In this project, I seek to understand the logic of mass violence, not committed just in the top-down manner of juridical violence, but in the horizontal manner of collective violence against groups of people deemed ontologically and/or ethically subhuman. The variety of perspectives on this issue has been most noticeably done on the subject of the holocaust and German society from that period. Thus, a lot of the historiographical debate follows alongside sociological debate on the subject from the 1980s onwards. In this debate, Zygmunt Bauman proposes a thesis in Modernity & the Holocaust, following from Hannah Arendt’s work in Eichmann in Jerusalem, that the modern techniques of bureaucratic disengagement with moral choices created the possibility of the Holocaust. Bauman describes his thesis as between two mistaken extremes, where, on one end, the holocaust is an extreme exception that could only happen to the Jewish population, and, on the other end, so common that instances of mass violence are the normal functioning of modernity. In contrast to Bauman, Daniel Goldhagen offers an approach focusing on the German population and their historical anti-semitic culture; in Hitler’s Willing Executioners, he offers the perspective that the entire population of Germany was willing participants in the holocaust due to their history that led up to a mass annihilation of Jewish people. A third perspective may be found in a contemporary 1930s and 40s account of Nazi Germany in Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which argues that German culture developed and invested in fascism due to the repressive tendencies of its libidinal economy, summarized as the political economy and its relation to desire & the unconscious. Through Reich’s work, we are able to focus on the Germans as a collective instead of as Bureaucrats, but additionally as part of an irrational, violent culture created by repressive regimes in the family and culture that directed desire into patriarchal desire and annihilationist politics. This early libidinal economic view does not require centuries of anti-semitic build-up, but, like Bauman, allows for this to be a possibility of modern society, but with a mix of lingering archaic, repressive social structures that were merely invested in to the point of becoming the collective unconscious force of the German people.

Between these three views, we find a variety of necessary points for trying to understand mass cruelty, but not a solid understanding of its exact overall mechanics. While I can pull from each that firstly, this is a problem of rational modernity, secondly, this is a problem of the collective culture, and lastly, that this collectivity is the problem of the politics of desire, none of which, in my view, provide a satisfactory explanation for understanding mass cruelty in its various forms throughout history. To complete this account, I seek to bring in the understanding of sovereignty, particularly within the framework of biopolitics from Foucault & Agamben. This perspective brings in the view that the consistency of a political community requires not only an understanding of the sovereign as the base of law but a condemned other that is an internalized exclusion; this leads to a modern politics with the management of life and death as its primary tools. Biopolitics brings alongside it a genealogical method that seeks to see the development of practices of power through the lens of minor figures targeted by them. Through the lens of a biopolitical genealogy, I would like to outline the major pre-modern and early modern condemned figures – such as the jewish person, the witch, the heretic, the Saracen, the barbarian, and the criminal – and their development into modernity, as well as the potentially new forms of condemned figures found during modernity in the colonized non-european native, the racialized slave, and the holocaust victim.

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Got no human grace

You’re eyes without a face

Such a human waste

You’re eyes without a face

-Billy Idol

I have found, since my introduction to both thinkers, a fondness between the work of Deleuze and Levinas’ ethical-political projects. The language may be different: immanence, difference, becoming minor for Deleuze and the Same, the Other, and relation with the Face for Levinas, having some overlap in their use. On the other hand, I have felt that there was something missing in my reading of Levinas that is much more present in Deleuze and plenty of the thinkers he pulls from or is a contemporary of: an understanding of why people act in a reactionary way and the means by which people can attain a revolutionary consciousness or unconsciousness. In short, Levinas seeks to understand that which makes murder impossible, that relation with the face of the Other that could make the holocaust no longer a possibility for humanity; sameness and totality don’t fully explain the extent of reasons why people can commit violence against others, especially at the level of the social. Deleuze and Guattari’s Schizoanalytic framework gives us the conceptual tools to understand these phenomena as processes of molar networks of desire, taking away our autonomy, and the means capable of taking them back. Through this, I think we can understand the concepts of Levinas’ Other and the face much more deeply by giving them a dimension of understanding the frameworks of the unconscious, in connection with society, that give way to the possibility of a relation with the Face of the Other and other frameworks and mechanics that block that relation.

It is this latter aspect that I wish to further develop here, an exploration into the forces that produce a subject that is blocked off from the possibility of an ethical relation with a particular other. For a combination of Deleuze & Levinas, I see this relation with the face of the Other as a micro-political revolution, a moment of awakening, something that reinvests the flows of desire which may be cut off, or directed against others towards that which brings one into direct contact with the humanity of another person. But there are times and places where the molar forces people invest into create blockages at the micropolitics of the unconscious: we can not redirect these flows away from their assemblages if we can not interact with another as an autonomous human being.

These are the faceless beings, those that, from our experience, have no entrance into any kind of ethical relation; they are not condemned by a judge in front of a jury of their peers, but, alongside birth, they found themselves stuck inside of ontological categories that make them less than persons, an unrelational relation to those within the society, a nullified infinity. These aspects bring about a need to bring in a biopolitical lens, found in Foucault & Agamben’s work, to understand Facelessness in how it articulates itself at both a Molar and micropolitical level. Particularly with Agamben in Homo Sacer, we find a biopolitics that articulates lives that do not matter; but, it is only bringing this in the context of a libidinal economy of Facelessness that we may find the processes that produce and maintain the justified mass cruelty found in biopolitical modernity at the scale of individualized persons. Bringing together these figures, despite the gaps between their focuses, allows me to ask and answer the questions of how these large structures block us off from our face-to-face, one-on-one interactions. How do they make us into beasts of cruelty or apathy, if there is even a difference between the two anymore?

The Other, the Same, & the Faceless

I wish to begin by turning to the two major relations that Levinas posits in his own work: the Same & the Other. For Levinas, the Same is able to change; it is merely a process of reidentifying itself time and time again, the process that becomes problematic, that of undermining the metaphysical desire towards the Other, is that of the totalization of the same. Thus, what Levinas seeks is not a relation of negation found in alterity, as one may find in the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, but one founded on the breaching and breakdown of the totality of identity & egoism, “The metaphysical other is other with an alterity that is not formal, is not the simple reverse of identity, and is not formed out of resistance to the same, but is prior to every initiative, to all imperialism of the Same.” Totality, in Levinas’ framework, is a reduction to finiteness that avoids entering into a relation of alterity with another on the basis of reducing it to egoism in terms of individual relations or to top-down facts in terms of knowledge production (Levinas specifically mentions historical writing, leaving out all the minutiae of lived lives). Totality finds its antagonism in the face-to–face relation with the Other, where the Face of the Other represents a door to entering into relation of respect with their infinite alterity, this is the relation that opens up the possibility of the true & infinite Ethical relation for Levinas: “It is my responsibility before a face looking at me as absolutely foreign that constitutes the original fact of fraternity.” The infinite alterity of the Other calls me forth towards a responsibility beyond that of the same, beyond that which I identify with as an extension of myself; it breaks down the totality of any identity in this process.

But totality is merely a process of reduction, a process of making the infinite into a concrete identity. Totality, as mentioned above, has breaches; it leaves something with the potentiality of a face for a subject to possibly find, even if it may be met with internal resistance; the Other, while not their infinite alterity, exists as a set of identifiable facts. Levinas attempts to understand our unethical actions towards others either by the totality, discussed above, that leaves me without an ethical obligation towards that which I can not identify with or through the sensibility, which may be a modality of the former option, that creates the experience of a world of things meant for unreflected enjoyment and consumption; sensibility is thus a world experienced without alterity. I wish to posit a third relation, less than the relation of the I & the Other, even less than the relations established in the totality of the Same: the non-relational relation, the relation that leaves no doors open for the possibility of a face-to-face encounter, a process that does leave the Other as reduced or outside, but makes them into nothing, makes them unworthy of perceived existence itself.

This third relation, the nonrelational, is what I wish to designate as the Faceless. It is a designation that goes beyond the perception of the outside of the totality of the Same that one may find already in Levinas, but rather a designation that defines a being outside of existence at an ontological and ethical level. The totality of the Same makes the other exist within a reduction to the Same; it is allowed existence at the cost of its infinity; the Faceless, however, can not be allowed to exist in any capacity, the experience of totality is maintained only by their complete exclusion. It is not enough to exclude them from an ethical relation founded on alterity, normal totality already does that for most people we exist around, the Faceless must be extinguished within the realm, at the opposite of an ethical relation. This is marked at the level of their ontological being, whether that be determined by the political reality at the base as a biological, political, or cultural enemy. It is in this way that I must now turn to biopolitics to make a particular distinction for Facelessness in political reality.

Infinite condemnation

In Levinas’ Other, we find a relation where one becomes incapable of murdering the Other because of an infinite ethical obligation to them; in the Faceless, we too find a relation where one becomes incapable of murder, not because of ethical obligation but in its opposite: one becomes incapable of murder because one has no relation to this kind of outsider. In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben seeks to expand the project of biopolitics, started in various writings and lectures by Foucault, and pair it within the studies on sovereignty primarily through Carl Schmitt, as well as Walter Benjamin, Thomas Hobbes, & Hannah Arendt. The work establishes two relation of internalized exclusion that found sovereign societies, that of the sovereign who is seen as the foundation for a society, its political power, and its laws but is considered outside of these domains, and, on the other end, the Homo Sacer, or condemned man, who is exiled from society and is defined, by roman law, as a man who can be killed without their killer being charged for homicide. Through these various influences and discussions of sovereignty and death, Agamben seeks to expand Foucault’s biopolitical analysis that politics, while always having had a power over exclusion and death, has now morphed, since the birth of modernity, into something that has power over life.

Before this, Agamben discusses the societies that established political subjects as lives already established within a designation of higher life, bios, that of thought, those that worked to live were treated as outside the political community, whose lives are resigned to the term zoē, referring to all forms of life, otherwise designated as Bare Life. Western politics has typically treated zoē as outside the realm of politics, to make decisions for the political community and exile or condemn those who violate the law were the rights of the sovereign. Agamben argues that modernity constitutes a moment where there was an expansion of politics into the realm of zoē; where it had always designated what was political life and what was excluded into bare life, bare life becomes a site of management that escapes no member of the political community. Foucault establishes this time period in his discussion of the birth of Liberalism in his Lecture series, The Birth of Biopolitics, designating the moment in the 17th through 19th centuries where the management of populations as an economic aspect becomes a major aspect of power. Here, the concern is primarily that of population growth or decline, since these designate the States’ abilities to defend themselves. This continues, for Foucault, in Discipline & Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: an Introduction, as attempts to understand, through genealogy, how states manage the complacency and ordering of entire populations who, from the 17th century onwards, become a more direct concern for states, as criminals, citizens, and sexual subjects. Agamben finds something that could use further expansion in Foucault’s analysis of the condemned man in Discipline & Punish, in that modernity is not merely about regulation or discipline but still about exclusion; it is not merely that anyone has the possibility of being condemned to maintain control over the entire population, but that any life can be condemned to the point of having no value at all. For Agamben, “In modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or the nonvalue of life as such.” Exclusion extends its reach beyond the domain of an inclusive/exclusive disjunction for a political community and enters the domain of annihilation; it is no longer enough to remove one from the rational political making process or condemn one for opposing the community through crime, there are lives from the moment of their birth that are designated as unworthy of life itself.

It is here that one can bring Facelessness into the political context. Homo Sacer as Faceless is possible only within a political regime that designates that there are lives not worthy of life, not at the level of betrayal of a community but at the level of their biological or ontological existence. It is a life that can not matter, but Agamben is premature to assume that this exists outside of any ethical domain just because it is typically done within legislative or judicial domains. It is ethical precisely because it must be decided and acted on at an individual level; Hitler may have reigned as Sovereign over the biopolitical project of the holocaust, but it may be better to understand him as a figure that represents the centralized figure of sovereignty made diffuse throughout the entire population that contributed to this project. What was sovereignty if not the Germanness, the ableism, the anti-Jewishness that was constituted as life that did matter as opposed to that which could not? We may confront Nazi society, from our retrospective view, as an entire system, but that leaves out all the biopolitical minutia of individual actions: everyone who turned in their neighbors to the local authorities, every guard that decided to enact a little extra cruelty to the prisoners that would be shortly gassed to death, every soldier that made people dig their own graves before shooting them. The designation of what lives did not matter, and which therefore could have anything done to them regardless of the cruelty, may have come from above, but it finds a repetition, it finds an investment at a micropolitical level in each member who enacted the actions that would add up to the death toll we can merely see as a statistic now.

Facelessness designates bare life as an ethical category, a life that could not beg for itself to be murdered instead of just killed in front of the other that confronts it as bare life in need of annihilation. Agamben finishes Homo Sacer by arguing that the camp has now become the regular site of power throughout biopolitical modernity, and everyone gets made into bare life in one way or another. But I wish to venture into how we got to here at a micropolitical level, articulated by Deleuze and Guattari throughout Capitalism & Schizophrenia. How are people brought into systems that designate lives worth nothing more than extermination? How are people able to enact the biopolitical will of modernity sovereignty not merely as a necessity to survive but in the enjoyment of its cruelty? An understanding of a micro-political biopolitical libidinal economy becomes important in answering these questions, but first, I wish to take a detour to further establish the logical existence of facelessness within the system of sense articulated by Deleuze in The Logic of Sense.

Sensical Asense

The reason for this detour is to establish a logic of political/ontological exclusion that exists at the level of the system and any particular unconscious at the same time. Deleuze’s system of sense and non-sense establishes an understanding of a system of signs in very much a similar way that we might understand political sovereignty. Nonsense is not that which is outside of sense, but merely that aspect of the system of sense that has no referent other than itself; its exclusion from being sense gives the possibility for an entire system to become sensical. Sense, as opposed to aspects of language like denotation or manifestations, does not concern truth value or the individual desire of the speaker or writer, but instead brings about the presuppositions necessary for understanding by providing pre-existing referents for each sign being used. Outside of any system of sense exists an absence of sense, asense, that is non-referential.

In this system, we may find great parallels to how sovereignty has been studied and represented above by Agamben and the thinkers that he builds from, but it is here where we may be able to make a larger distinction between the internalized exclusions of the Sovereign and Homo Sacer. Sovereignty, like nonsense, finds no base upon which to found itself: divine right finds no referent under their god, democracy finds no referent under some abstract idea of a people. The Sovereign represents the bringing in of sense, and with a particular form of authority or power, to the entire structure of a political community; they defend the referent of their political power by establishing it as the referent at the base of the entire society.

Asense, on the other hand, has a particular kind of existence from the perspective of the system of sense. The total body of signs that could be designated as asensical should be, theoretically, infinite, but there are particular ones, those that exist as a negation of our system of sense, that are intelligible as asense from inside the system of sense: sharp circles and perfectly round squares, to name a couple of abstract examples. This is the sensical asense that I wish to designate, a form of asense that the system of sense brings into itself by leaving it on the outskirts of itself: a controlled and semi-referential outside. It gains its reference by its exclusion and negation of the entire system of sense. To return to political systems, we find this in the citizen criminal, the terrorist, the enslaved, etc… that are possibilities understood only in their opposition to the existence of the entire system of political sense; this is the basis for Homo Sacer, who has been condemned to bare life and the possibility of annihilation by any member of a society, the foundation on which the faceless is made possible. They are designations that are referential without the sovereignty that includes them as internal to the system; they are thus referenced from entirely outside of themselves. A man in Iraq or Egypt could easily read words in arabic plastered on the signs of businesses and the front covers of books, they are words to them, but to the American audience at large, they find them on the news, in war movies, in videos games as signs that no longer have the autonomy of being words; they are rearticulated to inspire fear and terror, to push off the possibility of becoming sensical within their own system of sense. The Faceless are represented as an impossibility, as a negation to all things within the system of sense.

The Micropolitics of Biopolitical Libidinal Economy

Deleuze and Guattari work together on schizoanalysis to confront not only the quotidian afflictions that were being mistreated by psychoanalysis but particularly tackle, head-on, the affliction that spread like a cancer through the mass of society: fascism. They wish to understand fascism not as an irrational & rare extreme of our rational society, like many of those that initially studied fascism and nazi germany, “No, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desires of the masses that needs to be accounted for.” Fascism, instead, is an ever-present possibility growing in the cracks, infiltrating the assemblages of desire by any means possible, and forming molar structures through the coming together of a mass of micropolitical forces:

“Fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction , which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran’s fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family school, and office.”

It is here, in micropolitics, where we find Deleuze & Guattari’s answer, building on Wilhelm Reich’s, to how the large assemblages of death came together in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan during the 1920s-40s.

Like a cancer cell, fascism grows, but not in opposition to the full breadth of possibilities of functions that pre-existed the process of cancer; whatever drive that this cancer represents was one that was meant to be moderated within the mass unconscious, but not made its central task. It is a particular overinvestment that makes the possibility for these forces of permitted violence and cruelty to take center stage, but they preexisted this turn because, according to Deleuze & Guattari, “There are no internal drives in desire, only assemblages. Desire is always assembled; it is what the assemblage determines it to be.” Facelessness, which makes fascism possible once it becomes a micropolitical process, is thus an operation to be controlled, used in certain moments by power to justify itself, but it takes over when it gains too much energy. Systems of totalitarian sovereignty wish to use it in regulated manners, keeping the possibility of a molar facelessness found in a fully judicialized or militarized Homo Sacer that only the state or the sovereign is meant to deal with. It works to create this figure in its regular micro-political practices that organize the desire of the masses:

“Each power center is also molecular and exercises its power on a micrological fabric in which it exists only as diffuse, dispersed, geared down, miniaturized, perpetually displaces, acting by fine segmentation, working in detail and in the details of detail. Foucault’s analysis of ‘disciplines’ or micropowers (school, army, factory, hospital, etc.) testifies to these ‘focuses of instability’ where groupings and accumulations confront each other but also confront breakaways and escapes and where inversions occur.”

Each of these institutions reflects a molar operation at the level of micropolitics, creating the citizen in the affirmation of molar sovereignty and the negation of that deemed outside or antagonistic to a socius. The sovereign, as discussed above, must be able to decide who is deserving of life and death and thus seeks to replicate their sovereign decision on such matters into the desires of the people, but this is not the process of mass facelessness that we find in fascism; it is a regulated facelessness that does not become the primary operation of the body of society.

This facet of biopolitical sovereignty is why fascism is an ever-present micropolitical possibility; it is already inscribed as a potentiality in each organ. The sovereign not only needs to be able to define what is an enemy to the consistency of a political community, but, additionally needs to be able to make and act towards them as bare life without backlash. It creates the delinquent student as a figure in the school, the unmurderable enemy in the army, the lazy worker in the factories or offices, the vegetable, the pitiable sick, or insane in the hospitals, and the criminal in the legal system. In each of these figures, we find a reification of lives that matter less or don’t matter, a negative upon which the citizen must define themselves and invest themselves against and away from. This is where the latent possibility of biopolitics is founded within libidinal economy: axes unto which someone must invest themselves, both in what they designate as the field of possibilities and the destruction of what is deemed outside of those possibilities.

Already, through these, are the molar structures prepared to designate the strict possibilities of the face to face interactions: who gets to be designated as a person deserving of moral consideration in a particular action, the delinquent may be condemned judicially for their action because they are not ontologically condemned in their person (they are thus condemned to practices of reform), as well as the possibility of being deemed persons at all. It is this latter consideration that truly details facelessness and the way it spreads like a cancer in fascism. The sovereign needs the entirety of the socius invested in the annihilation of what would negate their sovereignty: the divine-right monarchs negatively organize society around punishing heresy, and the nationalists negatively organize society around destroying enemies of the abstract idea of the people (and thus keeping the purity of the population). These are diffuse throughout society and exist at a micropolitical scale, ready for constant reinvestment into molar powers through quotidian interactions. It is only under this framework of biopolitics that fascism becomes an immanent possibility within a mass micropolitics.

The faceless, the non-relational relation, the nullified infinity, becomes a figure and an operation of molar control where apathy, if not outright mass cruelty, becomes a necessary investment by the entire body of the society. On the news, in the schools, and in the streets, political structures are organized by the ability to designate lives that do not matter before the mere possibility of their existence becomes a political threat. We can not say that the 20th century brought about the first mass fascism, as a micropolitical project, we can already find it in colonization, slavery, and segregation. How many of the Spanish soldiers looked in the eyes of dying and overworked native Americans and felt nothing? Regardless of the importance of de las Casas or Vitoria to the Spanish king’s decrees on economic activity in the Americas, this was a much more present reality that the Spanish colonialists invested themselves in: cruelty towards certain others as normality, then as necessity. It may be most explicitly found in the American South (which may be the first of many models of contemporary mass cruelty), establishing in the economic relations of slavery a non-relational relation with blackness, whose exclusion from political community was just as much a major function of society as their necessity into the economic framework of that society. The early structures of African slavery and European indentured servitude get rearticulated through history into a sort of proto-surveillance state through the racialization and defacialization of blackness. It was in this system that black lives were made into lives that could not matter, the ethical possibility of their existence made into asense, their infinite alterity made into a personal threat to anyone within the political community. This system demands of its political community a constant reassertion and reinvestment into this schema, especially as its foundations began to become further under attack. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 turned a molar project that could not cover every meter of the territory of the country into a micropolitical project where the project of slavery had to be invested in by all in both slave and free states.

Facelessness as a micropolitical investment attempts to argue for one’s own face, one’s own mattering, specifically in contrast to lives that don’t matter. What we meet at a micropolitical and quotidian level that invests in this operation of fascism is the spread of the normalization of cruelty. Fascism, as first a micropolitical formation longer before it is a molar one, operates by habituating cruelty against the faceless as an internal pride. But facelessness, especially when it is not regulated in molar formations, is a paranoiac operation; this is what makes fascism a cancer even to the political body it seeks to create. The designation of facelessness comes with the designation of personal enemy, of that which one must annihilate, but it expands outwards. The slave, the racial underclass, the terrorists are threats to a society that must be maintained as faceless, to enter into ethical relation or to acknowledge them as people with minute & unique lives is a threat to the entire society, so those that aid & abet and then those that sympathize must too become bare lives in need of extermination in the eyes of the entire population. Facelessness spreads until it consumes the whole of society; it begins with easier designators, whether that be creed, race, gender expression, political affiliation, etc…, but spreads out to cover any possibility of ethical consideration in the advocates from within that can not be easily monitored or found. Additionally, these societies begin to have this mass cruelty against those deemed faceless as a libidinal outlet for the entire society, despite being a molar operation, by this point, it is still held together by micropolitical actions in the face-to-face interactions or the blocking off of them. It is merely the beginning of this process that Agamben acknowledges in Homo Sacer by stating that bare life becomes a possibility within everyone in biopolitical modernity. Facelessness slowly takes over a society, inflicting cruelty, violence, and death towards the faceless, which becomes more than a seeming political necessity and becomes a site of enjoyment & pleasure. It is here, with cruelty as the primary immanent possibility, that the study of evil must begin: it is not merely an operation done by states onto people in a top-down manner but people that are blocked off by their quotidian, micropolitical investments from making an ethical relation with a particular other and, in extreme cases, with any other.12345678

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Santiago Castro-Gómez’s work Critique of Latin American Reason argued, in the mid-1990s, that Latin American philosophers were not dealing with the reality of their times.1 Stuck in the perspective of Latin America as a pure periphery to the global order and with an idealized gaze towards the revolutionary possibilities of their cultures, religious, traditional, and/or indigenous, they were unable to understand and deal with post-modernity. It is not that they did not hear about or discuss post-modernity, but that they saw it as a particular way of viewing the world that was a particular European invention that did not line up with understanding Latin America. Castro-Gómez argues that viewing post-modernity this way causes these thinkers to misunderstand Latin American reality because:

“Postmodernity, as Jean-Francois Lyotard explained so well, is a condition and not an ideology one can dispense with through argument. Nor is it an issue of consciousness but rather of experience, which has consolidated in the majority of Latin American nations with the help of capitalist globalization.” (Castro-Gómez, 7).

Through the globalization of all culture, post-modernity, as a condition, asserts that there is no escape back into real connections; identity, connections, and politics are fragmented in such a way that Latin American philosophy, which wants to view at least a portion of the people of Latin America as not affected by the sicknesses of modernity, can no longer accurately deal with, and which may be fueled by the commitment of these philosophers to not engage with post-modernist philosophers critiques.

Liberation theology was a political and ethical philosophy that sprung up primarily in Latin America during the 1960s and 70s and has gained some prominence today throughout the Catholic church. Castro-Gómez discusses Liberation theology most prominently with Argentine philosopher Juan Carlos Scannone, who saw the need to return to certain indigenous views of religion that were more connected and communal than those that modernity has offered (Castro-Gómez, 68). But, this is not the full breadth of liberation theology, and is likely not its strongest perspective for dealing with post-modernity as a condition afflicting nearly all life in Latin America. Gustavo Gutiérrez, in his work A Theology of Liberation, offers a much more Marxist perspective towards Liberation Theology and its role in Latin American politics that seeks to restructure the church, as an institution, detaching itself from the state and social hierarchies and making it into a revolutionary vehicle of history that adds material salvation as its primary task. (Gutiérrez, 150-1).2 Does this perspective on liberation theology, one that deals head on with the material reality of Latin America, acknowledge and accurately deal with the problems of postmodernity as a condition? Particularly in contrast with Castro-Gómez’s critiques, does this view of liberation theology repeat the articulation of the poor as a transcendental subject of history that liberation philosophy typically falls into doing and can the church as a vehicle of revolutionary history and material salvation escape the fracturing of the real that has taken place now everywhere? It is not enough to contrast Gutiérrez’s argument to Castro-Gómez, additionally, I seek to position both in contrast or similarity to present-day Latin American politics and its relation to mass democracy and religion.

Castro-Gómez’s Post-Modern condition

Before exploring its relation to and possible critique of Gutiérrez’s view on liberation theology, I first seek to truly understand what Castro-Gómez’s critique of Latin American philosophy’s perspectives on post-modernism are and what, in his view, are the particular challenges they create for philosophies and politics that do not want to acknowledge this condition as an immanent reality. Castro-Gómez specifically seeks to argue what the post-modern condition is, with the background of Foucault, Baudrillard, and Lyotard as European post-modernist influences and the works of those like José Joaquin Brunner, Jesús Martín-Barbero, and Nelly Richard, among many others listed, as Latin American cultural scholars that seek to understand the ways that global social structures recreate everyday life (Castro-Gómez, 8). Many different ideas characterize post-modernism, neo-individualism, depoliticization, fragmentation of identity, and disenchantment, but these are not to be confined into a totality or a single subjectivity, as these would fall back into the problems created by modernism, but rather to be analyzed as diverse tools of political and economic power that deal with subjectivities that can not be subsumed into one singular mode of understanding.

The bedrock of these is the transformation of subjectivity within the postmodern condition; this is not the recognition of the multiplicity of subjectivity that can not be captured in identity, as Castro-Gómez and Foucault may seek to understand through genealogy, as will be discussed further in the section below. This neo-individual is not even entirely autonomous as an individual, instead “Neo-individualist culture… is characterized by a tendency toward forming “restricted identities” in which microgroup and private experiences are valued. Identifying with the “national,” which previously served as an integrating element of recognition, is diminished before the force of a transnational culture staked out by mass media and culture industries.” (Castro Gomez 10). Subjectivity, in the ways that it is allowed to exist in postmodern capitalist reality, is not one that defines itself through itself but one that attaches itself to global identities detached from any localities and always reinvesting identity into the social powers around it. Castro-Gómez finds this subjectivity reified in the means of autonomous expression and community-building practices communicated to the postmodern subject: “Social integration shifts to the realm of ‘light ideologies’ that offer individuals the opportunity to become the protagonists of their own lives” (Castro-Gómez, 11). The communities one is able to integrate oneself into are about self-improvement, wealth, or other attempts to recapture subjectivity within economic or political powers. Instead of constituting a political potential, they represent means of expressing identity, overtaking what could lead one into potential collective and revolutionary groupings at a local level and pushing them into fractured and global identities based around advertising and new technologies of communication.

These functions have a material basis in Latin American reality for Castro-Gómez; the philosophers of this region can not claim that it escapes the effects of modernity merely because of its position on the periphery of the global economic system; instead, Castro-Gómez claims that it may be this particular position that subjects it to the postmodern condition. Discussing the effects on culture of a globalized political economy that has shifted a large part of the Latin American working population into unstable or informal labor relations that put day to day survival as the focus before long-term improvement, Castro-Gómez argues that “Under these conditions it is not surprising that an immediatist sensibility has spread throughout Latin America, mistrustful of the ‘grad projects of social engineering” (Castro-Gómez 11). Individualized in their social relations and brought into the perspective of fighting for short-term existence, the poor of Latin America are not a revolutionary class rising up, but ones that no longer even believe in long-term projects of the state, potentially seeing them as corrupt, as will be discussed further below. In the wake of their material reality, the politics that form out of this framework, while democratic, let down anyone with liberatory or idealistic ideas for the possibility of Latin America. Postmodern subjectivity refocuses what the theorists that Castro-Gómez critiques see as revolutionary potentials into something that makes one work as an individual instead of as a collective or group with a vision of a better future, “Instead of a heroic vision of politics and a messianic focus on the future, politics is now reestablished in a pragmatic form as the ‘art of the possible.’” (Castro-Gómez, 12). Politics takes on the task of dealing with the improvement of daily life for the individual but not as a means of getting rid of poverty, creating new possibilities, or anything else that may require idealism, improvement is articulated in new ways that make them into individual economic decisions causing short-term alliances and affiliations to become more a political normality, “Instead of establishing a social situation of unity and harmony, the politics that has slowly been emerging in Latin America since the 1980s is oriented toward the recognition of dissensus as a central element of democracy.” (Castro-Gómez, 12). This function reshaped how the left and right in Latin America are able to function and argue for their particular policies, as becoming closer to advertisement & images than real political groupings, this creates a Latin American political reality that is reflected in how politics throughout the global systems function.

