinese civilization include vast bounties of literature, painting, theatre, music and dance. But the problem is that nationalism limits the accessibility of this archive. The noumenal substance of culture passes between dynasties and languages, and much of it becomes illegible due to the insistence on a fixed identity of the Han people. For instance, even the fabled Tang dynasty, the centrepiece of Chinese civilization, are not identifiable as ethnically Han.

So the economic point here is that nationalism takes the resources of civilization off the market. So this re-conception of culture could be considered from an economic advantages, in that it could overcome the scarcity of culture created by nationalist ideology.

This tombstone was discovered in Fujian province on the east coast of China. The inscription is in Syraic, and a date is given according to an Alexandrian calendar which corresponds to the early 12th century AD. This image can help us to pose a broad question concerning the circulation of Hellenistic culture in East Asia. There is reason to suspect that Chinese Buddhism may have been Hellenized in India before it circulated into China, and that this left it with features bearing a family resemblance with Christianity. This systemic connection has broad ramifications for the interpretation of Chinese modernity. Some archaeologists have gone so far as to argue that the iconic terracotta warriors in the tomb of the First Emperor (236 BC) were constructed with ‘Greek’ technology. Such facts are open to debate, but there remains the possibility of a broad Sino-Hellenistic historiography that would allow for compelling reinterpretations of Chinese modernity. The possibility is open that a layer of Alexandrian codes were introduced in ancient China, which has provided a cultural foundation for modern Chinese liberalism. The consequences of this reinterpretation would be far reaching, and could facilitate a revitalization of global civilization.

A series of related inquires arise from this hypothesis. Allow me to make a few broad strokes here, just to illustrate the magnitude of this discovery. There are, for instance, the striking homologies between the literature of Han dynasty statesmanship and the contemporaneous Roman Stoicism. There is the question of how the Qing dynasty relates to the Counter-Reformation, and how the struggle that ended the Ming was coupled with the contemporaneous Thirty Years War. It seems that colonization models have obscured inter-regional correlations. There is the problematic of how revolutionaries like Sun Yat-sen and Mao Tse-tung fit into broader patterns that would include revolutionaries like Ming Hong-Wu, St. Francis of Assisi, Jean Calvin, Oliver Cromwell, and all the way down to Donald Trump. These are obviously huge problematics, but the point here is that they suffice just as problematics. They do not demand solutions, but rather they are the keys which can function to open the circuitry of world cultural exchange.

Liberal capitalism did not arrive abruptly in China as is often assumed, but was planted here in ancient times, where it grew up just as it did elsewhere. The challenge is to recognize Chinese modernity as something indigenous which has communicated with global modernity all along. This sort of orientation would render the archive of Chinese civilization more accessible, putting it on the market as it were. It could also bring a definitive end to the period of European colonization. It seems the theory of colonization should be renovated into something more abstract and singular.

In some ways, this brings us back to postmodernity, although significant innovations have taken place in the discussion. It should be possible to deal with this condition more tactfully than it was last time around. For one thing, we have learned that marketing must be taken as the ultimate objective, since that is the arena where any movement succeeds or fails. Commercial exchange becomes an ideal form of alienation, so that the raw impersonal circulation of culture through the archive must accede to commercialization.

The cultural markets must be hacked in order to overcome the limitations imposed by nationalism. An Ariadne’s thread of ancient civilization must be fed into the market, so that the spice route is remobilized, and the whole global exchange system reboots itself on the basis of its elements in ancient religion. The markets must get hooked on a singular dynamic of cultural circulation, aka world systems, in order to initiate another Great Return. This is the step that so-called postmodernity has been unable to achieve, but which still may be possible.

From the perspective of difference, one chopstick is from Chu and the other from Yue, but from the perspective of sameness, Mao and Trump could be identical twins.

The point here again is not to overturn multiculturalism, but to pervert it so to insert (插) the flows of cultural memory. Nationalism is often stricken with weakness and poverty. The key is to exploit its points of exhaustion, and to insert archival programming there at the sites of its greatest weakness or abjection.