All of the above, for Castro-Gómez, is a disenchantment of the entire world that is not the end of modernity but rather the effect of the processes of modernity in the long run. The project of modernist philosophy attempts to synthesize discordant rationalities that were breaking apart and coming into conflict, whether through history, class conflict, phenomenology, false consciousness, etc. These philosophers sought a reconciliation, either in reunderstanding consciousness or the potential of the future, of these rationalities (Castro-Gómez, 18). The unraveling of these multiple rationalities into postmodernity creates this disenchantment with reality, as Castro-Gómez puts it, “Postmodern disenchantment is not the ideological correlate of a technocratic and neoliberal offensive but rather the result of a transformation of the lifeworld across vast segments of Latin American societies, the result of the asymmetries unleashed by the very processes of modernization.” (Castro-Gómez 16). The neo-individual is all that is left of this disenchantment; there is no shared project of the future left for mass politics, at least within the eyes of the masses themselves; centralized connections to identity and community are shattered in the face of political, economic, and material reality that finds more usefulness in the reformation and reterritorialization of identity around a constant stream of images. For Castro-Gómez, this is the challenge created for all, but will be a particular difficulty for Latin American philosophers and political thinkers, unable to understand postmodernism as a condition rather than something to argue against.

The Philosophy of Liberation & Gustavo Gutiérrez

One of the many Latin American philosophies that Castro-Gómez seeks to critique for falling into the regular pitfalls of anti-modernist and anti-post-modernist philosophies is Latin American Liberation Theology. Founded within a wide range of thought, but predominantly Latin American Catholicism, this view largely seeks to use religion as a means to go against social injustices, but the way they attempt this may be mistaken or fundamentally flawed if it can not grapple with contemporary political reality. Castro-Gómez specifically targets one perspective of Liberation Theology, stating that “During the 1970s, liberation theology proposed to discover in the popular religions of marginalized groups an inexhaustible source for the material and spiritual renewal of society. The Argentine philosopher Juan Carlos Scannone… argues that the underlying instrumental reason of both capitalist and Marxist projects has been ethically transformed in Latin America by a symbolic-religious rationality” (Castro-Gómez, 68). Castro-Gómez argues that Scannone’s view of liberation theology as a project that could only be of a Latin American ethics and community building is one that merely borrows from European understandings of justice; it merely rearticulates an insular, as opposed to exterior/european, frame on to the whole of global society, just rearticulating elements brought about through European modernity to see Latin American’s place in bringing about ethics through history and religion. (Castro-Gómez 68-9).

The primary problem that Scannone and other thinkers of Latin America run into is the formation of the poor, the indigenous, or the average Latin American person as a sort of transcendental subject that is either the object of global salvation or the object of study to fully reconceptualize the entirety of history and studies of humanity:

“Blinded by a romantic Third Wordism, some philosophers of liberation simply chose to invert the roles: instead of looking at all of human achievement from the point of view of the conquerors, they decided to look at things from what they called ‘the other side of history,’ which is to say, from the point of view of the conquered and oppressed. Here again we see, albeit in an inverted form, the enlightened purpose of the ‘subject of history,’” (Castro-Gómez, 21).

Castro-Gómez, building on the genealogical work of Foucault and Nietzsche, doesn’t want to create a singular form of subjectivity to understand history, the present, and the potentials of the future, though, “We believe that such models and categories obscure the multiplicity of historical practices that explain why we have come to be who we are.” (Castro-Gómez, 21). However, Scannone’s weakness may be in how it constitutes a transcendental subject as constituting revolutionary potential within such a narrow context; other forms of Liberation Theology may need to be contrasted in order to see how they deal with subjectivity and postmodern politics.

Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation is a project that seeks to see the task of the church and the task of socialism/communism as one in the same historical process. Gutiérrez argues for the church to understand faith as a political action as well, sin is not merely a religious distancing from God but takes place within material reality that breaks up the possibility of global communion with God and global utopia, liberation from sin, and thus the political action of faith, then becomes the liberation from poverty and the liberation from the material and social relations that create exploitation, violence, poverty, and the many other origins of sin (Gutiérrez 138-9). Gutiérrez’s Liberation Theology then argues that the church is the vehicle of history away from sin by the transformation of material reality itself, mixing eschatology with Marxist-Hegelian philosophy and Decolonial thought into a single coherent view that sees spiritual salvation and material salvation as one and the same process (Gutiérrez, 143-150). Thus, he makes his position on the current state of the church, in 1971, clear in that it is something that has attached itself to the social injustices of economic and political powers in order to maintain a high position in Latin American society, and no doubt elsewhere, to take on the true task of the church, for Gutiérrez is thus to delink the church from these organizations not as apolitical but openly standing against what they bring about in the world (Gutiérrez, 150-156).

Gutiérrez argues that there is a particular subject to the revolutionary potential of the church, stating, “Freire is right when he says that in today’s world only the oppressed person, only the oppressed class, only oppressed peoples, can denounce and announce. Only they are capable of working out revolutionary utopias and not conservative or reformist ideologies. The oppressive system’s only future is to maintain its present of affluence.” (Gutiérrez, 137). It is through this subject, that of the poor and oppressed, that the knowledge of what material salvation is and the material sin that must be done away with comes about for Gutiérrez. Through bringing this oppressed subject into the ability to affect history and material reality through the praxis of the church, Gutiérrez seeks to avoid the pitfalls of contemporary politics that fall into maintaining oppressions. For him, it is imperative to keep this project of a world without sin and without material suffering as something that guides us: “The loss of utopia is responsible for humankind’s falling into bureaucratism and sectarianism, into new structures which oppress humanity,” (Gutiérrez, 138). It is in this way that Gutiérrez deals with the effects of modernization and potentially post-modernization, through arguing that the archaic form of the church can be remade through reforming it around fighting for the oppressed and making salvation a project of liberatory praxis.

Beyond arguing for a transcendental subject through the poor as a subject in need of an institution able to give them a voice to express their experience of the material world, Castro-Gómez may have another problem with Gutiérrez's view of politics and the church as a possible revolutionary institution. The claim of social justice itself may be problematic:

“I think that this concept of justice as an ‘absence of all evil’ is a legacy of Judeo-Christian eschatology which must be eradicated from Latin American politics. Any attempt to transpose this myth onto social reality almost always degenerates into its opposite: some of the most notorious authoritarian regimes of our time have been established in the name of ‘social justice’.” (Castro-Gómez, 28).

Social justice, as a term, seems to have become used by any means and any organization, detached from any possible particularities, as a political slogan. Liberation Theology under Gutiérrez’s frame may inspire local organizing and can, at least through the influence of the Vatican, have some global effect, but when it comes to Latin American politics, its effects on inspiring mass democracy seem to face the problem of a postmodern politics. This confrontation brings about questions around whether the oppressed have a privileged position towards understanding and articulating their own oppression. And whether utopian left-wing politics is possible within the current post-1980s Latin American politics?

The Politics of Post-Modern Mass Democracy

Postmodern politics is a potentially dangerously nullifying force for all involved, reshaping the whole of political reality around the flow of images and economic forces. In Castro-Gómez’s words, “If politics is no longer understood as an activity oriented around metaphysical certainties, it could dangerously become a performative spectacle engineered by market forces. The decisive factor for which candidate or party will take office is no longer the rationality of their political ideals but rather the ability to create an artificial ‘world’ with which voters can identify.” (Castro-Gómez, 12) Latin American politics, for Castro-Gómez, thus takes a step away from the real, which can not be trusted or found any certitude within, and into the world of pure images and unconscious associations. What is important is not that one is known for a political capability nor a care for those in need, but rather the ability to effectively broadcast an image of oneself or certain political issues that voters will identify with and act on:

Politics becomes a simulacrum, an image of images whose only reality is that of a world occupied by the rhetoric of the media. It is not discourse but rather the image that has the most impact on the Latin American masses, who experience modernity under the influence of movies and television…This means that, alongside with the media, the socialization of the individual is related to transnational criteria and guidelines of behavior, all at the expense of taking distance from the traditional forms of cultural transmission. Mass culture promotes the dissolution of traditional certainties that used to function as guarantees of social integration…” (Castro-Gómez, 13, 14).

If the politics of particular localities, identifications, and collectives are broken down into the spread of simulacra and global economic forces, what potential still could exist for a liberatory politics to undermine this global structure that has for decades now taken root in Latin America?

What Gutiérrez seeks in making the church become the vehicle for the revolutionary praxis of the oppressed masses may be lost through the shifting of identification into images and short-term necessities. Castro-Gómez would see that this particular style of political practice has found itself lost in the problems that postmodernity presents: “Postmodern philosophers teach us that the unitary ideal of modernity cannot continue functioning as a legitimizing ‘metanarrative’ of political praxis. The expression ‘end of modernity’ therefore refers to this kind of narrative’s loss of credibility and not the cancellation of modernity as a historical era.” (Castro-Gómez, 18-9). The church as a unifying organization for the oppressed would have to face up against the neo-individualist formations of subjectivity that fight against it; these do not merely exist in the owning classes or the middle class that may be able to afford a moderate amount of luxuries, but are rearticulated into every stratum of society in postmodernity.

What then is the current state of the church in Latin America? Traditionally a catholic region of the world, Liberation Theology may have been able to give a slight left-wing bent to catholics on a lot of economic issues, but the last half of the 20th century marked the beginning of a noticeable rise in Evangelical Protestantism in Latin America. This shift has not overtaken catholicism as the majority religion throughout Latin America for a variety of reasons but hints at changes in the political and religious background of the region, in “Transforming Religious Identities in Latin America,” Stacy Keogh recounts that “The new religious messages being disseminated in Latin America, such as the ‘health and wealth’ or ‘prosperity’ gospel, and the economic benefits available in such religious settings signal a dramatic shift in the way religious forces appeal to spiritual seekers.” (Keogh et al. 140).3 These new forms of religion, specifically in right-wing evangelical protestantism, present a real, material challenge for the potentiality of Liberation Theology within the region, it is possible that this is the effect of the church separating itself from the institutions of power and the state, as Gutiérrez warned as a consequence of such a necessity.

The nature of right wing politics in Latin America has largely been able to adapt to this new reality of postmodernism, its interests as a political force have taken up the fracturing of identity as something to work around rather than a full block. In “The Grassroots Right in Latin America: Patterns, Causes and Consequences,” Lindsay Mayka and Amy Erica Smith begin by defining “the right as a diverse set of individuals and organizations aiming to maintain social hierarchies that are perceived as traditional or natural… such hierarchies might include, for instance, patriarchy, the economic dominance of large businesses or landowners, or the subordination of LGBTQ+ individuals or Black and Indigenous Latin Americans.” (Mayka & Smith, 3).4 This diverse set of interests, even if all of them appear to be singularly unified around a form of traditionalism or hierarchy, allows for grassroots movements, in Mayka & Smith’s view, to come from all kinds of social categories and no longer just a subaltern groups; the right is able to rearticulate itself from the now stigmatized militarized forms of taking power towards more mass democratic ones (Mayka & Smith 4). Simply because the right now engages more in mass democracy in Latin America does not mean that it has dropped all of its advantages from before or that these advantages are lost in post-modern politics; it is able to use money effectively through media space to accomplish its goals, building energy for what every cause is pertinent at any given political moment whether that be fights against public sex education, against secularization, abortion rights etc… even pulling in people socially left wing on all other issues (Mayka & Smith 4-5, 10).

Mayka and Smith highlight one theory, among many, that Evangelical politics forms itself as a major basis of right-wing grassroots Latin American politics not merely through the fact that the members of these churches lean to the right of catholic politics but additionally that they are also substantially more religiously and politically active compared to catholics (Mayka & Smith, 10). The Evangelical right is thus able to reorganize religious and spiritual energy into a political one through the church that deterritorializes particular grievances through the creation of a community space organized around right-wing political messaging. Tayrine Dias, Marisa von Bülow, and Danniel Gobbi, in their essay “Populist Framing Mechanisms and the Rise of Right-wing Activism in Brazil,” study the role of social media in organizing a mass movement for the impeachment of the Brazilian Workers’ Party president in 2016.5 In this particular case study, a variety of perspectives and social identities within the Brazilian right were able to create organization and social media discourses around corruption and the need for impeachment that led to a mass movement that organized and mobilized millions of Brazilians against the Workers’ Party (Dias et al, 75-79). These organizations used social media as a means of creating temporary discursive unity through framing mechanisms, blocking off particular disagreements in order to focus on a single affirmative task and creating a singular identity around anti-corruption politics (Dias et al, 79-83).

This, however, does not mean that the right, even if they are taking up more grassroots methods of protest and social activism, effectively use social media, and use a more explicitly religious bent to base their claims on, are the only ones capable of dealing with postmodern politics effectively. According to Mayka & Smith, “While there does appear to be an elective affinity between these mobilizing platforms and rightist issues and identities, a long history of leftist organizing in both churches and social media leaves no doubt that these platforms are far from hegemonic for the right” (Mayka & Smith, 12). The trouble is whether the left has enough power through these institutions and mechanisms to truly create an effective politics through liberation theology. We may find moves by the catholic church to install an American pope that explicitly makes statements about America’s domestic and international politics as one of many means that the global left coalition has made in order to deal with politics in the postmodern order of simulacra. Latin America also seems to have gone in a polarized direction that has replaced the fully depolitized individualism that Castro-Gómez characterized 1990s Latin American postmodern politics as, in this current moment, there are expressions of both far-right and fairly left-wing governments throughout the region that all base themselves on mass democratic support, at least to get into power. Castro-Gómez describes this shift from the early to mid-20th century to the postmodern politics by stating that, “Nationalisms and fanaticisms pale before the triumph of mass democracy, which is able to offer citizens the full satisfaction of their psychological need to be accepted without having to look for ‘external enemies’” (Castro-Gómez, 19). From this perspective, we may be able to argue that even polarized politics is truly depoliticized, support shifts quickly between extremes rather than from just momentary interests, as people understand something is wrong but not what, leaving behind extreme short-sighted shifts after another.

In analyzing the protestant parties that had formed during the 1980s and 90s, Paul Freston found that their ability to command political power through elective democracy was undermined by their attaining of power and having to actualize particular solutions, instead “Persecution (i.e. a state of powerlessness) is the most favourable situation for evangelical unity; any approximation to power makes unity less likely.” (Freston, 273).6 In the abstract, and as anti-governmental parties, or parties in opposition, the evangelical right, and likely the right more generally, are able to make promises to all their constitutive groups that would be impossible to please all at the same time once reaching power. Dias, von Bülow, & Gobbi also make note of the variety of issues that each right wing political faction & organization are attempting to attain through the corruption trial and the demonization of the Brazilian workers party; the particular issue of impeachment & corruption may have unified them and created energy for all their causes, but their actual solutions post this issue quickly bring many into contrast with each other: traditional morality, economic liberalism, nationalism, anti-leftism, policing… (Dias et al. 85). Additionally, Mayka & Smith make note of the workings of the state as a blockade for radical shifts brought about by any grassroots campaign, the working of the bureaucracy and the allies of past governments creates difficulties for these movements if they can not sustain long term political power, which many have shown to be incapable of (Bolivia & Brazil to name 2 major examples over the last decade) (Mayka & Smith 13). Thus, while we may be able to conclude that post-modernism creates difficulties for the left, especially when it comes to organizing through the practice of liberation theology, post-modernism as a condition additionally does not seem to have a right-wing bent in the long term either. It is able to ally right-wing groups for short-term causes through new technological space, but their actualization in real politics creates just as quickly a disunity among their following. All of this, however, does not mean that they are unable to undermine left-wing politics, as they so often do at least temporarily, but that they are unable to permanently bring about their own varied interests without internal and external resistance.

Conclusion

In these varied cases of real Latin American politics, we find difficulty and potentialities for Liberation Theology as a potential project in the postmodern political condition. On one end, right-wing evangelical protestantism takes up potential religious and spiritual energies in Latin America and redirects them into individual glorification or right-wing political projects. On the other hand, the oppressed as a central and unified subject that could lead us to utopia does not necessarily undermine the political project’s potential in existing within a world of simulacra and individualized subjectivities, and could be effective within this dimension if used correctly. The greatest challenge then becomes whether politics has been entirely neutralized by the powers of postmodern society and global economic relations; despite the fact that official European and American militarized imperialism has generally ended (with cases like Venezuela earlier this year proving as a strong example for the possibility of its potential return), the globalized culture may have permanently stalled the potentiality of any revolution. Gutiérrez’s project of Liberation Theology holds up to the scrutiny of Castro-Gómez better than other versions due to its much broader focus on recognizing material conditions and turning already existing cultural institutions into means by which liberation politics may bring about total change to material conditions. The true difficulty that Castro-Gómez presents is whether this perspective can rearticulate itself into a global political culture and whether or not the church as an institution of revolution can find new methods to fight against individualism and the political nullification of mass democracy. This version of Liberation Theology may aid from attaching itself more to postmodernist philosophical perspectives, and shows a willingness to consider recent changes in political and messaging strategies and Gutiérrez’s use of what then were contemporary advancements in Marxism, found in figures like Marcuse, & the primacy of the perspective of the subaltern in Liberation Theology.

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It is hard to work with autobiographical origins, particularly when it comes to things that slowly consume your life. There are early moments where I remember becoming more interested in Deleuze’s philosophy, but there is no particular point that I can easily recall as the first. Perhaps it was my good friend Eric, someone I had met in my hometown’s open mic scene, who took a class on Deleuze & Guattari at their Master’s program; he was the one who helped my burgeoning interest in philosophy become something more permanent, so maybe he was my first interaction. Perhaps it was through Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, which I read my freshman year of undergrad in 2020, and which had a list of philosophers and psychoanalysts I would spend the next couple of years treating as a reading list. Who is to say if I can’t clearly recall it? What is important is that I knew the name Deleuze, and had understood that it was typically accompanied with a “& Guattari” by the time I finished my freshman year and was preparing myself for a deeper dive into philosophy as a whole (I would declare my major in it on the first day of my sophomore year).

The summer of 2021 is when I can easily recount that my interest in Deleuze’s work became more clear. Fisher had initially given me an interest in the work of Slavoj Zizek, which I assumed meant that I would need to deep dive into the psychoanalysis and philosophical tradition leading up to Hegel, Marx, & Lacan. I read a fair bit of some classics: some Hume so I could read Kant, some Kant so I could read Hegel, but it was the podcasts that I listened to early in my deep interest in philosophy and psychoanalysis that would give way to Deleuze in the end. I had spent the summer, whether at home, driving to my lifeguard job, or on the way to hang out with friends, listening to an introductory philosophy podcast, Philosophize This!, which gave me a fairly good opening rundown to a lot of the history of Western philosophy, while at the same time listening to a lecture series on the introduction to Psychoanalysis.

Maybe it was just a coincidence that the moments line up, maybe it was the moment I needed something new to invest myself in, but I particularly remember getting to the Deleuze sections of the Philosophy podcast on the same days as my grandfather’s funeral and memorial. Close familial death was not something I was, and still to some degree am, particularly used to dealing with; the solo drives from work to the events left me with time where I just wanted to listen to philosophy and think, or at least think about something other than the events going on around me. The four-part Deleuze introduction happened to fill those car rides with the exact kind of noise I wanted in those moments. But it felt like more than noise, obviously, there was something in this philosophy: a new mode of thinking about how things work together in assemblages and flows, a new way of understanding the unconscious as machinic, and many other concepts that have faded from memory in terms of what I listened to, but I am assured I actually understand now.

This interest propelled me into my sophomore year, as I had found another theory/philosophy podcast by the end of the summer, the Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour, and had become mutuals on Twitter some months after that as well. I picked up both texts of Capitalism & Schizophrenia by October of that year and began to read Anti-Oedipus as slowly as possible, it seemed, at the time an insurmountable task. But I viewed the other books I was reading — Freud, Nietzsche, Marx, etc — as preparation for these texts alongside the podcasts, which, for MUHH, Taylor Adkins and Cooper Cherry had set up a good portion of the episodes to be background on the milieu that Deleuze & Guattari engaged themselves in throughout A Thousand Plateaus. It would also be during this year that I would discover the Acid Horizon podcast that regularly crossovers with MUHH and filled every second I didn’t want to listen to music with one dialogue or another on philosophy and post-structuralist theory. These were filled with debates I would not understand fully until years later, but had valuable bits to latch onto that helped me figure out what direction I wanted to go in through my exploration into philosophy and theory.

The summer of 2022 eventually came, and I felt like I was finally ready to tackle the text of Anti-Oedipus. I decided to try and pair my reading with the MUHH seminar series on the text, since I came in knowing there would be bits I would pass over and not notice that would be important to get one way or another.1 This gave me a much more controlled and engaged reading of the text than I would have gotten going in blind. I would read the text on my own and then listen to the corresponding seminar dialogue on the section, which I remember as eye-opening. By the end of the summer, I had done it; I had read the entire text from front to back and felt like I actually got something out of it that would stick with me permanently. I didn’t get it all, but I knew what I could clearly articulate and what I needed to go read Freud, Marx, Reich, Lacan, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Bataille, etc for.

This would define my personal readings for my junior year of undergrad: I knew I wanted to eventually return to read Anti-Oedipus again, but not until I had more background. I read and wrote on the names listed above, whether it be for an in-class paper or for my first-ever conference presentation, I wanted to be able to say that I had engaged in the same ways that Deleuze & Guattari did with their background in various fields. It would be this year too, after having read the third section of AO, that I would need a bigger background in structuralism and the varying fields identified with it: sociology, anthropology, history, and linguistics, before I came back to the text again. Bataille led to Mauss, which opened the field for my interest in the various understandings of what economy and society could be and had been in the past.

After the school year ended again, I wanted to revisit the text with a firmer grasp and a reading behind me before doing my undergrad thesis, but I decided to not do this alone this time. So, I hosted my first-ever public reading group to go over Anti-Oedipus in 5 sections (grandiose vision, I know). When I reached out to find people interested in joining, I was surprised, to say the least. I had many people show up for the 4/5ths of the book we made it through before finishing it early, and Taylor Adkins helped expand on the text by joining, further broadcasting the group, and even getting Professor Emiretus and Deleuze translator Charles Stivale to join (the exact same week I bought The Logic of Sense from a used bookstore, if I remember correctly). Professor Vernon Cisney, writer of Deleuze and Derrida: Difference & the Power of the Negative, with whom I became mutuals after his appearance on MUHH and ended referencing his book in my first conference presentation earlier that spring, also joined for one session on the “Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Man” sections. Even though I was saddened to not see my reading group ever get to the final section, “the Introduction to Schizoanalysis,” I was greatly encouraged by the Deleuzian and theory community I had found that seemed to foster anyone genuinely interested in his work and his contemporaries.

The next school year, I began work on an undergrad honors thesis, going over the possibility of an ethics combining Deleuze & Levinas’ thought (the latter of which I have genuinely no idea how I was introduced to). Having expanded to some of the monographs the previous year, particularly Spinoza: Practical Philosophy and Nietzsche & Philosophy, as well as Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, and my first treks into A Thousand Plateaus, I attempted to use the deeper and more varied understanding of Deleuze to try to explain an ethics based on the foundation of immanent events & encounters with the Other instead of universals. In some ways, I look at the paper as a success; the fact that I got it written and defended was definitely a success. In other ways, I view it as something I was in over my head for, something I needed to have read a lot more Deleuze, like I have done since, to fully articulate the way I wanted to. In this latter sense, it is still my current project to find the words to express such a project; in many ways, I have changed my perspective on what this synthesis of thinkers is and what it can do.

My gap year between undergrad and my current master’s program gives somewhat of a slow down in this progress, its hard to keep up with reading and a full-time job & no obligation to study anything at all. But occasionally, when I returned, I referred to myself as a Deleuzian, so I didn’t want to drop it. It was here, through these blog posts or essays, that I would find my obligation to read and write, wanting to have something interesting to publish or interesting to say; this became a testing ground for thought. I spent my gap year, when I did read and write, exploring a lot of other thinkers in conjunction with the concepts and insights that I had already gotten from my years of reading Deleuze. It is this time, with a quickly written essay on Baudrillard’s The Agony of Power, that I would get invited onto a podcast, Acid Horizon, as a guest for the first time ever, which I have somehow done three times now, even if I can’t say I’m the best philosophy guest to have. This was a year that I got to find what I actually wanted to say with Deleuze and the other thinkers I engaged with; I had written in many of my applications to Master’s and PhD programs little to nothing of a coherent philosophical project: by the middle of my senior year, I only had the names of philosophers and vague ideas of what I wanted to say with those names and concepts. It was during this year between studies that an interest in Deleuze became articulated closer to the context I engage with it now: understanding libidinal economy through engagements with history, politics, and ethics to understand the means by which people were/are oppressed, desire that oppression, and potentially invest in its dissolution. It is because of this shift that Baudrillard, Foucault, and Agamben have become more important to me without losing Deleuze in the process.

Now, these previous 8-9ish months in my Master’s program have seen me finally figure out what I have to say. I occasionally deal with the problem of not being able to read and write as much as I wish, but its more targeted. I attained a broader background in political history, particularly in Europe, since the second semester of my senior year of undergrad, and now applied that more through theory and philosophy. I’ve also realized that my focus on Anti-Oedipus, while a monumental text, has left me disregarding a few other essentials, whether it be in Deleuze’s corpus or in his contemporaries. To mend this, at the beginning of this Spring semester, outside of the courses I was already taking, I decided to do the monthly Logic of Sense reading groups, since I had only gone through a few chapters on my own, and a Discipline & Punish reading group as well, since finally reading the panopticon chapter gave me an understanding that I missed a lot by putting this text down on page 74 years earlier.

My journey with Deleuze is nowhere near over; it is going the way that I hope he would respect: synthesizing with the work and concepts of other thinkers to create new ways to view and theorize about the world. My current philosophical engagements see me attempting to conceptualize a biopolitical libidinal economic theory that engages with both ethics and history (through genealogy). I have no idea how unique these ideas are, but they’re, at the very least, something that challenges me and pushes me towards expanding how I engage with theory and the world. Finally, looking back, I’m thankful for all the people I met through Deleuze, all the people that helped me learn, had seminars to listen to, had written or translated books that helped along the way, or merely chatted with me about these ideas; without them this journey would not have happened at all.

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The text below is an unofficial translation of this work and is only a personal project of mine at the moment. Additionally, I am publishing these transltions by chapter at the rate that I work on each chapter. Therefore this translation may be subject to edits, updates, or reworks as the project continues.

Author Biography & Background

This first installment of The History of the French Workers’ Movement covers nearly all of the 19th century: the period of the first industrial age marked by the predominance of steam engines and steel.

The Author, from a working family of the textile region of Bas-Dauphine, which is still very sensitive to industrial crises, is a professor of history. He belongs to the generation that was around 20 years old in 1940. and he participated, after the struggles of the Resistance, in the political and social combats for the working class, who had been full of richness and teachings for him. Additionally, he had often been tasked with hosting work meetings and discussions, and internships, which began to give shape to the continuous plot of workers’ history and their march towards liberation.

This is where this history was born, the work of a historian and of a permanently linked militant, and that owes a lot to the human context in which it was elaborated. Envisioning a “movement”, it doesn’t limit to organizations. From the beginning, the primordial role of sciences and technology is highlighted in the very structure of modern industrial society and in class struggle. Little by little, through the successes and adversities of these struggles, in the difficulties of daily life, slowly awakens the consciousness of the possibility of victory, a growing demand for dignity, an appetite for knowledge, a powerful surging of group values piercing the individualist shell forged by capitalism.

“Those who live are those who struggle” - Victor Hugo, The Punishments.

Introduction

The history of the French Workers’ movement is essentially the history of a permanent struggle.

Born, in its modern form, during the first quarter of the 19th century, the working world had to immediately fight for its life, but its struggle very rapidly exceeded the simple demand for subsistence, attaining the magnitude of a combat for the complete liberation of man and for the conquest of their dignity. Little by little, solidarity developed from one region to another, from one profession to another, starting from industrial progressions, then enlarging to a national plan and beyond the frontiers, contributing, therefore, to bring together the effort that aimed to construct a world habitable for all.

This history is filled with victories and defeats; the conquests of a day, obtained the most often by rudimentary means, are put back into question the day after, but when watching the progress over the last one hundred and fifty years, the advances are certain. The adversary is, however, powerful and knows how to take on various forms following each period and the circumstances of the confrontation: this concerns all the privileges of the order established by liberal capitalism, of all those who profit off of this order and have an interest in maintaining it by any means, that is to say, in a large sense, the bourgeoisie. Against it, almost everything has to be conquered in a bitter class struggle carried out by each generation of workers, passing on to the following generation positions to improve without cease. From father to sons, it is a long chain of solidarity that is forged; each adding to it their own indispensable link, each has its fixed place in the march of this world struggling towards its liberation, each gaining from acquired advantages, always at a heavy price, by those that preceded them, but must contribute for their part to the progress of the whole.

Written in the context of the combat and modified by it, the history of the Workers’ Movement is made of the daily lives of workers, of the slow awakening of their belonging to a class enslaved by liberal capitalism, of the theories that animate their action and open perspective to them, of the organizations that they progressively give themselves to and allow for more certain victories.