There is a further theoretical problematic this creates, which concerns the subjective orientation of the archive, or we could say the archive’s own pleasure principle. Much energy will have to be devoted to this problem of the subjective (in)finitude of memory, or what might be called archive fever. There must be vigilance regarding the fragile edges of the subject’s composition, which must be maintained through ruses. Let me next begin to outline some borromean strategy for maintaining subjective composition where postmodernity has so far failed.

When John Dewey arrived in China for his 1919-22 lecture tour, he understood that he was bringing with him ancient cultural codes which had passed through China before. He knew that his doctrines of Wilsonian democracy were not completely foreign to the Middle Kingdom. He tried to speak from a position that was oriented within this infinite circulation. Dewey must be considered as a precursor in this project, but one who failed miserably. And his failure corresponds with the failure of secularism and liberal modernity.

Religion provides essential resources for the codification of infinity. The subject of the archive has proper names, such as Confucius, Buddha, Christ, Mohammad, along with their disciples, and the gods and spirits they worshiped. Religion provides these masks or personas which equip us to speak from the position of infinity. As we break with the cliché’s of nationalism, these masks recodify us onto something familiar, which we could call the pleasure principles of the ancient world.

The clichés of multiculturalism themselves must be used tactfully. They are like stepping stones that can prevent us from getting washed away – swooning – into infinity. When we are in danger of getting lost, we play a multicultural cliché, however ironically.

These are three different levels of resources that we cobble together to maintain subjective composure. First, we must register the very particular local contingencies under which we are coding. Secondly, we dabble in mythology and god masks, wherever they become functional to express the voice of the archive. Thirdly, we resort to multi-cultural clichés, which function as points of desublimation. These are of course the negative positions in the market-matrix which we are attempting to overcome, but wherever we can’t succeed in overcoming them, then they can be adopted ironically.

The problem is to put the archive into market-motion. To work on the matrix of exchange surrounding the multicultural clichés, and manipulate that matrix in order to bring threads of archival material into play. One must discover a dynamic or rhythm whereby this substitution can take place: a substitution of cliché for memory. The problem is to smuggle the archival material into the market under the guises of multiculturalism and ancient religion.

Working at a particular juncture in the system of world exchange, one hacks the prevailing pleasure principles so that archival flows can be substituted into exchange systems.

Traversing Obstinacy

I’m reading a book called Civilization and Monsters (1999) by Gerald Figal, which is an ethnography of modernization in Meiji Japan (1860s-1930s). It focuses on the rhetoric of fantasy. There were intriguing debates in those days between folklorists and naturalists, which can provide fodder for metaphysical speculations, and insight into current political conditions. The project of cultivating a national spirituality led the Japanese folklorists to produce a sort of patriotic fantasy literature, but that genre ran into conflict with scientific positivism.  This sort of dialectic is a variation on the common mythos-logos tension that often runs through modernization discourses. But there was something distinctive about how these debates unfolded in Japan, and this area of discourse is especially relevant for understanding what is happening in east Asia today.

To outline an original path through this impasse between science and spirituality, I will suggest how the (rationalist) psychoanalytic cure can be allegorized with (spiritualist) religious conversion to conceive a hybrid event which is neither psychoanalytic nor religious, but something entirely anomalous. This event involves an original externalization of the superego. This is a theory of the event that can move beyond the mythos-logos impasse. This could have interesting political consequences.

Let’s begin with a simple model of psychopathology.  A pathological subject is one who perceives different objects, experiences, loves… but these all share a common essence which is the fundemental fantasy. Thus we can define pathology simply as obstinacy. The fantasy is like a fence that encloses the range of possible experiences, and the problem of psychoanalysis is to help the subject move that fence. This allows for a richer psychic life, because it opens a wider range of possible relationships. I want to consider this fence-moving as an allegory for religious conversion.

The psychoanalytic cure implies a new relation with the instinctual drive, where the drive itself remains the same, but the disposition of subjectivity in relation to it changes.  There is some change in how the energy of the drive is represented symbolically. This is a new partitioning of the drive-energy between self and other, and this redistribution is what I conceive as a conversion-cure event. This is where subjectivity is restructured so the drive possesses it otherwise. This event is where the attribution of the drive shifts onto the other, so it becomes the other’s drive.