It takes place in a context in perpetual modification; the importance of this context is primordial, and its absolute knowledge1 is necessary for whoever wants to understand the sense and the scope of workers’ struggles. It is for this reason that, in the chapter that follows, a large part is devoted to the study of techniques because their evolution drives industrial production, and the bourgeoisie, who seek to take the maximum profit from these techniques, and whose ownership the proletariat must continuously contest.

To the changing realities of this context, the struggles of workers had to adapt themselves; we experience the preludes of these up to 1850, with the diffusion of the first machines, the violent reaction that they aroused among the workers, the greed of the bourgeoisie for maximally using its stock of men and machines, and the birth of the first socialist schools.

From 1850 to the end of the 19th century was the first industrial age of the steam-powered machine, steel, rail, and the triumphant bourgeoisie. The worker’s contestation became clearer, numerous organizations were created, animated by better awareness of class struggle; international perspectives opened up to the combat of factory workers that, in 1884, gained the right to form unions.

It is, therefore, during the 60 years, up to 1950, of the imperialist expansion of capitalism, during the course of the second industrial age, animated by the new sources of energy, oil and electricity; of new industries, like that of chemistry; and of new means of transport, the car and airplane; in the face of this new form of capitalism that the Worker’s Movemement structured itself in unions, it adopted, rather largely, marxist socialism, it reacted to the russian revolution of 1917 and, occasionally well organized, it gained certain advantages in 1936 and 1946.

Since 1950, the French Workers’ Movement found itself confronted with the current aspect of industrial capitalism, neoliberalism, this third age marked by automation, the promises of nuclear energy, and global economic communities, but also rivals. Once more, it must search for new forms of action, new responses to provocations of profit, reinvent new methods of organization and of contestation, and multiply information and elevate the gaining of class consciousness of workers at the level where it allows struggle.

Between these stages, schematically drawn, with no break, and no discontinuity; the Worker’s Movement carried itself from one to the other imperceptibly, by sectors, certain industries, or certain regions having already changed ages while others were held for along time in the preceding period; this distortion always made their struggle very difficult to organise and often created, even inside of the working class, antagonisms that capitalism largely utilised.

In studying this daily struggle of work with money and profit, the historian can’t act like an arbitrator, responsible for counting the points for distributing ratings. In a struggle where the strongest use the totality of resources which they use to crush the weak and keep them in a subhuman state, neutrality would only be the smokescreen of resignation. The shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity of all those who wage a similar combat is, to the contrary, profoundly necessary, because “ the doors to the future… will only give in to a united push, in a direction where all, together, can join themselves.”2

First Part: The Shock of the Machine, First half of the 19th century

Hardly had the new economic forces awakened, in the first part of the 19th century, when this confrontation began.

The principal shock is first produced by the eruption of modern machines that plunged workers into unemployment, but they would bring about the backlash of worker resentment, sudden outbursts of anger, and quick fallouts, because their misery is waiting for unemployment.

During this time, the bourgeoisie structured themselves, reinforced themselves, and attempted to assure its future and justify its present domination; on its side, the working world tried to develop its organizations of solidarity in order to not be submerged, while the first socialists analyzed the deficiencies of social organization and proposed more or less long-term alternatives. The confrontation translated itself often into trials between local forces, where the workers were left dead.

But, for both, these are only the prelude to struggles of bigger proportions: the capitalism of the first industrial age is still finding its best formulation, and the working world is reduced to dealing with its most urgent matters.

Chapter 1: The Context: The Birth of Bourgeois Society

Three republics — those of 1792, 1848, and 1870; two empires — with Napoleon and Napoleon III; four revolutions — 1789. 1830. 1848, and the commune of 1871; multiple types of monarchy — the constitutional final years of Louis XVI, the restoration of the monarchy (1815-1830), and the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe (1830-1848): the diversity of political regimes that succeeded each other in France from 1789 to the end of the 19th century appears rather astonishing. In 80 years, the country had changed more than ten times, and the mutations often took place in violence, overthrowing the thrones, sweeping the assemblies, exiling the ones in power, and raising former exiles to the places of power.

For those that would hold on to this aspect of the events, the history of France could resemble an ample soup opera with unexpected twists, which the history of the workers’ movement would only be a chapter, social, among many others, easily isolatable from the context and not necessary to the understanding of the whole.

It seems, to the contrary, that, beyond all this diversity stirring up the movements of the very surface of history, there can be detected at a deeper level groups of forces that have been weaving a continuous network since the beginning of the 19th century and the opposition of successive regimes has not succeeded to untangle; groups of force, which are the most often, concurrent, and which their confrontation draws a grand part of the advance of history: it is about, in particular, during this period, the progressive decline of the grand territorial properties and the aristocracy who had built their power through them, and about the rise of the upper middle class thanks to capitalist accumulation by commerce and industry, and the utilization of the state.

It is in this context that the birth of the French workers’ movement began. Also, to clarify the framing of this birth, it is necessary to highlight two extremely important grand social facts:

— one concerns the installation of the upper middle class, already prominent economically, into political power;

— the other, the birth of the industrial machine in service of this bourgeoisie.3

1. — The Organization of the New Bourgeois Order

At the meeting of the Estates General (5th of May, 1789) to the coup d’etat of the 18 Brumaire (9th of November, 1799), the unfolding of the Revolution can, in a sense, be envisioned in the following way; taking advantage of the political, economic, and financial crisis of the Ancien Regime, the Bourgeoisie — whose taxes covered the expenses of the state, revenue rendered very unsupportable when they were unproductive, like those of the court — wanted control of the employment of sums swallowed up by the royal coffers.

The protestation had rapidly transformed into a global and violent contestation of the former society who — with its three hierarchical orders, two of which were privileged, meaning they paid next to no taxes, with their rigid structure for producing their riches, their barriers that hindered the free play of new economic forces — considerably limited the possibilities of expansion and profit, and revealed by that inadaptation the profound demands of a dynamic world in gestation.

Therefore, under a series of battering rams, this former order collapsed, at the same time that it constructed a new society. Certain acquisitions were often merely modified drafts; others turned out to be transitory and gave way to the place of more solid construction, but, little by little, the more durable foundations had implanted themselves.

The Privileged are now Those of Fortune

Here is the first part that structures a new social hierarchy where superiority is more and more conferred by fortune and not by birth. Money assigns to each their place in society and allows one to rise to a more elevated situation. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens had correctly proclaimed in its first article: “men are born and remain free and equal in right. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common utility,” the Constitution of 1791, which immediately followed this declaration, already divided the French people after their incomes as actives citizens, the most rich and those who had the most political rights, and passive citizens, the poorest and to who were refused the right to vote.

This casting aside of the less fortunate is resumed by the constitution of year III organizing the Directory; under the consulate of the Empire, universal suffrage serves only to propose, to the choice of those in power, candidates for the Assembly; again, politics is reserved for the most rich under the Restoration (90,000 electors in 1817) and the July Monarchy (167,000 electors in 1831).4 It is indeed the case here, affirmed by this successions of measures oriented in the same direction, that a very precise will of the new bourgeois framework to reserve the right over the direction of the country to those that money deemed “capable,” and to confine to a secondary role the peasants, artisans, workers, shop-keepers, all the small earners who by the meagerness of their revenue or the absence of their resources would be devoted (one would say by nature) to the obscure and horizonless tasks of a banal and desperately everyday life. And the middle class would “be fools,” wrote Saint-Marc Girardin, “if they would allow the flood of proletarians into the national guard, in the municipal institution, in the electoral laws, or in all that is the State.”5

No more than this new hierarchy organize by wealth, did the regimes that followed it the bourgeois’ possession of national assets leave it uncontested; the former domains of the clergy and of emigres served first to guarantee the issuing of Assignats, but the rapid debasing of this currency allowed speculators to acquire, for some packets of paper that had become worthless, vast landed estates that were furnished with excellent investments and guarantees to power and consideration.

This, therefore, operated a giant transfer of property that any following regime would not dare to challenge. The Charter of 1814, itself, despite preluding a period favorable to the past emigres, had been obligated to guarantee these assets to their new owners. On the one hand the impoverished peasants had found themselves in general to be too poor to be able to buy these lands while they were being sold, on the other hand the stricter application of proprietors’ rights removed a part of collective rights that, in the past rural world, had given to these peasants and agricultural day laborers an indispensable supplement of resources; these modest social categories saw their quality of existence decrease up to the point of being insufferable; To those that lived only a few kilometers from cities, the solution offered to them was to go work in the new manufacturing factories. This social evolution could, therefore, furnish, to the factories, a proletariat at a cheap price.

Economic Freedom and the Utilization of the State

But the most important, the most solid, and the most appreciated victory of the upper middle class, as well as the most consequential for the evolution of all of contemporary French society, was that of economic freedom. Liberty, proclaimed the Declaration of Rights, had been given a more precise sense, that of an individual liberty taken in isolation, facing another individual, refusing the interference of all collectives in economic and social networks, even in the form of the law regulating, for example, the questions regarding working conditions. The liberty of such groups is not recognized. Existing associations, like that of corporations, who could hinder the free play of competition, are eliminated, and it is forbidden to create others: there is no freedom of association. The Le Chapelier law of June 14th, 1791, decided that workers would have no common interest and did not have the right to organize for their defense:

Art. 1 — The annihilation of all spaces of corporation for citizens of the same status or profession is a fundamental basis for the French constitution, it is forbidden to reinstate them in fact, under any pretext and under any form.

Art. 2 — The citizens of the same status or profession, the entrepreneurs, those that open shops, the workers, and companions of any art shall not be have the power to, whenever they find themselves grouped together, nominate presidents, secretaries, or syndicalists, issue decrees or deliberation, or form regulations for their so-called common interests…

It is no longer a question of toleration of gatherings or coalitions designed to achieve, for example, modifications to salaries, by any form of pressure or by strikes; the law of the 22 Geminal, year XI (12th of April, 1803) came to prevent these excesses:

Art. 7 — Any coalitions on the part of workers to cease work simultaneously, forbid work in certain shops, prevent starting and staying work before or after certain hours, and, in general, for suspending, preventing, or increasing the price of labor will be punished, if there were an attempt or the commencement of execution, with imprisonment that will not exceed three months.

Articles 414, 415, and 416 of the penal code subsequently confirm these prohibitions by the increase in repressive measures.

All workers must equally be a carrier of a worker’s booklet as stipulated by the law of 9 Frimaire, year XII (the 1st of December, 1803):

Art. 1: “...all workers working as journeymen or apprentices must possess a booklet”

Art. 3: “...all workers who would travel without being equipped with a booklet endorsed [by the police or the mayor], will be given the reputation of vagabond, and arrested and punished as such [six months of prison].”

This is a sort of work passport which bears, in addition to the indications of social status of the worker, the names of their diverse bosses, reasons for hire, and departure or dismissal. Each worker’s past is carefully inventoried and revealed on a single piece of paper for the eyes of another business owner whenever there is a new demand for employment; it permits the control over whether a worker has always been a submissive subject of liberal economics or if they have attempted to organize their coworkers to obtain some increase in salary or decrease in the hours of work: in the latter case, it is a poor assessment [or reputation] that is brought along, which one is unable to get rid of, and makes finding new sources of employment more difficult, at least until one reintegrates into the disciplinary framework imposed by the established order. It is only in the second half of the 19th century that the usage of these booklets falls into obscurity, before their suppression by the law of July 2nd, 1890: conceived at the beginning of the century for linking enterprises with the workforce they would have needed on site, it became useless, the conditions of production having been completely transformed.

This is, thus, a juridical reinforcement that is constructed to always allow the development of the most considerable for this new society founded on money, the unceasing accumulation of new profits, and solidly holding, enclosing, and controlling those whose work is necessary for this development and accumulation. Liberty, yes, but oriented in a greatly determined way; equality, yes, but in the way that people can be formally equal but in fact so terribly unequal: there are those that have fortunes at their disposal and those who, isolated, only have their arms to hang on to, being barely alive.

The monument that brings together all of these acquisitions for the bourgeois and juridically founds the society of the 19th century is the Civil Code, enacted on the 21st of March, 1804; it resumes, in putting them into order, those, sometimes scattered, acquisitions of the preceding 15 years, completes them, connects them together around the notions that were becoming foundational to economic freedom and private property, and baring all collective organization that could contest them.

At the same moment that they developed this organization with a considerable scope and assured an improved functioning for their interests, the bourgeoisie relied, controlled, and invested in the state. It populated the chambers of the legislature, the ministers, the consuls of the state, the upper administration, and the prefectures. Then, they used the state, like, for example, in 1810, to grant perpetual mineral rights without any questioning or competition, after only a review by the government of the opportunity and merit of the concession, in exchange for a modest fee.6

The bourgeoisie gave themselves equally the right to look at the nation’s finances by the creation of the French Bank (13th February, 1800) with capital holdings of 30 million, of which 28 were furnished by the state and 2 by the first shareholders; therefore, using public funds to discount bills of commerce that allowed for substantial revenues. This bank was managed by 15 elected regents by 200 most important shareholders; we find among them bankers, businessmen, and industrialists like Claude Perier, Mallet Perregaux, Le Couteulx, Germain, Recamier, etc… Here also, the stranglehold seems solid.

The Need for a Strong Government

To ensure a good start and guarantee the development of these economic and social victories, the bourgeoisie needed a strong state that was sheltered from possible fluctuations and would sometimes contradict the public opinion. They knew of two major errors they must avoid:

• They did not want to owe their authority to those that one would broadly call Jacobins and spokesmen for the lower class: for this lower class that had tried to impress onto the government of the Revolution a democratic orientation over repeated days and who, engraving in history the epic of the soldiers of year II, having guaranteed the integrity of the territory and strengthened the new regime, would therefore require not promises but profound social and economic reforms. That was out of the question. Rejected into the passive social status from the beginning, the lower class is finally disarmed after the failure of the revolutionary days of April 1st and May 20th, 1795, and the “empty bellies” are reduced to silence.

• Nor was there any question of tolerating, under whatever form it may be in, a return of royalists at emigres that would destroy the new edifice, recuperate the national assets, and avenge the death of the king voted for in January of 1793 by the rising political class.

Then, after the fall of Robespierre on the 27th of July, 1794, the back and forth of Jacobins and Royalists in power threatened and coerced the leaders of the Bourgeoisie to practice a seesaw-like politics, which was poorly assured and full of risks. In order to avoid sinking in either of these pitfalls, to consolidate their acquired privileges, to be able to expect a steadily rising stream of profits and enjoy, in all security, the benefits of the established order, the French Bourgeoisie gave themselves a master in the person of Bonaparte.

The speculation on war supplies continued with a renewed vigor under the Consulate of the Empire (1799-1815), the conquered countries were put under systematized management, and the Continental Blockade permitted the accumulation of guaranteed profits protected from any British competitors. Since France is the most industrialized country on the continent and the market of its manufactured products extends little by little eastwards, this situation lasted up to the moment where the economic crisis of 1810-13 showed that the blockade limited commerce and its affairs more than it protected them and that the Napoleon regime’s time had passed. Provided that his fundamental conquests were maintained, the bourgeoisie thus abandoned Napoleon the 1st and welcomed the restoration over the course of which it effectively conserved the majority of its sears; in spite of the interlude of 1820 through 1830 that saw an anachronistic attempt to resurrect the society of the Ancien Régime.7

Who are these New Leaders?

The men who had taken the levers of power into their hands and whose business exploded under the protection of the state, regardless of the form of the regime, didn’t represent all the pockets of the Bourgeoisie. Among those excluded are the possessors of fixed revenue, the landlords, victims of inflation, and those whose revenues are diminishing; those that held onto international commerce and that the blockade had severely harmed, and inversely those that had over invested in imperial protectionism and found themselves without defense at the end of the blockade; those that thrived off of luxury industries which the emigration of the clientele had been strongly hit. Nor was it a matter of the local petit bourgeoisie, who hardly lifted themselves above average means.

On the contrary, the upper middle class, master of the hour, groups, along side of old fortunes acquired before the Revolution in maritime commerce, the bank, factories, all those who, since 1789, had made a fortune in analogous domains or in speculation on assignats, national goods, army supplies, innumerable kinds of taxed merchandise, or even in smuggling which the blockade had made very profitable.

Here, enriched by the cotton industry starting in the 18th century, is the Alsacien business community with Dollfus, Mieg, Koechlin, Sclumberger, men of progress who did not shield secret business affairs or hide even the least detail of their business entreprises; on the contrary, they grouped the manufacturers of their city in an “Industrial Society of Mulhouse” (1826) that published the results of their research and work, created by commissions for the study of industrial, commercial, and even social questions, which was rather original for the time, and which somewhat benefited the works. In the region of Belfort, Peugeot and Japy manufactured painted canvases; another Peugeot worked steel starting in 1810; in Hayange, these are the Wendel; in Elbeuf, Grandin made work of two groups of workers of the same profession and thus invented work by teams, etc…

Then those of the bank and Stock Exchange, often protestants originally from Switzerland: the Mallet, who occupy a seat of regent in the Bank of France up to 1937 and who founded the Company of General Insurance (la Compagnie d’Assurances générales) in 1819; Delessert, also a regent, and who made his money at the time in cotton spinning and the fabrication of beet sugar, was a creator of the savings banks in 1818 and Royal Insurance Company (la Compagnie royale d’Assurances) in 1819; Perrégaux was a manufacturer of printed fabric and regent of the Bank of France. Laffitte was a banker and the first minister of Louis-Philippe.

Here is the Périer family from the Dauphiné region: coming from Triéves, Jacques Périer fixed himself to Grenoble, in 1730, and brought in huge profits from the Voiron canvas trade exported from very far away. His son Jacques-Augustin was the director of the East India Company while his eldest son, Claude, developed the family business, adding the bank to their activities, lending money to the government who owed them 564,931 livres in 1781, manufactured wallpaper at Vizilleas as soon as 1775, then printed fabrics, bought the chateau at Vizille in 1780 for lodging his industry there and welcomed the Three Orders of his province there in 1788, and handled the trade of sugar with Saint-Domingo. Under the Revolution, he prudently and effectively guarded his fortune, bought national goods, gained a foothold, in 1795, in the Anzin Company, and, in 1801, was one of the first regents of the Bank of France. Three of his sons would succeed him in that office.

His descendants would join politics to their other activities: six of his eight sons were deputies as well as two of his son-in-laws; in three generations, from 1816 to 1877 except under the Second Empire8, twenty two representatives from his family would serve in the Chambre; there were several times when it was five all together and even seven from 1871 to 1873, and always at least one from 1815 to 1851 and 1871 to 1894; in 1894, a Périer was President of the Republic.9

Therefore, the representatives of the upper middle class rapidly installed themselves to the offices in command of the economy and politics; they created a law that gave an official and burdensome character to their domination and that protected profits against any revolt from the “inferior classes”. They also used all the improvements of technique that would multiply the possibilities for the expansion of their enterprises.

2. — The Dawn of Industrial Mechanization

At the debut of the 19th century, France was, before all, an agricultural country: in 1826, with a population of around 31,850,000 inhabitants, one counts around 22,250,000 people living off of the land. The fields and the meadows, as well as the forests and the fallows, imposed themselves on the countryside; from one village to another, barges traveled along the canals and the rivers, and the roads were actively traveled by pedestrians, mail coaches, stage coaches, and carriages carrying merchandise. There were no railroads. Each Département had only a single city, its administrative center, most often with less than 20,000 people, and, at the beginning of the Restoration, excluding the capital, only Lyon and Marseille surpassed, and only by very little, 100,000 inhabitants.

However, new events full of consequences were in the process of taking place in various parts of the territory, and their totality allows us to discern the birth of industrial mechanization.

Mechanization, which is something that isn’t just the presence of machines. Already, in effect, the 18th century had seen machines spread to the country and the village; numerous textile professions had been invested, perfected in England, and then had penetrated little by little into France, arousing a new development of rural and urban artisans, even creating, in places, establishments where machines are concentrated and powered by force generated by water. But this energy offers to industry only limited possibilities for expansion. Industrial mechanization only commenced at the start of the moment where a new source of energy had permitted a multiplication of the power and the size of establishments and opened the path to an endless increase in profits: the old types of production were being turned upside down, and the social order was being transformed. This new form of energy is that which is furnished by the steam engine.

The Steam Engine

These are inventions with successive improvements up until 1872 and, in particular, the work of Watt in 1769, who had begun enabling the development of steam engines in England over the course of the 18th century. These “Fire Pumps”, as one would have called them then, were first used to evacuate water from mines; then, the back-and-forth movement was transformed into a circular movement, in order to move other machines.

At the beginning of 1779, the Périer brothers10 began to produce steam engines in their Chaillot factory, about forty, up to 1791, sold in France and to foreign countries, then there is an arrest of construction during the Revolution and it is necessary to wait for the Empire for seeing the reprise: there were around 40 in service in France in 1810; in 1825, 65 establishments possessed one, and 625 did in 1830.11 This is still very little.

Steam Engines were very large, cumbersome, extremely loud, and used only a tenth of the energy that they were supplied with. Certain experts even thought that they had no future; in 1809, Gay-Lussac and Ampère didn’t think they would be capable of serving the purpose of making boats move: “there is no sufficient motive,” they wrote, “for the government to open up experiments on this subject that would be very costly and probably not useless for the progression of industry.”

Yet, although the hydraulic wheel was still, in 1830, the most used motor by industry, and certain were still turned by horses or oxen on treadmills, the steam engine always produced a more considerable amount of energy, which was especially easier to move and to multiply, while the water wheel was limited by the rate of flow even in a stream. No more inconveniences provoked by water bases, floods, winter frost, or summer droughts: the Steam Engine functioned at any temperature and in any season. The growth of profits is no longer hindered by the uncertainties of climate; the cadences of work are accelerated; time outs and moments of relaxation that were inherent to old forms of energy disappeared and, when gas lighting spreads, it is no longer the absence of light nor the lack of motivation that could prevent business owners from allongating, at their pleasing, the work day for workers operating the machines.

The Machines

Because of the Steam Engine, other machines could multiply, and mechanical systems grew in importance and efficiency.

In the young cotton industry, unencumbered by the weight of traditions, spinning and weaving machines, coming from England, spread little by little and animated the regions of Mulhouse, the Seine-Inferieure, the Nord, the Parisian region, and Tarare. The wool industry, with a longer history, adopted different machines invented by Douglas, followed by those of Cokerill, which were much better; these were put to work in Sedan, Louviers, Reims, le Nord, Normandy; they allowed 20 spinner workers to do the work of 150 and, for the entirety of wool textile operations, reduced the workforce by two-fifths; production costs are considerably reduced: spinning 140 livres of wool in a day costs 26 livres 15 sols in place of 42 livres and, per piece of cloth, the price of labor drops from 80 francs to 50. Profits increase significantly.

The flax spinning machine was invented by Philippe de Girard starting in 1810. Around 1805, Jacquard and a certain number of other technicians, in particular Breton, from Privas, developed the silk loom that other textiles would adopt little by little: in Lyon, 7,000 looms in 1814 increased to 17,000 in 1818 and to 22,000 in 1824.

The first fabric printing machines with copper cylinders were put into service in Jouy in 1803.

On the other hand, the progress of metallurgy had been blocked by the Revolution and 23 years of foreign wars; the necessities of national defense would not tolerate experimental research and its uncertainty: in 1815, progress is slim in relation to the Ancien Régime, and is no longer stimulated by the protectionism of the Restoration. Tentative coke iron smelting trials were held in Creusot at the dawn of 1789, remaining without any future, only to be taken back up very slowly starting in 1815 because of forest owners who supported the government of the Restoration. The extraction of coal, however, passed 250,000 tons, in 1789, 820,000, in 1815, and 1,500,000 in 1825, and its principal basins were the Loire and Anzin. Then, the volume of blast furnaces was augmented, furnishing more iron with less coal; reverberatory furnaces and the process of puddling became widespread under the Restoration, which allowed for the attainment of better quality iron. The Fourchambaulty factory, founded in 1818, began using puddling in 1821 and possessed 10 blast furnaces and 20 reverberatory furnaces by 1827; around 1830, Le Creusot delivered, each year, 30 to 40 steam engines; de Wendel developed his forges in Hayange, but the principal metallurgic centers were still situated in proximity to the forests of Nièvre, Berry, Haute-Saône, Dordogne, Haute-Marne, and Côte-d’Or.

In chemistry, the work of Berthollet transformed the bleaching and dying of fabrics; the Leblanc process enabled the production of soda ash (1805); Vicat invented Hydraulic Lime in 1822.

The First Concentrations

All of these forms of technical progress modified the conditions of labor and the life of workers; they contributed to the concentration of industry and finance, in particular in the industries which needed vast spaces, numerous and expensive machines, and abundant capital. Before 1830, these concentrations had still barely developed; territorially, they represented only small dots in some regions, but, despite certain resounding failures, they opened important, beneficial perspectives. Additionally, they served as examples and were soon to be increasingly imitated.

Under the Restauration, while Le Creusot was still stagnating, the metallurgic factory of Fourchambault employed 2,400 workers; there were hundred of them in Aubertot, Vierzon, Dietrich, Strasbourg, de Wendel, and Hayange; the textile printing factory that Oberkampf directed in Jouy, under the empire, already practice the integration of chemical operations with spinning and weaving, and one finds identical situations in the textile mills of Rouen, Lyon, and Mulhouse, the enterprises were sometimes in the hands of genuine companies.

Turnoux, who utilised and widely spread the machines of Douglas and Cockerill, was at the head of massive teams, grouping 5000 workers in 1801, and by 1807 had 3000 only in the city of Rouen, with 15000 in all Normandy in 39 factories. In Sedan, Reims, and Louviers, manufacturers also integrated the practice of buying wool themselves, giving it out to be spun in the countryside, then weaving it in their own factories, and handling the sale of their finished product. Richard-Lenoir employed, 1806, 3,600 workers in his six cotton spinners and 8,882 home-based weavers, before going under during the crises of 1810-13 and dying in ruin in 1839.

And, on a scale even more vast, certain, like John Cockerill, had interests in all of Europe:

Monsieur John Cockerill still owns in Liège, at the foot of Pont-des-Jésuites, this beautiful and vast model machine factory, where all those that he employs in his diverse establishments come from. Moreover, he possesses, in Liège, a weaving machine, a merino factory as well in Verviers and in Aix-la-Chapelle; in Andennes, near Namur, a paper factory and textile mill; in Cottbus, Prussia, a net factory; in Stolberg, zinc mines; in Przelbord, Poland, a fabric factory; in Barcelona, a cotton mill; in Suriname, steam mills; in Berlin and Guben, spinning mills for sheets/fabrics; in Aix-la-Chapelle, combed wool spinning mills; in Liège, a cotton mill under the firm Yates and C^ie; in Tilleur, a foundry for casting; at Val-Benoît, an establishment for the production of boilers; in Amsterdam, a house for the selling of cotton fabrics; in Spa, a cotton mill.

Monsieur Cockerill is interested in significant shares in the blast furnaces in Ougrée, L’espérance, and Chatelinau; in the production of war rifles, and in Saint-Denis, near Paris, in the massive linen spinning and weaving manufacturing plant.

He is setting up near Petersburg, in this moment, workshops for the production of Steam Engines, locomotives, and wagons, and is beginning the operation of a coal mine around Saint-Etienne, where he proposes the establishment of blast furnaces and the production of rolled iron.12

All of these manifestations of industrial activity were, at that moment, merely a very embryonic form of capitalism at a very slow pace of growth; it was still a close blend of elements which once supplied the base of power and authority and continued to support13 them at the beginning of the century with new elements that would initiate a transformation of industrial production and social relations. Each newly enriched manufacturer hastened to invest a large share of their profits into land properties that would give them, along with consideration, access to political power; these manufacturers were often former merchants for whom the profits of industrial activity came to simply complete those supplying their sales. These are, for example, the same people who had canvasses woven in the west and guaranteed their sale overseas at the port of Nantes; thousands of spinners and weavers were always working the wool in the countryside between the grand periods of agricultural occupations for the accounts of some merchants in neighboring cities; small workshops, or in-home workspaces, were still widespread throughout the land in the majority of activities involving wood, metal, or textiles, utilising the force of a small stream or cheap fuel from a nearby forest.

The Limits

This first budding of industrial capitalism quickly met obstacles, and the need to surpass them called for new technical progress; here are two examples:

• There is a limit with the lack of good means of communication and transportation of raw materials, finished products, or the workforce; roads and canals became insufficient in a time where England began to use Railways.

• There is another limit in the lack of capital: for the majority of entreprises, the initial contribution was supplied by family in the framework of a partnership and shared name, or, at best, by some rich contributors in a sponsored partnership, if the need for more important capital was felt, but would hardly go beyond that; throughout the system, all seek to remain financially independent and secrecy is most often the rule. The Haute Banque primarily invests their funds in state bonds, and other capital preferentially invests in land.

New methods for the circulation of men and things, new methods in the circulation of capital, are what is required for economic progress.

For the moment, the narrow frame of industrial development, fear of British competition, protectionism that maintained the routine, the necessity for any company to find money in its immediate surroundings and, by consequence, to generate maximum profit for realizing a sort of self-financing, hinders the progress which one would need, maintaining elevated production costs and base salaries, and contributing to the misery of workers.

Here and there, despite everything, technical progress cracked the unevenly solid shell of society and the economy of the Ancien Régime. Associated with political and legal transformations that it helped to provoke, urged on by the search for an always-growing profit, it sparked initiatives and brought about new social strata. One could see that what was emerging was a world very different from that of the 18th century, in its overall framework as well as in its content. New relations between people tend to establish themselves; the entirety of life is in the process of changing, but in particular, the existence of those who, daily, are channeled towards the factories.

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Ernst Kantorowicz’s 1957 work The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology sits up there with the work of thinkers like Hobbes, Schmitt, and Foucault as a foundation to the understanding of how power and sovereignty work, at least within the frame of Western history. This mostly historiographical work systematizes a two-part structure to all formations of sovereignty and how they transform over the course of the European Middle Ages, going into the early modern period. The divine body of the king forms out of the association with the legitimization of the king by Christ’s power, which eventually becomes the power of justice through the rise in law, and the physical body of the king, which transforms from monarch to monarch. We may be able to redescribe these as Sovereignty and the Sovereign, respectively.

Sovereignty in this frame is the entire structure or conceptualization of the legitimization of power; it attaches to very abstract ideals, whether that be the grace of god, justice, the will of the nation, etc. The Sovereign is the person or thing that represents or actualizes this legitimization within a particular political domain. While this longue durée view of medieval political theology may show us a transitory and changing aspect to both of these parts of the structure, they are meant to appear as if the King and the power structures of their kingdom (military, police, administrators, governors, and so on) are the current actualization of an eternal form of legitimization.

Sovereignty as an Assemblage

We may understand these two as the totality of an assembledge with two primary groupings for machines: justification machines and actualization machines. Each referring to and being reproduced by the other to some extent. The Sovereign machine is the machinery of the state in its current form, all the mechanisms and machines that go into actualizing a particular manifestation of power. These may be the police, the prisons, the military, the laws, the taxes, and all the real interactions with the machinery of power. But each of these manifestations or processes has a primary goal of enforcing or bringing about the structure of sovereignty. So they must cover themselves in the symbolization of justice, nationhood, protection of the people, rationality, or divinity, and must justify all of their actions with this establishment in mind. One can easily find the evolution in these sovereign or state structures in the genealogies of Foucault or similar kinds of work, but here I seek the mechanisms of sovereignty as an abstract machine that demonstrates both a full definition of what sovereignty works and how it evolves.

Sovereignty organizes power through the mechanism of its legitimization and is changed with each particular form of sovereign structures that use it to materialize and justify themselves. Sovereignty only makes sense as a self-referent because it only works as a self-referent from the view within the system: the divine right of kings or national democracy seems self-apparent to the systems that are based upon them, but are quickly questioned and lessened outside of their framework. I base this understanding on Deleuze’s conceptualization of non-sense that, instead of being outside of the system of sense, is a solely self-referential symbol, or process in this regard, whose acceptance allows for the rest of the system of sense to organize itself on it. All the systems of the sovereign and the people, in regard to power, may be able to base their justification upon other structures within their system, but ultimately must base the existence of the whole organization on a singular aspect that has no justification. I wish to assert that Sovereignty is this self-justifying process, but, at the same time, is modified through time by the structures that use it to justify and base their existence; sovereignty thus changes mostly through more direct engagements with sovereign forces.1

The goal with arguing for Sovereignty as an assemblage that changes throughout time is to delink it with the particular kinds of legitimizing forces of the pre-democratic political eras. The study of sovereignty in the Western political tradition has largely come from sources dealing with princes and kings and their legitimacy and has rarely left those confines, opting instead for completely different forms of legitimization as the basis. I do not want to go against the place carved out for understanding the role of Discipline in the history of power by Foucault or societies of control by Deleuze, but rather merely argue that Sovereignty has the same general aims and mechanics under the monarchs as it does under democratic nations.

The object or content of Sovereignty has surely changed. Sovereignty moved for Kantorowicz from being based in the grace or likeness or Christ towards the basis in the law and reason by the time of the renaissance; it is important to note here, that there is a transition in this period, the former does not go away when the latter is rising but the former begins to be rearticualted more and more into the language of the latter until the entire political sense has changed. Like I attempted to discuss earlier in the third part of this series, The Divine Right of Capital, the language of Sovereignty, and how political legitimacy is gained and fought for, changes to distance itself further from the physical force and threats that power ultimately finds as its final basis (though I would not argue that this is necessarily a conscious process). Those who win power by force, war, or similar means ground their power in the symbolic in order to cement it into history and place. The West finds that beginning in the Christianity of the Early Middle Ages, which evolves into a second form with the rediscovery of Roman Law and political thinking.

Within this historical basis, we find the Sovereign as the centerpiece between what legitimates power through its omnipotence and the body politic. Originally, the word of God needed a material enforcer and found that in a King who is partially divine and partially human. This founds the Sovereign exception: the Sovereign, as Divine/Physical, both grounds politics and is excluded from it. But the Sovereign, especially as a physical being, can not be the ultimate basis for a political system and is subject to Divine will, Justice, or National History; their personhood or structure is justified as the means by which Sovereignty expresses itself properly.

The switch from grace to justice is one of the sovereign as the sole executor of all governance, becoming engulfed in a political history. This, too, drawing from Kantorowicz, is linked to the divine and physical bodies of the sovereign as the divine body is shared by each physical iteration of the sovereign. To rearticulate this structure, the structures of a new Sovereign find themselves either as a continuation or a building on the previous one, with the basis in law as a means of the continuation of proper justice. Additionally, particular sovereigns may be done away with in the case that they are not seen as the actualization of divine grace, justice, or the national will; that does not mean that Sovereignty itself is under attack, but rather being reasserted in the eyes of the new power, which is seen as the return to ruling with the concepts of Sovereignty.

Sovereignty here must not only mean the ideas discussed above, but additionally the concepts of Sovereign structures and power tied to them. The shift to a justice-based view of Sovereignty is brought about in tandem with the growth of bureaucratic and legal structures in the High & Late Middle Ages, and also serves as a basis for the transformation of the structures of the sovereign. The growth in educational institutions around the 11th through 13th centuries and the translation of ancient Greek and Roman political and legal writings, preserved in Arabic, brought a new class for state management that allowed for a diffusion of power throughout a kingdom. While there are books that will go much further down this route in detail, the goal of mentioning this is merely to show the relationship between the ideas of Sovereignty as an abstract structure and the actual institutions of power and their seemingly two-way relationship. The rise in justice and legal structures gives way to the building of political histories and laws within a political domain: the medievals draw from the ancients, but the legal texts they wrote are used by the early moderns as a basis for their legal arguments and so on. This allows the building, within Western Europe, of a conception of a legal, political Assemblage through history that begins to build by reference internal to the whole system.

National Sovereignty

I wish now to articulate one of the basis of Sovereignty as an Assemblage that national sovereignty is the same mechanic as the forms of sovereignty that came before it. Not only is this because it follows from it historically, but it has the same inclusive and exclusive mechanics that it has built on top of and created new forms on. What has taken place is primarily a depersonalization of power structures away from figures and towards institutions and a reformation of Justice and Reason into National Will. These transformations find their primary difference from their earlier form in the fact that Sovereignty is no longer seen at the level of the divine but rather the finding of reason or justice through the people as a collective. This collectivity is important because it is not merely a turn towards a political community, which would see monarchism as a historical detour, but instead an appeal to an abstract populace that has no real 1:1 referent in the people themselves.

This is the source of Sovereignty within the national will: the sovereign structures transform the Sovereignty they justify themselves through by the creation of a national people or national heritage. In the same way that the construction of familial history was important to the Medieval rulers or mythological ancestors was important to the ancients, the reformation of history and peoples is important to national power. The present powers reform the peoples of the past to reinforce their present rule and political desires. This may be partly why the far-right nationalists are always concerned with a return to glory rather than articulating a present greatness: they are able to rearticulate the past, to cut out divergent wills, and to make recent history a conspiracy against the true will of the people. Their gaining power always has to be spoken in the frame of a lost national past, not because that has actually been lost, but because it must become created as lost and refound in the national will that legitimizes present power.

In these systems, it may be reducible to claim that this is solely about the control of the understanding of people and history, conceptions, and mechanics are created to further cement these drives and political aims. With this, we may understand what becomes Sovereignty not just as the abstract people of a nation, but additionally the mechanisms of race or culture within the national context. These conceptions are surely the aims of establishing a modified and tailored past; the establishment of racial divisions at the level of a national rationality or National Sovereignty can submit them to being discussed as truth within the nation’s discourse. This has also seen a noticeable reterritorialization within the last century of far-right politics: while Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy absolutely had conceptions of the racial superiority of whiteness, they never articulated this as a universal whiteness shared regardless of nation or location. The modern white supremacist is probably the most deterritorialized in the history of such a group; their concern is no longer for just the nation they live in and its racial purification, which is certainly still there, but the purification of all lands deemed white and their invasion. The mechanics of national sovereignty may have expanded to the level of racial sovereignty within this now global community of hate. In some cases, one may even find a multi-racial and ethnic coalition of fascists and white supremacists. This is because their connection to sovereignty has been entirely reinvested in the abstract absurdity of racial and cultural purity made up and changed by people and institutions whose desires to commit violence in the name of Sovereignty outweighs the need for that desire to be articulated in any concrete form, like the nation. The logic has thus become a biopolitical death drive seeking out any alliance aiming at the endless purity of mankind, even if that alliance would be directly contradictory to any of the principles of their view of Sovereignty. This is merely a summary of a case that likely requires a book-length level of research and analysis.

As I gear up for a further explanation of Power as Reality in regards to political ethics and the justification of evil; here, I want to begin the discussion of a claim I wish to discuss much further in those texts. This is that the extremes of political violence are not rarities or exceptions from the logic of our political systems, but rather the logic of our current form of Sovereignty laid out bare. The violence found in reality is the assertion of not a new logic but rather a reorganization of the contents of this logic. This too requires an explanation further into the importance of the figure of Homo Sacer found in Agamben’s work, a figure that, by law, can be killed without it being considered murder, or those who are included within a community through their exclusion from it. How Sovereignty is legitimized is not merely through its ideals of divine will, justice, or national will but through the excluded enemy. The different forms of Sovereignty may represent different means by which politics is able to articulate a friend/enemy distinction or included/excluded, citizen/savage, or pure/impure distinctions.

In the normal functioning of politics, there seems to be a certain laxity with the borders of these distinctions, whereas the fascist form of nationalism is the application of the logic of the purification of the national will without end. It continually must search for impurity or outsiders to assert blame on the national collapse that they are consistently in the process of reversing. New things will be found that are against the national will because the will’s logic focuses on exclusion more than establishing an internal positive identity. The logic of their sovereignty is thus overly invested in an exclusionary death drive towards purification.

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Still, I would like to at least have the hope that its not all over, that if we get the politics right, then the total destruction of education and academia won’t happen, but will be narrowly saved. Academia’s demise, however, isn’t coming from a natural evolution away from the institution as the site of education; its demise will be akin to murder, and its non-existence will amount to the destruction of access to higher education for most people. While there are para-academic organizations, and I try to participate in a few, they are not wide-reaching enough yet to offer a humanities education to the hundreds of thousands of people who annually seek it through the university system. This destruction of humanities education seems to be the primary aim of the murderers of academia: big businesses get to turn college into a free training program, the right gets more ignorant masses that unquestionably follow their power and religious doctrine, and now AI companies get to be seen as the route to education for all (“at a metered rate” as Sam Altman now says), despite how often these AIs are biased and massively incorrect.

If these interests are to be totally defeated and not allowed to return, Academia itself will have to fundamentally change. The first of these three interests has seemingly won the space of academia and has degraded it into a job training site in almost any field in most universities around the US, the colleges meant for the children of rich white people being possibly the only exception. The view of what knowledge and education are has become antithetical to the best ideals of higher education: critical thinking skills and exploratory/experimental research. It is no longer a place meant to give students a place to grow their metacognition skills, but a 4-year mill for people to find lifelong careers through skill-only based learning, internships, and connections. The jobs that are growing in the space are the ones that fill the needs of these specific aims; the humanities are protected mostly by general education requirements and, because of this, are seen as basic college-level skills courses rather than fields that should lead to lifelong research. What then must academia become?

What Academia could be, with education and knowledge as ends in-themselves, is an experimental institution. It was this vision, which once existed in the past, especially in countries like France, that inspired me to want to pursue a career in academia. I used to look at the requirements of a new, and possibly even public, course every year about your current research done by such notable figures like Foucault and Lacan, as the ultimate academic dream. Experimental, groundbreaking research and theory were seen as part of the job, and its presentation was treated as either a public service or something regular students should be actively engaged in. I found this style of education exciting and worth building a career towards.

Around the same time I first read these figures and learned about the 20th-century French university requirements for their positions, I was reading the final seminar/lecture series done by Mark Fisher at Goldsmiths, University of London: Post-Capitalist Desire. I now find a lot of similarities between the space in which it happened and my current grad school seminar course experiences. While Fisher, as the lecturer and professor for the course, created the reading list/syllabus and spent most of the course’s time lecturing, the voices of the students and their questions are not something taken lightly or as mere clarification questions. This was an upper-level course, but it still shows a seriousness for what the humanities and training in the humanities can bring about in the classroom: the occasional dialogues between Fisher and the students were consistently on deep theoretical questions concerning the texts and their relationship to the world we live in, which made the lectures deeper and richer in meaning than any pre-planned monologue lecture could.

Lately, I’ve been thinking over the debate between pedagogy/teaching and research/theory that seems to have sparked back up on social media. Its an opposition that I find a lot of people in the humanities seem to see as extremes, where obligation to the former makes the latter near impossible to do, and I can’t say I don’t see where they’re coming from. The fields in the humanities are not necessarily seen as research areas within the United States of America, and usually are geared towards teaching only. But Pedagogy techniques and teaching responsibilities would not necessarily have to be antithetical to being able to do theory work or research in the humanities; the classroom could be a site of experimentation itself. From my experience, however, it seems that the classroom has instead become a site for administrative measurement. The humanities are reduced to the results they can produce in meeting general skill requirements rather than actually providing the metacognition that the humanities can actually foster. Classes get easier to meet grading requirements, pedagogy becomes more about reinforcing basic writing skills instead of teaching the actual field, the pedagogy required by admin or right-wing states severely limits what can be discussed, or classes become geared towards general overviews that the more complex debates of the fields to “meet students where they’re at”. These are all reasons why teaching and theory may seem currently opposed, but they don’t need to be.

The classroom is seen as a site of control by those forces that see education as merely a skill factory rather than the place where critical thinking is nurtured and allowed to grow as it wants. The classroom as a site of experimental learning is also the site of experimental theory for the humanities. Finding new ways we can exist through theory is a task that requires dialogue in order to avoid becoming stale and repetitive. New perspectives in the humanities are what keep it to the duty of theory, as theory is how we critically engage with the world and society. Additionally, teaching theory is something that forces the teacher to find new ways to translate it. While many in the humanities assume teaching philosophy or any other humanities field that deals with theory at an undergrad level requires professors to really water down their discussion and the concepts, this does not necessarily need to be the case. There may need to be an introduction stage towards concepts for students to get acquainted with the field, but many students are eager to do the work necessary towards understanding theory and merely need to be given the trust and spaces to do so.

In the public lectures discussed above by philosophers and psychoanalysts from the 1950s to 1980s in France, there were crowds worth of excited students and other citizens interested in their theory and speeches. These were not merely educational opportunities or groundbreaking theory, but also pop culture events, which are additionally now some of the most important works in their fields. These public lectures, whether they be the ones figures like Foucault, Lacan, or Deleuze did in France or the many offered elsewhere around the world during this time, were not treated as some obscure analyses of the world but as theory to be engaged with by anyone willing to put the work in. Thus, I would say that given the opportunities, there are plenty of people who want to deeply involve themselves in the humanities and theory.

I think we can still see this in what kinds of educational pursuits people still pursue, particularly through YouTube and podcasts. Millions of people still want to learn about philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, etc… as theory, but the opportunities that are publicly available to all have somewhat degraded, especially at an introductory level. Particularly captured now by right-wing forces are quick pop educational videos, the goal of these videos is not a deep introduction into theory, but an incredibly biased political goal; in a way, those looking for education in the humanities outside of the university or alongside their university education are usually running into superficial and antithetical engagements with it. The humanities, in these engagements, are reduced to fun fact videos or flashy lectures that present bad interpretations with an air of objectivity.

Both in and outside of the university, theory needs to be represented as something all can engage in, but never alone, and as a never-finished task. To involve oneself in educational communities and to find new dialogues should be seen as the prime motivator for those involved in theory, rather than the surface-level desires for engagement inspired by the videos discussed above that capture people looking for an easy introduction. But these spaces for experimental public theory need to be recreated to do this, and for us, already engaged in the humanities and theory, it may first require us to invest more in our educational communities so they can expand and find new audiences. In academia, it may be necessary for us to engage in new pedagogical models to make sure the humanities are not presented as merely a basic educational requirement, and instead are something that one engages with life itself through. In my short experience with pedagogy, this can be done through trying to make it practical without watering down the models of the humanities: how does this recontextualize our lives?, what do these theories and figures mean in the context of the history and debates of the field as a whole?, and what are the deeper questions being asked by these writings that aren’t explicitely on the page? While this is an abstract suggestion, I know its about making each of the introductory lessons into something that shows off the possible engagements of theory and leaves the students with better-defined questions about the humanities or theory and more curiosity than they entered the class with. Many of the philosophy podcasts I started out with years ago were not just fact bites or individualized lessons but contextualized engagements with theory. This meant that they created a path of curiosity for me rather than just trying to teach theory as if it were for a multiple-choice test. I wanted to become more and more engaged with these fields, these philosophers, the other writers they debated with, the questions they engaged with, and theory as a whole. Maybe we should engage ourselves with how we got ourselves into theory to understand what we must do to get others properly engaged with it, too.

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Recent works by Marxists on economy and subjectivity — like that of Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion or Adrian Johnston’s Infinite Greed— offer new articulations on how subjects are produced as already subjugated to capital. Mau’s work challenges the idea that ideology needs to be the primary component of this subjugation, seeking instead a return to one of Marx’s focuses, in that the social reproduction of capital is merely the only means given for existence, a mute compulsion.1 Johnston’s work is primarily a critique of the classical economists’ view that capitalism works by making a mass of selfish interests into a pro-social system through the economy, arguing that capital organizes us to give up our own lives and labor for its growth, making the capitalist subject, of both classes, primarily a selfless one.2

With works like these in mind, I wish to assert that there is not a singular capitalist subject throughout the history of the political economy, while Mau and Johnston’s arguments may hold ground for the major trends of subjectivity within capitalism, it is important to get a more particular look. If our means of existing within a system of value are limited to the forms and interactions presented by capital, and this is a system that demands our sacrifices to it before it gives us survival in return, then it may also be said that the means and forms of this system of existence will change with the form of capital accumulation. The society and subjectivity that productive capital creates are distinct from those that finance capital creates.

Circuitry & Subjectivity

I wish, additionally, to frame capital within the concept of general economy proposed by Bataille in The Accursed Share.3 Here, Bataille explains economics as a process that creates and must expend waste excesses rather than manage scarcity; economies, and the societies they exist within, in this context, have two primary mechanisms: productivity, which is concerned with the gathering of resources and expansion, and consumption, which is concerned with the use of resources for the cultivation of persons and social institutions. But these are merely mechanisms that define the particular manifestations of organizing general economy. The primary structure or process that exists throughout each particular society is that the economy is like a circuit, and the creation of a chain of connections is more important than any individual link on the chain.

Building on Structural Anthropologists like Marcel Mauss, particularly Mauss’ work Essai sur le Don, Bataille constructs the primary goal of economics to be the creation of social connections. Consumption and Production of excesses are the primary means by which these connections are maintained, but a particular importance is placed on the role of status produced within these mechanisms. The societies that Bataille explores throughout the first volume of The Accursed Share may be interpreted to exist on a spectrum with pure consumption and pure production as the organizing principles of social connections as the extremes on both ends. The Tibetan society Bataille explores is a society of full consumption, with barely any production mechanisms in place for its own reproduction; there is a complete lack of military, with the entire society focused on investment in learning, and it becomes entirely dependent on outside support. On the other end, societies of pure production, exemplified in Bataille’s exploration of the early Muslim Empires, are focused only on expansion and resource collection, with the bare minimum consumption used for the reproduction of the conditions necessary for more production. A notable feature of these latter societies is the internalization of military-level discipline among citizens, which originally was there to enable their expansion.

It is on this spectrum of consumption & productivity that we can finally discuss the management of excess through the circuitry of general economy. Societies, within this conceptual frame, are made up of circuits that are created and reproduced by investments into consumption or production. The investments into consumption are ones that deal with excesses through luxury or cultivation, production investments are those that expand the capacity of a society to produce, usually in the same way. These later investments can not change form without investments in the former: economic expansion by means of military raiding will only invest into more military raiding until investments are transferred into education, surpluses, luxury, etc, that enable production to focus on more internal market-based mechanics or expand the capacity of labor. Consumption, on the other hand, can not exist without the energy and resources created by production; this gives the two mechanisms a dependency on each other.

The circuit of these social/economic connections thus determines the means and scale by which energy is produced and the ways in which it is expended. If we take a real circuit as our example, the creation of energy allows for the whole system to exist but energy running through these connections can also overheat, as it will eventually produce excesses. Consumption, which expands the connections within the circuit or wastes energy through the investment into luxury or status, is thus the way in which the heat produced by energy excess is maintained. An entirely productive society expands connections but only insofar as they expand production and produce more usable energy.

Different modes of production organize this energy allocation differently and have different means for understanding this energy allocation. Each system not only determines within itself whether to focus on consumption or production, but additionally on who gets to benefit from both and in what ways. These social classes usually divide those who are subjugated to production and those who gain access to consumption and how. The energy that these societies use between connections on the chain can not be understood abstractly and must either be given a qualitative or quantitative value in order to be interacted with and understood from connection to connection. Value, however, is an abstraction in-itself, in that it can not be defined alone but only within its relations, but one that is an attempt to manage the movement of energy through symbolic or imaginary means. It is here, with value, that market economics, class relations, and social reproduction, as well as much more particular to other economies, come into view. We, as subjects under a political economic system, don’t understand consumption or production in-themselves but through the particular manifestations made sensical by the political economic system & its articulation of what value is.

While we may be able to understand relational value through the specific symbolic or monetary value given to an object, the ontological concept of value may not have a sense to itself but rather creates the sense of the entire system of value in its existence in order to make itself sensical. “What is Value?” thus becomes a fruitless question because of its lack of focus; how value exists within Feudal structures, Slave structures, and Capitalist structures would be a better perspective to aim towards. The concept of Value comes with the already made organizations of consumption & production, the social classes that exist within its circuit, and the means by which we understand the results of labor: commodities, taxes in-kind, etc. While there is no singular understanding of value in this framework, at the same time, there can not be multiple simultaneous understandings of Value within a singular system. Market or merchant economies may exploit subjects within symbolic value systems as consumers, but the former’s internal mechanisms are always quantitative and only take into account the qualitative relations to value of the latter as a means to increase quantitative market and price-based value.

To return to the topic of this article, that of subjectivity and capitalism, I assert that Value also creates with its schema of relations a subjectivity that is given to those internal to its systematics. This subjectivity is not given through the lies of ideology, though this may be a factor for some, but through all the means of social reproduction, including the mute compulsion of the real economy. The perceptions of and investments in what value is and how it acts thus form one of many foundations for subjectivity to be formed. Value as an abstraction from the real circuit of the general economy operates through the subjectivity of how it divides, aggregates, and produces persons. Certain societies may make every chain on a circuit’s well-being fully responsive to the growth of the entire circuit, while others may be entirely disconnected from benefiting from growth; both extremes attempt to be productive enough for social reproduction, but the latter is either focusing wasteful consumption on a ruling social class or is repressive to all members of the society. Other divisions exist in whether a system even creates individuals to act as its focal point in the first place or is more systematic; usually, there is an overlap between this and the last spectrum, but a system value must create and parallel the ontological categories it reproduces.

Value Without Labor

There are many directions this background of general economy, value, and subjectivity could go in, but the most important to the contemporary moment is to understand the new form of subjectivity that finance capital has created and its relationship to new systems of value. Productive capital may be said to work in a completely different way from finance capital; while both work to increase the effective return of capital, the latter is focused on the maximization of value through the systems of value itself, while the former is focused on the maximization of value through the production of new energy and commodities. If value is to be understood as the ways in which a society organizes production and consumption, then the production of value does not have to correspond to the production and use of energy.

Capitalist market economics manages the distribution of energy through the management of scarcity. Social classes are divided by the control and distribution of energy and resources, the bourgeoisie, and the production of energy and resources, the proletariat. Since energy is regulated through ownership and scarcity, the production of energy does not mean one owns the energy. The redistribution of value is the means by which the distribution of energy/resources takes place. While in the societies that Mauss examines in Essai sur le Don, societies perpetually exchange luxuries in order to maintain the social ties that bind and allow for the production and distribution of energy, Capitalism organizes this distribution through the C-M-C exchange form that Marx establishes in chapters 2 & 3 of Capital, Vol. 1.4 All energy is transformed into exchange value in order for it to be extracted and accumulated within the capitalist social relation, this transformation is the form of money.

Money, in the capitalist structure, is not the energy that makes societies able to reproduce themselves, but rather the means by which the distribution of energy is given to the capitalist subject: the individual, either as a free laborer or an owner of the means of production. If energy is a flow that follows the path of a circuit, money is the means by which any chain on that circuit may connect to any other and redistribute that energy. The capitalist subject’s aim becomes not the acquisition of the largest amount of energy for the self or for society as a whole, but instead the acquisition of exchange value, or the access to potential energy.

In Adam Smith’s formulation that selfishness at the individual level will enable a pro-social society through capital, it is this accumulation of exchange value that requires one to act in a pro-social manner by providing a necessary service that can be exchanged for money. Exchange value follows scarcity, and the demand for a particular resource means there is more pull for energy to be invested in the means by which that resource is produced. Productive capital worked under this function and redistributed energy into both production and consumption needs in order to maximize its productive returns: it hired more laborers when demand spiked, and it used educational facilities and other investments in society as a means to increase productivity through new machines and educated workers. However, the conditions of laborers only improved through the wasteful excess required to increase the level of production: unions and laborers were heavily brutalized throughout the period of pre-financial capital, but occasionally labor won battles either through union organizing or through the development of technology and political regulations. While this is not a very detailed historical account of the period prior to mass financialization, the primary point I wish to focus on here is that for any individual capitalist to accumulate more capital is was necessary that reinvestments were made not only into machines but into labor.

I believe that the bourgeoisie of productive capital did dream of a world where it no longer needed laborers, and the entire process of changing one commodity to another, in their own factories and facilities, would be completely automated. Like the liar in Kant’s counterexamples in the Groundwork, any bourgeois would only want their factories to work like this; they understood that if the rest of the world were completely automated, then their social relations would completely collapse. This dream was to be able to produce energy that could be turned into potential through exchange value without the need to distribute that energy to the labor process that creates it. Under this formulation, however, there is no reason why exchange value would still persist as a social formation, as it requires a broad diffusion of value to allow for energy to be transferred throughout the whole society. In short, a world without laborers would be one in which value could not be created, as even if resources are made to be scarce through access to them, no one but the bourgeoisie would be able to access these scarce goods.

This dream, or might we say nightmare, for most of us, has finally been realized in the form of a financialization of capital through assets, stocks, futures, etc. Finance capital may be said to create a new capitalist subject, but not one so completely divorced from how the previous one was produced. Productive capital gained prominence through the process of individualization that took place in the centuries around its conception and birth up until the 20th century. It required, if not the destruction, the subjugation of all forms of community to the subjectivation of individuality: all subjects must first and foremost act out of the interest of themselves/their financial unit. We may see the stagnation of this process of deterritorialization possibly only within the family unit, though this form of community recreated a form of individualization in the gendered familial relation regarding labor during the 20th century. During the growth of financial capital during the 20th century, the goal became not access to better and more productive labor, but the accumulation of assets. For the Bougeoisie, this saw an investment into asset markets rather than investments into greater productivity; for the workers, this saw the reproduction of life rearticulated through financial solvency being seen as the ownership of assets rather than the redistribution of the means of production.

Financial markets create the possibility for the exchange of value without the exchange of energy through the inclusion of risk and time into their primary mechanisms.5 In a fully financialized society, like that of neoliberal or post-neoliberal capitalism, it is not the production and consumption of energy that still create the circuit by which society actually functions in which value originates; it is the speculation on the potential movement of energy that creates value. Labor may produce the energy on which all society functions and uses value in terms of exchange value in order to attain, that remains unchanged in financial capitalism, despite its protests; the mass accumulators of value are seeking a total divorce between value and labor through speculation.

This financial capitalist economy creates for it a new capitalist subjectivity that surrounds our ability to produce ourselves with it. This is a brute fact through mute compulsion in that speculative finance has been shifted as the primary means most individuals have to change their living conditions, this has even gained a simulacrum in the form of gambling capitalism that seeks even more speculative ventures as means for financial growth for an individual. Ideologically, it invests in this brute force financialization of all life as the smart choice any reasonable person makes, disregarding all those that do not have the means to invest in financial futures as disinvesting in their own lives. The subjectivity of economic time is also a major factor here, former capitalist formations and other systems of modes of production functioned on a prolonged scale and invested in long term power through consumption. Financial capital seeks the production of value as its only goal, short-term speculative thinking becomes the primary frame of action and these actions are all individualized to individuals and firms rather than an entire system or even the long-term future of individuals. In this way Johnston’s thesis of selfless individualism may be affirmed even in the greediest, who subjugate their entire life to capital even in their short term extreme exploitation of others.