The event of religious conversion can provide a sense of relief, because the burden of the drive is shifted to the Other.  Previously, the drive affected the subject more directly, disrupting their temperment, and binding them to a limited horizon if relationships. But with conversion the drive is attributed to the deity. This way, religious conversion can be understood as an event which establishes a margin of disassociation from the drive-energy. The drive is resymbolized, so that it is attributed to the alterity if the other.

In psychoanalysis, the drive which irritates the subject has been channelled through the super-ego, the hypothetical faculty which deploys the drive as social pressure.  This way the force of the drive becomes a pressure rivetted onto the subject. The event of cure provides relief from this rivetting, by externalizing this faculty, so the subject gets some distance from it. The subject finds some new liberty in how they relate to the drive.

In religion, the super-ego gets externalized when it is replaced by God, while in psychoanalysis the externalization takes place through the analyst. What interests me here is whether this externalization might be conceived in a way that is non-clinical, and yet rigorously materialist.  I want to conceptualize a conversion-cure that would proceed without analyst and without God.  This event would reposition subjectivity within the system of affects.  The superego operates affect-identity traps which capture subjects in particular relations with the drive.

Fascism and consumerism offer seductive affects linked with identities.  The conversion-cure would contrast with these temptations, as an alternative system of identity and affect. But the concept of this event would remain closely connected to models of how the superego functions in consumerism and fascism.

In this regard, I want to consider the case of the Japanese folklorist Kunio Yanagita (1875-1962). He studied the invisible spirits of the Japanese people and transcribed folktales in a manner reminiscent to how the Grimms brothers had treated the Germanic spirit a few decades earlier.  This sort of spirit quest provides a form of enjoyment, where the Thing is this living essence of the nation. There was an event that occured in the middle of Yanagita’s career which provides a model for an event of conversion-cure.

Yanagita’s early writings focused on a certain legendary monster, the tengu. This is a ghostly thing that lives in the mountains and takes different forms.  For instance, a tengu can appear in the guise of a wandering monk. Yanagati published volumes of ghost stories about people getting possessed by tengus. He effectively approached this monster as the core of Japanese spirituality. He elaborated the abstract logic if its transformations in legends, and proposed that this was the hidden nuomena of his nation.  As this work continued, he gradually became obsessed with these creatures, and apparently even beleived in their actual existence. In this early phase he was also interested in female shamans, who went into the mountains where they conversed with divine beings and underwent initiations. This brought him to the topic of hysteria, which was assiciated with tengu-possession and mountain madness. This aspect of Japanese folk culture that was getting stigmatized and pathologized through modernization, and mountain madness was a fleeting site of resustance against the Meiji enlightenment.  Eventually the scientific community ridiculed Yanagita for being superstitious, as if he were succumbing to some effeminizing mountain madness himself.

In the mid-1920s he abandoned this concern with the mountain-tengus which had been at the center of his early work. The focus of his later research shifted onto ancestral cults of Okinawa, and in those patriarchal cults he relocated the spiritual heart of Japan in his later writings. These ancestors were a kind of omnipresent surveillance agency, which perpetually watched over the Japanese people. These ancestral cults were the core institutions of the emerging Japanese fascism.  After being ridiculed for his beleif in ghosts, he shifted his work into the service of nationalism.  

This shift from tengus to ancestors illustrates how the superego can be refigured. My concern here is that the superego itself could have an underlying invariable existence – a nuomenal Thing – which can be figured according to these different avatars.  The ancestors replaced the tengus as a superegoic figure.  These figures externalize a communal super-ego, so that a community is possessed by this external agency.

But how could materialists pursue analagous refigurations of the superego?  How to conceptualuze the possibilities for how the nuomena could repossess us otherwise?

Let us hypothesize that the superego itself may have an actual material existence however unlocalized. This would be a social physiology that would regulate the circulation of affects, a chemical system of communication within the nervous system. This system continually models our position within society, and modulates the electrochemistry of our drives according to its symbolization of our social behavior.  The superego would thus exist concretely, and would perform a symbolic modelling independantly of the psyche. This system would regulate the ammount of drive-energy available for the psyche, along with its emotional disposition.