Conclusion: Why the Housing Market Sucks

In the recently published article The City as an Anti-Growth Machine, Petter Törnberg argued that the coalitions that make up city governments and economies now are ones that prevent growth from taking place.6 Whether in the form of the necessary critiques of growth-only policies from the environmentalists or the actualized politics of asset-based financial interests — homeowners, landlords, real estate speculators, etc — there is now a coalition running city governments across the nation that builds housing scarcity regardless of whether it is their main goal. I wish to focus here only on the subjectivity of those who have active interests in this artificial scarcity and how it relates to value under financial capital, and how that organizes production and consumption.

Scarcity, within this system of value, seems to have become greater than a mere organizing principle and has become, at an internal but not real level, the source of value itself. While scarcity is an organizing principle meant that connections of energy were regulated by individuals through their accumulation of exchange value — thus investment in production and waste through consumption were made possible through the production and distribution of energy — scarcity as a source of value means the entire dissolution of the connection between the production of energy and the production of value. Speculation as the primary driver of capital is scarcity as the source of value.

While under the Fordist and Keynesian paradigms, capitalists had a variety of interests in growth and development, as Törnberg discusses through the thesis of Harvey Molotch’s essay "The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place" and a separate book that Molotch wrote with John Logan on the same concept, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. Törnberg acknowledges that the coalitions that Molotch and Logan argued pushed for urban growth only under the conditions of profitability; any investments into the consumption of the masses were made for profit and greater productivity. Cities under productive capitalism were sites of industry, and increasing access to housing by laborers both increased access to laborers by capitalists and lessened workers’ demands for pay. Real estate-based capital still grew under the conditions where development, instead of scarcity were the primary driver for investment; speculative loans on housing development were seen as something that would make a return without the need for harsh scarcity to drive up demand. Scarcity still occupies this time, but it serves as a hard limit that gives basic form and momentum to the economy rather than something that should create value by itself. Investments into the society as a whole were seen as a means for greater capitalist accumulation, even if it was only done from that motivation rather than from altruism.

Financial capital has taken an entirely different approach to housing. As the individual becomes restricted in access to exchange value based purely on the speculative assets in their possession, their scarcity is no longer a regulator but a means for expansion of the exchange value of that asset. Asset accumulation, unlike capitalist accumulation in general, has no need for the occasionally wasteful consumption spending that comes from investments into society and laborers; everything is able to become disconnected from any production of energy as the production of value. Private equity does not have to treat the companies they acquire like businesses that will need to invest in themselves and the processes that enable more capacity to grow; a company becomes an asset that is only useful in the least risky means by which it can turn capital into more capital. Housing, similarly, does not need to factor into the productivity of the entire society when it is the only asset owning individuals who are the primary holders of how powers and economies deal with housing. Cheap housing is productive for society as it allows for expansions in other areas of the economy and gives more freedom to workers, but cheap housing can not be used as a financial asset to maintain an individual’s economic interests.

The financial capital economy has to become a fully productive endeavor; wasteful consumption spending as social speculation instead of financial speculation is not an option within this subjectivity. Social speculation, such as the building of transportation infrastructure, social spending, or housing beyond what is directly demanded by the market, is societal consumption that reduces scarcity without the guarantee of a direct return. Societies that can not consume anything beyond what is directly needed for financial speculation’s greatest quick returns become thin, almost starving societies; it is hard to not see this as the goal. Starving societies create the foundation for scarcity to be a source of the production of value, as the regulatory mechanisms of normal economic functions are no longer in place. The world remains a crisis zone for the many, while speculators and asset holders get to profit from the ownership of a scarce resource. But, it also seems that holding onto these assets is much more valuable in financial scarcity than holding onto them. The valuations that come through financial asset scarcity are a means in themselves to gaining access to more exchange value through the ability to back these loans with securities. What would have been a $200,000 house a decade ago may now be worth twice or triple that much in 2026, depending on the area, without anywhere near a similar uptick in general inflation. This enables these homeowners to access capital at a massively inflated rate, while those looking to rent or buy are forced to give up a greater part of their income than 10 years ago on housing.

Törnberg’s article discusses much more of the particulars of this individual political issue, and I suggest you read it because of its thoroughness in such a short work, but what I sought here, through the same example of housing and cities, is to show that value has achieved a new dimension in financial capital. While labor is still the source of the actual resources, energy, commodities, etc, that allow for the economy to exist, access to exchange value has become more detached from labor and productive activity to a wider degree than discussed above (think of all the people spending money not on products but on the share of the future sale of those products or the bundled investment in future profits and many more examples). Labor comes with demands; it comes with needs for consumption spending that aren’t always maximally profitable, but labor also comes with a stable society. Financial capital, as long as it is the primary economic organizer, seeks a system of value without labor.

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Over the last couple of weeks, the course I TA for has switched to teaching Freud, particularly Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, which is something I have a fair bit of background over the last 5 years. During the first of the discussion sections on Freud, where we went over the first essay, I wanted to give a little bit of context on Freud’s general psychoanalytic theory insofar as it will be useful in understanding the text and the context that it sits within. We went over the five developmental stages, which more information is to be found in the latter two essays, in order to understand the different kinds of variations that come about in sexual aims (what acts one desires to do sexually) and sexual objects (what person/thing one has a sexual attraction to).

In this background understanding for our discussion, I went on to explain Freudian understanding of how libido/desire works. For this, I was originally calling back to the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis lecture series by Nina McIlwain that I had listened to as my introduction to psychoanalytic theory. My memory of the series’ discussion placed the understanding of libido into three Freudian camps: drive, affect, and a combination of both; the latter of these three was, to my knowledge, McIlwain’s position, which was taught throughout the series.

I, therefore, explained a model of understanding libido as both drive and affect through the modeled metaphor of drive as a light source that is just aimlessly outputting energy and a prism lens that focuses this dispersed energy into a directed beam. This model would thus position libido as necessarily both drive and affect since the former had no aim and the latter had no energy of its own.

At the end of the class, I had one of the students come up and discuss the model with me, and said that based on such a model, they wouldn’t understand how one would come to the position that it was either drive or affect, since its obviously both. This comment led me to reflect on whether this was a true necessity of Freudian theory or whether it was instead the conclusion that the model necessarily restricts our understanding to. I have come to the latter of these two conclusions.

Particularly, I think it is a weakness of mine to not be able to properly explain why someone would come to the other two conclusions within Freudian theory. For the drive side, which I think may be a duller answer between the remaining two, why are we assuming that drive is something completely aimless? This is an assumption of the model that is not necessarily the true interpretation of this theory. If we were instead to model a subject that has specific drives that provide only already focused energies, then we can come to understand a theory that would have no need of affect or any that would exist separately from drive.

On the otherside, a theory that focuses primarily on affect or only on affect has a much broader range of option. What would it mean for drive or libidinal energy to not have its own, seperate existence. For this, I would point towards the explanations of Lacanian theory that I remember most strongly from Kaja Silverman’s The Subject of Semiotics. This particular model sees libido as something that can only be understood through the process of its beginning state going through development into adult libido. Here, libido is not an energy in-itself as it might be through the explanation of drive, but is instead like a giant pool of liquid, such as an ocean, that has no potential or kinetic energy as an open space. Affect works as the primary aspect of desire because it constructs a defined channeling for this liquid and gives it a focus that creates libidnous energy through sectioning off until there is potential energy in the unconscious. Thus, affect is the cause of energy as it gives shape to the unconscious and movement to desire, which becomes like a liquid object being acted on through gravity rather than an active agent of the model of desire.

Thus, we have explored three different models of desire within Freudian theory that almost necessitate themselves and make the others impossible, but why is that? For my own explaination, I think the answer is in the fact that we can not create models without already interpreting the material at hand. It may be better then to teach all major models as comparisons, but it is at least necessary to do this reflection in order to understand whether or not we actually think in line with the models and interpretations that we are teaching. While there is nothing wrong with teaching a separate model from one’s own perspective, only teaching one explicitly doesn’t mean that we don’t use another model in the rest of our teaching, thus creating confusion. My particular model of desire, which I get from Deleuze & Guattari which build theirs to some degree on top of Lacan’s understanding, mine would be closest to an affect only theory with some changes towards how desiring energy is viewed. This could easily affect the rest of how I lead a group discussion on Freud’s theory, even if I accidentally gave the students a model in disagreement with my own.

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There has always been mass violence at the edge1s of reality, but never before has reality been crafted merely out of a never-ending stream of images as this post-modern present. This is not the first decade of the hyper-real, so maybe the State has come to see it as the first and final tool for all its crafts, but never before have we seen the State so concerned to try to close off any diverging possibility in the hyper-real so quickly. We are flooded by images, but we are being flooded by value-judgements about those images before the images show up on our feeds or televisions. The state, especially under the current trump regime, states, “you may see us kill people, you may see us break down the essential cornerstones of civil society, but don’t you dare care about it, for that is the greatest crime of all.”

The collapse of a reality happens at its edges, which is why the edges are where the violence takes place: the rebellions that deny the King’s legitimacy, the invaders who never knew nor opposed the realm’s rules or reality & merely took it over, or even the utopians of the 19th century trying to form their own internal, local political economies. The edges of reality are where sense can no longer be used as a means of warfare or a replacement for it; no longer are the fights about the differences in what are the proper means to do internal or domestic affairs, but the whole system’s reality is at stake. The hyper-real was a means of destroying the possibility of the edge between sense and absurdity, or the internal reality of the state and external reality of all Others. There can not be edges because edges create the possibility of escape, the possibility that this is not the ultimate reality, the possibility of rupture and destruction.

The edges today are between the hyper-real and the real; the absurdity of our entire system is now possible, and the violence of the state has ramped up to avoid that possibility, but, at the same time, making it more potent and possible. There are two processes happening towards this battle against the real and for the by the current state, merely expanded and given more velocity by the Trump regime. The physical violence happens in the real, taking place on the bodies of those who exist for one of the many other possible realities or against the hyper-real; this is the violence of policing or militarized war. The violence of the hyper-real is that which takes place within our information economy; this is a battle not over facts but over what can possibly be a fact or which facts and which sources are worth considering, and which are merely absurd. This latter struggle, the concern for this post, is a struggle over pre-defining images and events; it is not enough to say that the TV, social media, and other forms of news merely reduce our reality to images, for images still contain the possibility of escape, the struggle is over pre-creating the emotions and position one can have towards those images too.

The Conspiracist Epistemology of Fascism

I would by no means wish to claim that there is a singular authoritarian or fascist subject or epistemology; the study of micro-fascism shows precisely that the strength of their political mechanisms lies in the variety of psychological content that can be captured and brought into reactionary thought. But there is a primacy of type in the American model at the moment, whose primacy may be based on the hyper-real means that fascism is currently coming about. There is an irony in the fact that our current ramp-up in state violence is supported most strongly by the archetype of the conspiracy theorist.

This is not a surprise to anyone who understands the conspiracy theorist; those who understand them understand that their concern was never that of the truth against the onslaught of the false. Their goal is a totally different kind of differentiation: to find those who are deceiving them. Their venture into hyper-reality is a reality ready-made for the authoritarian state that merely talks in the language of deception; the fascist state speaks of having been deceived for decades, if not centuries, and that the support of their state is the only way out of this deception. It does not matter for the conspiracy theorist that they are being lied to by this state all the time; again, reality and truth are of no true concern, they find pleasure in the idea that all of their suspicion are justifiable, that nothing at all can be trusted, that the cynical life is the one worth living. They truly love hyper-reality as their goal is to acknowledge that their destruction of trust and community is warranted; they are prepared for a system built on empty signifiers and distractions, as that was all they really enjoyed in the first place.

The conspiracy theorist enjoys the hyper-real because they can finally show the world that it is the real itself that is the constant deceiver. A smugness fueled by the idea that all real truth would be unkind, unpopular, and necessarily cruel, and all that which is claimed to be true outside of such qualities is utopian and therefore false. When it comes to the recent political murders by ICE and the justifications made by Kristi Noem, DHS, & the White House for the necessity of these murders, this archetype, as the imagined citizen, is the model for their lies. This comes from their disregard for proving the truth but an interest in dissecting images and finding “what really happened underneth”. The Left demands truth and the end to injustice, the right now demands a conspiracy or an unfortunate truth. The conspiracist makes no commitment to the reality of even their own statements themselves — just as quickly as their suspicions about a government-supported pedophile ring were proven, they stop caring — by then, they had already been convinced that there were more pressing things to be concerned about, truer deceptions. Their commitment is to the idea of conspiracy; they are the perfect subjects for the fascist state that sees all of their enemies as one.

The conspiracy theorist may be the ideal model for the lies of the fascist state, but it is merely because they demonstrate the model of the hyper-real citizen through being such an extreme form of one. Hyper-reality leads to new forms of fascism as a central mechanism of its workings: the average mind is reduced to the discourse of images that take the place of reality. We may even say that it is a wonder that the world got a couple of decades where the hyper-real was only there to reinforce the idea of America as an ethical hegemon before being completely retooled into the greatest support for downwardly mobile middle-class fascism. Therefore, it may also be said that it is the fault of the decades of American hegemony, which closed off the possibility of thinking and perceiving reality and covered it in accepted images and symbols, that fascism is on the rise again.

The Sense of Hyper-Reality

The maintenance of the hyper-real is desired by both the regular state and especially fascism, as it has no major edges that threaten it from the outside. Once it has become the model of the experience of truth for the masses, its main concern is that reality can no longer be directly understood, but comes through proper sources. The genocides required of the state form do not take place in the hyper-real unless they are able to penetrate into the virtual realm of hyper-reality. The state’s struggle against those whom they deem as undesirables is meant to be automatically justified in the hyper-real by its exclusion from the realm of images.

Baudrillard shows throughout The Gulf War Did Not Take Place that the importance of the deferred violence in the virtual is that it confers morality onto the state. The primary goal is to present a realm of pre-judged images that convey the idea that the state is only doing what it must for its moral causes. The complicity of the news media is not the final complicity, for their agreement to spread purposefully misleading images and discourses is for the purpose of creating the bounds and universal truths of hyper-reality. The information economy is a fight over the stability of the state’s reality; for a long time, this has been a one-sided fight. It may, however, be a conversation with Deleuze that helps us understand how to fight the Hyper-real or the virtual. The Logic of Sense posits that the opposite of the truth when it comes to the internally supported Sense is not falsity, for what is false makes sense; it just simply happens to be untrue in this case, but rather absurdity; absurdity is that which is outside the domain of the reality of sense. Our struggle may be to make the state and its morality as absurd to as many as possible, so that their language is no longer sensical, which is the moment of escape.

The threat to the hyper-real is therefore the breakdown of the internal supports, the creation of edges within the system that are able to expand outward. Having discussed the model of the citizen ready for their style of moral truth, what is the discursive reality that the current regime and most fascist regimes seek to create? The discussions of truth in the virtual & hyper real are to some degree continuations of discussions made by earlier 20th century thinkers in the wake of fascism; Hannah Arendt makes an early contribution to understanding why lies are so important to maintaining the reality of the state:

“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.” - Hannah Arendt, “Truth & Politics”

This is why the constant maintenance of hyper-reality is, at its core, cynical. Everything points not away from or towards reality but towards the centralized construction of the experience of reality. The state supports its universality by the construction of an infinite doubt; the final submission to the state is the acceptance that reality is what it appears to be. This, too, is Baudrillard’s central political complaint. The models of truth and falsity become totally unconnected from reality creates discursive domains and spaces that use both truth and falsity as tools to support the state by pre-defining the debate:

“To be for or against the war is idiotic if the question of the very probability of this war, its credibility or degree of reality has not been raised even for a moment. All political and ideological speculations fall under mental deterrence (stupidity). By virtue of their immediate consensus on the evidence they feed the unreality of this war, they reinforce its bluff by their unconscious dupery.” - Baudrillard, The Gulf War did not Take Place” p. 67

Here, Baudrillard sees the discourse and information economy surrounding the “non-event” of the supposed war as not only replacing reality with images, creating a hyper-real, but also creating a consensus where we do not even recognize the point that is the borders of reality. The public and the news were so concerned with finding out the truth of the events that they ignored that what they may be discussing was pre-manufactured, its existence something forced straight out of unreality into the real via the hyper-real.

Hyper-Real Justifications

The hyper-real creates infinite justification because it manufactures unreality as if it were made of essential truths. Every lie is a reinforcement of the essential unreality of the events they wish to create. In the same way that the Gulf War was a non-event, the ICE Raids against illegal immigrant criminals are a non-event. Baudrillard does not need to deny that there was conflict and violence in Kuwait and Iraq to deny that the war was an event. The true event that happened in the Gulf was not that of a real war but that of a one-sided, swift invasion and the destruction of Iraqi national infrastructure. For Baudrillard, the essential unrealities of the war & its moral justifications are quickly found in how the United States no longer made any moral stake against Saddam to the point of actual conflict once it came to the internal ethnic cleansings that were committed against the Kurds and other oppressed groups in Iraq right after the conflict was over. The hyper-real defines what is visual and what is outside the realm of the site; that is the only means by which it makes the morality of these actions appear from their actual unreality. What actually took place regarding moral justifications was completely unreality from the start; it was a media event that created these justifications and then shaped the perception of reality through hyper-reality to support and justify any action taken or not taken.

If the current anti-ICE protests have any positive political center, it is the begging for something to actually have to take place. It is, hopefully, a breakdown of many essential hyper-realities of the fascist state that have hit the acceleration button to the point where they have not created their own justifications prior to all of their actions. In part, this may be the cause of the fascists’ desire for hyper-real violence; they need their moral justifications backed up through images and discourse rather than the perpetual non-event status of the violence they support. The means by which immigration was handled by western nation states, in the majority but especially in America, was already violent, but it was also only real outside of the average perspective. ICE has been needlessly violent against immigrants since its conception 19 years ago, but this cruelty was deferred in particular hyper-realities as necessary and ultimately moral. It promoted the violence necessary to our conceptions of the nation-state, but provided the minimal reforms for the central absurdity of the nation-state to never come about. There were protests against these conditions under the Obama and Biden administrations, but they became controllable issues for the right because even these administrations maintained the sense of the nation state, even if toning down its open cruelties, despite not toning down its real cruelties.

But the fascist has an aesthetic mind; the images of cruelty are the main goal of this administration, as it has been run by those who crave open violence. This is what makes the democratic administrations look weak on immigration to them; despite deporting millions of people and maintaining border patrol budgets, they didn’t get to spend all day looking at images of the cruelty of the immigration system; that is where the truth of hyper-reality lies. The growth of images has created the growth of massive protests, and hopefully a general strike, which is exactly what the fascists want of the hyper-real, but it may also be their greatest downfall and expose too many of the central conceptions of our reality that allow for the buds of fascism to sprout. Too many holes in the hyper-real are forming as the brutality of the images produced becomes a possibility of the return of the real.

This is why the administration and the right-wing news media (many social media sites, Fox News, & now CBS under Bari Weiss) are so intent on getting ahead of these images and pre-judging them for the consumer of their information economy. It is no longer enough for the controllable flow of images they put out to create an infinite non-event where nothing in the global or national order is challenged; once the images themselves would create hyper-reality as they were made to manufacture first-order truths by constraining debate to second-order truths. The state feels a particular concern, now, that it is not enough for it to have images define reality, but need to make sure we already have judgments made up about the images and don’t actually learn to question them ourselves. As every ICE raid comes with an employed cameraman, who is capturing the gore porn against immigrants for the supporters of the state, and onlookers/recorders, who are obstructing if they catch anything bad, there comes a conflict in which the actions they undertake expose their own unreality, and at the same time exist only to show off to others.

This is why we have seen so many statements by J.D. Vance and Kristi Noem regarding the violence committed by ICE agents in their raids. They are trying to normalize a reality foreign to everyone quicker than ever before. The American people who accept their pleas do not understand how much their statement, “this is just the way things are,” is in a state of constant change. Metaphysics, history, and personal connections are deterritorialized and reterritorialized in the name of maintaining hyper-reality. Not only is their justification for all their actions a fundamental unreality, but they have to constantly rewrite what we’re supposed to be okay with so that their justifications have a universal basis: all Americans are just supposed to have ID on them at all times, it’s not okay to protest against lawful actions, and agents must protect themselves at any cost to those around them but a protestor could never have any reason to use self-defense against an agent of the state. These are attempts towards transformations to the political reasoning of a population supposedly built on freedom and anti-tyranny.

On top of this change in the possibility for how everyone needs to operate in order to conform witht heir new hyper-reality, is the function of cynical doubt discussed above. The use of images is meant to provide a detached form of truth based on top of the other more fundamental transformations in reality. Every moment is to recreate the hyper-real, transformed and with the goal of that transformation to go unnoticed, in order that those working for the state have an infinite store of justice to define their actions and infinite store of injustice to define those they commit violence against. The images are reframed as if there are doubts surrounding the events of the murders committed by ICE agents, the burden of proof in favor of the victims becomes an impossible task against the state whose use of cynical doubt makes all of reality less than their ability to justify anything. Rennee Good and Alex Pretti’s murders are shrouded in the discourses of ICE justifications for the express manner of closing off the possibility that their deaths expose anything about our hyper-reality. In this unreality they are trying to force into the real, the state and its agents can’t do anything wrong, but those that are opposed to it or end up accidentally in its way are the only ones with real agency and accountability in these situations.

Finally, I want to end by saying that I think there are wounds in our hyper-reality, these are the wounds that create the internal edges where violence is now taking place, despite the fact the state wants to make it into a non-event. It is in the position of those that are now taking up the radical cause against ICE and the Trump regime not to heal these wounds but to injure them further. The fight against fascism and totalitarianism is the fight for the return to reality against the hyper-real; to not accept state morality and the endless stream of images used to justify it and position it as if everything it does were the outcome of necessary universals. These protests, though their main potential is political, have a major philosophical value in that they offer the chance out of hyper-reality through destroying the virtual as a tool solely for the state; additionally, the radical sense of care for others at their center may overwhelm the cynicality at the heart of modern fascism’s epistemology, reawakening externaln reality and truth as the ground of belief and action instead of manipulatable images.

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Gambling has become a more present aspect in our lives over the last decade. A few years ago, the legalization of sports betting throughout the country opened the door for gambling to be normalized and to ruin many lives. These gambling companies can be found throughout the social media landscape; recently, it was a regular and expected practice to see a gambling ad in the corner of every viral meme account’s posts. The gambling industry is an extractive force, meant to give one a perpetual hope of the possibility of great wealth, with the reality that nearly all are either regularly losing or coming up even. These companies are predatory in how they attempt to get people to use their apps regularly, and these practices are too varied for me to consider and properly explain in a single blog post; they possibly deserve a small series to discuss them and give me the chance to research and explain each aspect particularly. I wish to begin an analysis of gambling capitalism with the newest phenomenon in it: the pushing of gambling on the news & the likelihood of events as if it were the news itself at the end of 2025, and how they seek to create gambling as a basis for truth itself.

Gambling with the News

While the problem has definitely gotten worse as we have finished 2025 and entered 2026, the problem became significantly worse during the 2025 election cycle. During this election cycle, it became clear that the “prediction market” industry was attempting to make a claim on the nature of truth itself. While this claim is not entirely indefensible, as aggregates of people spending their own money on prediction markets, in the past, were a somewhat reliable gauge of general feeling towards an issue, this claim on the truth has created a simulation of the truth that destroys its own validity.

First, let us begin with its claims to the truth. Because these companies are operated as individual firms, their claims to the truth are not based on the totality of how prediction markets accurately, by majority prediction, predict the truth, but rather based on how often their own markets, operated by their companies, predicted the truth. However, this means that they have lied about the truth of their markets, seeing that the power to predict is more important than an active advertisement of the accuracy of the aggregate users of their markets. For example, this is how people associated with the prediction market Kalshi discussed the accuracy after the 2025 election last November:

While this claim states that all these markets predicted (above 50%) accurately, there is one noticeable mistake, which was only accurate in the final moments before the market closed, during election night. This was followed by other claims to possessing the real truth of the matter on these situations by advertising focused polls that may inspire more betting on less likely situations, like for the Cuomo campaign.

This post about the mayoral campaign seems to be the other side of their claim on the truth, and a primary reason why these Prediction Market companies want to be treated like the news. These gambling websites, if they make a profit in any possible way, it is from people betting on losing positions, therefore, these companies do not have a stake in the actual truth, but instead in getting the largest number of possible gamblers to believe they have an edge on the truth of a near-future event. These incentives them to publish as a news site, which is their real advertisement, but only one that encourages outrage, further speculation, and uncertainty. As Mamdani’s campaign grew to hold a clear lead in a three-way race, and then eventually an actual majority of the final vote, these incentives led the prediction markets to begin pushing for more right-wing outrage on the election, as well as using the supposed truth of their prediction markets to undermine the truth of polling. We can see the latter with the advertisement of incredibly focused predictions leading up to election day.

This particular post is a two-way advertisement for Kalshi’s prediction market: in the more obvious way, it hyperfocuses on the idea that there is some person willing to bet a large sum against the polling on the day of the election, but it also encourages further betting for those who still bet according to polls, as there was then more money to win by betting on Zohran Mamdani’s campaign. These companies understand that liberal/left participation in these markets, while less than right-wing participation, is usually among people who say things like “they’re selling dollars for $0.90.” This dynamic would encourage the creation of right-wing outrage and manipulation of the truth, while advertising to liberals that this outrage is causing people to put money on unlikely positions.

These political incentives, as well as the right-wing bent in those who are willing to use and work with gambling corporations, have led to these companies using their unearned trust as a news source to try to influence the view of the truth towards a more right-wing bent. This has led them to push the same kinds of stories as Fox News might, but only about the more controversial and huge News betting markets. For the 2025 New York Mayoral election, this led to posting about outrage within the city about people leaving or Mamdani unfairly getting more places on the ballot than others (Mamdani was on the ballot for the Democratic and Working Families Parties, which maintain different places on the general ballot).

Polymarket’s true focus is to inspire outrage that will manipulate the truth in the same general ways that the right has done at large lately. By positioning the threat of mass exodus or ballot fraud, they use their “news-coated advertisements” as a way to make potential gamblers believe something is going on that may change the way the event/election happens. Their goal with both of the above examples is to make gamblers believe that New Yorkers on the fence of such a close election would hold the same outrage as they do, and switch their vote.

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The Cyclical Creation of Truth

Having dealt with the political reality of the manipulation of truth by these news gambling corporations, which has only gotten worse in the previous two months to a degree that I do not have the breadth to mention everything now, I want to now deal with the philosophical and, specifically, epistemological implications of the creation of truth here. The best place to begin is the foundation where prediction markets may be trusted, as they were a few years ago, as a general aggregate feeling that led them to have a reliable way of predicting any election that is not on the fence or has surprises (such as Biden’s sudden drop out in the 2024 election, which significantly changed the primary prediction markets). The source of truth here is not in the prediction markets themselves, like these gambling corporations want us to believe, so their advertisements are more influential. The prediction markets were meant as the downstream collection of a body of people collecting truth from multiple angles and perspectives (I.e. looking at a lot of polling sites, general voter attitude, etc…).

Speculation and News becoming one and the same turns this process into a cyclical whirlpool, where reliable sources of truth external to the prediction markets are made to be ignored. The news that is passed around by these corporations and the right-wing communities of gamblers partially finds its source within the prediction markets themselves, as Polymarket and Kalshi both post their markets as “likelihood to win/happen”, as well as with the hyper-focused, outrage-driven news pushed to generate clicks or more gamblers. As I have already discussed, the truth in both of these is obviously a manipulated reality; no longer is the goal to accurately represent the possibilities of the near-future, but instead make that which is almost certain feel like it is undeservedly secured and make that which is absurd speculation feel like a coming suprise.

Here, there is no central, stable source to generate truth or reality upon; it is all deterritorialized and reterritorialized around creating more bets, which additionally is supposed to affect the nature of the truth itself. A perpetual series of loops wrapped around nothing meant to redirect one away from properly understanding the political world around us. These gambling corporations have an active interest in promoting mass psychosis; without a bedrock reality, but with an axiom of speculation, it is profitable that reality is in question, but the ways that we engage with the truth of the near-future are centered around making it personally-profitable. Thriving on the distortion of reality itself, these corporations must be shown to be what they really are: places for the generation of profit, not news.

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The present seems to be so full of ghosts. Surrounding us, we either engage with them or they follow closely behind. Hauntology, a strain of philosophy that Mark Fisher took and developed from passages of Derrida’s book on Marx, seemed to me, years ago, as work that would actually allow us to look at the ghosts of our society; in a way, it did, in another way, I was slightly disappointed. For Fisher, primarily in his book The Ghosts of My Life (2014), he was haunted by the possibilities of a past that he no longer lived in; I find myself haunted by the possibilities of a world I never knew. History has not taken place since I was born at the beginning of this century; there are no new pasts to be haunted by, merely more ghosts of the same nature. Should we have to understand these kinds of ghosts before we can understand the present?

On TV and in the movies, ghosts are an external representation of a held onto internal guilt that can be removed by the physical/spiritual removal of the former. The vengeance of the ghost comes to an end and frees the characters from their internal problems, who gave the ghost its metaphorical fuel to haunt. A ghost can be an incomplete life, an incomplete relationship, or a revenge made to come back to finish and resolve what their life could not. Derrida’s and Fisher’s project in Hauntology, as far as I understand either (which I have only read summaries of the former’s work on the subject), is the acknowledgement that our historical moment, post-Cold War capitalism for Derrida or neoliberal capitalism for Fisher, that has no done the seance to deal with its ghosts, in a way it would rather be haunted by them than have any of the incompleteness they represent finally resolve. Capitalism is haunted by Spectres of Marx because it needs an abstractable opponent to compete and be better than; resolving such a relation would negate the hard work done to make alternative ways of living seem undesirable. Neoliberalism needs to be haunted by the past that no longer exists so that it can be sold back to the consumer in bite-sized, incomplete seances through nostalgia consumerism, especially since neoliberalism has no culture of its own to make a future, let alone a present cultural moment.

These are ghosts that once tried to deal with ghosts.

While Fisher and I have very few overlapping musical tastes, I understand what he found missing in the society of neoliberal capitalism by the 2010s. Fisher looked back at the last fits and fights of a collectivist music culture found in dance and jungle music of the 90s, and saw a world that no longer existed by the middle of the first decade of the millennium. Pop and dance music used to be able to bring strangers into community with one another at a concert, rave, or other venue setting; there used to be a world where local music scenes were important and vital to the progression of entire genres, and that world and artistic development are sadly gone. The problem, however, is that these truths of a collectivist artistic past haunt us, but we do not understand their ghosts. Nostalgia is not what this loss of such a collectivist lost-future should provide us with a feeling of; it is definitely not the feeling that Fisher would want us to have. Nostalgia is that feeling that kills a culture, that treats golden ages as if they are a past that we must return to, instead of seeking to create a forward motion towards a new greatness. The individualist society that we have been left with, to our own collective misfortune, is one where everything is slowly rotting away for the sake of accounting books.

Their screaming is getting louder, but we are growing deafer.

To be haunted means that incompleteness is still here; we should cry tears of joy that the moment to reinstall a collective future has not passed us yet. We, however, do not know how long these ghosts will remain with us, how long we will be able to remember or look back upon a past where strangers became a community of friends instead of atomized at every point or interaction in one’s life. This atomization is, to some degree, what we have learned to desire. Our society is no longer held together by the ties of relationships, but rather by the expansion of social codes that are only meant to be there as a backup in the case of societal breakdown. We assume the worse of others, hold them infinitely accountable online in giant dog-piles, largely not for the sake of bettering the world but the brief rush of euphoria we get from being a part of the group that is correct on an issue or subject. Surveillance and its commercialization as online content has made us afraid of being anything but our least unique selves at all; it does not stop the racist rants of people in powerful corporate positions, but does make those that are affraid to embarass themselves dancing, singing, or participating in a community second guess their willingness to extend their way of life into something new.

We, however, still yearn for this collective lost-future (it is not yet lost), even if we do not quite understand what is actually lost. The hole has been filled with an endless stream of content that placates our minds to the screaming of lost collective desires. On the personal side, the change may require us to let that hole become empty for a while before we learn to fill it with a community. A life mediated through “content” is apathetic; to continue to let it consume our very being in its consumption is what prevents a new future from growing from us. This content-centric life leaves us empty and unconnected to others; but additionally, it leaves us without any way to unify and understand the world we live in beyond the present moment. The way we’ve learned to interact to celebrity scandals, to the plot of network tv shows, or to team-based sports has become the means by which we engage with all else including history, politics, and society as a whole. This atomization has purposefully debased the tools and capabilities we have to engage with reality; our quickly moving presentist understanding of events creates little room for nuance and no room for truth.

So they weep for our salvation and hope that we may see their tears.

The ghosts seek to resolve a simple contridiction in our neoliberal capitalist world: that it is the dead that hold onto the possibility of life and that it is the living without those possibilities. Here is our need of seance. We act with the desires for fear, isolation, and atomization while repressing the desires we spend so much time lamenting. The future does not exist, solely because the present hasn’t been allowed to. The boundaries blocking connection are still in place and are the ones that prevent us from gaining a collective future (as no other possible future can exist). The current moment is a haunted house, it is filling up with the ghosts of a past with a future and a present without one. The house is breaking down, things are being thrown accross the room, and something is shaking the foundations simply for us to notice that we are being haunted by the incompleteness of our collective lives. The ghosts do not want to harm us, they demand a seance, they demand that we live the lost-futures that they could not actualize, they demand that we no longer oppress ourselves and our relationships for the abstract benefit of the economy. Can you hear them creaking in the basement? they can’t be ignored forever; maybe we too will become ghosts that act just like them, lamenting the lost-futures, but hopefully someone will listen.

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We record the decline of education and yet our prose, measure against that of Jacob Grimm or Bachofen, has in common with the culture industry candeces unsuspected by us. Nor do we any longer have the same command of Latin and Greek as Wolk or Kirchhoff. We point at the decline of cilization into illiteracy, and ourselves forget the art of letter-writing, or of reading a text from Jean-Paul as it must have been read in his time. We shudder at the brutalization of life, but lacking any objectivity binding morality we are forced at every step into actions and words, into calculations that are by humane standards barbaric, and even by the dubious values of good society tactless.1

The sixth essay of Adorno’s collection of reflections in Minima Moralia is one on ironic detachment and its role in the decline of our own high standards. The academics of the past age (the generations long before those of Adorno’s) may have been very far and few between, but the education they got was a much deeper understanding of certain fields and abilities required for all those who got to be students. Whenever I read about education in the age of the 19th century or earlier, I imagine school was an entirely elite affair meant to create an upper class able to engage with the arts and studies reserved for them. Adorno (and I share such feelings) lements this past not because of the class divide it reifies in education divides, but because of the possibilities of these high standards existing in the place of the culture industry that placates us in its exciting but empty lessons.

There is a dread in returning to the academic authenticity that Adorno suggests implicitly here in this essay. For generations, those seeking to become learned as a class have degraded ourselves and our abilities by letting our standards merely be relative to the average person. We acknowledge that the average person no longer possessing the skills that we see as now having been the few to learn, and this helps us ignore that there are skills that the generation above us has that we did not require of ourselves to learn. The death of the well-rounded learned person will not come from the lack of the possibility of learning all the varied skills past generations knew, but because they will be placated only by the fact that the masses know less.

In the age of AI use that is rotting the brains of millions away to a level of having their social interactions pass through a more degraded culture industry than ever, the academic has only critique to offer. They sense and critique the death of writing; it is lamentable indeed, but at the cost of ignoring the talents that they are not fostering and requiring of themselves in new generations. Are we, as academics, not getting sucked into the same degradation of ability, interactions, and writing, even if in a different way? Satisfied by the low quality of “content” elsewhere, satisfied by being able to post a take on the state of things at any time on Twitter, Bluesky, or the other platforms, and satisfied by the infinite access to information and classes that many of us, I included, have given ourselves more reason than ever to be less learned.

Reading this essay the other day was a kick in motivation that I know I needed, and I hope will help going forward. The critique of the masses is a crutch to help forget all that we are excusing ourselves; for example, I was supposed to be fluent in French a couple of years ago (after already studying for years), according to my own plans, and while I am more fluent than ever before, my allowed laziness has hindered my progression through inactivity. In the time I spent scrolling, or whatever else, I could have been practicing this skill among many others; I could easily be practicing a third language to near fluency, if I had done the work back then, but this critique of the past is too an excuse for my present self.

I do not seek an economization of my time or of my person; I do not want to seek skills for the mere reason of making my resume or CV look better than ever before, that is, in part, how we got to this state of things. I, rather, wish to become a fuller being, more well-versed than ever before, more able to interact with life and others in new and varied ways. Many of us have had our brains geared for the quick dopamine cycles of the internet and the modern culture industry that is only speeding them up. But these skills and abilities that in reflection we praise in previous generations (knowing mulitple language fleuntly, writing beautiful letters or prose, and reading hundreds, if not thousands, of works deeply), are not gone, they are simply things that require the same regular work that was once used to acquire them. The educational environment is a good space for this because it naturally aids in forming a gap or divide between myself and that which I need to become, which can only be overcome by cultivating certain skills and abilities. But the problem is still in placation, in this external push, we do not learn the internal drive towards cultivation: we respond to a barrier placed for us that we must get around, but not one that we naturally give ourselves to overcome.

This is the task I must set for myself, and I may recommend it to those in the same place as I. I long to be a better writer, a better reader, someone who speaks a few languages with ease, someone who can create art that pushes me further, someone who can philosophize outside of the language that others use. In all these things, there are barriers that I must put in place in front of me; these are barriers that would not change my life if I did not overcome them. The motivation must come from inside to push through, to challenge myself every day to succeed as minimally as possible, as long as I am not stagnant or retreating. It can no longer be enough to satisfy myself that I read and write better and more often than most of the 8 billion people on this planet; there is no point where I will be better than anyone else simply because this gap exists or because I can critique those who don’t read or write as well or as much. I must instead learn to cultivate myself for myself; I risk letting myself become illiterate otherwise.

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“But the Bourgeoisie over-archaizes itself to found its own legitimacy, its order of economic filiation”

The bourgeoisie, the decoding class is always threatened with being decoded itself: hence its overarchaization.”1

Introduction

What the Oedipus complex, that Deleuze & Guattari seek to critique in Anti-Oedipus, defines is the origin of the form of lack that makes social and desiring production from the outside of the sovereignty of the subject. Oedipus is merely an abstract form for different historical political systems to base their social systems around. It sets as the form of State desire that the subject is incomplete in-themselves and must prohibit themselves from attaining the true fulfillment of their desire by getting a deferred desire in the social realm. The myth of this lack, whether expressed so outwardly by psychoanalysis or more gently by the molar structures of society, gives a ground and language to our existence because it creates the social field that we invest our subjectivity on; this is not to say that Deleuze & Guattari understand it as universal but rather that it creates itself as the universal that all forms of subjectivation are created from. The goal is to create an unconscious fiction which is not the whole breadth of all possible forms of existence, but defines positively and negatively all forms of allowed existence and all forms of allowed escapes or resistance to the system. One can find this best spelled out in Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of Oedipus & the incest prohibition:

The Law tells us: You will not marry your, and you will not kill your father. And we docile subjects say to ourselves: so that’s what I wanted! Will it ever be suspected that the law discredits—and has an interest in discrediting and disgracing—the person it presumes to be guilty, the person the law wants to be guilty and wants to be made to feel guilty?... For what really takes place is that the law prohibits something that is perfectly fictitious in the order of desire or of the “instincts,” so as to persuade its subjects that they had the intention of corresponding to this fiction2

The prohibition is created as the site at the beginning of social production that defines the whole field of possible subjects immediately. This is not the birth of subjectivity but rather the birth of the State as a central point in the production of subjectivity; lack defines desire not only outwardly into the world but also that the subject has no part in the creativity of desire.

But lack serves only as the model of desire meant to close off the full understanding of desiring production. It is not a content in and of itself, but the mold that all social and desiring production end up being filtered and obscured through. The social-production that one gets subjectified through, that which one comes to produce themselves by, is full of figures, limits, history, economy, and mythology that fill the field in which we invest ourselves with specificity. Lack transforms us into subjects ready for a State’s specific preparations, through the entrance into the Symbolic Order, but, for Deleuze and Guattari’s project of schizoanalysis, territorialization and coding make up our specific relationships and attachments to the systems of social production. Territorialization is that which defines the existing relations within a social field of investment, and coding represents our specific attachments to them. To begin with the exploration of Gender, then we can understand this, in the most basic form, which I will expand on as I go on, as the territory of gender being the binary gender duality and the associated possible points of investment, whereas the code is the bodies and actions that are invested into one or the other of these genders. While the most basic and incomplete understanding of Gender, it may be said that this binary is deliberately the most common understanding of our own possibilities of gendered existence specifically because it limits and serves as a universal for the complex power relations that truly exist in this system; the territory is understood not as something that already performs the task of limiting but as the definition of rational or universal experience of gender that must be conformed to because of its own self-asserted universality.

But Gender is not simply binary in its structure; even if it is not polymorphous like the real range of expression is, there are mechanisms beyond just lack and dimorphism that define the system. We can see in the cases of intersexed persons that this dimorphism is easily complicated, and we can easily recognize its absurdity, but we also find in the case of intersexed persons a force to exist as one or the other gender; dimorphism is manufactured by recoding the physical body into the permitted territories. Additionally, race and Gender are not territorialized and coded separately; they are produced in conjunction with each other, possessing not only desire and social production that intersect but that can not function properly without the limits of the other machine. The White-black dualism of the race machine within traditional Western societies, especially America, function with a male-female gendering of black persons but never a complete Gendering; the investments into the territory of gender by racialized others is nearly always what allows one to exist within the Identities reaffirmed, protected, and benefited by State assemblages. The racialized other is still coded around the dualism of gender, but is an additional absurdity for this structure, as they do not get to invest and code themselves in Gender but need to be able to be regulated by being stratified and coded within the dimorphic field. Their coding and bodies are thus treated as more varied and playing on the borders between Genders, their relation to territory is less attached and secure, but enough in order to be managed and used by the system. Within Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, the system of Gender not only functions alongside race, among many other categories that would need to be discussed elsewhere, but is a State assemblage of class preservation and domination along racial lines in an age where capital functions as the greater decoder and deterritorializer. This function of the assemblage is to maintain the hierarchies and dominations present in earlier ages, to use the privileges of primitive accumulation as a means to assert a class deserving their unequal existence with the justification of a universal history and science. For the purpose of mapping out such a system before going into further detail about it, the graph below serves to show all the major functions of Gendering and how it manipulates and restructures the purely positive plane of unconscious investments.

Capitalism, The State, & the Territorialization of the Body

We find the most brutal repressions, the most outward support for restriction, and the most ardent begging for less, not just for others but for ourselves too, not in the historical systems centered on the State’s axioms of meaning and symbolic relationships, but instead in our historic moment that is destroying the relations that the dominant classes cling to for their superiority. While the territory and classes of previous political-economies were defined and created by the axiom of the State, Deleuze scholar Eugene Hollard explains that, “The basic social relations in the decoded Symbolic order of capitalism, by contrast, are quantitative and strictly meaningless: workers (of whatever gender) are equated as abstract, calculable amounts of labour-power within the cash nexus of the market”3. Without the anti-production of the State to maintain class distinctions (whether that be literal economic classes or the racial class hierarchy that too exists in the West), all territories and relations would exist only as long as they match the flows of the market. The State, and its unconscious tool in State desiring, is no longer the central producer of new social relations but a system of maintenance for the dominating classes, as Deleuze and Guattari explain while discussing the State under capitalism in Anti-Oedipus:

[The State] is no longer content to overcode maintained and imbricated territorialities; it must constitute, invent codes for the decoded flows of money, commodities, and private property. It no longer of itself forms a ruling class or classes; it is itself formed by these classes, which have become independent and delegate it to serve their power and their contradictions, their struggles and their compromises with the dominated classes. It is no longer the transcendent law that governs fragments; it must fashion as best it can a whole to which it will render its law immanent. It is no longer the pure signifier that regulates its signifiers; it now appears behind them, depending on the things it signifies… As a machine it no longer determines a social system; it is itself determined by the social system into which it is incorporated in the exercise of its functions.4

The State’s service as anti-production to protect the class and interests of the dominating class, no longer the center or origin for the social field, means that we are territorialized and coded along two separate processes: the decoding of the market and the recoding of the class system and its interests.

Being Decoded, therefore, is a threat to those not protected within the privileges of stratified and territorialized social relations. The intersex, the gender non-conforming, the racialized other, all either barred out of or purposefully removed themselves from the codes of Gender, are not given the protections from the absolute deterritorialization of capital. While being able to pass within the identities under the strict code of the State’s anti-production is possible, which will be discussed in detail in the following section, being decoded or undercoded in the deterritorialized system of capital is not a safe position to be in; one is unable to accumulate wealth or relations, at least to the same degree, without being invested within the States codes, in terms of gender and sex, this is what writers like Hortense Spillers and C. Riley Snorton refer to when discussing the concepts of the captive body and flesh respectively.

These two writers are able to extract such a potent concept in flesh through African American history and its relation to gender structures, primarily through the focus on the extremes of degendering present in or because of slavery. Slavery takes the decoding of social relations and the body to the absolute limit, to where each part becomes purely an object without the legal and moral structures to structure a humanity to them. Spillers, in her essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” exemplifies the codes and desiring investments of Gender that protect the dominant social classes by exploring the implications of their removal in the overcoding and decoding of the enslaved orphan:

In the context of the United States, we could not say that the enslaved offspring was “orphaned,” but the child does become, under the press of patronymic, patrifocal, patrilineal, and patriarchal order, the man/woman on the boundary, whose human and familial status by the very nature of the case, has yet to be defined. I would call this enforced state of breach another instance of vestibular cultural formation where ‘kinship’ loses meaning since it can be invaded at any given and arbitrary moment by the property relation5

The enslaved person, throughout the history of colonialism and slavery, removed both from their physical and schizoanalytic territory, is placed into a social system where they are extrinsic to kinship structures and social relations. This exclusion, dealt with further in the final section, is due in part to a fully decoded economic relation; as property, the body of capital recognizes them as entirely quantifiable relations, which social respect for their families, romantic relationships, or their personhood would threaten6. For Spillers, it is important to note that enslaved persons did still try to have family and communities, but that the system of slavery and the capital flows that helped it function broke them down and showed that their only respected and protected relationship was that as property, “the enslaved must not be permitted to perceive that he or she has any human rights that matter. Certainly, if ‘kinship’ were possible, the property relations would be undermined, since the offspring would then ‘belong to a mother and father”7.

Every aspect of the body of the enslaved person is too relegated to the level of property and objectification through its degendering into flesh. Exploring the origins of gynecology in the experimental surgeries on enslaved women by Dr. James Marion Sims, C. Riley Snorton, in the first chapter of Black on Both Sides, explores the violence of degendering that turns the lived body of the degendered person into an object of study. For Snorton, Sims’ experiments represent captive bodies being turned into flesh for the use of the power of medical-knowledge; in the particular case of Sims, this is a two-fold use in that it allowed enslaved women to become “useful” again for their enslaver and allowed for the discovery of treatments of physical ailments also suffered by white women. Each part of the body is decoded to an economic use or treated as an objectifiable part for medical-scientific research, and only recoded in relation to the dominant Gendered body8. We can find this relation made visible in Snorton’s analysis of the illustrations of gynecological procedure and Sim’s examinations in Howard Kelly’s Medical Gynecology, where the bodies are covered in all areas except for that of the examined flesh9. The doctors/examiners who are creating or studying these procedures have no social relationship with the embodied person because the relationship through medical-scientific power is also made possible by the decoded and degendered body captive to property relations.

Decoding through degendering is a threat because it removes the social protections that make these interactions impossible. The degendered subject is made into a flesh that is not allowed anything but quantified/economic social relations and is subject to the recoding of these relations of the body needed by the dominant class at any moment. While the degendered racialized-other may be one site of violence for this gender-race-class matrix to protect dominant codings, and this challenges Gender’s binary system, this system also allows for or consciously forces a recoding of the body to conform with Gender.

Recoding the Body

The possibility of protection, granted by the absurdity and fluidity of the borders of coding, which is meant, but fails, to clearly demarcate and manage subjects, is still possible, however, only in the process of conformity, or becoming-Major. This may be found in passing as white or as a particular gender, as one who is mixed race may be able to do, or by the physical recoding of the body and its organs found in inter-sex surgeries. This conformity may come in the form of subversion of the broader system of territorialization and coding, as we can find in the fugitive stories of enslaved people in America, such as William and Ellen Craft, but can also be forced onto bodies that would otherwise be deemed subversive to Gender, such as in the case of Inter-sexed surgeries.

The concept of passing is central to all types of recordings of the body. Ellen Craft’s story best represents why this could take on a role that escapes or crosses the borders of how States manage race and gender at the same time. C. Riley Snorton explores the story of the Crafts in the chapter of Black on Both Sides, “Trans Capable,” after going through multiple stories of gender transition being used as a means for economic gain or to escape capture. In Snorton’s account, Ellen Craft transitions through racial lines by being able to subvert gender lines by appealing to them aesthetically: Ellen Craft, a mixed enslaved woman with very white skin, transforms their appearance into a disabled master that her Husband, William Craft, serves as a supposed aide to in the journey north10. For Snorton, the recoding of their bodies that allows them to pass through the barriers in travel that enslaved persons are not allowed, due to their economic position of property being so connected to race relations, is possible only in the couple’s entire configuration of their outwardly aesthetic relationship. The degendered, and thus masculinized, features that Ellen Craft received as a mixed woman allow her not only to pass as white, as English audiences would often note later in their lives, but also to pass as a frail male. Degendered flesh, thus, not only serves as the State’s ability to turn that which is human into usable property, but gives those with certain configurations of flesh at the borders of Gender the ability to subvert the State’s management and intersect with codes of its protection.

But Gender does not like the fact that this border can be crossed, confused, or subverted; its goal as a dimorphic system is to morph the field of all possible investments into a system that divides the possibility of the subject into two clear, demarcated investments. Deleuze and Guattari explore this need of the binary within State Societies within a section of the 9th plateau, “1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity,” as part of the State’s ability to manage and use authority comes from the ability to make the organization of power structures into a completely rigid division. For while primitive, pre-state, societies may have had a gender division that expresses itself in the division of labor and some other social division, it is only State societies that need to make this relationship rigid and completely non-transversable, “It is a particularity of modern societies or rather State societies to bring their own duality machines that function as such, and proceed simultaneously by biunivocal relationships and successively by binarized choices. Classes and sexes come in twos,”11. These sets of twos, formed in opposition, make something manageable in their rigidity. It is not that class and sex come in twos naturally, but rather that the state can reorganize what doesn’t fit precisely by recoding its structures and connections to meet the binary the state has created. While the details of this rigid sexual differentiation will be discussed in the following section below, the horrors of the required recording of the body for intersexed persons express the violence necessary for maintaining its rigidity.

While John Money may be seen as the father of the social constructivist view of gender, his views towards how this social construction needs to be done were the opposite of liberatory. As a psychologist, Money developed his idea of Gender alongside the practice of treating intersexed or unusually sexed patients, particularly children. Money’s theory focused on creating a “normal sexual development,” to be used on those with intersexed bodies or ambiguous genitalia; he thus detaches a concept of gender from sex before pairing the two as social-biological/anatomical codings of the body. Normal development thus requires a matching of rigid psychological/social gendered treatment with rigid biological/anatomical sexed features. As Lisa Downing interprets in the second chapter of Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money’s Diagnostic Concepts, “A Disavowed Inheritance,” Money’s system and justification finds its bedrock justification as “the idea [that] the sexually ‘normal’ body goes hand in hand with ‘normal’ desires and behaviors”12. The physical surgeries, a huge part of which were intersexed infants, due to John Money’s focus on gendered treatment being cemented by the end of the child’s first year and a half of development. These early childhood surgeries, however, were not about sexual function but rather the aesthetics of the body being organized clearly within the binary gender-sex categories, so that the social codes that the child was raised with match the biological codes of their body’s appearance. This led to many patients being unable to use their genitalia properly and being left with trauma from the strict and severe practices that were required to maintain “normalized sexing,” such as the extreme case of the Reimer twins. Intersexed and gender-ambiguous persons thus demonstrate that it is not gender and its rigid opposition that structure our lives, but our forced division into a binary disjunctive code that maintains the organization of gender and sex.

Lack, the Possibility of Failure, & the Desire for Repression

Having explored the decoded nature of the degendered racialized other and the recoded and binarized bodies required to make sense of Gender’s principal division, I now seek to understand the logic of the dominant class’ relation to Gender as the beings protected by its use. For Deleuze and Guattari the understanding of the Bourgeois class’ use of the State to maintain itself through rigid identification begins with an understanding of lack not only as the structure or model of desire, as can also be used to understand the decoded and recoded desires of capital, but the content and identifications that come along with a social system based around lack as the entrance into a fully coded symbolic system. Lack, in its abstract form, can function within a system of capital detached from any rigid code, but it is the association with lack with sexual differential and the entrance into the symbolic that Lacanians, and conservative Lacanians even more so, focus on heavily, and that Deleuze & Guattari critique throughout Anti-Oedipus. Matthew Lovett, in his essay “Lacanian Anxieties,” tries to argue against the conception of lack and sexual difference being maintained only through rigid sexual and gender conformity, as Lacanian figures such as Slavoj Zizek or Jacques-Alain Miller have argued for recently. Matthew Lovett explains Zizek’s position he seeks to critique on sexual difference as an ontological blockage that all subjects must accept as fundamental:

Sexual difference is not anatomical or biological. It is an impasse, an impossibility. Drawing from Lacan’s famous dictum that ‘there is no sexual relationship,’ sexual difference constitutes a fundamental blockage between any encounter of human subjects. We relate to each other through desire, fantasy, identification, loss, and masquerade: two never become one13

Lack submits one to prohibition and a redirection of desire from the Real into the Symbolic, which separates one from those that relate through perversion or demand instead of through lack.

The produced impossibility of the sexual relationship creates a diversion of desire into the social codes of the dominant class and their relations to identity: all gender relations are binarized and filled with the desires of a patriarchal system of relation as well as a racial system of white dominance, justifying its exclusion of the degendered racial-other as someone who has not entered into the symbolic order, does not lack, and/or does not participate in the same prohibitions as a citizen would. These deferred desires, which originate from the fictitious prohibited desire, establish the relationship between men and women of the dominant class; they are already differentiating themselves as binarized, already giving into the imbalances and differences between the genders as if they were universals, and already defining their relationship between people negatively through the lack of the other rather than as a productive unity.

Sexual differentiation being defined by lack means that the desires that one comes to produce do not come from oneself but through the social codes that are positioned as lack or beyond one’s capabilities of ever achieving. One must continually attempt to Gender themselves to maintain and justify their position in society, this is not only constantly shifting with trends but also defined negatively through the impossible relationship with the other Gender and the threat of the degendered racialized-other being a bypass to the social prohibitions and lack. These can not be understood as separate functions but too machinic processes happening and supporting each other’s maintenance: the masculine is defined as that which has possession over femininity, and femininity is defined as the desired object of the masculine, but the racialized-other is a looming threat seen as able to break down the prohibition that maintains one deferment to keeping sexual relationships within Gender. The breakdown, within a relationship, of the deferment into Gendering and white hetero-cis patriarchy, is seen as a failure of one’s ability to participate in Gender, but is additionally positioned as the breakdown of social codes as well, because one’s ability to perform and conform to these identities is identical with one’s ability to participate in coded positions within society, protected from decoded flows.

These failures constitute themselves differently along racial and gendered lines precisely because the lacked and deferred desires and the codes of prohibition that one positions oneself in by being Gendered are different, but both are positioned as the intrusion of the racialized-other who allows one to desire without lack. Hortense Spillers explores the failure of White Femininity in the autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, where Jacobs is an enslaved woman suspected of having a sexual relationship with her enslaver by his wife, Mrs. Flint, who subjects Jacobs to stalking and harassment beyond the usual. While Spillers articulates that this neuroticism by Mrs. Flint may suggest that while the typical Gendered relation is “the gendered female exists for the male,” she goes on to discuss Jacobs as a possible object of desire for Mrs. Jacobs because of her ungendered pansexuality as property14. While this interpretation is definitely not something that I would deny, I would say that it is more potent here to express that Jacobs, by being a supposed object of desire, represents the breakdown of the gendered social codes of the interpersonal for Mrs. Flint, who has come to desire the subservience that allows her to exist as both Gendered and white and cannot constitute her subjectivity outside of the relationship to the dominant class.

The possible failure of masculinity is represented well within the reactionary obsession with racial cuckoldry. In their essay “Cucktales: Race, Sex, and Enjoyment in the Reactionary Memscape,” when discussing why the far-right puts so much focus on cuckoldry in the memes they make and the way that they talk on their forums about politics, Uygar Basphelivan argues:

The reactionary imaginations of the collective self often derive from the fantasy of taking this enjoyment back from the ‘perverted others.’ Recent slogans of populist-nationalist movements such as ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Take Back Control,’ for instance, derive their fantasies of restoration from a felt right to enjoy the nation which has supposedly been stolen away by various racialized others…who now enjoy the nation more than the so-called rightful owners.15

Because the system of patriarchy, the nation, and masculinity are seen as foundational parts of the dominant code, this failure to properly exhibit Gender is often aggrandized and politicized by the reactionary mind that becomes so focused on either living a society after the social codes have broken down or believe they are witnessing the beginning of this breakdown with immigration or whatever progressive policy is currently taking place at the historical moment. The framing caused by the possible failure of masculinity is filtered through the imagery of the cuckold because it represents the destruction of the property relation inherent to Gender that protects the male of the dominant class. The way that the desired women in an interpersonal Gendered relationship or the abstract femininity of an entire nation is talked about as “taken over” or perverted by the other also exposes what the deferred and fictitiously prohibited desire of masculine Gendering are: the violence, the control, and unrestricted use of the feminine for personal pleasure, which is deferred into the institutions of marriage and the property relation of economic filiation.