This way of conceiving the superego is foreign to psychoanalysis, which considers symbols as part of the psyche. So I’m interested in a non-psychic symbolic, a kind of karmatic physiology, that would replace the narrowly psychological conception of the symbolic Other.  So this event would break with therapeutic theory or clinical psychology.  There is an implicit psychologicism in all clinical theory, which is perhaps part of a Cartesian legacy which translates symbols back into subjective relations.

The event I propose would occur at a point where the subject separates its own identity from this automated karmatic system. This would be a realization that this system is something appart from the psyche, something that perceives and codifies the body from the outside. This Thing would exist seperately as an automatic network for the social regulation of affects.  This external faculty would survey the subject’s actions, model their behavior karmatically, and generate the physiological responses which cause their affective dispositions. This material bureaucracy of affects is independant of the psyche.

This way the subject’s affects would no longer be experienced as immediately theirs, but would come to them indirectly, according to how this social system codifies their behavior. And they can only attain limited understanding of this mdchanism. This way they would not actively take their enjoyments, but rather receive them as retribution from this Thing.

The Japanese ancestors provide a model for this Thing, which could be figured according to different avatars. It could be figured as ancestors, gods, heroes, lovers, leaders, parents, children, neighbors, animals or enemies.  Beneath all these avatars is the physiological Thing which generates affective disposition towards karmatic others.This Thing can be allegorized with any social relation, yet its actual embodyment is physiological. It’s a kind of blank superego that is open to any figurations.  This way the subjects are not affected directly by any real social relations, but only through their physiological codification. This is a biological theory of karma as a neurochemical modelling of social relations.

This materialist subject would be liberated to pass through various avatars of the Thing, which each possess the community differently in turn.  This sort of mediated socialization is more satisfying than limited approaches which fix the Thing as an identity relation. Materialism allows for a wider range of affective dispositions, because the Thing can always be refigured otherwise.  

However, this infinite range of affective variation can also be a liability. The functioning of this material superego would require a degree of figural composition. The model of society and our orientation in it must be coherently figured. Without figural coherence the materialists risk catatonia. Avoiding catatonia requires an adequite repetoire of symbols and figures that code globally.

Much of this problem concerns the selection of personas, which are figurations of subjectivity disposed under singular conditions.  They provide subjective skins or costumes. These could be races, or cults, or just vague sets of traits.  A persona can be positioned on the side of the other or on the side of self, which means as either surveyer or surveyed, codifier or codified. The Other is the watcher whose symbolic perception grants the self its share of drive-energy, just as did the ancestors of the japanese.

Fascism and consumerism capture subjectivity into fixed relations with the nuomenal. They fixate the nuomenal as an identity.  The materialist event would be a revelation that the superegoic Thing is without figure. This Thing is rather a karmatic function, that can be refigured according to whatever contingencies arrise. It may be hard to predict how it will operate.  This way there is a solidarity between logos and mythos, such that our materialist rationality promotes the infinite expression of spirituality.  

This implies a dualism between the material base of physiology and the identities of spirituality. Here we are approaching the sort of Platonism that was circulating in Paris during the mid-20th century. This is comparable to the theory Deleuze outlined in Logic of Sense (1969). My proposed event takes a step beyond Deleuze’s “world without others” by positing the Other as a material actuality. This is not a world without others, but one where alterity has been radicalized.  I’m interested in an Other that is actual, but which exists on a dimension completely foreign to that of the psyche.  

This event would open a critical distance between affects and identities. The superegoic Thing produces affects through the physiology, and we know little about this procezs. Affects just befall us without cause. But perhaps we are free in how we figure them for identity. And this figuration may transform how they are felt.

This theory is geared towards the current conditions in the Chinese world.  Development in the People’s Republic has been following Japanese models on many points, and the dialectic of modernization and spirituality has entered a phase where the metaphysics of ancestry is becoming decisive. Xi Jinping speaks of ancestral fabulations like the Spiritual Civilization and the Chinese Dream, while the new Confucianists have proposed a reformed government based on ancestral castes. In this environment, I beleive the superego should be annexed by a conceptual materialism. The point is to ensure that figurations of the nuomenal remain variable. This might be accomplished by separating the origins of affect from the realm of psychological identity.