Lack and the failure to exhibit proper Gendering are systems of control for the dominant class, who, while they get to exist outside of the decoded violence of the market and knowledge-power and do not necessarily have to experience the violence necessary of maintaining the absurd binary of Gender, must still exist within a system of social codes to be able to maintain the ability to control and use this violence against others. Because these dominant classes are no longer represented by the Kings or large land-owning aristocrats, their attraction into rigid racial and Gendered categories means that they create divisions of classes beyond the economic division of society between Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. Dominant desire and dominant subjectivity are filtered through abstract social codes that break down relationships with the means by which one is overwise decoded and subject to market violence or violence within the system of dominant code; whether that be represented by the ununionized white male factory worker, the xenophobic Cuban-American immigrant, or the anti-feminist stay-at-home mom. This self-oppression that fuels the oppression of others, the fascistic desire, is a primary area of exploration and questioning for Deleuze & Guattari; it is central to the project of Capitalism and Schizophrenia and appears in the first section of Anti-Oedipus as:

The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: “Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”... after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves? …[in fascism] the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.16

Their answer to these questions and problems, which I can not fully summarize here, is that subjectivity is created around molar or dominant assemblages that take away desire’s creative and productive potential and replace it with a fictitious set of relations that make desire, and thus subjectivity, in the service of dominant, molar systems. Gender is simply one part of these assemblages of oppressive desires and because of its parallel processes in the systems of property relations, the history of citizenship, and the model of the family, the unconscious attachments and investments in these territories makes those conforming to them in one way or another desire their establishment as one gains an understanding of themselves as the State and its adherence to these assemblages.

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’s recent set of blog posts, “How Continental Philosophers ‘Argue’” has recently rekindled the seasonal analytic/continental divide debate that occurs every few years, with new and up-and-coming philosophy students publicly announcing what side they’d like to be on. After reading these two articles, I find their primary flaw to be a lack of curiosity by the author towards what continental thinker are attempting to do more than any actual destruction of continental thought itself. For those and other reasons, I do not wish to give a direct point by point response to the blog posts in question, but rather to seek a “clearer” understanding of what continental philosophy does and how it is distinguished from analytic philosophy.

Clarity & Concept

To begin with, the simplest critique, which was somewhat brought up in the first post and responded to in the second, is that a focus on clarity, which seems to be the posts’ primary argument, is not a basis of philosophic writing; nor is it something that analytic thought, particularly, always does. Analytic philosophy’s primary goal seems to be precision rather than clarity; precision does not make something clear, especially to a reader, but it does mean that within its own schema, it is meant to be only understood in a singular way. This is not to say that continental philosophy has an opposite goal, that of impercision, and I do see that continental thought also does seem to have ideals that do not include clarity, but its primary difference is found rather in how it interacts differently with the creation of concepts1.

This very simply goes back to an analytic/synthetic divide (at least for those that comfortably fit on one side of the analytic/continental divide). Analytic truths take concepts and seek their fundamental truth through breaking the concepts themselves down, while Synthetic truths are founded upon connections made through experience. I do not believe the former is the domain of analytic philosophy and the latter is the domain of continental philosophy, but rather that these fields interact with these two opposing uses of concepts differently.

Analytic thought, and its goal of precision, seeks to understand a concept in a way that can find no other possible meaning within usage. This usually leaves analytic philosophy to primary function within analytic views of truth, but they use synthetic truth through particular frameworks too, all of which are all synthetic interactions supposably governed within a form of logic or argumentative structures that defines all sound connections between non-analytic observations.

Continental thought, while it does focus primarily on a lot of synthetic connections to build on concepts, they do use analytic unraveling of concepts, but not within just a fundamental, universal idea of the concept. Rather, continental philosophy seems to focus on two things: method and framework, the latter of which is important now. For continental thinkers, the analytic truth of concepts may require and be dependent upon synthetic connections, if analytic truths exist at all for them. Disagreement on thinkers, and between thinkers, in the continental tradition primarily comes down to disagreement on framework. Entire conceptual frameworks are disagreed with for being insufficent to understand phenomena or systems rather than just being wrong at understanding universal truths. For continental thinkers, you can build on them by taking certain concepts and taking them further or building more connections with the concepts they intially created; on the other end one is able to agree with the general conceptual framework without having to argree with every single concept or argument made within that framework.

The workings of framework thinking within continental thought can be made apparent by most, if not all, of the traditions’ major figures and splits on them. While Hegel may be before the split, and the blogpost wrongly establishes Hegel as continental simply because he is German (which is on the continent) and not explicitly always clear with his writing, but has a right-left distinction that is found within a lot of major figures in parts of the continental tradition (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze being prime examples). This disagreement is not necessarily flaws in the framework of their own thinking, but rather that conceptual frameworks never exist in isolation (as analytic philosophy may at least seek) but in connection to the reader’s own thoughts and already existing framework of thought.

For Hegel in particular, you have a conception of progressive history that is an uncontestable concept within Hegel’s view of history, but Right and Left Hegelianism use this conception of history in attachment with certain pre-existing frameworks that this concept is connected with and built upon. Right-Hegelianism attaches progressive history along with its views on race & civility to build a conception of progressive history being about the white race actualizing through the growth of knowledge and the state; while Left-Hegelianism builds on progressive history along with its views of political economy and ethics to construct a view of history being the attainment of a society without hierarchy and oppression. It is not that any of these are incorrect uses of Hegelian thought, even if Hegel may have not thought of them in this regard, nor are they necessarily against the conception of universalized knowledge, but rather that the basis of Hegel is that universals exist in transformation and/or actualizations through time rather than in a singular form.

On Methodology

While these conceptual frameworks are often positioned as the truly objective way of understanding the world works, often times they are not necessarily positioned as just universal theories but ways in which we could/should understand the world and its structures. With a greater focus on human experience and affairs, continental philosophy’s traditions are often interdisciplinary with the humanities and social sciences, and with methods, frameworks, and evidence that travel both ways. This is evident in examples like the tradition of structuralism, which not only found a home in philosophy but also in history, anthropology, linguistics, economics (Marxist), sociology, among many others; and like post-structuralism that followed it, which found many interactions with the fields of literature, sociology, anthropology, psychology/psychoanalysis, and gender studies. Both of these traditions are broadened by the fact that these fields find these perspectives useful for understanding their field but also create new possibilities of understanding for their fields. The Structuralist tradition moved the focus away from the narrative focus in history or the natural language view of linguistics towards viewing these fields as studies of structure and the development of structures. Post-Structuralism takes this a step further to not only see society contingent on structure, but also to see these structures as both contingent and unfixed. While structuralism, like with Claude Levi-Strauss’ anthropology of kinship structures, may be able to understand the gender binary in its evolutions and changes throughout time, the post-structuralist would challenge that this structure is the universal and would rather argue and focus on how the gender binary is a purposefully maintained structure that comes with connections to forces and structures of power.

These two examples already show a great diversity in thought within continental philosophy, even within a tradition built on another tradition. These differences expand further in the analysis of all the traditions grouped into continental philosophy: phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, structuralism, post-structuralism, and certain brands of philosophy-focused psychoanalysis. All of these provide differing conceptual frameworks at a fundamental level from nearly all the others; many thinkers in parts of continental philosophy even have differing fundamental frameworks from philosophers that would be grouped right next to them. What unifies them is something different than necessarily what their particulars are, but instead more universal agreements not only in how they write, which is more prose and style-focused than explicitly precise (which these kinds of language use are not a bad thing and can actually be an aspect aiding understanding a conceptual framework), but in a shared agreement that regardless of whether the real world exists, that our mode of existing within it and experiencing it is not objective.

This is typically seen, in explanations for the analytic/continental divide, as building on Kant’s concepts of epistemology that, in summary, states that while we may be unable to experience and understand A Priori reality, we do have perception and the ability to process perceptions as a means of accessing experiential truth; the goal for Kant is to acknowledge this limitation and use what one can to understand the basis for experience. Phenomenology, under Husserl, takes this idea of the inaccessibility of the A Priori and questions why philosophy has focused on the A Priori for so long when it does not even fully understand the mechanisms of experience itself. This movement towards subjectivity under phenomenology (as well as the other traditions) is not the destruction of the possibility of objectivity, but rather a fundamental questioning of whether our understanding of objectivity is sufficient or if, in the case of phenomenology, experience shows that we should have a critical attitude towards it. While a lot of continental traditions purposefully avoid phenomenology’s conceptions, they all have a critical attitude towards how we view consciousness/selfhood and our interactions with the world. Phenomenology presents consciousness as something that is In-The-World or concerned only with the objects of consciousness, and is thus not created from something separate from experience. Structuralism takes or ends up with near conclusions on consciousness to focus on how consciousness is concerned with structures universal to all societies, or dependent on the history of the society one lives within.

Conclusion

While I do not expect to end this debate, I hope to have finally achieved a stage in my education able to explain and defend the unifying aspects of the variety of continental philosophy and its usage. While this is not a very expensive defense, as I may need to make later in my education, I wanted to speak now primarily because I saw it was relevant. To respond more clearly to some of the main points of the blogpost I am responding to, Continental philosophy is not necessarily obscurantist and often times just requires the curiosity regularly expected in other fields to understand them: I understand what Deleuze & Guattari are attempting to construct in Anti-Oedipus considerably more now that I’ve not only read it three times but also explored and better understand multiple of their inspirations and multiple of the people that have used their theory. In this way, I find the idea that all philosophy texts are meant to be clear to an average reader, even an average philosophy reader, to be a bit insulting; no one expects even a senior undergraduate student in physics to be able to articulate quantum mechanics but there is still worth in persuing and then building the understanding of quantum mechanics over a long period of study.

Continental philosophy also doesn’t have the same standards or goals as analytic philosophy, and that’s perfectly okay as long as one does not use their own standards for the other. I would not ask the analytic students in my Master’s cohort why their strictly logical proofs can not explain the role of power in sexual confession like Foucault can. This also follows through in the writing; the goal is not necessarily a clear understanding of what the author wishes to argue, but rather that the writing and the focus on the writing are meant to express and transfer the conceptual framework being used throughout. In certain instances, the importance of the conceptual framework exists because the author has no ability to pin down the analytic understanding of the concept they wish to define: Foucault’s work is predominantly centered around power and its uses, yet, with all its well-defined historical understanding of the uses of power, it at best points towards a possibility of understanding power through the contextualization and connection of its particularities. This is not a flaw in the argument of what power is by Foucault, but instead seeking to create a synthetic web of understanding something that cannot be understood in and of itself. Foucault’s works do not argue a perfect definition of power, but translate to the reader what power does, how it operates throughout history & in particular settings, and why one must see it as contingent and changable for the better.

Finally, another major thread of the Continental traditions is the focus on traditions. The citing of other thinkers and their concepts is not a claim to authority, like one might find in traditional argumentative structures; it is using the acceptance of or debate on those ideas to build a more expansive or particular conceptual framework regarding the role of the work. Judith Butler mentions Simone De Beauvoir not because the latter is an incontestable source, but because Butler’s framework is an extension of and a retooling of major concepts within De Beauvoir’s feminist works. This gives these thinkers the ability to use concepts as if they have already been explained further, for if you disagree with Butler’s view of gender in Gender Trouble, your disagreement may not be total, but with a particularity in the conception of what is borrowed from either De Beauvoir, Freud, Foucault, Derrida, or etc.

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The ideology of capitalism typically positions the poor as undeserving and unproductive and thus deserves to be disconnected from beneficial flows of capital. Even when it is a social safety net meant to practically uphold our farming economy and help poor people, such as with recent discussions of the 40 million Americans who are on SNAP benefits and are currently unable to access food at the same level, there are arguments over and over again about how it’s an unproductive waste of government spending to just give out “free money to the poor.” The ideology of capital, which finds connections in the racism, sexism, and xenophobia of the right, continually argues that those who take these government benefits are either mostly frauds, foreigners, failing mothers, etc, while always specifying that these policies should only be used for those who are truly in need. This creates the idea of an ideal person who should be on benefits, who will use them temporarily and then immediately find a way to support themselves

This, however, ignores the primary benefit of social safety nets and social services, which is pro-sociality. The right fundamentally misunderstands sociality, believing that it is something innate in a person, whether that be through race, merit, culture, gender conformity, etc…. This ignores that sociality is fundamentally a process. This process of sociality attaches to the desiring systems of those on the margins of society and brings them into the folds of a social system. These safety nets allow people the option outside of having to work within systems of exploitation or in the criminal world; these social safety nets are there not to get people to become ideal capitalists but rather to make it possible for them to become better citizens.

Every time someone pays with SNAP/EBT instead of stealing or buying less than they could with this safety net is a pro-social moment. Every time a person is able to access Medicaid or Medicare instead of paying astronomical fees for healthcare is a pro-social moment. Any time someone who has committed a criminal act, non-violent or otherwise, and is given the chance for rehabilitation instead of strictly punishment, is a pro-social moment. These are not moments of people siphoning off from society while not participating in it, but rather moments where someone is allowed to meet desires within the social framework rather than from outside it.

What is Pro-Sociality

Sociality is not about any individual person but about continuous connections to the social realm. While it is common on the right to find people discussing people who are unable to be a part of the social framework, whether that be certain immigrants, religions, or races, this is not true except possibly in extreme cases of psychopathy (which I still believe any society still should attempt to prove that everyone can become more social). Pro-sociality sees that there are those that exist outside or at the borders of society and seeks to give them proper reasons and connections to participate within the social framework. A society built around pro-societal values has a system set up to make following the rules personally beneficial, not just something that will be punished if not followed.

Pro-social policy is fundamentally and purposefully inefficient when it comes to purely market economies. The goal is a society where money is used for the benefit of people rather than people being used for the benefit of those who already hold large sums of capital. While a lot of pro-social policies are aimed at getting those at the edges to participate in a money/capitalist economy, the actual structure is the redistribution of money to make sure people are shielded from the means of survival that exist outside of the regulated economy. Those with a good social safety net are able to feed themselves and/or their family without the constant presence of the imminent threat of needing to accept any hiring position, which could be under-the-table pay below the minimum wage, joining criminal organizations that promise good pay, or possibly going into the sex worker market in one way or another just to make ends meet.

There are also pro-social programs/policies that are not about being able to participate in the economy but rather to inspire trust within the system of governance. Pro-sociality here follows along with many of the central tenets of social-contract theory: when communities have programs where one can go to that will protect and advocate for them, they are more willing to continue participating in such a community and following its rules. This role can not be done fully under the police, as state violence is something regularly used against those on the outskirts of the social framework, but rather by engaged social workers, who are given the resources and funds to properly deal with the concerns of community members. These can be many different things: community spaces & events for the youth, Food Banks, Advocacy Centers for those who experience sexual assault, NYC Mayoral hopeful (as for right now) Zohran Mamdani’s proposal for a department of community safety, or even just some community event centers.

What is Anti-Sociality

Having done a rudimentary description of what pro-social policies actually look like and do, I want to return back to the original point and show that the policies that right-wing capitalist ideologies prescribe are fundamentally harmful to the social fabric. Anti-social policies and programs do not seek the incorporation of those at the margins, but rather seek to pair social inclusion within a system of extraction. Those who get to participate in social systems are determined by non-social, but instead, in our current case, market terms: who is profitable, who is a good worker, who consumes correctly, etc… The rules of incorporation exist solely within market logic, with the exception of leftover hierarchical social systems that defined who would be able to become market leaders.

The central theme of anti-social ideology is that there are large portions of people who not only shouldn’t be given the chance to incorporate with a community but should also be subjected to worse and worse conditions because of their race, religion, class position, etc… This ideology pushes that people should be punished, if not harmed or killed, for having to exist on the outskirts of society. Except for its ideal poor person or ideal minority, which seems to never find itself in any real person, this ideology sees being in a position outside of the social fabric as an individual failing or, in the far-right case, something fundamental to the kind of people they are.

As I discussed in Only the Left Can Provide High Trust Societies, the social framework constructed out of an anti-social society is one that has every single person constantly on edge, feeling like they need to protect themselves from anybody. It is not a system that is built around trusting your neighbor, no matter who they are, but where trust is formed from momentary or unnecessary superficial decisions (such as by race or creed). Anti-social states are built around the use of state violence to protect the legitimate rule of a few, whether that be encoded in the constitution or made true by the manufactured inequality of the market system. Those on the outskirts of a social system aren’t only pushed out but then made subject to state violence in their criminalization. Anti-social policies create more and more people unable to participate and benefit from participating in society, and then force them into systems of exploitation and extraction: prison, low-wage labor, informal violent economies, etc… Existing within the outside or denounced systems is then moralized against, and those that were forced to participate in them to survice (which allows them to exist) are now treated as less than human because of it. It is a circle of unfair markets and strict moralization that justifies itself circularly.

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1. A Flow is a movement that allows for a new becoming. It connects beings, territorial sites, and/or resources and transforms them both in relation to each other, either by the sustenance for one or all, or by the replacement of parts of the beings that participate in the flow.

2. The Flow carries with it material that is deterritorialized into a liquid form, seeking to become territorialized/solidified by a new becoming only made possible through connection and/or movement. This can be the flow of money, which is an abstracted material of movement able to be exchanged for the flow of something else, or, as the first example below will expand on, like that of pollen, a material that will be transformed/territorialized into both new flowers and honey within the same flow.

3. All flows can be categorized into two categories: Semiotic or Symbolic flows; these are mutually exclusive flows, but semiotic flows can exist without attachment to symbolic flows, while symbolic flows largely require a relationship with semiotic flows to maintain themselves and are attempts to abstract, direct, and/or quantify semiotic flows.

4. Semiotic flows will always flow like water: from the highest potential point to the lowest potential point, in other words, the flow will go along the path with the least resistance. The structure of desire and the Symbolic flows both possess the ability to manipulate the potentiality of flows and their possible connections, thus giving shape to how flows become.

5. Flows exist typically with a counter-flow involved in their movement; this creates the linkage between beings to foster the investment into the continuation of each part in the flow. Guattari mentions the interaction between the bee and the flower in the flow of pollen to discuss semiotic flows. The flower evolves according to the most beneficial flow for its pollen/reproduction, while the bee evolves to best interact with flowers that give the greatest ease of access to be able to transfer pollen to create honey. The bees’ flow of Pollenation → Honey is met by the counterflow of the flower’s counterflow of Surplus Pollen → Reproduction. Both flows of sustenance for their species are made possible through an exchange of each’s deterritorialized resource: the flower’s pollen for the bee’s movement.

6. Flows, semiotic ones at least, are largely maintained not through what is being directly moved or transformed in their becoming but rather in the excesses and surpluses that spring off of them. The purest flows are perpetually inefficient.

   Symbolic Flows & Abstraction

7. Symbolic flows are abstract flows that are the flow of money, signs, values, etc…, that first seek to direct semiotic flows & are first formed as a counterflow to the real flows of semiotic becomings. These flows create rules for the real flows; they counter-command as well as block and restrict the possibilities of semiotic flows they shape.

8. Symbolic flows only function through capture; they create a sense within themselves that makes them only applicable, only able to interact with other flows, within their system. Money is the prime example of this, as money is the abstract/deterritorialized form of value within a system of exchange, but is not ever fully deterritorializable from the system/sense it exists within, as both points of connection must recognize and desire the abstract value of money. This requires trust in the systems/states that back the money and a desire to reterritorialize money elsewhere.

9. Signs are semi-deterritorialized flows within the flow of information that connect other, more complex structures and flows. Desire in-itself, being unrepresentable and often unrealizable without communication, relegates and diminishes itself within the task of communication. This represents aspects of desire or information without ever being able to make a full translation of desire from one subject to another. The sign is a deterritorialization from raw desire and a reterritorialization of desire within a shared symbolic system of coherence.

10. The systems of signs connect the subject to one or more symbolic systems of society that reform the desiring subject to the values of the whole system that orders the flows of signs/desire. These systems create the possibility of communicating desire and allowing it to perform the flows it is seeking at the cost of ordering and limiting its movement.

11. These symbolic systems gain their strength and power from this blocking off and limiting of more semiotic and basic symbolic flows. They create borders for possibility, but, at the same time, create a nexus towards which all real flows must pass through and be transformed by it. This is expanded on in even more complex systems to become more like checkpoints, creating an ordered flow that must pass through the centralized aspects of the symbolic to be continually ordered properly, and, in more economic/state terms, this centralization is the site at which one flow is transformed into another: In the 16th Century, gold from the Americas & Africa is sent to Seville in Spain to be transformed from gold as a commodity to gold as a currency.

12. As these symbolic systems get stronger and more complex within the world, they begin to regulate every intersection between the desiring subject and real flows. This is typically at two points: communication through the system of signs, and economics/goods through the system of abstracted exchange/money. Understanding both of these kinds of symbolic intermediaries to flows is necessary to understand the connection between the subject and their relation to the state/society.

13. The goal of a state, in regard to flows, is to capture the subject and get them to invest and attach more and more into abstract symbolic values that command and order flows and have the state as its center or its regular intermediary. This begins with less abstract and less territorialized attachments, such as an attachment to exchangeable value that is abstracted from the reality of the exchanged object within the real, semiotic flow. The subject’s increased connection to seeing the goal of their own action for exchange rather than sustenance of themselves or their own community/family creates a level of abstract investment into the social that centralizes flows into state apparatuses.

14. The primary desire for sustenance being overcoded by a primary desire to engage in exchange creates an increase in differences in the potential for flows of money, gold, goods, etc… This also creates a need for investment within a socius in the abstract value of that symbolic system as the strength of the central part of the socius is dependent on the flows of exchange taking place within its bounds and within its terms. To create the conditions for the counterflow of commodities with money, the state will either need to use the resources it has available to have flowing exchange value or seek to bring in resources from outside its domain, either through differences in exchange value (as in the case with Silver to Gold trade in China, due to their 4-1 exchange rate, bringing more Gold into Europe which was abundent in Silver during the 16th-century compared to its use of silver coinage at the time) or through war (which has been found to be more frequent, prior to the 19th or 20th century, during times of internal economic downturn and famine).

15. The state formation of the symbolic seeks to craft its system as not only sensible within itself, but additionally as eternal and unquestionable. The totality of the centralized symbolic system thus always points the subject away from the point of escaping its completeness. All desiring flows are redirected towards it, and all surplus of such flows are reinvested internally rather than allowing for external incidental investments. The system thus reforms the subject’s understanding of history or their basis for how they participate within the flows of the system. For Capitalism, we are made to believe that the capitalist system is a rational addition to the exchange form that merely needed to be made more efficient than barter systems of the past. In such a case, the barter myth of origin protects the system’s essential sense; money then becomes the perfected version of market exchange (which becomes accepted through this layer of abstraction as natural), and then capitalism is defined as the most rational or efficient use of money-based exchange (which creates a two-way justification for money and capital). Thus, the simulacrum of value obscures the real relations of society, but are often founded upon the essential non-sense of the socius, which is seen as a natural justification of the system that rests on top of it, but is usually fueled by the existence of these symbolic relations it is used to justify.

16. It is thus through this system of abstracting desire into the symbolic and after which into the centralization or intermediary sites of the state that the desire of the subject is reformed and focused into serving the state’s desire. The subject is left unable to exist without the mediation of the symbolic system, either mentally through language, which limits and defines thought patterns and flows of expression, or physically through economics and exchange, which makes survival only possible through interaction with the socius.

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Fascism finds its heart within aesthetics and desire, a corruption of both, but at the same time a fundamental feeling of loss and longing for a false reality within each. This does not make fascism a uniform aesthetic or desire at the level of particulars; fascism’s particular political strength is microfascism’s ability to draw people in from all different possible points of reactionary desires and aesthetics. While there is plenty of theory out there to help us understand these varied fascisms, I think artistic endeavors have also aided to a conception of the full body of fascist personages.

During the latter half of the 1970s, two British rock stars both created concept albums centering around a fascist musical performer. Bowie’s Station to Station (1976) is an album meant to be either about or sung by the Thin White Duke, an unfeeling and rude British gentleman who romanticizes a love in the songs he sings that he would be disgusted by. Roger Waters’ writing on Pink Floyd’s The Wall depicts a different fascist personage. Pink is isolated and taught to fear the world, while begging to feel, he lashes out at everyone who would possibly love him, and feels dragged into becoming a violent and cruel British fascist leader because of all those who can no longer put up with the abuse and neglect.

These characters are both unfeeling and cruel for at least most of their stories or backstory, but ultimately represent two separate kinds of fascist desiring assembleges: the Thin White Duke blocks off true desire while idealizing a pure aesthetics, and Pink blocks out the world to avoid the horror of self-reflection. While both actively deny what they claim as their desire: romantic love and acceptance, the former couldn’t care less if he actually got the love he sings about, while the latter is isolated by his own abusive actions and becomes further grasped by a movement of those that only fan the flames of the destructive desires within Pink.

Station to Station

You touch me
I hear the sound of mandolins
You kiss me
With your kiss my life begins
You're spring to me, all things to me
Don't you know you're life itself
(Wild is the Wind, writen by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington)

The Thin White Duke is a character that one must read between the lines of David Bowie’s 1976 album Station to Station to get any information about. While mentioned in the title track, where he is “throwing darts in lovers’ eyes,” the majority of information about the character comes from David Bowie’s characterization of him during concerts and in public during that album’s tour. The character is probably best understood within an aristocratic fascism, a pretentiousness about art and national character, without any feeling behind these ideals other than the idea that they must be pure and proper.

It is the song, “Wild is the Wind,” that best signifies this character. Bowie does a cover of Nina Simone’s cover of “Wild is the Wind,” as if he were the Thin White Duke coming onto the stage at a nightlife venue. The singing in the song focuses on a near technical perfection: holding strong vibrato, reaching difficult notes, and maintaining an emotionlessness in what is on the cusp of a heartbreaking performance. Itself being a cover, it is not the Duke’s words; he sees himself as an arbiter for the romanticism that is meant to ideally exist, yet he does not himself feel. He is necessarily angry that he feels no love; he is too detached for such a feeling. The goal is to perform a piece of art perfectly.

The romanticism in such a performance is contrasted with the description in the title track mentioned above. The Duke truly despises lovers. The actual practice of romance disgusts him, but its ideal he praises. He is a fascist because he believes in aesthetics and nothing else. The ideals of humanity are meant to be praised for their purity, but their realization is too impure to be allowed to continue existing. It is the fascism of the neurotic, who sees order as the goal of all things and the chaos inherent to living as a stain on society.

The Wall

How could you go?
When you know how I need you
To beat to a pulp on a Saturday night
Oh, babe, don't leave me now
(Don't Leave Me Now, writen by Roger Waters

One has a lot more to say about the character Pink; not only is The Wall more than twice the length of Station to Station, but it is also a concept album centered on the journey of this character from childhood to a self-destructive adulthood. Waters spends considerable time writing about how the character ends up turning to fascism by the latter half of the album: surrounded by authoritarian figures as a child, he becomes a domestic abuser who forcefully pushes away the people who cared about him and walls off the parts of himself who still cared about other people. He has been made into the perfect victim for an ideology that will justify all his abuse and tell him that it is actually leftists and minorities fault that his life sucks.

Pink is a more typical fascist archetype because of all of this. His desire and calls for racial purity, represented most explicitly in “In The Flesh” & “Waiting for the Worms,” are out of an emotional outrage being directed by fascist organizations. It is a paranoid obsession with purity and a feeling of a need for violent outbursts rather than any actual understanding of what that means for himself. This seems to be built on a typical form of masculinity that is harmful to itself and is actively demanding to others (mother, wife, etc...) to make his choices and do his chores for him, yet constantly feels the need to hold control/majority over any system or society it is a part of.

Pink, in a way, is primarily a subject primed for fascistic psychosis. This starts with his mother isolating him as a child and specifically bringing him to bed every night while telling him of all the things in society he should be fearful of. He has no good relationships of his own: his mother is paranoid & alone, he watches all the kids on the playground have fathers that play with him while he himself is alone, his teacher is abusively authoritarian but beaten at home by his wife, and his wife is handpicked by his mother and runs off with a hippie lover because of Pink’s abuse and neglect. His upbringing and personality either isolated him or gave him a model that all relationships beyond his own mother’s authority were unsafe and needed to be forcefully maintained. Pink is thus taught to isolate, blame others, and maintain relationships at the expense of others.

Pink is Waters’ attempt to understand the late 1970s British Fascists in the far-right turn in British politics during that era. Seeing the fascist not as an agent with individual beliefs, but one primed and readied to serve a greater purpose of hatred and exclusion whenever they’re handed the pamphlet of the local fascist league. It also attempts to show that these microfascist impulses are not necessarily individualized or only invested in by the far-right of a society, but it’s actively the molar/macro structures of British education, society, and family structures that gave Pink and likely the Fascist crowd he leads in the last quarter of the album the predisposition towards fascist politics. A society ready to prime the elite into neurosis and everyone else into devotion to order through mass psychosis.

Conclusion

I hope to have shown these two characters as opposite ends of a fascist personality continuum. The Duke, a pretentious, emotionless neurotic, and Pink, an empty shell of an abusive man waiting to be infiltrated by any form of psychosis to give him meaning and authority. In many ways, I find these to be representative of a fair few archetypes within fascist personalities: one sees devotion to something greater than themselves as all that should be cared about, nothing human remains, the other is actively disciplined to be uncontrollably emotional, yet sees society and personal politics as always requiring some form of abusive authority.

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There are many aspects of dreams that have been of great interest to me from time to time. While I may be surprised by the random inclusion of people I haven’t seen or talked to in years, to the point that it may even ruin the entirety of the next day for me, what I have always wanted to explore further was our acceptance of the dream’s sense. This is not trying to identify the meaning behind a particular dream, but rather trying to understand how dreaming produces itself in a way that we always accept its sense as obvious while we are dreaming.

Sense & Non-Sense

Sense takes on a particular relationship with signifiers within the dream that is totally unlike the relationship between sense and signifiers within our experience of the real world while awake. Deleuze discusses the latter relationship in The Logic of Sense, stating, “Sense is like the sphere in which I am already established in order to enact possible denotations, and even to think their conditions. Sense is always presupposed as soon as I begin to speak; I would not be able to begin without this presupposition.”1 Sense, within language at least, is that which is unspoken and underlying that creates the possibility for what is spoken or to portray anything particular at all. This is not merely within the sense of language which creates the content of the signifier-signified relationship, but also sense by anticipation, memory, and relative meaning: additional meanings created by social association.

While awake in the real world, sense has to perform the underlying function of providing translatability between subjects as well as defining and limiting the grounds of that possibility so that particularity can function. The dream exists in nonsense primarily because it does not have to provide the possibility of inter-subject translation. Dreams present a form of sense folded into itself and having become nearly one with the signifiers that it provides the grounds of possibility for. Sense providing an external check for signifieds would break the experience of the dream, thus everything is made sensical to the dreaming subject as nonsense.

This is because the underlying process of making sense is taking place at the exact same time as the observed process of making the signifyers or stimuli of the dream, the events and their sense are self-referential to themselves and to each other rather than as a signifying chain. Deleuze discusses this in the section on Non-Sense in The Logic of Sense, stating, “We know that the normal law governing all names endowed with sense is precisely that their sense may be denoted only by another name (n₁→n₂→n₃…). The name saying its own sense can only be nonsense (Nₙ).”2

While Deleuze primarily speaks of this on the topic of language, semiotics, or linguistics, for the purpose of dreams, the distinction of Sense and Nonsense must also be conferred onto events. The dream is self-referential, it is self-expecting, it is self-determining, with the external world providing at most characters and events to fill itself with. What is taking place is a language in that it is understood by the subject, but it is a language that only gains sense from itself while being spoken; once awake, you are again filled with the curiosity of how you were fooled by such obvious deception.

The Nonsense of Dreams

To further explain, let me put in more specific detail the difference between this relationship while awake and while asleep. While awake, the real world provides the limits of sense externally. Language use in the real world thus does not merely exist within the distinction of sense and nonsense (the underlying referential and the self-referential) but more often within the distinction between sense and the lack of sense. When something is not understood, it is assumed, rather than being something that can only be understood by reference to itself, that there is a missing & necessary sense that would contextualize what is being said or done properly and thus provide translatability. One will then seek to find or learn this sense rather than this sense always finding them.

In the dream, there is only too much sense and never less than enough. The relationship between sense and signifiers is folded in on itself as a loop, while sense produces the possibility of useful signifiers here, the reciprocal relationship within the dream means that signifiers are often producing sense at the same time that sense is providing the ground for the signifiers. The things that exist within sense itself: memory, space, expectation, linearity…, are constantly altered to maintain sense in the ever-changing events of a dream.

Going back to the content discussed at the beginning, when I have a friend or former friend that I have not spoken to in years become a character within a dream of mine, our relationship is often completely recontextualized. Rather than starting off from the point of view and memory of my waking self, who would often start with reintroduction (that is, if I even went up to speak with them), rather the dream begins with us having already reestablished such friendship. Additionally, it is not necessarily that I can now remember the particular dream memory of rekindling, but rather that I know within the dream that we had, at some point, rekindled the friendship for some time now.

Further aspects of one’s life are changed through this alteration of dream memory in order to maintain sense: just the other night, I had a dream take place within the hallways of a large apartment complex that I recalled as my current residence despite currently living in a house and having never lived in a place that looked similarly except for maybe at a hotel. This produces the necessary sense as it answers questions that my dream self would have, such as “why am I here?” and “who are the people around me?”

The alteration of expectation, space, and linearity seems to be around one and the same process, as it is the maintaining of sense during the progress of the dream that matters here for all three. While dream memory is an alteration of the conditions and relationships before the start of a dream, this alteration shows dream time as excessively present-minded. With the constant production of sense, the dream proceeds with a sort of linearity that focuses on the current moment and is concerned at most with what could possibly happen immediately next.

This linearity only makes sense in the dream, and it is only once we wake up that we see the obvious discontinuities between quick and immediate changes in feelings and space, as they no longer make sense to us. While within the dream, the constant production of sense requires an active forgetting of any contradictory or disjointed past, even if only experienced seconds ago. Transitions that would be immediately noticed by the awakened mind are seamless, as the production of sense focuses endlessly on producing the sense for the present moment, as the present moment is the only thing that needs to be maintained to contain the dream. Disjointed spaces can be easily connected, and scene changes drastic enough to only be described as a separate dream can be immediately contextualized again.

The sense and the signified also function as a feedback loop through expectation; many times, I, as the dreaming subject, have thought of a possibility within the context of a dream, only for such a thing to immediately take place. The expectation of danger has turned dreams of just walking around into ones with dangerous stories and quick changes in character interactions. The latter is evident in dreams where someone will appear and I will think of them in one way or another, and they will immediately begin acting in such a way: if I see them as a potential danger, they become so, if I see them as someone I wish to talk to, they will come speak to me, etc… The expectations and actions I take within the dream are filtering back into the creation of the experience of what is external to me as a subject, but since the external is also internal, as it is my mind taking parts of itself for producing its own dream, the dreamer has only the rare idea that this is nonsense.

There are dreams where things don’t make sense, but they have often mimicked the feeling of a lack of sense of the real world, where you are missing necessary sense, rather than seeing that you are simply not within the process of a self-referential sense. Dreams where I am confused by the actions of all those around me are the most common from my own experience. I would spend the entire dream wondering why everyone is acting so strangely, but there is still a unifying nonsense in that this strangeness does not break the full sense of the dream; it is a self-reliant sense that the characters in my dream have a sense just one that I am seperated from and would not act or speak within.

Lucid dreaming is another case that seems to sit outside of a normal dream, but it still falls almost perfectly within the feedback loop of a dream’s nonsense. The Lucid Dreamer is aware of the dream and thus usually decides to fly or do something that can not be done in the real world. It is the awakened mind within a realm of pure self-referential sense: one can fly because one is able to believe that they can fly, one can be anywhere because one is able to believe that they can be anywhere, and all of this maintained by the subject understanding that sense and the signified events of the dream are in a loop. Sense bends to a will within the lucid dream in the same way that it does within a normal dream; it is simply that that will is directed externally, rather also produced in a feedback loop with sense.

Even the lucid dream still tries to produce an excess of sense to recreate nonsense, and this is why lucid dreaming can result in the return to a regular sleeping state. I remember this happening once as when I was younger, I had an instance where I went back to accepting the nonsense of the dream unquestionably after having a temporary lucid dream; when I woke up later, I was mad at myself for letting myself be fooled again. It thus seems to me that the logic of the dream reveals a sort of desire for sense within the mind, always trying to reconfigure itself in such a way as to be within sense, even if that means being within nonsense.

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Mortality presents an interesting aspect of both sides of power. On one end, it is the threat of imminent death through force that creates the conditions for servitude that has served as the basis for all classed societies thus far, while on the other end, it creates a physical limit to those who ultimately hold power over such a society. It is easy to imagine society as something unavoidable in the human experience, or at the very least, an unquestionable good for human development, but not so deep dives into the very beginnings of state society reveal that the border between people living within state societies and outside of them was very permeable and regularly had people fluctuate back and forth. Early civilizations were vectors for disease, and early agriculture was unreliable; so a sovereignty maintaining power over others was not an easy accomplishment, even if it is something completely unescapable today.

It seems rather more acceptable, under this acknowledgement, that power had to grow out of its ability to enact servitude through force. It has certainly developed from an age that required maintaining a military power to guarantee control over another area and a labor force. From here, power develops and abstracts by making itself seem as an unquestionable constant, even if a specific leader gets deposed, it is a particular society’s job to work towards making the rebellion reproduce the same structures that existed beforehand, or to advance them further and make power more imperceptible and universalized. Whether this be a revolution that tries to overthrow a cruel system that ends up replicating it, or simply a co-op store that ends up replicating the model of capital, the unintended goal of the symbolic systems of power is not just a mute compulsion to participate in the conditions of present society but to prepare any attempt at escape for capture.

The problem of mortality and power is that the individual who represents the top of this power structure is often at its whims as well when the goal is to maintain the system and not its particulars. A system maintained purely by force is too structurally fragile for a single person to ensure their society lasts without constantly present force, while a system that has abstracted into systems of belief and desiring makes sure that at most specific positions will be necessary to the running of the society, but as a countermeasure, usually resists the centralization of power on any particular person. Those that have attempted to hold a power centralized around them are already of high stature and real power within these system and throughout history, whether we speak of monarchical figures like Louis XIV or capitalists like Elon Musk, they, however, do not seem to like the fact that they are a part of a system rather than a system’s central figure. These figures can only make moves to expand their power at times where their positions are afforded a centrality to a system with underlying concepts, weakened decentralized structures, and redirectable flows of power that they can exploit and redirect towards centering around them as an individual and not as a position.

In the two abovementioned figures, it is the exploitation of the religious appointment of the king that is reworked at multiple points into becoming a divine right of kings, and the exploitation of the seemingly sacred values associated today with having accumulated capital that grant Multi-billionaires Musk, Theil, or Trump an unquestioned sense of legitimacy in their views. But, I also think these two exploitations of their respective economic & symbolic systems of power are parts of larger movements in the conception of the metaphysics of power within the Western world. As Marx understood the development of the possibility of capitalism, “The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former.”1 I now seek to understand our modern conceptions of power as the continuation and combination of multiple long movements from basic organization through force to the modern & abstract distribution of sovereignty. I will explain this as 5 major movements in the metaphysics of power from the early Middle Ages to today.

This begins with organization through being able to exert force on others and protect particular lands from invasion or rebellion (1). This abstracts & centralizes, along with the past cultural forms of inheritance of power, into a system of strict proper lineage, which creates a legal system to define and maintain the symbolic system of rights towards property and inheritance of positions & land (2). Monarchs further abstracted their particular lineage rights, which had allowed them to personally accumulate and consolidate land holdings under their rule over centuries, with the religious position of their kingship to abstract again into the Divine Right of Kings (3). The Divine Right of Kings, which has to become more and more justified by the concepts of rational government & the social contract that grew out of 17th and 18th-century philosophy, abstracts and is overturned by the societal desire for proper governing, as it used to justify itself. Power by reason is deterritorialized from the particular, unelected position of a king to being more and more based around constitutional democracies and capital that seek to represent rational distribution more properly than traditional governmental forms (4). Capital has since tried to subsume all forms of sovereignty from the individual to the societal, and the capitalist has gained a sense of legitimacy through their holdings as capital, which is seen as keeping a constantly re-deterritorializing mode of reproduction that requires constant innovation to stay ahead. Capital, however, can be used in political structures to create the conditions of constant flows towards capitalists, whether that be guaranteed grants that create monopolies or stable businesses that would go under otherwise (Tesla, for example), or creating rules that allow for monopolies to exist through limiting the possibility for competition. The culmination of which could result in a world where political legitimacy too is subsumed completely by capital, under the control and vision of the capitalist (5).

From Force to Personal Transcendence

From the collapse of Western European societies up to the French Revolution, there are 3 somewhat clear movements of power relations within those societies and 3 somewhat adjacent movements in the metaphysics of power that structure and justify those power relations. Each of these understandings of sovereignty must respond to the needs of the age and the material and/or ideological conditions necessary for gaining and maintaining power and stability. These movements of Force, Lineage, and Divine Right don’t disappear in the appearance of the next one, but are rather more material reinforcements for the abstraction of power into more symbolic and abstract assemblages.

The First Movement: Force

The first of these movements is the closest to that of providing society with the possibility of certain stability and survival. Military leaders function as a primary source of leadership in the weak but partially organized states of these societies who would pass down leadership by lineage defined by specific cultural norms, but could and were overtaken by other families in times of crises that they themselves could not measure up to or coups (for example, Charlemagne’s father Pepin the Short becoming King and ending the Merovingian Dynasty through political maneuvering of nobles & the church and a military might to back it up). While being a king during the earlier portion of this period still meant some sense of centralized sovereignty, this centralization decayed throughout Western Europe because of the destabilization caused by the Viking Raids. Princes and nobles became more powerful, but only relatively to the central power.

This is not to say that no symbolic structures existed during this early movement in the conception of power, but they are much more internalized to a few institutions, neighboring groups, or classes that actually recognize their symbolic power. Being a protector of Christendom was one of these major claims that could get a King recognition and deep alliances with institutions like the Church, which Charlemagne either did or had forced on him, depending on the historical account. Outside of these internal recognitions during the Early Middle Ages, the recognition of such claims were more ironic or formally done in external & new neighboring powers only in order to complete treaties, as in the cases of pagan vikings who would go through Baptisms to get alliances or treaties with Christian Kings (of which there are accounts of Vikings taking multiple baptisms throughout their lives, and supposedly giving their lives to christ, while remaining completely pagan in their own faith). These alliances, treaties, and the symbolic order of power of this age are very connected with the ability to administer force to assert sovereignty.

The Second Movement: Lineage

The first changes into the second movement come with the necessity of switching lineage rules in these western civilizations from traditional customs which usually were spliting between all legitimate heirs into creating a strict means by which one person shall become the single legal heir of political claims (in most of these civilizations, it was always the eldest son). With the destabilization of society during ~900 - 1100 CE, it became even more of a threat to political centralization, as once relatively powerful kingdoms were being broken into parts with each generation. In some societies, this came out of the need for the family in power to maintain a clear territory that passed from generation to generation under the title of the King: England under the descedents of William the Conquerer are an important example of this as, by the time of the Angevins and Plantagenant dynastys, controlling both sides of the channel under one title became important to the stability of their political power. Many, like the first couple centuries of Capetian France, first developed practices of declaring a particular son the singular heir while still alive to avoid contestation and civil war between brothers after the death of a king. This tradition was also found important to many aristocratic elected positions and is also found throughout the histories of those like the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire and the Doges of Venice.

Materially, this second movement is the transition of attempting to consolidate or maintain power by abstracting it from raw power, force over others, and old traditions that decentralized power further each generation, to the groundwork for a legal structure that focuses first and foremost on standardizing property laws and thus accumulation & consolidation of land holdings. While accumulation of surrounding lands by force was still common during this time, primarily by taking over lands by either lesser powers or areas governed by city states, or a lack of clear organization, the structure that comes out of the focus on a (typically) singular male heir lineage is primarily the consolidation of land through political marriages and the creation of the protection of the lineage of nobles and princes. Sovereignty gets abstracted in recognized lineage and brings in this legal recognition to smaller powers in the process, as principalities recognize weaker kings as a form of reinforcement and defense of their legal hereditary claims. Kings are largely weak until the 12th and 13th centuries, which is the same time period that Western Europe had a growth, if not the birth, of its legal structures, but even after that, princes and nobles play a large part as leaders and not merely just lower administrators of the Monarch until greater consolidations of power made in later centuries.

Wars like that of the Hundred Years War between England and France demonstrate that this abstraction has become a norm to be followed symbolically for a justified mandate for war between two recognized powers. The war, while ultimately about contemporary recognitions of land holdings and continually decided by who could overwhelm or discourage their opponent by force, was fought on the terms of the proper heredity of the throne of France. It is particularly wars, like the Hundred Years War, that created the grounds for the melding of the state with an early conception of the nation as one end large parts of France faced a singular enemy in the English while the English monarchy, now locked out of their continental and french territory, finally began to assimilate more and more into the english language and customs that surrounded them.

The relative stabilization of territory created by property and heritage’s new stricter legal grounding allowed for a movement back towards centralized state power. While the greater powers may have fought over common ancestry and rightful inheritance, these new customs gave the grounds for internal problems to be dealt with by an expanding legal system. The difficulty with expansive power during the Middle Ages is mostly a logistical problem that could not yet be solved, as the institutions of power or the material support for their existence simply did not exist yet. This was solved often by delegation of land & power, which was paid back through tribute (as even stronger princes still recognized the king, even if they held all real forms of sovereignty in their domain). The king held claim to large swathes of territory, primarily with the need to distribute it to nobles or church monasteries, abbots, and bishops that would recognize this claim to be able to maintain hold of any technical sovereignty in such areas. This created a structure of power that was direct; every person largely interacted with the position directly above and/or below them. Peasants had no part in life decided by the king (outside of defeating peasant rebellions) but rather were beholden to the sovereignty of the lords who owned and controlled the land they worked. Likewise, many Lords were under other, greater Lords and did not need to directly interact with the King as Sovereign. Each stage in the system of castes and classes only interacted with an adjacent class in any material way, and thus was only loyal to the class above them. The task of the third movement is to subsume and centralize the existing power structure under the king and state rather than having fragmented levels of power.

The Third Movement: Divine Right

Before the consolidation of power that allowed for the birth of the modern conception of state sovereignty, there was another legal and religious consolidation that must be made for the third movement of the period. While kings during certain times were weaker than many of the princes and nobles they claimed as subjects, they possessed another form of sovereignty that created them as a separate and higher entity than their princes and nobles, beyond their power as a judicial institution for their domain: the recognition of kingship by the Church. This system of the legitimation of power was mutually beneficial for a while, before kings were becoming too individually powerful by the time of the Renaissance, as Kings had their thrones given religious legitimacy, and the Church gained regional protection and allies. This was not always a smooth relationship throughout its tenure as the dividing line between what was a secular power that the king possessed and what was a religious power that the church possessed had no clear definition as both sides wanted at least some parts of what the other claimed as their own (the appointment of Bishops being one of these issues). But in the third movement towards the divine right of the king, the problem became that the Throne was recognized by the Church first and foremost, and the King themselves recognized only situationally.

The Church in Rome had, and occasionally used, the power to declare that kings were illegitimate or excommunicated because of their actions. This power, at the level of actual force, came not from the Pope’s or Rome’s armies, because they could barely even be said of having their own, but rather from the religious reaction of the nobles and princes in these societies who did not want to be excommunicated as a territory (such as in the case of King John of England and the Magna Carta). Kings wanted the divine power recognized in their throne to be also recognized in their person, and over centuries, this became the metaphysical norm for the king’s relation of power.

The completion of the Divine Right of Kings required growth in the other two movements as well: the central state under the king had to become a military power that no noble in their domain could match and the schemas of lineage that used to cause civil wars between siblings became means of alliance as traditions around lineage & marriage became more complex and strategic. The metaphysical backing of the Divine Right of Kings needed these material backings, as Kings no longer represented the throne but rather were in their persons the individual creating and continuing alliances through familial alliances, which in the case of rebellion or usurption would be means of force and backup to uphold the family’s and its lineage’s individual right to the throne. Power in the age of powerful kings declaring their divine right to rule is paradoxically the most abstract in its metaphysical backing and the most personal regarding at least military and international affairs. Kings, notably Louis XIV, began to try to lessen the powers of nobles and princes (and lower officials, lords, and administrators) by creating direct means for the king and their authority to interact with their populace. Their part in the nascent conception of nationhood was in their, at least on paper, assumption of nearly all state duties and the increases in domestic institutions and involvement in the economy.

At the level of the mass populace, this came out of the dissolution of traditional feudal bonds that created the tiered system that was structured and fragmented into layers of all power relations. The economic and agricultural changes of the Renaissance and Baroque periods created a mass underclass that was no longer permanently attached to the lands of a particular lord and thus free peasants; the King or Queen and their administrative state created the means by which these free peasants were to hire themselves out as workers so that the landed powerful wouldn’t have need of competing between workers by the creation and enforcement of maximum wage laws, minimum length of employment laws, as well as vagrancy laws. Around the same time, local communities with nearly completely internalized economic activity were forced to adopt a common currency that ruined many local economies based on local currencies. While the state plays more and more of a role in the economic affairs of the nation, this is handled primarily by corporations that have the authority of the state while being run by separate boards. This puts the king or queen as the creator and maintainer of the unproductive structure that creates the ground for economic activity and the birth of capitalist accumulation. This is primarily in the form of the expansion of a police state to enforce strict laws against free peasants so that they must participate in economic activity or be forced into lower forms of work or even death. This is the domestic material necessity for the Divine Right of Kings to have some real stake for the average person, instead of being an abstract claim respected by maybe a few nobles already allied with the King. The King became a symbol of the state for the average person by the 17th century, and thus became symbolically responsible for the welfare of every person.

While the Divine Right assures a form of protection within the symbolic system it exists within, it is only in overturning the metaphysical system that the kings themselves can be permanently defeated. But the institutions and other major powers that once provided a threat to the king as a person and a lineage are all within the same symbolic system. Wars between powers that are non-symbolic take place in the colonies. Developing out of wars over lineage and territory among heirs, warfare between the powers that existed within this symbolic system became wars of national ambition, religious wars, and rivalry between nations and kings. At the same time, however, the populace is gaining a sense of personal rights, at least philosophically, that is first given up to the sovereign as a representative of God2, but not much later, seen as given directly to every man.

The Capture of Trascendence

The Movement into Government by Reason & Capital

The movement into capitalist republics during the 18th to 20th centuries maintains the divine abstraction of the Divine Right of Kings without the person of the King. The Divine abstraction also came with its ideological justification: reasonable government. The Monarch, as the representative of God, was seen as holding the capacity for only reasonable government and was the only thing keeping society from collapsing into a perpetual state of war. Understandings of monarchal sovereignty, like that of Hobbes, created a system of governance that was meant to be unquestionable, as being a member of a society was seen as equal to consenting to give up one’s sovereignty to the sovereign, whose agency was thus able to inflict any action upon the citizen but not vis versa. The overthrowing of the system of the Divine Right of Kings was not the destruction of all of its concepts, but the attempt to overthrow its material reality in favor of attaining the proper form of government built on reason that it once used as its ideological defense.

This overthrow was of great benefit to the capitalist classes that had been built on the laws and police state that enforced the rules allowing for the primitive accumulation of capital by providing limitations on land ownership and labor freedom. Having already accumulated the land and machines necessary for capitalist accumulation, it was next possible to unleash the possibility of capitalistic competition without fear of the capitalist class immediately collapsing. Enough people could participate as consumers, and enough capitalists had gained enough control over the means of production and an accumulation of capital beforehand that their positions would not be considerably threatened by any other class than their own.

Capital’s prehistory in violence through Primitive Accumulation was covered up by its theorists through myths such as the Barter Theory, where economic activity throughout history has always been fundamentally capitalist in nature, but merely with inefficiencies or barriers3. Capital, thusly, gets positioned as a means by which to reasonably govern economies outside of the old territorialized systems, while at the same time retaining most of the class positions established before the capitalist revolutions. The creation of the proletariat had already taken place centuries earlier by that point, so the totalization of capitalism was more about the destruction or subsumption of all sovereign classes into the bourgeois class. This was a slow and unequal process that required the deterritorialization of all traditions and, for the traditions that could, reforming themselves around capital or performing non-productive uses as long as they too gave in to capitalist flows.

On the side of governmentality, the metaphysics of power were making similar moves as the economic transitions were. Power was restructured into more democratic or republican forms while keeping enfranchisement limited for a period before expansion. Sovereignty gained another level of abstraction with the creation of the political concepts of this transition in the 18th and 19th centuries; the populous of a nation was seen more and more as the source of the right to governance while the state itself held the administrative capabilities of it. Those seen as being able to properly appeal to reason and meet the level to be a voting member of society began to found the metaphysical idea of power during this age; but this metaphysic of power was ultimately that a mass of citizens could achieve elections based on reasoning what would be the best for the country. Capital and governmental reasoning follow the same trajectory as abstracting to being a collective notion meant to reflect a reasoned response to present needs, while the distribution of political and economic powers still remained with mostly small and slow changes to the members of the classes with actual power in each sector until the 20th century.

The shifts towards an appeal to abstract universal reasoning and to capital to determine the political and economic sovereignty of the states and societies of the world thus present a means of abstracting sovereignty towards being impersonal and unattached to traditions. Like the appeal to whether god(s) founds ethical truth or it is simply there with god(s) to enforce it in Euthyphro’s dilemma, this shift creates a metaphysics of power that abstracts from a mortal physical representative of god to institutions meant to create the means by which universal reasoning acts itself out within society and the economy. In as much as this is a liberation of the determinate of power, from unelected lineage to expanding electoral rights, at the same time it is the expanded protection of the institutions of the state that give new routes of redress through their democratic institutions while maintaining the same abuses against members of the working class(es) in the name of the economy. The ties and alliances that gave particular families a safeguard to their rule, abstracted to being between states, and while military partnership and declaring peace between countries is still a feature of these alliances, they are predominantly for negotiating the barriers of trade and economic entanglement; of which were typically the more capitalist and powerful country tearing down trade barriers for their own companies.

In the wake of communist revolutions and influence throughout the 20th century, the focus on capital as the economic organization of pure reason grows further as a counter-measure. While Capital has, from the stage of primitive accumulation until however long it lasts in history, only existed due to the state violence and state non-productive stabilization of economic activity used to maintain or further its goals, its philosophical supporters begin to see it alone as good in-itself, only turning bad in the cases of too much government interference or specific bad actors. Capital in-itself gains a sort of power as being a marker of work and ingenuity, as he who possesses it could have only gained it by showing himself worthy of it. Capital has become an arbiter of virtue, divorced from the reality of violence and the unequal conditions necessary for most capitalists to gain and expand it. Most capitalists of our day, especially at the level of multi-millionaires and billionaires, began their lives in families that already had capital and thus access to even more capital that was also able to be passed down through both inheritance and expanded access to institutional credit.

The Collision of the Democratic & Capitalist Will

Finally, the present movement is an incomplete movement that could be the beginning of the end for capital through its pure personalization. Just like the monarchs of previous ages, the great capitalists and the families that possessed great sums of capital have long held an anxiety about how fluid their capital and thus power was. The threat of death and overthrow has now become ever-present, not even requiring the ending of a life to take away sovereignty from the capitalist, merely the redirection of the flows of capital away from that which sustains a particular wealth. The descendants of the grand capitalists of the Gilded Age suffered the grand anxieties of the possibility of such a loss; some were driven to suicide from such intensity of this possibility. Yet, in our new Gilded Age, the capitalist seems self-assured of their immortality, not through even lineage but of their own body. This fifth movement, that of the personalization of the sovereignty of capital, is not one that is complete or even fully agreed upon, but it is a metaphysical conception of power big enough to create major political players such as Trump, Musk, Theil, etc.

Capital & Reason have not remained impersonal gods under this movement; these capitalists are doing all in their power to transform these deterritorialized determinants of power back into territorial formations. It is not enough that capital has been reinforced, fostered, and protected time and time again by political institutions, but these capitalists seem incredibly self-assured of their success and gains being a direct result of their character and intelligence. Their companies have even divorced themselves from the intelligence and industriousness that is the supposed virtue of the capitalist, which is typically reflected by innovative branding and products that are both testaments to the company’s quality. These financial signifiers seem to be transitioning to being more and more about the capitalists as individuals, such as Tesla gaining more and more investments through the interest in the person of Musk, while their products have become less innovative at his command and lost market share due to the electric vehicle becoming more previlent in older brands and strong new brands. The capitalist, as the commander of flows, is trying to restructure the anxiety of how capital un- and reattaches itself at whim by commanding a sense of that which the public is meant to possess as a collective reason.

The greatest sin of this fifth movement, and one of its core aspects, is the capitalist becoming seen as an intellectual and a beholder of truth itself. In part, this is due to a shrinking of what aspects of intelligence people care about, which shifted first towards financial intelligence and then towards technical intelligence (I.e., military technology & surveillance advancements that are given a sort of futurist vibe). President Trump, who possesses only arguably the former of these two, gains a sense of legitimacy through the capital he possesses; one can rarely convince his supporters that he may be dangerously ignorant when it comes to the state of affairs of an entire nation on abstracting the basis of his competance on the basis of his money. Thusly, the fifth, and luckily at least for now still incomplete, movement is a movement that attempts to meld the rational behind capital with the rational that the democratic mass seeks to attain.

The futurism of the current capitalist class is also darker than ever before. Figures like Theil, and many others in the tech world, seem to be guaranteeing their ascention into immortality by creating a stricter society of control. While it is not new for capitalists to fall into far-right ideologies, they seem to be increasingly open about seeing themselves as a master race that should rebuild society in their image. Their innovations are therefore based on increasing the ability to track and predict not just the desires of the masses, as the capitalists have long tried to do, but also the creation of surveillance systems for tracking and categorizing individuals for the purposes of ideological rather than economic means.

These members of the capitalist class see their power as separate from the ever-changing flows of capital that originally built their capital accumulation. The government they imagine is there to support them more as individuals than members of a class, and they seek political power personally in some cases. The interaction with the government of the previous gilded age was primarily so that the capitalists could continue to secure an economic nationalism centered around their companies (and thus redirect all capital flows within the nation towards them), this time it seems more that the capitalists, as individuals, want to have the government become a part of the particular flows that maintain them as persons, not just their companies or holdings.

Trump is not merely a beneficiary of the metaphysic of power shifting towards capital, determining political virtue and intelligence, but has been a means by which the broader insidious structure of the new right-wing capitalist has installed their visions of the future. This is no longer represented in just the guaranteeing of government contracts, which still have their vital importance to some of these capitalists’ companies, but is also about making sure their government is investing and using new intelligence projects headed by these capitalists. There is no mistake that these advancements in tracking are taking place under an administration openly willing to use violence and force to control members of the population who won’t stand for the governmental abuses. My question now is, will the centering of reason through capital into individuals create the grounds of destruction for capitalism, just as the centering of the rational of god into a single individual created the grounds of destruction for the old power structures, even the monarchs themselves?

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